WOMEN:In the West, the Barbie doll symbolises particularly superficial form of consumerism, but in China, it has become associated feminist movement that is challenging long-established patriarchal norms, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Shanghai
SHE’S BLONDE, SHE smiles all the time, and Shanghai’s newest and hippest shopping emporium is dedicated to her. She’s 11½ inches high. Her name is Barbie.
Walk through the new six-storey flagship House of Barbie on the Huaihai Road in Shanghai, the most fashionable street in China’s biggest city, and you see young girls going crazy for the iconic toy known as “Ba Bi Wa Wa” in Chinese, picking their favourite doll from the huge range on sale.
Chairman Mao Zedong once said: “Women hold up half the sky.” But you can bet the man who founded Communist China 60 years ago never dreamed the epitome of American consumerist ideals would come to represent the growing power of girls and women in the new China.
Irish Barbie is here, looking a tad incongruous in her Peig Sayers pleated dress. Shanghai Barbie has black hair, pedal pushers and ultra-hip pumps. Or what about Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie – who comes with a set of more than 40 tiny tattoo stickers.
In the salon, mums and daughters get facials and manicures (although there are no tattooists at work so far). In the cafe, they chomp on specially commissioned chocolates, mulling perhaps, over the day when daughter dearest will be here to spend €10,000 on a Vera Wang-designed wedding dress, also on sale in this temple of little girl couture.
There are plenty of grown-up girls browsing the Barbie clothes, and the carrier bag to be seen with in Shanghai these days is a Barbie one, pink of course.
You might imagine the Barbie shop would be a temple of kitsch, but the store is truly spectacular, as much a work of contemporary art as it is a consumer paradise.
New York-based Irish-American architect Hayes Slade, who designed the store with her husband James, says the House of Barbie embodies a belief in making girls’ dreams come true, and that includes dreams of being Lawyer Barbie or Astronaut Barbie.
“It’s the first flagship store on this scale. It’s unique to Barbie. Barbie is very Western, very blonde and Mattel’s research showed that this was what mothers and daughters in Shanghai were interested in,” she says.
Slade tells of how as a little girl she found herself taking apart Barbie’s house to correct the proportions, make it more liveable. She was Architect Barbie, basically.
Barbie’s curves, proportions and platinum blonde hair mean she presents an impossible body image for Chinese women, but her role as a working and independent woman has captured imaginations around the world, especially in the world’s most populous country. She has a job. She doesn’t live with her parents, she has a flat. She drives a car. This is what young women in China want.
Gene Murtha, vice-president for international business development at Mattel, which makes Barbie, says the US toymaker decided to locate in Shanghai because it was the city where the brand was most broadly received, among both mothers and daughters.
China is strategically important to them, just as it is for most companies in the retail or export sector these days. As it stands, Asia makes up less than 5 per cent of Barbie’s global sales, and the House of Barbie in Shanghai is part of the process of boosting that figure.
The wisdom of locating in Shanghai was borne out by the fact that 50,000 people visited the store within its first 10 days of opening. Mattel expects two million visitors a year to the store.
“There has always been lots to do for the boys and their dads, but not a lot for mothers and daughters to do,” says Murtha.
Barbie is unapologetically pro-girl, and she is all about being an empowered girl, he says.
“This is especially true in Shanghai. The Shanghai woman is strong in personality. In the West we’ve had a couple of generations saying: ‘We can do anything.’ In 1965 Barbie was an astronaut, over 20 years before the first real female astronaut. Barbie says to young girls: ‘Girl, you can do anything,’ ” says Murtha.
“When we got our research back, Chinese people said: ‘Barbie is beautiful. She is noble and virtuous. I want to teach my daughter these values.’ We wish we had as clear an indication from Western consumers,” he says.
The men’s toilet has a display of toy cars behind the urinals, but the Kens of this world are a bit out of place here.
On the top floor, a little girl sashays on to the runway, all pink ruffles and girlish make-up. The cameras flash as she struts confidently in front of the most appreciative audience she’ll ever have, while other onlookers sip cappuccinos and eat expensive hand-made chocolates.
At the end of the catwalk, she is embraced by her beaming, proud mother and the two pose for photographs, more hugs, and then she turns, hand on hip, and walks back down the elevated ramp, disappearing behind a velvet curtain to a ripple of applause.
The princess of the runway is seven years old, and her English name is Angel, says her mother Shi Wei. Shi works for a foreign engineering company and has no doubt that girls are equal to boys, at least in the cities.
“My friends and my workmates all agree – there really is no difference any more between having a daughter or having a son. Some even think girls are better than boys because they like to dress up their girls and you have to worry less if you have a daughter,” she says.
The mother and daughter scenes you see in the store represent a sociological shift here. For most girls and young women in China the situation remains grim, but years of economic growth is feeding in to a better life for girls, and the upswing in the fortunes of girls and women in China’s big cities is very real.
While feminism in Ireland and other countries in the West has achieved many of the goals from the 1960s, the women’s rights movement is still in its infancy in China, but is growing as incomes increase.
For generations, girls were second-class citizens in China. To see the women and girls doing their thing away from the normally dominant male members of the family, it’s incredible to think how far the girls have come in China.
It’s even more amazing when you think that this whole process of Girl Power began not with 10-inch Jimmy Choo heels and Calvin Klein micro-minis, but with dirty overalls and compulsory bobbed hairdos, in the factories after the revolution of 1949 that brought the Communist Party to power. This is Girl Power in a Mao suit.
