Working with her husband, a Taiwanese, Zhang Yin at first bought American scrap paper through intermediaries, but in 1990 she moved to Los Angeles and began to work out of her home. She drove around California in a used Dodge minivan, visiting garbage dumps and making arrangements to obtain their scrap paper. The dumps were happy to make deals with her.
“I had to learn from scratch,” Zhang Yin said. “The business was just my husband and me, and I didn’t speak a word of English.” She was able to ship scrap paper back to China cheaply, because ships were bringing toys and clothing from China to California ports but returning mostly empty. As Chinese demand for paper soared, Zhang Yin built up her company, and in 1995 she returned to China to open a paper-making plant in the southern boomtown of Dongguan. Her plants make containerboard, which is used to make corrugated cardboard boxes for Chinese exports.
Zhang Yin’s recycling company in California, called America Chung Nam, is now the biggest American exporter to China by volume. Her Chinese paper manufacturer, Nine Dragons Paper, has more than five thousand employees, and she has grand ambitions for it. “My goal is to make Nine Dragons, in three to five years, the leader in container-boards,” she told our New York Times friend David Barboza. “My desire has always been to be the leader in an industry.”
By 2006, Zhang Yin had a net worth of $4.6 billion and topped some lists of China’s richest people. She was arguably the world’s richest self-made woman, although market turmoil later sent her net worth plunging and threatened her operations. In any case, there is something larger going on here: By the reckoning of the Huron Report, which tries to track China’s wealth, six of the ten richest self-made women in the world are now Chinese.
All this reflects the way China has established a more equal playing field for women. In a larger sense, China has emerged as a model on gender issues for developing countries: It evolved from repressing women to emancipating them, underscoring that cultural barriers can be overcome relatively swiftly where there is the political will to do so. A broad range of countries around the world—Rwanda, Botswana, Tunisia, Morocco, Sri Lanka—have likewise made rapid progress in empowering women. Challenges remain, but these countries remind us that gender barriers can be dismantled, to the benefit of men and women alike.
We sometimes hear people voice doubts about opposition to sex trafficking, genital cutting, or honor killings because of their supposed inevitability. What can our good intentions achieve against thousands of years of tradition?
One response is China. A century ago, China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female. Foot-binding, child marriage, concubinage, and female infanticide were embedded in traditional Chinese culture. Rural Chinese girls in the early twentieth century sometimes didn’t even get real names, just the equivalent of “No. 2 sister” or “No. 4 sister.” Or, perhaps even less dignified, girls might be named Laidi or Yindi or Zhaodi, all variations of “Bring a younger brother.” Girls were rarely educated, often sold, and vast numbers ended up in the brothels of Shanghai.
So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer to slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures. One lesson of China is that we need not accept that discrimination is an intractable element of any society. If culture were immutable, China would still be impoverished and Sheryl would be stumbling along on three-inch feet.
The battle for women’s rights in China was as bitter as it is today in the Middle East, and there were setbacks. Chinese social conservatives were furious when young women began to cut their hair, saying that this made women look like men. In the late 1920s, street thugs would sometimes seize a woman with short hair and pull out all of her hair or even cut off her breasts. If you want to look like a man, they said, this will do it.
Communism after the 1949 revolution was brutal in China, leading to tens of millions of deaths by famine or repression, but its single most positive legacy was the emancipation of women. After taking power, Mao brought women into the workforce and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and he used his political capital to abolish child marriage, prostitution, and concubinage. It was Mao who proclaimed: “Women hold up half the sky.”
There were some setbacks for women with the death of ideology and the rise of a market economy in the 1980s, and Chinese women still face challenges. Even college-educated women experience discrimination in finding jobs, and sexual harassment is widespread. A Chinese cabinet minister once mistook Sheryl for a local secretary and tried to force himself on her; she got her revenge when she wrote about the incident in our book China Wakes. Concubinage has returned with er nai, or No. 2 wives, and China has millions of prostitutes again (although, in contrast to India, they mostly enter the business by choice). The combination of the one-child birth control policy and convenient access to ultrasound testing means that parents routinely check the sex of a fetus and get an abortion if it is female. The sex ratio of newborns is 116 boys for every 100 girls, meaning that many poor men will never be able to marry; this will be a source of future instability. Sadly, neither economic development nor the rise of education and a middle class seems to have affected the predilection for aborting female fetuses.
All that said, no country has made as much progress in improving the status of women as China has. Over the past one hundred years, it has become—at least in the cities—one of the best places to grow up female. Urban Chinese men typically involve themselves more in household tasks like cooking and child care than most American men do. Indeed, Chinese women often dominate household decision-making, leading to the expression “qi guan yan,” or “the wife rules strictly.” And while job discrimination against women is real, it has less to do with sexism than with employers being wary of China’s generous maternity benefits.
