LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND CHINESE CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

The structure of language functions as a tool to define and constrain women's activities and power in society. As language constructs reality, it perpetuates the devaluation of women; but it also provides a means by which this devaluation can be overcome. French feminists argue that language, signs, and symbols are keys to understanding gender construction. English and American feminist linguists have discussed the substance of the English language as literally man made and under male control. American historian and feminist theorist Joan Scott has also proposed that the analysis of language provides a starting point for understanding how social relations are conceived, how institutions are organized, how relations of production are experienced, and how collective identity is established.

Hence, many recent feminist theorists analyze history from the standpoint of language and textuality and, in doing so, attempt to define the relationship between history and language.

However, although much has been written on linguistic gender biases in English and French, as yet little has appeared on the linguistic gendering of Chinese.

The following textual and historical analysis will show how gender identity is both constructed and reflected through language in Chinese culture and society. I shall analyze how linguistic imbalances bring into sharper focus real-world inequities. I attempt to single out those linguistic usages that have demeaned women from antiquity to the present. My analysis extends to a consideration of the functions of a public-and-private sphere ideology and of values assigned to private social relations and the family in the structuring of gender inequality. An analysis of the particulars of linguistic forms indicates the patriarchal forms of meaning and denomination embedded in the very physical structure of the Chinese language.

These linguistic forms are both reflective and constitutive of the historical realities of the relationships of women to the state, to the family, and to the trajectories of revolution and reform that are described in the following sections. The relevance of linguistic innovation by women as an instrument of gender liberation is then illustrated through an analysis of the development of the "women's scripts" (nushu) in the mountainous region of Shangjiangxu, Jiangyong county, Hunan province.

China is undergoing a complex process of modernization. Recent economic reforms, aimed at integrating China into global market systems, are likely to come into conflict with the maintenance of a socialist political system. This dualism gives rise to conflicting cultural modes. It would be rewarding to analyze the relationship between emerging cultural modes and economic processes and their impact on women.

But the cultural contradictions attendant to the uneasy coexistence of market capitalism and political socialism are superimposed upon the cultural contradictions of Chinese tradition and modernity that already informed the consolidation of the Chinese Revolution itself. Chinese women are subjected to the varying and conflicting strains of being cast in the image of the traditional family role of "good wife and wise mother," dealing with the residual imperatives of limited socialist gender egalitarianism, and being absorbed in the processes of Westernization and commodification.

THE SEMANTIC STEM OF FEMALE (nü)

Central to the examination of the gendering of the Chinese language is how the Chinese character for woman {n?) is semantically and culturally deployed. The Chinese character for female {n?) consists of a pictographic representation of a person kneeling with hands folded, a pose seen as a form of submission. The etymology and applications of other characters that use the semantic stem of woman {n?), demonstrate the linguistic prece dents that subsequently confirm gender inequality and the development of patriarchy. Gender construction for females starts early. At the age of seven, girls are supposed to be separated from boys in all the social activi ties?as the saying goes, male and female have separate spheres (nann? yubie). A woman during her lifetime lives with two families?in her "uter ine"6 and marital homes. A woman is thought to marry into her husband's family, so the character female plus home conveys the word meaning mar riage (jia). After she is married she becomes a wife or woman (fu). This character consists of a female with a broom signifying submission and the duty to do housework; hence, it attests to a gender division of labor. Once married and under her husband's roof, the wife's condition is identified as being content {an). Three women together are up to something wicked and treacherous (jian). A good and capable wife is described as being successful because of the activities of domestic service {xian neizhu); but a man's achievements do not include credit for the assistance and sacrifices he has received from his spouse.

The semantic stem of female {n?) is mated with other signs to become an accomplice in myriad characters. There are about 250 characters con taining the form of n?: some of them are descriptive, others are compli mentary of woman's physical attributes. The rest of them have negative meanings such as cunning and deviousness of speech {ning); weak, timid and lazy {ruo); wicked, treacherous, and evil (jian); silly, frivolous, and mis chievous {shuo); seductive and evil (yao); preposterous and arrogant {wang); and ambitious and avaricious {Ian). A woman and a stone mean jealousy {du), one of the undesirable characteristics of women in a poly gynous society. A woman and a hand means servant {nu). A heart written below this character makes the verb for becoming angry {nu), because women who lose their temper easily are difficult to get along with. A woman under a spear means male power and authority {wei): men assert their authority by subjugating women through physical force. Male domi nance and female subordination are evident in such idioms as "males re spected, females despised" {nazun nubei), "male and female" {nann?), "husband and wife" (fufu), and "son and daughter" (ernu). This kind of lexical usage even appears in a phrase meant to connote gender equality {nann? pingdeng)?the male character is placed first. The idiom, "When husband calls, wife follows" (fuchang fusui) enforces the superiority of men and the inferiority of wives in the home.

the inferiority of wives in the home. There are many other terms that describe women in specifically de rogatory ways: woman's heart and moods shift quickly, {n?ren shangbian); woman's heart is most evil {zuidu furen xin); women are a cause of troubles {n?ren hoshui); women are short-sighted; a woman is flirting, bewitching, fox-like, or she is the female yaksa?a frightful, malicious, ugly woman {muyeca).

