Empowering Ethnic Left-behind Women in Their Own Language

Village women receive legal training given in the Hani ethnic language. [China Women's News]

A women's federation in southwest China's Yunnan Province has been promoting legal rights by inviting lawyers to speak to rural "left-behind" women in their own ethnic Hani language.

Left-behind women refer to a group of underprivileged women whose husbands live away from their rural homes most of the year, seeking better-paid jobs in the cities. Statistics from the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) in 2011 showed that there were nearly 50 million left-behind women in China's rural areas.

The Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefectural Women's Federation organized the legal training activity in Jiushi Village of Honghe's Shitouzhai Township.

The federation invited lawyers from Yunnan Zhongxu Law Firm to introduce legal knowledge related to women in different stages of life, such as pre-marriage, in-marriage and divorce, especially the rural bride-to-be's farmland rights, in the local language, as the village is mostly inhabited by the Hani ethnic group.

During the training, lawyers continuously quoted practical cases to dissect the relevant issues so that those female attendees could better understand how to use legislation to protect themselves and preserve their interests.

So far the training is well-received.

Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, located in the province, is inhabited by not only the Hani people, but another ethnic minority group, the Yi.

According to the Sixth National Population Census released in 2011, China has about 8.71 million Yi people and 1.66 million Hani people across the country, with over half of the Yi and over 90 percent of the Hani living in Yunnan.

The Hani language belongs to the Yi branch of the Tibetan-Myanmese language group of the Chinese-Tibetan language family. Having no script of their own before 1949, they kept records by carving notches on sticks. In 1957, the people's government helped them to create a script based on the Roman alphabet.

(Source: China Women's News and baike.baidu.com/Translated and edited by Women of China)