We could see the progress in Sheryl’s ancestral village in southern China. When Sheryl’s maternal grandmother was five years old, her mother tried to make her beautiful by wrapping cloth bandages around her feet from her toes to her heels, starting a process that would crush the tiny bones so that she could display dainty three-inch feet called golden lotuses. These were considered sensual: Nineteenth-century Chinese had far more erotic words for women’s feet than for their breasts. Sheryl’s grandmother stripped off the bandages after she moved with her husband to Toronto, but it was too late. She became the matriarch of seven strong-willed children but hobbled until the end of her life in tiny shoes, walking like a slim penguin on short stilts.
By the time we began visiting China, foot-binding had disappeared, but village women still mostly accepted second-class citizenship, pleading with the Goddess of Mercy for a son and sometimes drowning their own daughters after birth. Yet the spread of education and job opportunities for young women led to a rapid recalibration of perceptions concerning gender. Educating and empowering girls is certainly the right thing to do, but, most important in the eyes of many families, it is profitable! China has enjoyed a virtuous circle in which, once girls had economic value, parents invested more in them and gave them greater autonomy.
Chinese women are also making inroads in fields that were once overwhelmingly male. The majority of math and chemistry students in China are still male, but the edge is slimmer than in the United States. Chess is one of the most male-dominated pursuits all around the world, and that is also true in China—but women there are catching up more than elsewhere. In 1991, Xie Jun became the first women’s world chess champion from China, and since then two other Chinese women—Zhu Chen and Xu Yuhua—have succeeded her. Moreover, a girl named Hou Yifan may be the greatest talent ever in women’s chess. At the age of fourteen in 2008, she narrowly lost in the finals for the women’
s world championship, and she is still improving rapidly. If any female now playing is to wrest the title of world chess champion from men, it is likely to be her.
China is an important model because it was precisely its emancipation of girls that preceded and enabled its economic takeoff. The same is true of other rapidly growing Asian economies. As Homi Kharas, an economist who has worked on these issues for the World Bank and the Brookings Institution, advised us:
Engineering an economic takeoff is really about using a nation’s resources most efficiently. Many East Asian economies enjoyed a sustained boom by moving young peasant women from farms to factories, after giving them a basic education for free. In Malaysia, Thailand, and China, export-oriented industries like garments and semi-conductors predominantly employed young women who had previously been working in less productive family farms or doing household work. The economies got multiple benefits from this transition. By improving the labor productivity of the young women, growth was raised. By employing them in export industries, the countries got foreign exchange which could be used to buy needed capital equipment. The young women saved much of their money or sent it back to relatives in the village, raising national saving rates. Because they had good jobs and income-earning opportunities, they also delayed marriage and childbearing, lowering fertility and population growth rates. So a major factor in East Asia’s economic success was the contribution of its young peasant female workforce.
It’s no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic takeoff have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work. In contrast, it would be difficult to imagine—at least for the moment—millions of rural Pakistani or Egyptian teenage girls being fully educated and then allowed to move to the cities while still single to take up jobs and power an industrial revolution.
Leading Indian business executives have noted that one of their country’s weaknesses is that it does not employ women as efficiently as China, and they are trying to rectify that. Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Technologies, a leading technology company, notes that 26 percent of Wipro’s engineers are now female. His foundation, the Azim Premji Foundation, focuses on getting more village girls in school—partly to help those individuals, but also because the result will be lower fertility and a more capable labor force to power the economy as a whole.
Implicit in what we’re saying about China is something that sounds shocking to many Americans: Sweatshops have given women a boost. Americans mostly hear about the iniquities of garment factories, and they are real—the forced overtime, the sexual harassment, the dangerous conditions. Yet women and girls still stream to such factories because they’re preferable to the alternative of hoeing fields all day back in a village. In most poor countries, women don’t have many job options. In agriculture, for example, women typically aren’t as strong as men and thus are paid less. Yet in the manufacturing world, it’s the opposite. The factories prefer young women, perhaps because they’re more docile and perhaps because their small fingers are more nimble for assembly or sewing. So the rise of manufacturing has generally raised the opportunities and status of women.
The implication is that instead of denouncing sweatshops, we in the West should be encouraging manufacturing in poor countries, particularly in Africa and the Muslim world. There is virtually no manufacturing for export in Africa (aside from Mauritius and small amounts in Lesotho and Namibia), and one of the ways we could help women in Egypt and Ethiopia would be to encourage factories for the export of cheap shoes or shirts. Labor-intensive factories would create large numbers of jobs for women, and they would bring in more capital—and gender equality.
The United States has established a terrific program to promote African exports by reducing tariffs on them. It’s called the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, and it’s an effective aid program that never gets adequate attention or support. If Western countries wanted to do something simple that would benefit African women, they would merge AGOA with the European equivalent, called Everything But Arms. As the Oxford University economist Paul Collier has noted, that merger of standards and bureaucracies would create a larger common market for tariff-free import of African manufactured goods. That would constitute a significant incentive to locate factories in Africa, boosting employment and giving Africans a new channel to help themselves.