Traditionally, women were supposed to be seen and not heard in pub lic. If a woman expressed her opinion, it would be considered as just a "woman's expression" {furen zhijian). If she tried to show compassion like an ideal Confucian scholar, what she did would be described as a "woman's kindness" (furen zhiren).

WOMEN AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE

The Chinese writing system goes back to the Shang dynasty (1765-1122 B.C.) and possibly earlier and was intimately related to the development of the dynastic state. The most important of the wujing edited by Confucius (551 B.C.-479 B.C.) became the orthodox Five Classics doctrine of the state by the time of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.). In the Book of Odes, there is clear evidence of gender inequality: "When a baby boy was born he was laid on the bed and given jade to play with (longzhang), and when a baby girl was born she was laid on the floor and given a tile to play with" (longwa).7 It was considered essential to exclude women from public life to preserve social stability and the order of the cosmos:

If women are entrusted with tasks involving contact with the outside, they will cause disorder and confusion in the Empire, harm and bring shame on the Imperial Court, and sully sun and moon .... The Book of Documents cautions against the hen announcing dawn instead of the cock (pin ji si Chen).

The Book of Odes denounces a clever woman overthrowing a state:

A clever man builds a city wa!V A clever woman overthrows it/ Beautiful is the clever woman, but she is an owV a hooting owV A woman with a long tongue, she is a promoter of eviV Disorder is not sent down from Heaven, it is produced by women/ Those who cannot be instructed or taught are women and eunuchs .... And therefore the women have no public service. They have to abide by their silkworm work and their weaving.

Chinese male scholars who created the Classics granted the power of naming only to themselves. Women learned from childhood to perceive the world through the eyes of men. Because they were denied the opportunity to receive a formal education, they were seen as unqualified to participate in public service, especially in politics. Throughout Chinese history, women were considered bearers of trouble who would bring confusion and disorder (luan) to the political arena. On the other hand, although the warning quoted above was against the regency of an empress dowager, there is no legal codification of this point of view. In the Qing dynasty, dynastic statutes included a section on empress dowagers attending to state affairs from behind a screen, a practice given explicit sanction by dynastic law. "It had become a dynastic institution, which, though occasionally prohibited and criticized, was often resorted to as a measure of emergency and expediency." There were in fact strong women leaders who ruled in many periods of China's long history. Empress dowagers, such as Empress Lu (reign 188-180 B.C.) served as regents of Former Han, and Empress Cixi (1835-1908) dominated the politics of the Qing dynasty for half a century. Both these women exerted considerable influence on Chinese history. Wu Zhao (r 690-705) of the Tang, the only female emperor in Chinese history who founded her own dynasty, based her power on the expansion of opportunities for the successful candidates of the civil service examination system who entered the state bureaucracy. She commissioned the building of monasteries, pagodas, and the Longmen caves in Loyang. But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that women joined men in battlefield revolts, against the Qing government, joining popular uprisings-especially the Taiping, and Boxer Rebellions. Many women following Jiu Jin ( executed in 1907 after leading an aborted anti-Qing uprising) joined the radical revolutionary movements that seriously challenged the dominant system of Confusion social relations.

But despite these dynastic and revolutionary precedents, women on the whole remained marginalized in their formal participation in the state. During the June 4th [Tiananmen Square] movement of 1989, Chai Ling and Wang Chaohua were the only two women leaders of the student movement; women's issues were ignored in the male-dominated activities; and Chai's critique of traditional gender and family relationships met with indifference. In 1993 women constituted only 13.5 percent of the full members of the National People's Congress and 9.2 percent of the standing committee members of the Communist Party.

The exclusion of women from more than episodic or marginal participation in the historical development of the Chinese state is culturally and structurally intertwined with their reclusion in the patriarchal Chinese family system and the overwhelming impact of this gender sequestration on the entirety of Chinese culture, displayed in the very semantic roots of the Chinese language.

