The echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale were startling and sinister. Last week, a Dutch ‘ethical hacker’ named Victor Gevers exposed a database of 1.8 million women, hosted on a server in China, that listed their personal details including age, marital status, ID numbers and addresses. The database also contained a ‘BreedReady’ category, which gave the Chinese women a binary score of one or zero, seemingly referring to their potential to have children.
It is not known where the database originated, and it was taken offline within 48 hours of Gevers posting the screenshots on Twitter. While it may look like data from a dating app – and 90% of the women were unmarried – Gevers noted that dating profiles normally require certain information about hobbies and interests, which were absent in this case. ‘The way the register was set up was not something that you would expect from a dating website,’ he told Grazia.
The leak has sparked fears that the database could have been compiled by the Chinese government – and raised disturbing questions over what it might intend to do with the information. It comes amid growing concerns about China’s slowing birth rate and ageing population. Just over 15 million babies were born in 2018, two million fewer than the year before, and the lowest birth rate in the country since 1949. In 2016, China’s controversial one-child policy to control the population size was replaced with a two-child policy.
This change has been ‘accompanied by a very aggressive propaganda campaign aimed especially at college-educated Chinese women, trying to push them into having babies, preferably while they are still in their twenties’, says Leta Hong Fincher, author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening In China. She described the ‘BreedReady’ database as ‘very worrying’. During the one-child policy, a premium was placed on male children, leading to the abortion of many female foetuses. One outcome was a massive gender imbalance in China, which now has 34 million more men than women. But despite this surplus of potential mates, more and more young women are putting off motherhood.
‘I’ve told my parents I may not get married or have children in the future,’ says Nancy Chen, a 26-year-old human resources manager in Beijing. She said that while her parents still prioritise marriage, ‘They are open-minded and support what I really want’. Chen’s reason for turning away from homemaking is so that she can focus on her career. She is not alone: more than half of university students in China are female, and the number of women working in urban areas increased 34% between 2010 and 2016. Faced with slowing economic growth, the cost of having even one child can be prohibitive.
For Su Yang, 30, the pressure is acute. People often ask her when she is going to have a baby, which makes her feel stressed because although she would like to, ‘my current working and living situation doesn’t allow me to reproduce’. Su grew up in China, but is now studying for a PhD in Melbourne. After she got married, she says friends in Australia asked if she was happy, while friends in China said, ‘You should have a baby as soon as you can.’
If the birth rate continues to decline, Hong Fincher argues that ‘the government may try to introduce more coercive policies’, casting ‘BreedReady’ in an ominous light. Victoria Yu, 24, said the database reminded her of ‘women’s virtue’ classes, which have taken place in China, ‘which educate women to be “good” in a sense of them being ignorant and virtuous’. Yu says that despite her youth, ‘a lot of people I know are getting engaged [or] married, or at least being pressured to do so’.
For now, though, she is heeding the advice of her step-grandmother, who bucks the traditional trope of pressurising elder relatives: ‘She married early and while she loved her husband, she felt that it limited her from truly understanding herself. So she wishes for me to take time for myself first.'
Read more: feminist comments from fiction
Grazia Feminist Quotes From Fiction
1 of 11‘When you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worthwhile.’
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
2 of 11‘If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.’
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3 of 11‘She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.’
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
4 of 11‘There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.’
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5 of 11‘I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.’
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
6 of 11‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
7 of 11‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.’
Charlotte Brontë by Jane Eyre
8 of 11‘Don't let the bastards grind you down.’
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
9 of 11‘The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.’
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
10 of 11‘Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
11 of 11‘When you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worthwhile.’
Borderlands La Frontera by Gloria E. Anzaldua