REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

These Chinese women are seven in a billion

CHINA, BEIJING: Chinese women still lack clout in politics, but fortune is certainly smiling on them: Half of the world's 14 self-made female billionaires are China-born.

And these women did not inherit their wealth, but created it on their own steam and gumption, according to the latest annual ranking by Forbes magazine.

The wealthiest of the lot, Ms Wu Yajun, made her US$3.9 billion (S$5.3 billion) fortune in real estate.

Madam Lei Jufang sells Tibetan medicine, while Ms Zhang Yin - also known as Ms Cheung Yan - turned paper recycling into a vast amount of cash.

The other billionaires on the Forbes list released last month are tobacco flavourings magnate Zhu Linyao (or Chu Lam Yiu), property tycoons Zhang Xin and Chen Lihua (Chan Lai Wa), and shopping mall mogul Xiuli Hawken.

Read more at ASIAONE Business

Looking Back on My Days as Ri Koran (Li Xianglan)

Otaka Yoshiko interviewed by Tanaka Hiroshi, Utsumi Aiko and Onuma Yasuaki

 

Otaka Yoshiko was born Yamaguchi Yoshiko in Manchuria in 1920. After joining the Manchurian Film Association in 1938, she starred in films as a Chinese actress under the name of Li Xianglan (Ri Koran in Japanese). Arrested as a spy by the Chinese Nationalists following Japan's surrender, she was arraigned before a war crimes tribunal and acquitted. Following her release, she was active as an actress and singer in Japan and then in the United States. She subsequently served as a television host and journalist covering Vietnam and the Middle East. She served in the upper house of the Diet between 1974 and 1992. This is one in a series of Japanese Lives.

 

What my father tried to convey to me

 

Q. In the autobiography Ri Koran -- My Life (Yamaguchi Yoshiko with Fujiwara Sakuya), I was particularly struck by your learning Mandarin as a girl, and by the figure of your father, who tutored you. He taught Chinese, and associated with Chinese people as an equal. That point of view differentiated him from most Japanese at the time. It's clear that his approach -- learning the language completely and respecting the culture of the host country -- was passed down to you as his daughter.

Otaka From the time that I was 3 or 4, my father (Yamaguchi Fumio) taught Chinese to employees of Mantetsu (The South Manchurian Railroad). He had been attracted to China in his youth, had gone to Beijing to study, and put immense effort into learning Chinese. When I was in kindergarten, he taught me Chinese pronunciation one-on-one. When I started elementary school, he had me attend the Chinese night class he taught at Mantetsu; I was the only child in a class of adults. I went to a Japanese girls' school until the second grade, then transferred to a Chinese girls' school.

Read more at Z Communications

Hear Them Roar

Female dissidents are rewriting the rules in countries where they can't even show their faces.

For women in Iraq, running for office is an especially risky proposition. The country's Constitution, like those of many nations that have been racked by conflict, requires that a quarter of all parliamentary seats must go to women. Yet even as the number of female leaders and political activists has increased, so has the backlash. In February, a female candidate was shot and killed in Mosul.

Yet female activists continue to challenge Iraq's religious conservatives. Hanaa Edwar, one of the founders of the Iraqi Women's Network, a coalition of NGOs, recently blasted the minister of education for trying to separate boys and girls in public schools. "These ideas are imported from Iran!" she says. The minister eventually backed down. Another activist, Jenan Mubark, who became frustrated about the lack of progress around women's rights, has pulled together a slate of 20 women, whom she hopes will be elected into other political parties. Once in Parliament, they could work together as a voting bloc. "I will continue to fight for Iraqi women and their rights," she says.

A surprising number of women are leading political dissent in countries like Iraq and others where women's voices are often suppressed. Women are at the forefront of Iran's Green Movement, and are leading reformist agendas in Afghanistan, Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, and Angola. They are especially visible in conflict zones, where they are blogging, marching in the streets, holding sit-ins, and launching petitions to secure their rights—as Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi has done with the One Million Signatures campaign, which supports changing laws that discriminate against Iranian women.

