Chinese Worry About Indecent Protests Police, Cab Drivers Instructed On Dealing With Streakers
Authorities, already bracing for sharp criticism of their policies at the coming international women’s conference, apparently are haunted by an even more daunting prospect: Foreigners running naked through public squares carrying placards clamoring for equality of the sexes.
As some 30,000 delegates converged this weekend in Beijing for the 4th United Nations Conference on Women and in this small farming town north of the capital for an associated women’s forum of grass-roots activists, Chinese organizers gave police and taxi drivers a special course in how to deal with would-be streakers.
“Stop your cab and put on the handbrake,” said the advisory to taxi drivers, who had to take the obligatory course. “Then jump out and holler for a policeman.”
Police and hotel security staff were advised to prepare sheets and blankets and be ready to wrap them around bare protesters, for the sake of decency.
The measures to safeguard Chinese morals and the country’s public order are symptomatic of official fear that Communist China’s first experience in holding a major global meeting could become a stage for female activists eager to express solidarity with their Chinese sisters and determined to publicize their message to the world.
Such public exhibitions, the officials fear, might spark popular unrest in a country where history shows the masses are easily ignited.
Although Mao Tse-tung officially bestowed Chinese women with equality in the 1950s with the now-famous quip that “women hold up half of heaven,” women have serious grievances in China. On a U.N. scale of gender equality, China’s women are rated only 122nd out of 185 nations.
China’s paranoia has overshadowed a conference whose central aim touches on sensitive Chinese issues as delegates seek to map out strategies for women in their battle for equal rights and equal political opportunities around the world.
Conference delegates will oppose forced abortions, a measure encouraged in China to maintain its one-child policy. Governments like the communist regime in power in Beijing will be lambasted for virtually excluding women from senior posts.
The government stands to be embarrassed by discussions about the rights of prostitutes, now sent to labor camps without trial, in a country where the sex industry has become rampant.
China’s hand-picked delegates have been briefed by the State Family Planning Commission on how to respond to questions from inquisitive conference members. They are certain to be queried on birth control, abortion, reportedly widespread infanticide of girls, repression in the troubled Himalayan state of Tibet and the heavy-handed way China applies the one-family, one-child policy.
Within the conference, rifts also are expected as anti-abortion groups clash with abortionrights groups, and conservative Vatican and Islamic delegates try to dilute liberal resolutions.
Half of Poland’s delegation, for example, is sponsored by the government, the other half by the Catholic Church.
Conservative delegates arrived in Beijing last week with the song “We Shall Overcome” on their lips, while more radical elements quoted their philosopher, Rosi Braidotti, a university professor at Utrecht in Holland. “Enough of Mama’s moralist feminism,” she wrote. “Enough of the sweetened image of the creative maternal power.”
China always has paid lip service to women’s aspirations. But its security apparatus now is afraid that such ambitions may spill over into demonstrations.