WOMEN AND
THE FAMILY

There is little writing in the Five Classics about women as people; rather women are treated in terms of their family roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. One of the Five Classics, the Book of Changes (Yi Jing) established the most basic equations of male (yang) and female (yin), with parallel dualisms of heaven and earth, and sun and moon. In the beginning the two cosmic forces were equal but different and complementary in function. "By the classical age of Zhou (1027-221 B.C.) that order was transformed to create a sexual hierarchy in which the female came with time to hold the subordinate place. In other words, the Five Classics did not initiate female subordination but justified it. They did so largely by speculating on the nature of woman, and by demonstrating her natural inferiority."

In the Analects, Confucius equated women and inferior persons (xiaoren ), the antonym to the more superior man (junzi). "It is only women and worthless persons who are difficult to take care of, if you draw them close, they are immodest, if you keep them at a distance, they complain." • Mencius's story of his good mother together with an accumulation of legend relating to motherly and wifely devotion gave these roles a deceptive gloryin the official dynastic history. Confucian tradition emphasizes ancestor worship as an expression of the continuity of lineage. This emphasis on the continuity of the family line led to the placing of great value on producing sons. Mencius said, "There are three things which are unfilial, and the greatest of them is to have no descendant." The paramountcy of lineage constructed politically the single most important identity for Chinese women, transforming all social and economic relationships associated with it. Mencius's aphorism is a synecdoche for cultural practices that have had an adverse and even deadly impact on Chinese women, including many closely successive pregnancies, the practice of polygyny, child marriage, and female infanticide. Historically, infanticide and abortion were by and large not regarded as crimes, although infanticide was criminalized in the Qin (221-220 B.C.), the Han (202 B.C.-220 AD.), the Southern Sung (1127- 1279), and the Yuan (1279-1368) dynasties.

Enormous population growth was one of the consequences of the centrality of lineage to Chinese patriarchy; the tenacity of these traditions was most recently and forcefully asserted when the one-child-per family policy instituted by the Communist government in 1979 issued in the dramatic rise of female infanticide in contemporary China. Female infanticide is combined with abandonment and with the abortion of female fetuses. The number of missing girls reached almost 1.2 billion in 1989. This trend is part of a larger social phenomenon that is rooted in a complex interweaving of traditional culture with contemporary politics in China.20 According to interviews conducted in three Shaanxi villages in 1988 and in 1993, the traditional reproductive ideal was very pervasive among people in rural areas: 86 percent of the about one thousand women interviewed named the two-child family with at least one son as the best, because they considered one child as simply not enough- if the child died, the couple would be without issue, a social, cultural, and economic tragedy. 21 In traditional China, there was no pension security system for most of the population, and effectively speaking that situation persists today, especially in rural China. Boys are the primary sources of support and care for the elderly parents. As the saying goes "To raise a son is security for old age" (yanger fang/au).

During the Han dynasty, men's relationship to women developed into a codified superior-inferior status as interpreted by an authoritative Confucian scholar, Dong Zhongshu (179-104 B.C.). "The ruler is yang, the subject yin; the father is yang, the son yin; the husband is yang, the wife yin."22 The code of behavior for women in the Han dynasty was the three obediences and the four virtues (sancong side). A woman should obey her father before marriage, her husband after marriage, and her son after the death of her husband. She also had to observe the four virtues: to be faithful, diligent, cautious in speech, and modest in manner. Throughout all of her family roles, women's position was subordinate to the authority of men. However, a mother's authority might be high, especially in the extended families of the upper class, when she became a grandmother-in-law. As Lin Yutang observed, "we still have plenty of matriarchs, even in the Confucian households. "

The birth of a daughter was not a happy event, because a daughter could contribute little to her family in terms of material resources or care for the parents in their old age; above all, in most cases, they could not continue the family name.24 The only expectation of the parents was to marry off a daughter well. The expression "commodity on which money has been lost" (pei qian huo) is a common description for a daughter. As the idiom goes, "a boy is born facing in and a girl is born facing out" (nan xiangnei nu xiangwai). Naming the child often indicates the father's or grandfather's wish or disappointment for the child's or family's future. Many girls have names like "Little mistake" (Xiao cuo ), "Second to a Boy" (Ya nan), "Call for a brother" (Zhao de), "Little maiden" (Xiao mei), etc. Girl's names are more likely to be negative and stereotypic, or to be names intended to classify the child or to be used as a vehicle for changing circumstances external to the child herself.