Almost halfway around the world, a country very different from China is also emerging as a model on gender issues. Rwanda is an impoverished, landlocked, patriarchal society that still lives in the shadow of the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 people were slaughtered in one hundred days. Most of the killers were from the Hutu tribe and most of the victims from the minority Tutsi tribe, and tribal tensions remain a challenge to the country’s stability. Yet somehow from this infertile, chauvinistic soil has emerged a country in which women now play an important economic, political, and social role—in a way that hugely benefits Rwanda as a whole. Rwanda is consciously implementing policies that empower and promote women—and, perhaps partly as a result, it is one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. In some respects, in everything but size, Rwanda is now the China of Africa.
In the aftermath of the genocide, 70 percent of Rwanda’s population was female, and so the country was obliged to utilize women. But it was more than necessity. Men had discredited themselves during the genocide. Women were just minor players in the slaughter, so that only 2.3 percent of those jailed for the killings were female. As a result, there was a broad sense afterward that females were more responsible and less inclined to savagery. The country was thus mentally prepared to give women a larger role.
Paul Kagame, the rebel leader who defeated the genocidaires and became Rwanda’s president, wanted to revive his country’s economy and saw that he needed women to do that. “You shut that population out of economic activity at your peril,” he told us, as his press secretary—a woman—looked on approvingly. “The decision to involve women, we did not leave it to chance,” he added. “In the constitution, we said that women have to make up 30 percent of the parliament.”
Kagame speaks fluent English, meets regularly with Americans, and perhaps realized that it would be helpful to brand Rwanda as an equal-opportunity country. Rwanda’s cabinet room, which is more high-tech than its equivalent in the White House, frequently echoes with women’s voices. Kagame regularly has appointed strong women to cabinet posts and other top positions. Women now hold the positions of president of the supreme court, minister of education, mayor of Kigali, and director of Rwanda television, while at the grassroots level many women played major roles in village reconstruction. By 2007 Rwanda surpassed Sweden to become the nation with the highest share of women members of any parliament in the world—48.8 percent of its seats in the lower house. Then, in September 2008, a new election left Rwanda the first country with a majority of female legislators—55 percent in the lower house. In contrast, 17 percent of members of the United States House of Representatives were women in 2008, leaving the United States ranked sixty-eighth among countries of the world in the share of women holding national political office.
Rwanda is one of a number of poor countries—others include Costa Rica and Mozambique—that have at least one third female total representation in parliament. Rwanda is also one of the least corrupt, fastest-growing, and best-governed countries in Africa.
Countries like Rwanda and China have shown that governments can nurture women and girls in ways that boost economic development. In such countries with good governance and equal opportunities, Western help is often particularly effective.
Murvelene Clarke was a forty-one-year-old woman in Brooklyn who felt a vague desire to be more civic-minded and to devote more of her income to charity. She was earning $52,000 a year working at a bank and thought she had plenty to meet her own needs. “I heard about tithing, where you give ten percent of your income to the church,” Murvelene explained. “I’m not a member of a church, but I thou
ght I, too, should give ten percent of my income to charity.”
One priority for Murvelene was a charity that spent little on administrative expenses. So she went online and spent several hours browsing the charities that received the top rating—four stars—from Charity Navigator, a Web site that evaluates charities on their efficiency. Charity Navigator is not a perfect guide, because its focus is on overhead rather than impact, but it’s a useful starting point. Murvelene came across an organization called Women for Women International, and she liked what she saw. It’s a sponsorship organization that enables an American to support a particular woman in a needy country abroad. Murvelene, a black woman of Jamaican ancestry, liked the idea of sponsoring an African woman. So she signed up, agreeing to pay $27 a month for a year, and asked to be connected to a woman in Rwanda.
Murvelene was paired with Claudine Mukakarisa, a twenty-seven-year-old genocide survivor from Butare, Rwanda. Extremist Hutus had targeted her family, which was Tutsi, and she was the only survivor. Claudine had been kidnapped at the age of thirteen, along with her older sister, and had been taken to a Hutu rape house. “They started sexually violating both of us,” Claudine explained in a shy, pained monotone when we talked with her, “and then they started beating us.”
Large numbers of militia members came to the house, patiently lining up to rape the women. This went on for days, and of course there was no medical attention. “We had started rotting in our reproductive organs, and maggots were coming out of our bodies,” Claudine said. “Walking was almost impossible. So we crawled on our knees.” When Kagame’s army defeated the genocidaires, the Hutu militia fled to Congo—but took Claudine and her sister along as well. Militia members killed her sister but finally let Claudine go.
“I don’t know why I was released and my sister killed,” she said, shrugging. Probably it was because she was pregnant. Claudine was puzzled by her swelling belly, as she still had no idea about the facts of life. “I had thought I could not get pregnant, because I had been told that a girl becomes pregnant only if she is kissed on the cheek. And I had never been kissed.”
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