When I was teaching at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China a few years ago, one of my students told me a shocking story about her childhood. With China’s one-child policy in force since 1979, having more than one child was against the law, but my student, “Polly,” five years old at the time, remembers her mother becoming pregnant. She also remembers her mother’s screams as officials took her away to the hospital and ordered the forcible abortion of her fetus—three times. When Polly was eleven, her mother became pregnant again. This time, the mother did not wait for the authorities to take her away. As soon as she began to show visible signs of pregnancy, she fled to a faraway relative’s home to hide and have her baby there. When she returned home months later with the newborn, the authorities showed up and demanded that the family pay a fine—equal to more than $1,000, which was a fortune to a family living in Sichuan province in those days.

My student’s story of her mother’s forced abortions is one facet of China’s approach to women in the last three decades. As a girl from rural Sichuan province who was able to go to university and later enter the workforce in one of China’s “special economic zones,” Polly can be seen as an emblem of progress women in China have made in education and employment, but also the challenges for women and girls that remain.

Women in China, it seems, are chronically engaged in a few-stepsforward- few-steps-back cycle. The Chinese government has improved women’s health overall and raised its rank on UN measures of wellbeing. Consider how far the country has come in maternal mortality; from a rate of 110 deaths per 100,000 births in 1990, the rate has fallen to 38 today. In fact, China ranks only just behind the United States but ahead of Russia on the UN Development Program’s (UNDP’s) overall Gender Inequality Index of human development indicators measuring reproductive health, labor participation, and inequality between genders. Among Asian countries, only wealthier Japan, South Korea, and Singapore rank higher.