Once she is married, a woman becomes the property of her husband's family and is relegated to the world of household and community. The wife is referred to by her husband as inside person (neiren ), because she is secluded to the innermost compartments of the home. She is defined in terms of her husband, that is, in kin or status category terms. The terms she is addressed by and the terms she uses to address others serve as constant reminders of the hierarchical relations of gender, age, and generation. 25 The gender ideology is so persistent and pervasive that to this day, people in rural areas still give their daughters the same name, or worse, leave them nameless. Deng Xiaoping's mother is known as his mother. There are only her sons' names on her gravestone, like most of the head stones of Chinese women!

As we have seen, in traditional China a patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal society was sanctioned by Confucianism. A woman could not inherit property and was trained to accept her lot unquestioningly. Marriage was for and by family, not a romantic union of two people in love. Women were expected to leave their natal homes as adults and lead secluded lives in the environs of their husbands' homes. As a young bride, a wife's position in the family was low and insecure. It was the major break for most women from her natal family, friends, and community. Except for the possible interference of the brother, control of the bride and the object of her duties were transferred on her wedding day from her natal family to her husband's. She could not initiate divorce nor remarry if widowed.27 Marriage was considered the single most important event in her life, because it was her career or livelihood (jiahan jiahan, zhuangyi chifan ). No matter what fate holds in store for her, as stated in the idioms, a wife should stay with her husband-"when married to a cock, one must follow the cock," "when married to a dog, one must follow a dog"-the wife must adapt herself to her husband's fortune and habits (jiaji suiji, jiagou shuigou ). Her role was-and continues to be-defined in terms of wife and mother, but even that position is not secured by the mere fact of her marriage. When she is with a male child, it means good (hao ). Indeed, it is only after a woman gives birth to a son that her position in the family is secured. Most families put great pressure on the wife to bear a son or face the humiliation of accepting a concubine or other forms of emotional abuse and divorce.

Chastity was a required expression of female fidelity. In the Song dynasty (960-1279), Neo-Confucian scholars' emphasis on chastity and opposition to widow remarriage was expressed in a frequently quoted phrase of Zheng Yi (1032-1107): "It is a small matter to starve to death but a grave crime to lose one's virtue." A virgin is described as clear as ice and pure as jade (bingqing yujie). Therefore, women should guard the body as one would a jade-to preserve one's virtue like a jade (shoushen ruyu). A widow was told to preserve her chastity-to remain in widowhood and never remarry. She was never to lose her virtue for fear of incurring disgrace (shishen). If a member of the gentry family was raped, the socially acceptable solution was to commit suicide. There was a double moral standard for men and women. Women should marry only once, men could have many wives. Women were to follow one man to the end-to be faithful to one husband till death and not to remarry after the death of a husband. ( congyi erzhong). A married daughter was perceived to be no longer the responsibility of her natal family and was therefore considered a resource lost, as "water spilt out" (pochu deshui). With the death of her husband, young and childless widows scarcely had much to live for, for the rest of their lives. Some of them found an alternative in suicide. Once an upper class widow announced her intention to follow her late husband in death, she would be honored by officials, admired, and die, knowing that her name would be commemorated as a chaste widow. Monumental arches would be erected in her honor. Occasionally, an oppressed woman would be driven to take her own life as a form of protest and revenge. Suicide was almost the single escape from the brutality to which Chinese women were often submitted. Because a married woman's suicide brought her husband's family public disgrace and, at times, retribution by her own kin, it offered an abused woman both vengeance and escape.28 Fei Hsiao-tung explained:"According to popular belief (a suicide) becomes a spirit and is able to revenge herself; further, her own parents and brothers will seek redress, sometimes even destroying part of her husband's house."29 "Death brings not only an end to suffering, but power, the means to punish her tormentors."

In traditional China work was closely identified with home and family life; the family was the primary economic unit. But in addition to cooking, cleaning, and caring for young and old, women did engage in such work as tending mulberry trees, raising silk worms, spinning, weaving, and sewing. And although most women worked primarily at home, some also worked outside the home-as innkeepers, herbalists, midwives, brokers, matchmakers, and spiritual mediums. But such women were labeled as busybodies (sanku liupo ), and thus their critical social role was trivialized. It was the women who remained private, secluded from other women and men, who were upheld as ideal female role models. Most of the women were illiterate; education for a female child was not only irrelevant, it jeopardized her chance for a good marriage. Women were thus not only excluded from taking the Civil Service Examination- the only regular avenue to official power and the institutions of government bureaucracy-but were denied the opportunity to receive any form of formal education. Only daughters of the scholarly official families would have a chance to receive an informal tutorial education at home. The Confucian scholars justified this deprivation by saying that "women without talent are virtuous" (nuzi wucai bian shi de). This cultural tradition still affects parents' decisions regarding daughters' education in today's People's Republic of China. A century after the Ministry of Education of the Qing government announced the establishment of schools for girls, the illiteracy rates were 12.68% for males and 28.96% for females, six-years-old and older in the 1990 Census.