“Chinese women have been involved in social production since the 1950s to 1960s, taking part in physical labour in both the countryside and the cities. They entered factories, and that’s where the change in women’s status in China began,” says Li Yinhe, a professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
During the 1960s and 1970s, women accounted for 30 per cent of college students, while now the figure is nearly half. China ranks 28th in the world in terms of gender equality, and that’s improving all the time, says Li.
“According to my studies, in cities, girls are equal to boys in families. They enjoy the same treatment as boys. They are able to have an independent income when they grow up, and they have the same opportunity of being educated,” she says.
Like so much of the metamorphosis that has overtaken China in less than a generation, the change in attitudes has been rapid, with prejudices and values held for thousands of years seemingly undone in a few short years.
China has operated strict family planning rules for the past 30 years that generally permit couples to have just one child, at most two. The government says the One Child Policy has averted 300 million births.
For a long time, the rural Chinese have prized their sons because they believe they are better able to provide for the family, work the land, support their elderly parents and carry on the family name – all very appealing factors in a country with little in the way of a social security blanket. They wanted tractor drivers and strong workers.
If a farming family’s firstborn is a girl, the couple is allowed to have another baby – a boy or a girl. But the bias towards boys means many parents decide to abort if the unborn child is found to be a girl.
Gender scanning of the foetus is illegal in China, but a large black market flourishes, with a scan typically priced at 50 yuan (€6), if the child is a boy – and 30 yuan if it’s a girl.
Daughters become members of their husband’s family when they marry and move away, prompting the saying: “Raising a daughter is like watering someone else’s fields.”
The gender imbalance has filled China’s classrooms with boys – and packed the orphanages with girls. The preference among rural Chinese for sons over daughters has caused a potentially disastrous gender imbalance in the world’s most populous country.
Government data showed that of China’s 1.328 billion people last year, 683.57 million were men and 644.45 million were women. The ratio of males to females at birth was an alarming 121:100. In Shanghai the ratio is a slightly more comfortable 107:100. The skewed gender ratio is a relatively recent phenomenon – in 1982, the birth gender ratio was 108 boys for every 100 girls.
There is already a problem with a rise in the trafficking of women, as well as the sale of women as wives in the countryside, and a much-feared resurgence in female infanticide. Experts estimate up to half a million children are abandoned each year in China, and 95 per cent of them healthy girls.
Fearful of armies of “bare branches”, the Chinese expression for unmarried men, wandering the countryside looking for wives, the government has introduced cash incentives to stop farming families aborting baby girls.
It has also started a propaganda battle in a bid to change the way people think about girls. The “Care For Girls” campaign in recent years tries to raise the status of women in society and protect baby girls, and threatens harsh punishment for anyone using illegal gender-selection tests and sex-selective abortions, and to severely punish anyone harming girl babies.
You can see signs of this campaign in action in the countryside, where the walls of villages are plastered with the slogan: “Daughters are as good as sons!”
The propaganda, and the tax and education incentives, are slowly paying off, but the economic reality that a young woman with an education can earn more in an office in Shanghai or Beijing than her brother could working on a building site is also doing much to change attitudes.
“Nowadays, the pressure is really on the boys. My family has two children, me and my little sister,” says Zhang Yang, a 25-year-old postgraduate student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, who comes from Xuzhou, a rural area in Jiangsu Province.
“In the countryside, if a family has a girl, they can have another child. My sister came, although everyone was expecting a boy. But I feel my parents love us more and more. Girls have a closer relationship with their parents. Also, if I was a boy, my family would have to worry about marriage costs, about buying him a house and his career,” she says.
“All my parents care about is my health and happiness and that of my sister. They do not have to worry too much because in China, men have to provide a house for marriage, and in Beijing, people always say that a man needs at least a house and a car. They must have a good job to afford all this,” she says.
“In my village, people all prefer girls to boys now, because if your family has a boy, you have to save money from the time he is born to pay for his studies and his marriage,” she says.
In 1992, I took a train from Chengdu in Sichuan province, sharing a sleeper carriage with a family of three – an 18-year-old and her parents – who were travelling to Guangzhou to settle the young woman into university. She was their only child under the One Child Policy, and the father was inordinately proud that his daughter had made it into university, and he said on numerous occasions how it didn’t matter that she wasn’t a boy, she had done very well.
The mother-daughter relationship has also been a complicated one over the centuries. Take the practice of foot binding, which began during the Song Dynasty (960-1280), supposedly because of a particularly beautiful concubine’s ability to walk like a lily on water.
Initially just court dancers did it, then the women of the court and finally it spread from the north of the country until everyone was doing it, even poor families eager to boost their status.
Usually, a mother would break her daughter’s toes, and then bind the feet in long bandages. Every two days, the bandages would be removed and rebound. This would go on for 10 years, from the age of four to about 14.
The Manchu and Qing dynasties were against it, but the idea had taken hold in the countryside and it was not until the time of Sun Yat-sen’s Republic in 1911 that the practice really began to stop and you would be hard-pressed to find any examples post-1949.
The relationship between mothers and daughters is so much less painful now. Shi is feeding her daughter some cake after her glittering modelling debut. “In the city there is no such thing as treating woman as inferior to men. I have a girl. When I was pregnant I didn’t care whether the child was a boy or a girl,” she shrugs.
In the minds of the marketeers, Barbie represents aspiration and dreams, and these notions are currency in the new China. Increasingly, dreams are becoming reality for the young women of the cities of the eastern seaboard such as Shanghai and the capital Beijing. The next stage is for girls in the countryside to start fulfilling their dreams and for Girl Power to go truly nationwide.