It is worth noting, though, that the first of such courses was offered at Beijing Normal University as early as 2007 (interestingly the same year that the popular magazine Psychologies was launched in China). The courses in Wuhan clearly meet a need amongst students – there are images of students stood outside the building, with inside a hall bursting at the seams.
But these courses also fulfil a social need – and it is tempting to think that it is this need which drives the international exposure that the Wuhan courses have been given by Global Times, China Daily etc. Like many governments, the Chinese one is worried that marriage numbers are down, divorces are up – and most critically that the birth rate is at a 60 year low. In a piece of research, 44% of women said they intended not to marry – and to have a child outside marriage is still an adventurous and unusual occurrence in China (see ‘China’s Doomed Fight Against Demographic Decline’, Foreign Affairs, 3 May 2022).
The government has been bringing into being policies to change the situation – in 2021 instituting a 30 day ‘cooling off’ period in divorce proceedings, during which ‘family and marriage guidance’ is available. If one partner changes their mind over the divorce, it will not go ahead. In Wuhan this led to a 60% drop in divorces last year. For some this is a positive outcome – but there are those who believe that such initiatives may be part of the push back on women rights.
In one of our interviews for this newsletter, we were talking to a Wuhan female resident who temporarily lives in Europe. The line went down when we began to talk about feminism. To be frank, we saw nothing awry. But our interviewee said she was confident that was because feminism was raised as a topic – there is always someone listening in on calls with Chinese abroad, she said.
How the government’s pro natalist position develops in Wuhan is worth watching. The city has a huge student population, troubling graduate unemployment as in the rest of China – and Wuhan has a mythology of powerful women. Mulan, the legendary female warrior of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589) comes from there and in the recent Disney live action version the actress Liu Yifei who played Mulan is Wuhan-born. More generally, Wuhan women have a reputation of being 凶 (fierce) – a fair description of one of Wuhan’s most famous contemporary daughters, Guo Jing, who as early as 2014 became the first woman to sue successfully a company in court on the grounds of gender inequality. More recently she has weighed in on domestic violence during Covid in Wuhan, on the indifference of judges to psychological experts – and on the shackled woman in Shandong.
If pro-natalist positions calcify into a requirement that women’s ‘special role’ is as ‘virtuous women and good mothers, assisting their husbands and educating their children’, as one of the President’s speeches has it, then we might expect Wuhan sparks.*******Recent figures, according to Gelonghui Institution（格隆汇), suggest that unglamorous cities such as Wuhan may have a more central role in China’s future – younger people, especially graduates, can’t afford housing and other costs in Shanghai and Beijing and are staying put in Wuhan. That’s why the success or otherwise of the cultural developments in Wuhan matters so much – to the economy of the city and of China.