THE IMAGE
AND POSITION
OF WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA

After the reforms, revolution, and the women's rights movements in the twentieth century, Chinese women were described as holding up half the sky (nuren zhan banbiantian) in the People's Republic of China. Women's rights in the family were guaranteed by the Marriage Law of 1950. The Land Reform Act of 1952 promised women equal rights to land, but land was distributed to the head of the household-generally a manand peasants were encouraged to fulfill their dream of setting up a household and making one's fortune, (fajia zhifu).32 It is obvious that in a relative sense women's development has advanced at a faster pace than that of men, at least before the current period of market reforms. For 30 years the policy of low wages and high employment gave urban women virtually the same access to employment as their male counterparts. However, many families have problems of geographical separation - husband and wife work and live in separate places. Common living becomes difficult; when they share time with each other on holidays, the husband often tries to be less demanding and more accommodating: "henpecked" husbands (qi guan yan) have emerged as part of the national idiom. China has been passing through a period of transformation since the implementation of the "Four Modernizations" policy in 1979. The complex process of reforms since that year has begun to restructure the lives of women in many ways. We have already seen some of the effects of the one-child-per-family policy. The campaign slogan was "later marriages, fewer children" (wanhun shaoyu). Ultrasound machines and ready access to abortion have made it relatively simple for urban parents to guarantee that their one child is a boy. Despite the fact that the 1992 law prohibits abortion based on the sex of the fetus, infanticide continues. The preference for boys and the result of female infanticide and gender-specific abortion show in the disparity in the ratio of males to females: the 1990 National Census showed a total of 599 million compared with 565 million females, representing a 34 million gap between the sexes. In almost all other countries of the world, the sex ratio shows a marginally higher proportion of women. The same census in China showed that out of a total population of 1.2 billion, about 205 million Chinese over the age of 15 were single; there were nearly three men for every two women in this age group. It also indicated that while the majority of Chinese adults marry by the time they turn thirty, 8 million people in their 30s were still single. The men outnumbered the women by nearly 10 to 1 in this age group. This meant that millions of Chinese girls did not survive to adulthood because of female infanticide, malnutrition, inadequate medical care, desertion and neglect, resulting in high female mortality rates. The preference for boys has been worsened by the insistence on having male heirs. "Female infanticide is a form of policing and terrorist practice of control over women to keep them in their prescribed reproductive role as the bearers of sons." The other issue concerning the relationships of power and inequality that has structured women's roles and status is that the government prioritized economic growth over gender issues. Now China is in a stage of transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, and the transition results in complex socioeconomic developments in which women face many problems, such as women returning to the home (funu huijia fun), female workers losing benefits, young girls being forced to discontinue their education, and the reappearance of prostitution and concubinage. Women college graduates are being turned away from jobs for which they are qualified. There is a marked decrease in women's participation in politics. The growth of the global market has benefited a few urban educated women but impoverished the majority of rural women. Global economic integration has made women, especially poor women, disproportionately worse off. The new crime of the forceful abduction of girls and young women has become so common that the government had to set up a special task force (da guai) to crack down on it. The female companion who accompanies male customers drinking, singing, and dancing, appears in the discos and bars in the large cities; these so-called "three accompany girls" (sanpei xiaojie) are like bar hostesses in Japan. Home and motherhood have once again become glorified and presented as women's path to complete fulfillment. Expressions such as "two persons to guarantee the success of one" (er baoyi) refers to the idea that the success of the husband is ensured by sacrificing the wife's career. Women find themselves trying to absorb changes and social strains similar to those brought about in the West during the Industrial Revolution. Another major impact of economic reform and modernization has been the liberation of the mass media. Since the 1980s, much discussion on gender has followed in the wake of widespread social and economic transformation. Women have tried to reestablish and redefine gender roles and relationships. There are public debates on femininity, masculinity, and sexuality in public forums and the mass media. By the 1980s magazines projected "an administrator/intellectual/professional-type image based in the main on administrative cadres in education/medicine/sports/science research, businesswomen and private entrepreneurs. The most prominent image became women with personal achievements and success."35 There are increasing numbers of women entrepreneurs starting their own businesses and managing their own companies. This group of enterprising, mobile, independent, shrewd and successful business female executives is described in a newly emerged image as strong women (nii jiang ren) in the new economic system. New forms of Western gender difference and commercialism have been introduced. Some women have embraced a notion of femininity that American feminists would find restrictive or as demeaning women into sex objects by paying careful attention to fashion and appearance in order to attract men. Chinese youths, on the other hand, protest by reacting against the government policy of puritanical morality and isolationism and look to the West, especially American movies, novels, and magazines, for an image of sensuality and sexual liberation that they associate with Western democracy. This is a far cry from 1950-1980 when it was almost impossible to notice sex differences-everybody wore similar clothes, no one wore makeup, or commented about personal appearance. In the 1980s, Western