EAP2
HUGH
Summary response
07/06/08

Gender Inequality in China

According to Li,xing in her article “Gender Inequality in China”. People think when the economy becomes better, the gender gap will seem to become less; however, this isn’t happening in China. At first glance, the Chinese income gap between men and women seems to have become less, but this is not truth. The truth is that it cannot reflect truth that the gender inequality still exists in politics, education, and survival of infant girls. The main reason is an unbalanced birth rate. Although government forbids people to practice gender discrimination, it still happens. Some laws still have gender discrimination. For example, women need to retire at the age fifty, but men at the age of sixty.
Nowadays, gender inequality still exists in China; it has already happened for ages. Now it’s become more serious, so we need to use some special methods to deal with these problems. When the situation becomes on the track, we can change the other policies to try to keep gender equality. We can use some methods such as the following:

First of all, we can encourage people to have more girls. Government can use money to give people who have girls as a reward, giving money annually until the girl finishes college. People will not worry about money to raise girl. Especially in China, most people think having girl babies is wasting money, because when they grow up, they will not take care of their parents. The policy can make people have the desire want to have more girls than boys. It can increase girls’ birth rates a lot.
In addition, government can give some extra money to families that have girls. They can give some families who have girls some rewards, such as: freedom from tax for 10years, or being able to have a girl and a boy at the same time (That’s because Chinese only can have a child) and maybe some money.
Finally, the law should strongly protect infant girls. In rural areas, some people will kill infant girls because they think they can’t work to help farming. In order to improve this situation, government needs to use strict laws to control people’s behavior until they change this bad behavior.

In brief, different situations should have different solutions. We can use encouragement, reward and protection to make this strong inequality become better. That’s what we should do. In the future, when the situation becomes better, we can change other policies. Government should change depending on the situation and can’t use one rule without thinking change old policies.

Reference:

Li, Xing(2007, November 15). Gender inequality still rife. China Daily.
Retrieved on July 8 2008, from:
http://en.bcnq.com/opinion/2007-11/15/content_6257468.htm