This past Tuesday, I attended another excellent Noon Lecture Series at the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies (CCS). I am a very biased observer, of course, since my graduate program is administered and run by CCS, so feel free to sprinkle a few grains of sea salt on the page when reading. Affiliations notwithstanding, I assure you that if the lectures weren’t good, I wouldn’t bother telling you about them. At the end I touch on how issues of gender equality can be applied to thinking about China’s healthcare workforce.
Dr. Wang Zheng, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and History, University of Michigan
Chen Bo’er (陈波儿), one of the most famous Chinese public figures and communist revolutionaries in the first half of the 21st century, was the center of this weeks lecture, “When Talented Women Became Socialist State Power Holders: Chen Bo’er and the Paradigm of Socialist Film in the PRC,” by Dr. Wang Zheng, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and History at the University of Michigan.
Chen was born in 1907 to a wealthy family in the countryside, and owing to her father’s wealth she was able to study in Shanghai. There she studied Mandarin and English. (At the start of the 20th century Mandarin was not yet the lingua franca of China, much like English did not become the lingua franca of Europe until well after WWII. Up until that point French was still the dominant language of diplomacy, and interestingly enough if you meet Chinese or American diplomats who were students during that post-WWII period, chance are they learned French). She was highly influenced by the feminism of the May 4th movement.
She joined a film troupe in Shanghai and gained a very good reputation as an actress. Her starring role in 1938′s Ba Bai Zhuang Shi (八百壮士), as a heroine battling against both the invading Japanese army and the excesses of a post-May 4th movement culture geared towards materialism , brought her fame throughout China. The film was China’s first film with full audio and won international awards. Chen used her success to enter even more fully into revolutionary life, something that she had always identified with even as a young girl , when she caused a scandal by cutting off her braid in support of the May 4th ideals of cultural independence and feminine strength. Eventually, she became a leading figure in the communist fight for China, where among many things, she concerned herself with recruiting women to fight in the revolution. At one point, Dr. Wang Zheng read a very poignant account of how Chen would go to villages where women with bound feet were now donning the clothes and weapons of revolutionaries. The picture at the top of the article is Chen taking picture of two women fighters during one of her many reported tours of revolutionary forces.
After 1949 Chen was a revered figure. The group portrait on the right shows Chen sitting in the middle of the photograph, second from Mao’s right (I couldn’t find a bigger size picture, sorry about that). She was given control of the Communist Party’s first film studio and produced more than a half-dozen films, most of which featured heroines, who, according to Dr. Wang Zheng were created to show off feminine strength from a females point of view. This post-1949 work was the theatrical tip of a much larger post-1949 push by women revolutionaries to seize the rights they were promised by Mao and the broader communist revolutionary movement. Chen used the silver screen to try and change the popular image of women as powerful seductresses with tepid insecurities – an image she rightly viewed as one created exclusively by male-dominated culture. At the same time other women revolutionaries were securing their place in the new society, through marriage rights through the First Marriage Law (the first law that China ever passed), and myriad other avenues by way of influential postings in the first years of the PRC, including the first Minister of Health, Li Dequan (李德全).
But, Dr. Wang Zheng raises the question, if Chen Bo’er was so famous during her life - her early death resulted in a very ornate national funeral – then why is she largely forgotten today?
As with anything academic and fact based, the ultimate answer is complicated, and the neither the lecture nor a single well-researched volume would suffice to explain it fully (For you budding scholars out there, you should know, Professor Wang’s expertise in this area would suffice to provide an answer several times over, so if you’re looking for a complete answer start with her list of publications.). A major component of the answer, however, speaks to a broader truth about the role of women in Chinese and, indeed, world history more generally. They tend to become invisible with time.
In the case of China’s empowered feminist women of the communist revolution, they were quickly labeled reactionaries and the gains made in women’s rights and equality during the period from 1949-1957 were the farthest jump for women’s rights in China, probably through to the present day (Although, I suspect, though I am not well read at all in this topic, that globalization and the information economy have brought to Chinese women many of the same gains that they’ve brought to women in the US and elsewhere). The heroine in today’s China movies is noticeably different that the grenade hurling heroine of Chen’s works.
The lesson here for me, as I’m thinking about how this lecture can be applied to healthcare, is that attitudes aout the role of women in society are reflected in China’s healthcare workforce. Like in the US, nurses in China are overwhelmingly women. Physicians, by contrast, are much more evenly distributed, although top leadership positions, like elsewhere in China, tend to belong to men by a wide margin.
For an American company coming into this sort of professional culture, there has to be an awareness that modern American norms of gender in the workplace might rub against the current reality of those norms in China. Arguably, for many reason, American hospital are not well equipped to deal with questions of physician-support staff relations. The ongoing professionalization of the nursing workforce (nursing qualifications are currently a hodge-podge of graduate degree, bachelor degree and associate degree holders, as well as nurses who receive diplomas through a sort of apprenticeship), the effort by nurses to gain greater say in the management of clinical care and physician push back to that effort, and the aforementioned gender gap in US nursing all point to an American staffing ecosystem that has a long way to go in solving its own problems before it goes about changing norms in other countries. Still, the expectations and management norms of American healthcare operators towards the healthcare workforce are shaped by the highly regulated and very litigious American healthcare industry. No doubt there will be a lot from that experience that can be brought to a Chinese hospital or other healthcare provision facility, but there will be a lot that simply does not or cannot apply.
A note on searching for information on nursing in China
I bet you didn’t know that if you search for the term “护士” on Google Images the majority of your hits will be women in nurse costumes, though of the decidedly uncredentialied variety. I only know that because I regularly have to track down healthcare-themed images for our articles. I’ve learned that if I want to find an image featuring real Chinese nurses I need to search for “忽视会议”, nurse conference, or “护士医院”, nurse hospital, or some other variant that includes both the term nurse and an accompanying term that specifies a place where professional nurses gather. For the sake of comparison with the US and countries in China’s immediate neighborhood, if you search for just the English term “nurse”, there is a much more professional correction of images in the first several pages of results, although there is a noticeable deterioration to sexual imagery later on. A search in Japanese for the terms “看護師”, kangoshi, the word for a professional who takes care of the sick, and “看護士”, the same pronounciation, kangoshi, though this one specifies a male professional, yields exclusively a professional set of photos within the first few pages of results. In Korean, the word “간호사”, Kah-no-san, turns up a decidedly NSFW mix of images in the first few results, with even greater of prevalence of NSFW images later on.
The variance is interesting but there are many simple potential explanations that don’t require me to speculate on the immediately inflammatory issues of adult industry prevalence and gender equality in each country. The Google search engine’s ability to filter adult content from each individual language source could be the sole source of the variance, for example, as could be each individual country’s regulations on the adult entertainment industry.
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