approaches to advertising-using women to sell products-became current business practice. As Tao Chunfang, director of the Women's Research Institute said, "Everyone has benefited from the reforms, but men have moved ahead at a faster pace than women. This is China, where the man has always been the focus of the culture. China has glorified the man for several thousand years."36 China Women's News held a forum on "The Image of Women in Advertising" on March 2, 1992. Most of the panelists agreed that the role for women in advertising is that of sex object. The magazine also suggested that women appear in two stereotypical roles: the good wife and wise mother or the modem flower vase-in the later case, a woman is shown simply because of her physical attractiveness and sex appeal, clearly in a decorative role. Women have thus been exploited and denigrated by the media to enhance profits Economic reform has led to the decentralization and autonomy of industries, the establishment of private enterprise, and the elimination of the cradle-to-grave state-insured "iron rice bowl" (tefanwan) employment system. Enterprises are now expected to be responsible for their own profits and losses in contrast to the 1949-1980 period. The reform of the employment system to optimize the labor structure began in 1987-88 and posed a threat to female employees who held permanent positions. It was women workers who bore the brunt of the drive to reform labor structure (yuhua zuhe). A survey by the Women's Work Department, under the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, of 660 enterprises from the end of 1988 through the beginning of 1989 revealed that in the drive to optimize the labor structure, women constituted 62.5% of redundant workers, which came to 21 % of all women workers. Of the 660 enterprises, only 5.3% of the managers said they preferred to hire women for jobs that could be done by either sex. Many of the managers felt that the system of protective benefits to women workers constituted an example of receiving government handouts "eating out of the big pot," and should be abolished. The new economy has made many people rich, but it also makes life more difficult and frustrating for women. The whole of Chinese society now focuses on profit at the expense of equality, and as Communist socialist doctrine loses its influence, women are losing the ground they gained in the 1950s. Women are discriminated against in jobs, in housing, and in land allocation. Physical attractiveness has become increasingly important. The new campaign to eliminate the secure and permanent government job, the "iron rice bowl," will affect large numbers of female workers.38 Women are the first to be fired by struggling state firms, and the last to be hired by the vibrant private sector. State figures show that women make up 70% of the 20 million workers made idle by enterprise reform. They were instructed to go home and wait for assignment or find their own job. "It's clear that there's been a great reversal with the reform era. Things are going backward," said Wang Xingjuan, who runs China's only nation-wide women's hot line, and was a founder of the Women's Institute in 1988. She said that "as government supervision wanes, employers-who are mostly men-are reverting to traditional, patriarchal ideas that women should not work and that female hires will quit to marry or cost money for maternity and child care."39 Under Mao Zedong's rule, factories and offices had little autonomy, were not much motivated by economic gains, and were obliged to observe central guidelines against gender discrimination. Mao Zedong planned his strategy for victory in China on the argument that Chinese rural poor peasants, not the proletariat, were the "revolutionary vanguard."40 Now in the 1990s, 70% of the Chinese population live in rural areas.41 It is in Chinese rural society that gender inequality remains entrenched. In 1992 there were 109 million people in absolute poverty in China, all of them residing in rural areas. The traditional attitudes toward daughters persist in spite of a century of revolution. Most rural women suffer from poverty, lack of health care, and are illiterate. According to the 1993 census, the illiteracy rates for girls in western China are shockingly high: Guizhou, 62.28%; Gansu, 81.48%; Qinghai 79.30% and Ningxia 64.88%.42 Further, they have no access to good health care, professional training, or higher education. The rapid economic growth since 1980 has widened the gaps in regional growth rates, earnings, and access to investment capital. For example, average wages in Jiangxi province in 1993 were 47% of those in Guangdong, and 44% of those in Shanghai.43 This kind of social and economic disparity exists both between urban and rural and between coastal and inland areas. Most rural women in the transition period of economic reforms are burdened with increased work as men move away from farms and into industrial work, and young daughters drop out of school to help their mothers. In 1987 the State Statistical Bureau conducted a sample poll indicating that out of 220 million illiterates over the age of twelve, 156 million were female.44 In 1988 the All-China Women's Federation, aware of the serious situation, tried to improve the condition by initiating a new activity in the countryside, "Women's Double Activity" (funu shuangbi huodong), attempting to mobilize Chinese women to raise their education level, learn science and technologies, and participate in the political and economic construction of the nation. Three years later, the All-China Women's Federation joined twelve other ministries and commissions to sponsor a new project called "Accomplishing Heroine" (jinguo jiangong). It called for urban Chinese women to become new women who uphold high ideals and morals and are disciplined with confidence, self-esteem, and self-reliance. They selected 4,672 women as role models. The rapidity and contradictory character of political and socioeconomic change in transitional China demands that women, to be truly emancipated, find an independent voice, an effective repertoire of means of cultural subversion that can resist the redefinitions of women's place now underway because of the retrograde synthesis of traditionalism and westernized commodification. In China, any such subversive cultural project of resistance and transformation must come to grips with the repressive as well as the liberating potentials of language as the bearer of patriarchy. It is here that the historical experience of the niishu movement of the Shangjiangxu region in Hunan province provides a glimpse of what this task might involve.

