ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at gender bias against women in China. In China, as in many societies of the world, sexism against women is unfortunately deep-seated and has characterized both pre-modern and modern times. The development of the Chinese writing system has been influenced at almost every turn by evolving power relations and social systems. Users of Chinese characters do not need to consciously analyze the sexist connotation within the characters in order to appropriately use them – and indeed they do not seem to. This is because a writing system, in its essence, is a set of symbols used to represent speech, and the same graphemes can be used to write and convey messages that are either sexist or not. The marginalization and oppression of women in imperial China is believed to have its roots in Confucianism, the predominant doctrine or ideology that, for millennia, governed how Chinese people thought and behaved.
