Violent protests this month in Guangxi’s Bobai (博白) County—sparked, according to international press reports, by heavy-handed implementation of birth control rules—are a tragic reminder of the pain caused by a policy that has, nevertheless, played a key role in China’s social and economic transformation.

An Inquiry into Commercial Sex in the Community of Men Who Have Sex with Men in China (中国男男性交易状态调查) Tong Ge (童戈), Beijing Gender Health Education Institute (北京纪安德咨询中心) March, 2007

Although overall maternal and child mortality rates are continuing to fall in China, the decline is slower than would normally be expected of a country experiencing such robust economic growth, and there is very wide variation between rates in urban and outlying, rural areas, according to a Joint Review of the Maternal and Child Survival Strategy in China published in December by Unicef, UNFPA, WHO and the Ministry of Health.

A network of people studying and working on gender-related issues and a gender and development “case bank” (http://g-case.id666.com/) are taking shape to accelerate gender mainstreaming in China.

Yang Shaobin (杨少斌), born to a coalmining family in Hebei Province, has put together an exhibition of oil paintings and installations that, according to the catalogue, “dialectically thinks about the linkages between Chinese history, culture and social development.” Nick Young looks at these and other pictures, wondering what “dialectically” might mean nowadays.

International development NGO, Mercy Corps, is partnering with a local organisation established last year in Sichuan Province’s Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in a new initiative to improve life skills and livelihood opportunities for teenage, ethnic minority girls who have grown up in an area ravaged by poverty, drug use and AIDS.

According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, in 2004 less than one percent of Village Committees and village-level Communist Party Committees in China’s 653,000 administrative villages were headed by women.Wu Jing’ai (吴京爱), 53, is one of those rare women. A loyal Communist Party member, she has led her village to relative prosperity. Speaking in her native, Shandong dialect, she told Tina Qian (钱霄峰) about her life and career in grassroots politics and development.

For centuries the Yi people of Liangshan (凉山) in southern Sichuan observed strict marriage codes that prohibit inter-ethnic wedlock. Now, although many of the benefits of development have passed by this mountainous region, which remains home to 2 million Yi, the prospect of larger dowries from Han suitors is triggering an outflow of Yi women to other provinces. Matt Perrement reports from Liangshan on a form of migration that appears to fall somewhere between aranged marriage and, as some locals bluntly call it, trafficking (拐卖).

The Centre for Women’s Law and Legal Services at Beijing University, which this week marked ten years of pioneering work to protect and strengthen women’s rights, received a CNY 130,000 birthday gift from the China Legal Aid Foundation established by the Ministry of Justice in 1997.

Seven groups took away grant awards totaling USD 200,000 to tackle the gender-related issues of HIV/AIDS, migration, political participation and domestic violence, the United Nations Theme Group on Gender announced on April 27 in Beijing, marking the second anniversary of China Gender Facility.