NUSHU
(WOMEN'S SCRIPTS)

Niishu suggests that writings by, for, and to women were powerful sources of encouragement and mutual support in a patriarchal and oppressive culture. According to the theory of muted groups, offered by British anthropologists Edwin and Shirley Ardener, every society has a dominant ideology that describes all social behavior. The dominant ideology dictates thinking, social norms and expectation, supplies vocabulary, and reflects the image of reality held by dominant groups. Suppressed subgroups, whose views differ, may lack the language to express their own views or even an adequate vocabulary to conceptualize their differences. They may adopt the course of not airing those differences beyond their own subgroup to avoid antagonizing those more powerful.45 Related to the theory of muted groups is the way women have tried to create personal spaces that either coexist with a dominant male social order or exist covertly in patriarchal societies.

The only empirical data of this type of creative response in China discovered so far has been the use of unofficial language, niishu (women's scripts). This is the only Chinese writing system developed by and used for women to communicate among women themselves. They kept it secret from men for a long time until the 1950s. The dominant males, who use the "official language" -the standard writing system-dismissed it as insignificant.

Chinese archaeologists, linguists, and feminists recently discovered hundreds of poems, stories and letters written in the secret writing system in a mountainous region of Shangjiangxu in Jiang-yang county in Hunan province in central China.

Nushu first appeared in Beijing in 1958, when a woman presented a note in nushu writing to a police station, asking for direction. No one could read it, so they filed it away. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), women in Shangjiangxu in the Jiang-yung region discontinued writing in the script for fear of being charged with practicing witchcraft because they had written words, signs, and secrets.

When Gong Zhebin, an associate professor in Zhongnan College for the Minority, began researching the script in the 1980s, he found only a dozen elderly women who could read it and only three who were able to write it. Tan Baochen died in 1989, Gao Yinxian in 1990, and Yi Nianhua in 1991, after giving their collections of nushu to the researchers. Nushu was published by the joint effort of feminist scholars both in the People's Republic of China and in Taiwan the following year.46 Nushu's use declined as women gained access to education in the middle of the nineteenth century. Only a few nushu writings survived, because the writing system was passed matrilineally from mother to daughter. It is exclusively a women's language. The originators wanted only females to write and handle it, because they considered it was the only appropriate form to tell their own story. One woman wrote: "No man can record my sorrow, because he would not understand my problem."47 They treasured the writing so much that many women willed the works written in nushu buried or burned when they passed away, so they could read it in the afterlife.

Chinese linguists have deciphered and transcribed hundreds of the writings into standard Chinese.48 As a phonic script, it used about a total of 700 characters that could easily be adapted to a changing and modernizing vocabulary. The existing nushu vocabulary is about 100,000 words. The language is phonetic but uses characters derived from standard Chinese to represent the syllables of the local dialect. The standard Chinese writing system has no phonetic base, using characters solely to represent meaning. In nushu, however, each word has many meanings, depending upon the context. The language is formed of a series of abstract geometric shapes and reads vertically from top to bottom, right to left. Visually, a close connection between nushu and needlepoint works can be seen. In traditional China, almost all women worked at home; embroidery and weaving were common handicrafts. When women in this area did their embroidery work together, they taught each other how to read and write nushu. Usually they shared their writing by reading aloud in the local dialect of Shangjiangxu. Men could understand it if they heard it read aloud, though they could not read or write nushu.

