A. Society – Page 145. Definition: People who share a culture and a territory.
First off, in the documentary “China’s Lost Girls” is to shine a light on China’s female foster children, and how they have a crazy abundance of female children that get left to die, abandoned or thrown out. This is because of China’s one child policy. When the one-child policy was introduced, the government had come up with a target number of population by the year of 2000. This number was 1.2 billion. The policy has only helped to reduce the fertility rate, or the rate at which the civilians have been reproducing. This also resulted into most people hoping and only keeping their sons, because they are the ones that carry on the family name and help take care of
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Gender consists of the behaviors, and attitudes in which a group considers proper for each sex. Within China, the male children grow up to take over the land, or home and take care of their parents. They also are the ones that bring in the family, and carry on the family’s last name. When the Chinese government introduced the one-child policy, this made most men, want and desire to have male children. Then started the men throwing out Chinese children and the women to begin to leave the female children or abort them because a daughter was not acceptable. This shows that the males held the dominant position within Chinese society because of the fact they inherit everything, and are to take care of the parents when they become elderly. Also, in Chinese culture the women are more submissive, and throughout history were always the one that was sold, had arranged marriages and other more seen as someone’s property other than someone’s daughter. But because of the stigma against female children, they have predicted that in 2020 that around thirty million adult males to be unmarried. Some say that women are being held more precious and valuable, but as shown in the documentary, many women are being kidnapped and sold to men without wives. This leads to violence, and these women constantly living in a fearful and abusive environment. In the documentary, they also showed us a man that works to find these missing, or kidnapped women. Another person that spoke to us was a woman that he rescued, she was barely rescued because the whole village tried to fight off the police and detective. This resulted in her having to leave her son with the man. This shows us that within Chinese culture men just believe the female gender is meant to be submissive, and have no
Do you believe in equality? Regardless of gender, age, education, religion, etc. all people should be treated the same. However, not everyone is. This literature review shows that. My literature review is on the Gender Matters set of essays. The first essay is The Startling Plight of China’s Leftover Women by Christina Larsen. This essay is about the unmarried, educated women in China and why they are still unmarried. The second essay is The Invisible Migrant Man: Questioning Gender Privileges by Chloe Lewis. This piece is about the struggles and issues that married male migrants face and have faced. The last is Body-Building In Afghanistan by Oliver Broudy. It is about the men who are unemployed in Afghanistan who spend their time working out. My literature review is written in the following order: Larsen’s essay, Broudy’s
“Small Happiness” is a documentary about women of a Chinese village. The title derived from the quote, “To give birth to a boy is considered a big happiness, to give birth to a girl is a small happiness.” It covered a variety of topics such as how women view their bodies, marriages, and families. From the documentary’s interviews of women of different ages, we can see although the tradition of male dominance in the Chinese society remains, the lives of rural Chinese women have changed significantly in the last half century.
The united States Declaration of independence states that all men are equal, but aren’t all women as well? Nowadays, the numbers for the population are at an increase for the support in gender equality, with the capture of feminist labels. The seek for equality between men and women, and criticize the privileges that arouse by gender differences. However in Old China, males control almost everything due to a patriarchal society. At that time, not only men, but also women are influenced by male chauvinism. In the Jade Peony, written by Wayson Choy, female characters are affected by an unequal perspective despite their age group.
Lisa Ling’s study showed that over ¼ of babies adopted and brought to the United States are from China. Most of these babies are girls. Due to the one child policy to control population, these unwanted girls are aborted, abandoned or hidden. They might even get killed. Boys are preferred because they will carry on the family name and they will stick with the family to care for them as they get older. These girls have never known a father. They have never known a mother, and they never knew a big sister. Most of them will be adopted from families in the United States. Others will stay in an orphanage until they are old enough to be on their own. China is one of the world’s oldest civilizations with over 4,000 years of history and culture. Today,
My parents told me that they had a good life back at China, where they grew up, my father told me that they had a pretty nice life going on back there. Why they came here is beyond my comprehension, my father told me that they had a pretty good income back there, and life was good. Why they came here stumped me and make me thought why and so I asked, they gave me vague answers, but one of the reasons was because my parents were having their first child, which was my big sister. At China, there is this policy, the one child policy, only one child, it’s because China is overpopulated. Furthermore that boys were more favored than girls were. If they were to have an only my sister, I wouldn’t be born today nor my little brother. I later discovered that a good reason why to come here, for opportunity.
It is clear that China’s one child policy has affected Chinese society in multiple ways. The policy has resulted in corruption in the Chinese government, an abuse of women’s rights, female feticide, and an imbalance in the gender ratio, and potential problems with China’s elderly and younger populations. The Chinese government decided to implement a one child policy in order to counter the effects of rapid population growth. The question to ask is if the benefits of population control really do outweigh the problems the policy has created in Chinese society. It will be interesting to see if the policy continues to affect Chinese culture in the future, and how the changes that have been recently made play out.
There are obvious differences within our two cultures and the way we depict gender roles. These differences show themselves in the work force, the distinct tasks performed in the home, and the privileges one receives in society. In the work force, the women of America hold many positions of importance, relatively speaking (I know that's a whole other essay). They are usually treated as equals with men and there are few jobs from which they are excluded, again for the sake of argument. In China, women are expected to stay at home and are not permitted to be in a work force that is held exclusively for men. They are assigned the role of housewives and must stay at home to clean the house and raise the children. Women in America receive education that will prepare them for the high paying jobs of a professional, all while the women in China are obeying the orders from their husbands and culture. The films portrayal of these particular gender roles are very evident. We can't forget however, that this was a western made film and in my opinion I feel that it tends to exaggerate the gender roles. I'm not saying that they are not present, because there is a definite inequality. I just keep in mind that it is a film and has to have an audience appealing theme.
