BEIJING, 4 August 2004 — Xiao Li, a 32-year-old nurse, still weeps when she recalls the first time her tour guide fiance beat her up. The couple was bickering over how to renovate a newly purchased flat in Beijing when the argument dissolved into shoves and punches in full view of neighbors and security guards.
“Every time I got up, he pushed me down again. My mobile phone clanked on the ground. He kept cursing me and demanding I admit I was wrong,” she said, tears trickling from swollen eyelids.
“No one had ever talked to me or treated me like that before,” said Li, whose fine features and porcelain skin seem to have been copied from a Tang dynasty brush painting. “In that moment, I could understand why patient wives, abused for years, end up killing their husbands. If I had a knife, I think I would have used it.”
Li is one of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of Chinese women regularly abused by their husbands or partners, experts say.
Wife beating and alarming female suicide rates have been well documented in China’s remote, dirt-poor villages.
But experts say young, cosmopolitan women like Li are increasingly falling victim to domestic violence as they bear the brunt of unprecedented social upheaval sweeping the country, spurred by an economy galloping at more than nine percent a year.
In a bizarre twist, many women even say their status in society has been eroded as economic reforms unleashed 20 years ago cast aside the last vestiges of Maoism, under which women were famously told they “hold up half the sky”.
Wife beating hit the headlines in 1999 when news broke that three women in northwestern China had been murdered by their husbands, sparking much soul-searching. One woman was stabbed, another beaten and the third was set on fire.
An official at the All China Women’s Federation, Wang Simei, said the level of violence in domestic assault cases has increased.
According to a recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, as many as one third of women in 270 million households across the country have been victims of domestic violence.
Researchers say surveys often understate the problem because many women are unwilling to “lose face” by admitting, even anonymously, that they have been beaten. In traditional Chinese society, family strife is considered best kept from the public.
Whatever the true number, experts agree domestic violence has become more common as China moves toward a market economy, throwing millions of people out of jobs and ushering in a return to the more traditional values that preceded Communist rule.
“Domestic violence has gotten worse,” said Ren Yuan, a professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University who studies women’s issues. “People are more stressed. We all feel this. China is changing very quickly, too fast for social support services and the law.”
That doesn’t surprise Mrs. Wang, a 42-year-old engineer, who has been a human punching bag for her surgeon husband for 10 years. “He’s under heavy pressure at work and transfers his anger to me,” the Beijing resident said by telephone. “At the beginning, he slapped my face. Step by step, he progressed to kicking me and throwing everything in the house he could grab.”
Wang said her parents and relatives have pushed her to tolerate the beating, saying it would be difficult for a woman at her age to be alone.
“I don’t want to divorce, not only because the apartment I am staying in belongs to him and his salary is two or three times higher than mine. I want to keep a complete and normal family for my child,” she said, echoing the fears of many abused women.
“(But) each time, my son and I feel so scared. I have even thought of killing him, killing myself and asking my parents to bring up my child.”
Wang says her future would be bleak if she left her husband. There are virtually no state-sponsored women’s shelters in China because officials are afraid women would bring their children and stay for good.
Experts say the problem is compounded by a regression in rights and career opportunities, even for talented women. Social attitudes also seemed to be reverting to the old Confucian ways.
Those who seek jobs are becoming commodities, they say, with some young women going as far as getting nose jobs and eye-lid surgery to catch the attention of prospective employers.
“Women’s employment rate has fallen and the income gap between men and women has risen,” said Wang Simei of the Women’s Federation. “More and more people believe women should play a more important role in the family rather than in society.”
Marriage is a social pressure many modern Chinese women like Nurse Li can’t simply shake off, even to an abusive husband. “If I don’t marry him, I might be an old maid!” she lamented, crying into her Diet Coke.
