Gender and Family in East Asia

Well, today is the final day of the Gender and Family in East Asia Conference. Aside from a personal diversion to go play in Hong Kong yesterday (cable cars, very cool), I have been attentive and engaged. Really.

Many of the papers are more academic in nature, and while interesting, nevertheless irrelevant to my research. A few, however, touch on aspects of the policy or potential implications from similiar social transformations that give me reason to think.

A few pertinent points I pulled from yesterdays presentations.

Laurel Kendall of the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University gave the Keynote, titled Marriages and Families in Asia: Something Old and New.

Dr Kendall made the point in her paper that the westernization of marriage rites in East Asia at the turn of the century coincided with a wider trend of embracig western ways as a means of overcoming western subjugation. Western dominance and the consequent 'Eastern Humiliation' of of the region was largely understood to be possible because of the backwards ways of local culture. Modernity, as it was understood to be represented by western culture, was viewed as the only means of throwing off western subjugation of the east. Thus a grievance with the West did not result in a rejection of all things western; rather it resulted in the cultural desire to utilize the means of subjegation as a means of strengthening the local against the outsider. Thus the modernization of family policy was indistinguishable from the 'Westernization'.

In many ways, the One-Child policy represents a diversion from this. Overpopulation is viewed as a uniquely non-western phenomenon. The fact that this challenge is largely loosed from the often habitually invoked crutch of blaming social ills on historical western subjugation or colonizations (an often justifiable, if not helpful tendency) in the cultural psyche has facilitated the development of a uniquely Chinese response to this challenge. The One-Child policy represents an unprecedented governmental strategy that is often perceived as a gross violation of individual privacy and fundamental human rights to western scholars, governments, and general public. The right to determine the size and timing of children is actually codified in the UN Human Rights Charter.

In the face of a dramatic social challenge from within, China has turned away from Western normative understandings of family law and policy, and has embraced and integrated a local solution to a local problem. As China begins to negotiate its role in the world of the 21st century, the One-Child policy represents a greater trend of moving past the notion of embracing Western cultural family practices as a component of a greater strategy of using western cultural norms to 'modernize' and overcome national challenges. Rather, China throughout the 20th century, and particularly in the last 25 years, has developed family and social policies that are anathema to Western values in many ways, but nevertheless are effective and locally understood to be acceptable in the face of the perceived greater threat of population to locally understood human rights.

The future of social policy in China- innovative solutions to challenges that the West has not yet faced in modern times. Often these solutions will be viewed as oppressive or violating human rights from a western perspective; however, differing understandings of what 'basic human rights' means will facilitate local acceptance. My sense is that those who view Chinese cultual adoption of western morality as an inevitable consequence of development and increased information accessibility will be frustrated with seeming lack of 'cultural progress' in the development of future family social policy in China.