After Mao Zedong won control of China, Mao’s revolution was based on the communist ideal of classless society, leaving China, a poor country, suffering from the years of war, disease, and natural disaster. The country’s population was the largest in the world and growing. Seeing all these problems China was facing due to overpopulation, China’s government came up with the one-child policy which would limit Chinese couple’s to one child each. The one-child policy was a good idea because it not only benefited boys, but it benefited girls by giving them better education, and better jobs. With more children it puts stress on the parent/guardian, and the child. The one-child policy also had a positive outcome with air pollution, and brought it down 17.6%, and water pollution by 30.8%.
Feng Wang and Cai Yong stated that the fertility rate was already declining and the policy wasn’t necessary for the Chinese people, especially because of the enormous costs. The fertility rate, which is the number of children the average woman has in her lifetime, in China started at 2.7 in 1979 and decreased to 1.7 in 2008. The article “China’s One Child Policy at 30” argued that the policy did not need to be introduced in China because the rates were already lower than Brazil at 4.2 and Thailand at 3.6.
The early part of the novel shows women’s place in Chinese culture. Women had no say or position in society. They were viewed as objects, and were used as concubines and treated with disparagement in society. The status of women’s social rank in the 20th century in China is a definite positive change. As the development of Communism continued, women were allowed to be involved in not only protests, but attended universities and more opportunities outside “house” work. Communism established gender equality and legimated free marriage, instead of concunbinage. Mao’s slogan, “Women hold half of the sky”, became extremely popular. Women did almost any job a man performed. Women were victims by being compared to objects and treated as sex slaves. This was compared to the human acts right, because it was an issue of inhumane treatment.
Examples of cultural constructions can be seen throughout history in several forms such as gender, relationships, and marriage. “Cultural construction of gender emphasizes that different cultures have distinctive ideas about males and females and use these ideas to define manhood/masculinity and womanhood/femininity.” (Humanity, 239) In many cultures gender roles are a great way to gain an understanding of just how different the construction of gender can be amongst individual cultures. The video The Women’s Kingdom provides an example of an uncommon gender role, which is seen in the Wujiao Village where the Mosuo women are the last matriarchy in the country and have been around for over one thousand years. Unlike other rural Chinese villages where many girls are degraded and abandoned at birth, Mosuo woman are proud and run the households where the men simply assist in what they need. The view of gender as a cultural construct ...
The Disney movie, Mulan, is a fantastic movie that depicts gender-stereotyped roles, socialization of gender roles, and consequences of over stepping one’s gender role. Both males and females have a specific role in the Chinese society that one must follow. Mulan made a brave choice pretending to be a man and going to war against the Huns in place of her father, risking serious consequences if she were to get caught. She broke the socialization of gender roles and could have been faced with very serious consequences of her actions. The Chinese society in Mulan exemplifies the typical gender roles of males and females, the consequences of displaying the opposite gender role, and showed what the society expected in males and females in characteristics and attitudes.
Directly prior to either of those factors entering the scene, the gender ratio was 1.06/1, an entirely normal number (Gu, Roy 3rd para.). By 1986, when the one child policy had been in place for seven years, and ultrasound available for about six, the gender ratio was 1.109/1(Hull 69). The one child policy was implanted as a method of population control. At the time, China was country with a population that was quickly increasing, and the government was concerned that the population would overwhelm available resources. Consequently, they implanted the one child policy, which, except for a few exceptions, limited couples to one child. More recently, as the negative impacts of this policy have become apparent, the policy has been relaxed and more exceptions allowed. In rural areas where the amount of people is less dense, couples can have more than one child. There are many articles explaining the purpose and results of the policy, one of which was, “The One Child Family Policy” by W. Zhu. In it, Zhu stated that a recent change was if two only children get married, they can have two children, one to replace the mother, and one to replace the father (463,464). China has always preferred males over females, but the one child policy really exacerbated the problem. There is also a significant amount of information regarding gender preference after the policy was in practice, and one such exam is an article titled, “The Consequences of Son Preference and Sex-Selective Abortion in China and Other Asian Countries” by Therese Hesketh, which greatly helped clarify the background information. In it she says that once parents were limited to only one child, they take much greater pains to get a boy, and used every means available to either prevent getting a girl, terminating a
I believe China has a serious fertility decline issue that resulted in the failure to transition their aging demographics. This issue stems from their country 's three decades’ belief that overpopulation is the root of all problems because it taxes natural resources and the economy. In fact, many economists and demographers alike will agree. Ironically, their issue isn’t how fast the population is reproducing, the problem is under population and their inability to replace their aging workforce. The reason that China is facing this struggle is at one time, China had the fastest population growth on earth. To combat this problem, China implemented a one child per a family policy because the Chinese government was concerned about the impact of
China has created a law that only allows for a family to have one child. This law is in an attempt to control population control. This law has caused families to terminate pregnancy’s as well as to abandoned a child if it was not the gender the family had hoped for. Population control is harmful to children and families. Having children is a personal decision and should ...