Taiwan鈥檚 female president faces criticism for being single. Is Asia backsliding on gender equality?
The official's remarks that Taiwan's president is unfit because she is single highlights a challenge that many women still face in China and other parts of Asia.
Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen waves as she delivers an acceptance speech during her inauguration ceremony in Taipei, Taiwan. A newspaper published by China's official news agency says the new president of rival Taiwan is more 'extreme' in her politics because she's an unmarried woman lacking the emotional balance provided by romantic and family life.
Chiang Ying-ying/AP
A Chinese military official has come under fire for saying that Taiwan's newly inaugurated president, Tsai Ing-wen, is unfit to be a leader because she is single.
"As a single female politician, she has no emotional encumbrances of love, no family restraint, no children to worry about. ," wrote Wang Weixing, a member of China's Association for Relations across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS), an organization that handles ties with Taiwan, in an oped published in the International Herald Leader, a newspaper owned by Beijing's state newswire Xinhua.
He continued, "she doesn't care so much about the direction of political strategies, being more concerned with details. She proposes extreme short-term goals, and does not consider long-term goals."
The official's remarks coincided with President Obama's visit to Vietnam, where the US president championed women's rights there, encouraging Vietnamese to promote gender equality.
"," Mr. Obama said during a speech to 2,300 at the Hanoi Convention Center, The Washington Post reported. "Strong, confident women have always moved Vietnam forward. The evidence is clear 鈥� I say this wherever I go around the world 鈥� families, communities, and countries are more prosperous when girls and women have an equal opportunity to succeed."
The oped on Taiwan's president, which has since been deleted, released an avalanche of responses on Chinese social media sites including Weibo, China's version of Twitter, defending Ms. Tsai's social status and her ability to govern.
"," one user wrote on Weibo, according to the BBC. "This is typical discriminatory behavior but it still disgusts me."
"This is how North Korea attacks Park Geun-hye," the South Korean president who's also unmarried, a Weibo user wrote. 鈥溾�� asked another user, alluding to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was divorced, but later re-married, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The remarks appear to be a response to Tsai's recent inauguration speech in which she Since her election to the office Tsai has faced a lot of backlash from Chinese officials for her pro-independence stance. Beijing still considers Taiwan as an autonomous region that is part of China, and Tsai's failure to mention that hasn't gone unnoticed.
Still, the denigration of women isn't uncommon in China, despite the the progress that it has made in advancing women's rights. China has often been held up as a good model by other Asian countries for the progress it has made concerning women's issues, according to The New York Times.聽. In one incident, Mr. Zedong made a famous declaration stating that women "hold up half the sky."
Such advocacy coupled with China's economic boom have propelled the place of women in the Chinese community. The percentage of women in the work force has increased over the years, . In comparison, in 1949, women accounted for only 7.5 percent of the country's workforce. And a study by Grant Thornton, an organization that advises companies, found that聽the proportion of women in senior management in China was at 51 percent outpacing the global average of 21 percent, the Asia Times reported.
Yet there is a sense that women are still lagging behind in China. But more concerning, many observers note, is that China appears to be regressing when it comes to how women are perceived and treated in Chinese society. In 2015, the Chinese New Year Gala event, which attracted some 690 million viewers, sparked a widespread outrage following the airing of various skits on television聽that were deemed misogynistic. One skit made fun of unmarried women, a common practice in the country in which .
"The media has been publicizing individual cases of successful women, but over all there isn't space for women to develop in the economic realm," Feng Yuan, a prominent Chinese feminist, told The New York Times. "."