The Sunday Mail
Special Correspondent
ALONG with the rapid economic growth and significant social development over the past decades, China has made much progress in gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Since 1995, China has initiated its first multi-year national programme for women’s development, specifying national strategies and action plans to advance women’s rights and interests in key areas such as economic participation, decision-making and management, education, health and legislation.
In September 2021, the Chinese government carried out its fourth national programme for women titled “Programme for the Development of Chinese Women (2021-2030)” for formulating and implementing policies and measures to protect women’s rights and interests, as well as ensure females’ all-round development in the new era.
As signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979 – the member of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) and the host country of the fourth United Nations World Conference on Women – China has been actively implementing the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted at the aforementioned conference in 1995, as well as goals regarding gender equality and women’s development in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
As China develops a series of measures, legal frameworks and programmes to promote women’s equal rights and unlock opportunities, below are two women from the world’s second largest economy who have made some positive influences in making the world a better place.
TU Youyou – the malaria warrior
TU Youyou was born in 1930 in eastern China. Her family prioritised her education, but she had to take a two-year break from studying at 16 because she had contracted tuberculosis. When she returned to school, she knew exactly what she wanted to study: medicine, to find treatment for diseases like the one that had afflicted her.
TU studied pharmacology, learning how to classify medicinal plants, extract active ingredients and determine their chemical structures at the Beijing Medical Collage, and was assigned to work at the newly established Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine after graduation, where she took a full-time course in traditional Chinese medicine. In the late 1960s, TU was appointed to find a cure for chloroquine-resistant malaria. Her first order of business was researching the effects of malaria in situ. For that, she led a team to Hainan Island in southern China, which was experiencing a malaria outbreak of its own. In those rainforests, TU witnessed the disease’s devastating toll on the human body.
Upon their return to Beijing, the team reviewed ancient medical texts to understand traditional Chinese ways of fighting malaria. After testing over 240 000 compounds for use in potential antimalarial drugs, TU’s team found a reference to sweet wormwood, which had been used in China around 400 AD to treat “intermittent fevers”, a symptom of malaria. TU ultimately extracted a compound artemisinin that has saved millions of lives. When she isolated the ingredient she believed would work, she volunteered to be the first human subject.
It took two decades, but finally the World Health Organisation recommended artemisinin combination therapy as the first line of defence against malaria. The Lasker Foundation, which awarded TU its Clinical Medical Research Award in 2011, called the discovery of artemisinin “arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century”.
In 2015, TU was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine, becoming the first mainland Chinese scientist to receive a Nobel Prize.
ZHANG Guimei: educator lighting up rural girls
ZHANG Guimei is the principal of the Huaping Senior High School for Girls, China’s first and only free public high school for girls. After she graduated from Lijiang Teachers College, she worked as a teacher in Huaping – a poor, mountainous region in southwest China – devoting herself to changing the lives of rural girls.
ZHANG found that some school-aged girls in Huaping did not pursue senior high school education after finishing their primary school and junior high school.
The school was opened in September 2008 – with no walls, canteens or even a toilet. About six months later, nine of its 17 teachers resigned and six of the 100 learners quit because of what they deemed harsh conditions. However, the remaining teachers offered to stay. They supported their learners with devotion and thereafter improved the quality of teaching.
Thanks to their unremitting efforts, the school became an educational miracle, as in 2020, the admission rate ranked first among all senior high schools in Lijiang.
The founding of the girls’ school marked a turning point for them.
The years of hard work and mental pressure took a toll on ZHANG, who is battling 23 illnesses, including emphysema, cerebellar atrophy and skull osteoma. She had to give up teaching and now works in a supporting role at the school. She donates all her savings to subsidise learners in the girls’ school and a local primary school.
As a pioneer in the promotion of free, quality education for girls, ZHANG was awarded the July 1 Medal in 2021, the highest honour of the Communist Party of China (CPC). ZHANG is hailed as a heroine and outstanding member of CPC in China. She is definitely a well-deserved model of the times.
CHEN Wei: a medical scientist dancing with life-threatening viruses
“I would like to give my all to the lab and bring hope for people living in virus-stricken areas,” said CHEN Wei, a 57-year-old researcher at the Institute of Military Medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences. From SARS and Ebola to Covid-19, CHEN has spent half of her life fighting against deadly viruses.
When SARS broke out in China in 2003, CHEN and her team isolated the virus and identified the cause of the disease without delay. In order to evaluate effectiveness of a candidate drug, she spent six to eight hours a day working in a sterilised lab. She sometimes even wore adult diapers just for working longer. Luckily, the nasal spray developed by CHEN and her team at the time had prevented about 14 000 frontline medical workers from getting infected.
After SARS, the forward-looking woman shifted her attention to Ebola, the deadly virus which claimed thousands of lives worldwide. In 2015, she and her team were sent from China to Ebola-stricken Sierra Leone to combat the virus. They conducted their second phase of clinical experiments on the Ebola vaccine. The vaccine has proven to be safe and effective, and widely administered to patients in Africa.
On January 23, 2020, China locked down Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province, to curb the spread of Covid-19. Three days later, CHEN was recalled to Wuhan and led her team to develop China’s first Covid-19 vaccine. It was just one day after the Chinese New Year, China’s biggest holiday for family reunion. She and her team didn’t waste a minute to work in a makeshift lab for research and testing.
Almost 50 days later, the first vaccine was ready for phase-one clinical trials. In July 2020, the data of the vaccine’s phase-two clinical trials was also released to the world. Results of the two phases of clinical trials verified the efficacy and safety of the vaccine.
For her outstanding contributions to the country’s fight against the Covid-19 epidemic, CHEN was awarded the national honorary title, “the People’s Hero” in 2020. CHEN attributes the outstanding achievements to her team: “Everyone in the team has shown extraordinary perseverance and contributed their wisdom,” she said.
Chairman Mao Zedong once said that “women hold up half the sky”.
This was an acknowledgement that women are diligent, dedicated and farsighted. With the Chinese government attaching more importance to women empowerment and gender equality, we expect more and more Chinese women to make more contributions to the country and the world.
