Yang Xiaobo said she didn't appreciate an apron as Women's Day gift, although she may have needed it.
"That was about ten years ago, we were given a day off on March8, International Women's Day, but the only gift we got were aprons, which we never really wanted because they were intended to make us work even on our festival," the 46-year-old woman recalled.
For this year's International Women's Day, Yang, an accountant at a company that exports farm produce in Jilin City of northeastern China, received a VIP shopping card and decided to go for a facial and some shopping with her daughter.
Some women still receive detergent and brooms from their employers on Women's Day now, and still grumble about the "unjust connotations of the gifts", but they are seeing more diversified presents, like free tours, gym classes, hairdressing, and legal counseling.
The women's festival, established in 1910 when women demanded shorter hours, better pay and voting rights, has taken root in China over the past decades, especially after Chairman Mao Zedong's famed catchphrase of "women hold up half the sky" and decades of modernization that brought freedom and equal chances for women. Popular text messages that circulated among mobile phones read something like "women should just watch soap opera and enjoy life, leaving husbands to do the cooking and chores."
The pro-women sentiments have been so palpable that Chinese men have been calling for a "men's day" to offset the feminine feeling that prevails, at least on Women's Day.
Today, diversified ways of celebrations are seen as a symbol of a better life and better status for the millions of females compared to the past.
The Finance Department in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province offered international business etiquette courses to its female employees ahead of the occasion. Zhang Dasheng, course lecturer and a professor at the Heilongjiang University, said "Women's Day celebrations changed with the times: gifts like aprons bore distinctive planned economy hallmarks decades ago when people were given what they needed rather than what they wanted."
"They have more and better means to mark the occasion now," he said.
Sports activities like rope-skipping, jogging and Taijiquan, a kind of traditional Chinese shadow boxing, contests were held almost on a nationwide scale, with some banners reading "Fitness for women, Fitness for the Olympics". Awards that came with the competitions, like flower bouquets and shirts, drew envy from maleco-workers.
In the central Chinese city of Changsha, women threw pillows at each other, rejoiced amid flying feathers and vied for the gifts hidden inside. In Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei Province neighboring Beijing, more than 1,500 women displayed their Taijiquan moves, pummeled drums and performed traditional folk fan dances to celebrate their day.
In several cities including Beijing, Guiyang and Chengdu, career fairs were set up for women, and no males were allowed.
Environment protection, which now figures strongly in the daily lives of the Chinese, was also shoehorned into the celebrations. In the Qianfoshan Primary School in Jinan, eastern Shandong Province, mothers received cloth shopping bags on Thursday, made by their children and fathers. Down in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, women held a "marathon jog" advocating the use of phosphorus-free detergent, cloth bags and to water-saving tips.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Traditional Chinese values held that women should obey the wills of their sons, husband and father. But over the years, women's rights and status have been remarkably boosted. They now work in almost all the fields that men do and are often even better: they drove formidable cranes at the construction of the Three Gorges dam, they were among the top designers of the Chang'e lunar probe, and some women bosses made their way into the list of China's most wealthy. Expectations have been high that China could send women into space in the future.
Despite the festive atmosphere for the population that hold up half the sky, women's rights and status remain to be improved.
A touch of irony lies in "Sanba", short for March 8th in Chinese, as it is not associated with any respect and romanticism, but has the meaning of being garrulous, fussy and not agreeable, and is by no means a favored phrase when used about a woman. The only positive connotation may be found in the "National Sanba Red-flag Bearer", an annual award given to model women by the All China Women's Federation.
The entrenched belief that favors boys over girls has been blamed for a gender imbalance of more than 118 boys to every 100 girls across the country. At the ongoing annual session of the National People's Congress, women made up 21.33 percent of the about 3,000 deputies, but the figure only grew by a mere one percent over the last year.
"In some villages, girls born to poor families are still denied education opportunities, and married women had to go for sterilization surgery behind their husbands' backs because they don't want to have any more babies as the husbands desire," said Wu Haiying, head of the population and family planning commission in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
In the cities, women face the challenges of job discrimination and domestic violence, she added.
Wu said she hoped more women could have their lives bettered through education and determination to defend their rights.
"We should continue to break the shackles of biased beliefs, and try to have more say and take up more responsibility," she added.
Source: Xinhua
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