The writings of women's script can be summed up in the following categories:

1. Rituals.

A temple was dedicated to a goddess called "Kupo" in Shangjiangxu, Jiang-yung; here women held festivals for their goddess before 1949. Female worshipers wrote their wishes, prayers, and supplications on either paper or paper fans and brought them to the temple to read or simply placed them on the altar.

2. Poems or songs for amusement.

among women on the "Cow Fighting Festival" on the eighth day of the fourth month in the lunar calendar. It was a women's day, when women fed their cows, then took their favorite food and met together at a certain place to sing, read their writings, and eat.

3. Tokens of friendship.

Women wrote to each other to make friends. Psychologically, Chinese women depended largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, these women tried to build a culture with their own values, customs, and written language.

4. Letters written between two women to acknowledge their sworn sisterhood.

When two or more women met, if they liked each other and wanted to form a long term relationship, they would send letters to each other by a female messenger in niishu vowing their commitment to each other. This type of non-kin, same sex network was quite common among women in this area. "Sworn sisterhood" could involve females of the same generation or whosoever hit it off with one another. 50 Judging from their letters, this relationship was typically life-long, intimate, highly emotional, faithful, and mutually admiring.

5. Biographies, to express loneliness, sadness, or a sense of lost after the death of member of the family because of natural catastrophe or war.

Women either wrote their biographies themselves or asked someone who could write to record it for them. The writer usually wrote something to comfort the suffering person. The women carried their own biographies with them, for therapeutic reasons, in times of emotional stress.

Many minority people who lived in Jiang Yong area practice to this day "the not going to husband's home" (buluo fujia). The bride goes to the groom's home for three days after the wedding, then returns to her natal home and residence until the birth of her first child, but for no more than four years. She will visit her husband's home four to five times a year. On the third day, the bride's female friends deliver their writing of "the third day writing" (sanzhaoshu) to her new home. Many essays have been written under such circumstances. These writings usually express helplessness and sadness over losing the "sworn sister" to marriage.

There are writings that reveal a mother-in-law's mistreatment of a daughter-in-law, such as Yi Niainhua described in her own biography: "My husband went to school. I did my best to serve parents-in-law. I have observed 'the three subordinations' and practiced the four virtues. My motherin- law accused me of eating eggs without permission and punished me by beating me. I cried for three nights and contemplated committing suicide, but I could not bear the thought of leaving my young daughter behind so I decided to wait for my husband to come back."

6. Historical records and epics.

Women kept records of historical events of their own time. One book was about the Taiping Rebellion (1852- 1865), describing how difficult it was during the war to walk with bound feet and take care of their children and how much they suffered from the deaths of their husbands. They had to cultivate land by themselves and feed the young and old. It was the only history of Taiping written from a woman's personal perspectives. They recorded their suffering during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Their young and strong husbands and sons were drafted. Only the sick and dying returned home. The shortage of agricultural labor turned their farms into wasteland. They cried out desperately to heaven and earth for help, but all in vain. They also recorded all the major events of the People's Republic of China, 1949 to 1958.

Nushu provides much needed evidence documenting women's experiences. The women in the mountainous rural area of Hunan province, just like their sisters all over the world, had been excluded by traditional history. Because women, especially women in remote rural China, had neither political nor economic nor military power, they were not a part of the official history. History is made, after all, by the powerful. Nushu deals with women's hopes, their fears, their constant struggle to get along with their world and with their in-laws in the traditional Chinese society. The writers and readers of nushu, as a suppressed subgroup, created their own writing system to express their own views with an adequate vocabulary to conceptualize their differences from their oppressors. Nushu was their true creation, their own voice.

CONCLUSION

The analysis of Chinese characters, idioms, and semantic placements provides the context for understanding the historical construction of gender roles, images, and ideas that inform the oppression of women in Chinese society. We have seen that language was crucial in the creation and perpetuation of the Chinese patriarchal system. The physical structure of the Chinese language testified to the continuing inequalities of gender within Chinese society, the roots of which revert to antiquity. The Chinese writing system that is by and for men serves to maintain patterns of behavior that reflect as well as reinforce gender inequality.

We should recognize that social change creates linguistic and behavioral changes. Linguistic disparities reflect real and sustained social inequalities that can and should be changed. There is no other alternative for Chinese women seeking equality but to change the language and its usages. Once Chinese women expose the falseness of existing male meanings and encode their own language, a more objective social reality can be envisaged and perhaps ultimately achieved.

ORIGINAL ----->