It is difficult for Westerners to understand China. While there are always analogies to be drawn between different civilizations, Europe has few parallels to Chinese history. The unbroken continuity of culture, the unique socio-political structures, and the amazing revolutionary experiment of the 20th century set the Chinese into a category by themselves, especially from the Western perspective. While our Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, scientific-industrial, imperialist-capitalist heritage has transformed the entire world, we have nothing resembling Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, or communism. Our nuclear families and weak kinship contrasts with their extended families and clans, while their collectivism and our individualism are polar opposites. Western women have only recently emancipated themselves from the yoke of male domination and achieved equality, yet nothing in the long history of sexism can compare with the oppression of Chinese women, unless it be the Indian civilization from which some of its worst features were derived. "Few societies in history have prescribed for women a more lowly status, or treated them in a more routinely brutal way, than traditional Confucian China" (Johnson, 1983, 1).
The historical facts are overwhelming. Along with economic, legal, and sociological discrimination, one must consider the psychological and the spiritual. It is as if the traditional Confucian Chinese male was threatened by the female, and could not accept her personhood or full humanity. For such a lack of love and respect to be institutionalized for so long is indicative of a sadistic tendency in the culture, something also manifested in the rigid, frequently cruel, dictatorial hierarchy that most characterizes Chinese history, although there are occasional exceptions.
This attitude tends to be more extreme even than the legendary machismo of Spain or Latin America. Its legacy is untold frustration and pain, as well as the tra...