Status of Women

Approximately 30 percent of the 270 million Chinese families surveyed in a 2004 All-China Women’s Federation survey reported the occurrence of some form of domestic violence, according to a December 17, 2005, People's Daily article (in Chinese). The Marriage Law, Criminal Law, Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Women, and Public Security Administration Punishment Law all prohibit domestic violence.

The National People’s Congress (NPC) withdrew a proposed amendment to the Criminal Law that would have penalized sex-selective abortions, according to a June 26 Xinhua article. Parents or medical personnel involved in a sex-selective abortion would have faced fines and up to three years in prison under the proposed amendment. Zhou Kunren, Vice Chairman of the Law Committee of the NPC Standing Committee, announced that NPC Standing Committee members as well as government officials had disagreed over the proposed amendment, according to a June 24 Xinhua article.

Twenty-eight women in a village in Hohhot city, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, have waited since November 2005 for the court judgment in a suit against their village committee, according to a May 22 article in China Women's News, posted on the All China Women's Federation (ACWF) Web site. The village committee denied the women land contracting rights when it reallocated collectively owned village land. The committee justified the decision by saying that the women did not have rights to collectively owned village property because they had married men from other villages, according to a May 15 Xinhua article (in Chinese).

The National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee passed an amendment on August 28 to the Law on the Protection of the Interests and Rights of Women (LPIRW); the new provisions became effective on December 1. The amendment outlaws sexual harassment and domestic violence, promotes equal rights for women, and helps victims of trafficking. (Article numbers below refer to the text of the law as amended.)

The parties in a Beijing sexual harassment case reached a settlement out of court in favor of the plaintiff, according to a November 4 Beijing Morning Post article posted on Xinhua's Web site. The case was the first since the National People's Congress Standing Committee outlawed sexual harassment in an August 2005 amendment to the Law on the Protection of the Interests and Rights of Women.

A Henan woman lost a labor arbitration case in which she alleged that her employer's rule that she retire at the nationally-mandated age of 55 violates the Chinese Constitution's protection of gender equality, according to an October 17th Xinhua report. The 1978 "Temporary Measures on Providing for Old, Weak, Sick, and Handicapped Cadres" require women to retire at 55, and men at 60. Zhou Xianghua sued the Pindingshan branch of the China Construction Bank, her employer, in a labor arbitration proceeding.