In some ways, the rise of dissidents reflects a larger trend toward greater female political participation everywhere. Globally, the percentage of women holding parliamentary seats went from 11.3 percent in 1995 to 18.8 at the end of 2009—largely because of legislated quotas like the one in Iraq. At the same time, educational levels of girls are rising rapidly across the developing world, leading to greater economic power, particularly in developing nations: in China, 20 percent of entrepreneurs are women, and in Russia, 73 percent of businesses have a woman in senior management. And while women in conflict zones or conservative countries can be at risk for violence if they engage in dissent in public spaces, the Internet has provided a safer way for them to air their grievances.

Read more at Newsweek

Famed Dancer and Agent Jadin Wong Dies at 96

Jadin Wong in 1951

When Jadin Wong was asked how old she was, the celebrated dancer, comedienne and talent agent quipped, "Age is a number, and I have an unlisted one." In reality, the Chinese-American pioneer, whose career spanned nightclubs, theatre, comedy and film, was 96 when she died March 30 of natural causes in New York City.

David Henry Hwang, the Tony Award-winning playwright of M. Butterfly, said, "The character of Madame Liang in my 2002 rewrite of Flower Drum Song was my tribute to Jadin: a brassy, brilliant ex-actress-turned-agent for 'Oriental' talent. An innovator and a pioneer, Jadin was the quintessential Broadway dame: bursting with chutzpah, never less than glamorous, a showgirl - with a showgirl's body - to the end."

Jodi Long, who played Liang in that Broadway revival, added, "Jadin was quick as a whip, had a great sense of humor, a generous spirit and as a performer, always knew where the camera was. It's the end of an era." Wong's life also was the basis for Forbidden City West, a musical that ran shortly in 2008 at the Yangtze Repertory Theater of America in New York.

Born on May 24, 1913, in Marysville, CA, Ms. Wong grew up in Stockton and started dancing at age five. She moved to San Francisco and headlined as a dancer in 1938 at Charlie Low's Forbidden City, the country's best-known Chinese-American nightclub (such as the one featured in Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical of C.Y. Lee's "Flower Drum Song"). Wearing an exotic headdress and costume, she was featured in Life magazine and written up in Walter Winchell's column in New York. Critics praised her "Dance of the Moon Goddess," in which she performed to Debussy's "Clair de Lune."

Read more at PLAYBILL

The worldwide war on baby girls

Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.

That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.

The national averages hide astonishing figures at the provincial level. According to an analysis of Chinese household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal*, only one region, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces—mostly in the east and south—have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and three have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.”

The BMJ study also casts light on one of the puzzles about China’s sexual imbalance. How far has it been exaggerated by the presumed practice of not reporting the birth of baby daughters in the hope of getting another shot at bearing a son? Not much, the authors think. If this explanation were correct, you would expect to find sex ratios falling precipitously as girls who had been hidden at birth start entering the official registers on attending school or the doctor. In fact, there is no such fall. The sex ratio of 15-year-olds in 2005 was not far from the sex ratio at birth in 1990. The implication is that sex-selective abortion, not under-registration of girls, accounts for the excess of boys.

View Article at the Economist.

Burden

A passenger with her hands full hurries to catch her train at the railway station in Nanchang, east China, at the weekend. She was one of millions travelling home to celebrate the start of the year of the tiger on February 14th. Photograph: Zhou Ke/AP Photo/Xinhua

Zheng Jie and Li Na herald China's arrival as major tennis power

In their home country Zheng Jie and Li Na have become named "The Golden Flowers". The rest of the tennis world has long been aware that China was on the point of blossoming into a major tennis power - at least in the women’s game. The only question was when but the answer seems to be now as the pair prepares to contest the Australian Open semi-finals.

Tennis success is not unknown for the nation with the largest population on earth - 1.3 billion. Zheng Jie reached the last four at Wimbledon two years ago and back in 2004 Li Ting and Tian Tian won the Olympic gold medal in Athens. But never before has there been the possibility of an all-Chinese major final.

The enthusiastic way in which Chinese tennis fans embraced the tennis event at 2008’s Beijing Olympics and the five-year stay of the Tennis Masters Cup in Shanghai before a name change saw the tournament relocated at London’s O2, shows the new following the sport has generated. The growing band of Chinese media at Melbourne Park underlines the interest and excitement.

finish article at Times Online