GROWTH INDUSTRY
China's culture and laws have put millions of girls at risk: A public campaign aims to repair the damage.
The numbers are alarming. In the awakening economic giant that is China, young boys now outnumber young girls by 17 percent—a trend that has accelerated since the late 1980s. In rural regions of Hainan and Guangdong provinces, the figure reaches a frightening 30 percent. What will happen when these children grow up? Mercenary marriages, female abductions, worker shortages, and far-reaching economic depression are just the beginning, according to China’s National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. With a similar gender imbalance in India, the problem takes on potentially seismic proportions. Up to one-third of the world’s population could soon face plummeting birth rates, exponentially aggravating the worldwide problem of too few young workers paying for too many old pensioners, not to mention shrinking the growth of these two nascent countries as economic powerhouses and sources of global consumer demand.
China’s response to the potential population crisis is Care for Girls, a campaign combining social marketing messages with financial incentives designed not only to encourage the births of girls but also to promote gender equality and women’s rights, says Bingshu Chen of the government agency responsible for the campaign, the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China. Launched in 2003, the federal pilot program now includes 24 counties, with 638 local programs launching this year. At a March conference about population, resources and the environment, Chinese President Hu Jintao called for a return to the natural gender balance, 103-107 boys for every 100 girls, by 2010.
Although China’s constitution guarantees equal rights for women, many families illegally pursue sex-selective abortions, a practice some say has intensified since China introduced its one-child policy in 1979. A demographic study in the late 1990s at Xi'an Jiaotong University found that many parents further hurt baby girls’ chance of survival by skimping on them, birthing boys in hospitals but girls at home, and saving more nutritious food and expensive doctors’ visits for boys. “Elimination of gender discrimination has to start at pregnancy; promoting gender equality needs to start with little children,” Chen says. Care for Girls provides educational materials as well as financial incentives: generous free schooling for girls, pensions for their parents, mandatory health exams to ensure proper nourishment, and loans to encourage small-business growth and to transform girls from economic burdens to wage earners.
In designing the Care for Girls campaign materials, Song Jun’s team at the China Population Publicity Center needed to convince a rural, largely illiterate audience to rapidly overturn years of settled thinking, in solving this highly abstract demographics problem. Accordingly, Jun took care to balance comforting, traditional values against this revolutionary message in each execution of the campaign. Describing a poster headlined “Caring for Girls is Caring for Our Future,” Jun says, “This poster presents five lovely, well-dressed little girls in ethnic dancing costumes,” emphasizing China’s diversity and regional pride, he says. “In the background are modern skyscrapers, signifying the future, and near the bottom is the ten-thousand-li [its length, according to tradition] Great Wall, a symbol of the unified Chinese people throughout history. The whole poster is filled with an air of joy and harmony.”
Another poster from the campaign, depicting a more everyday scene, also achieves this delicate balance. “This poster presents four little girls on their way to school. They wear red clothing, our traditional color suggesting good luck and happiness,” Jun says. “Red also expresses the love of the common people for life.”
One girl in the poster, Jun points out, wears a key around her neck: a common sign of premature independence among poor children. “In western China, many middle-aged farmers go to the cities as migrant workers to make a living,” Jun says. “As a result, many poor children cannot go to school. Schooling is a luxury for them.” The small, even plaintive detail drives home a real problem while shifting the tone to one of care for a precious resource. Both posters were hung in community centers and schools, where volunteers distributed cartoon-style pamphlets, wall calendars, and postcards about women’s legal rights and the gender imbalance problem.
For the wall calendar, Jun used traditional Chinese paper-cuts to cloak radical concepts—one poster promotes men’s living in their wives’ homes, rather than the other way around—in a reassuringly familiar visual style. The calendar opens the year with a girl riding a chicken, a traditional Chinese image, Jun says. “In Chinese, ji, ‘chicken,’ is pronounced the same as ji, ‘good luck’—thus wishing people good luck in 2005, the Year of the Chicken. A peach in the girl's hand also suggests longevity.” Other traditional images include that of Zhong Kui, a folklore hero whose household portrait captures ghosts and drives away evil, and of nine dragons playing with a ball, a symbol of working communally towards a goal. Jun hopes that even the simplest images will resonate: girls zooming around on ice-skates or tangling joyfully with a jump-rope. The latter image from the June page of the 2005 calendar says it all: “Both girls and boys are flowers for the nation.”
—Jude Stewart for Print magazine, September/October 2005
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