Forum in Shanghai Marks 20th Anniv. of UN 'Beijing Conference'

The attendees deliver speeches at the forum. [Shanghai Women's Federation/Yu Jieran]

Shanghai Women's Study Institute recently held a research forum commemorating the "20th Anniversary of the 4th World Conference on Women"—in memory of the U.N. conference held in Beijing in 1995—along with the Research and Communication Center of International Women and Children of the Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) and the university's Institute of International Relations and Public Affairs.

Xu Feng, the president of Shanghai Women's Federation and chairperson of Shanghai Women's Study Institute and other officials amounting to more than 100 people attended the forum at the university's convention center.

Xu emphasized that the SISU, as the first agency to learn the practical experiences of international society, had laid a good foundation for the upcoming "Theory Seminar for Shanghai Women" in the city in September by introducing the topic, taking advantage of its major individual and comparative studies of countries. She hoped that the center would be able to extend its research fields, reinforce its features and improve the contents of its studies to better serve women, children and families and provide intelligent support for women's careers in Shanghai and the whole country.

Many attendees delivered keynote speeches from the international perspective of laws, policies, and gender issues in society, as well as other topics, and discussed the development of modern women. They spoke on feminism, the "New Feminism of Modern China", "U.S. Feminism" and "The Basic National Policy of Gender Equality" from the perspective of historical materialism, pointing out that women's liberation was the basic rule with which to measure the general level of freedom in a society, of which gender equality was the important standard to evaluate the level of the civilization and progress.

The speeches also highlighted the view that the improvement of gender equality was a national strategy rather than a female-only policy, the target of which was to help women achieve progress and development since women have been playing an indispensable role in global management.

(Provided by Shanghai Women's Federation/Yu Jieran)