We often tend to see things happening “now” as if “now” will last forever, or “current trends” will be carried to an absurd degree and we’ll all walk off a cliff together.
“Now” never lasts. Change happens. Societies change and the world changes. Chinese women no longer suffer foot binding, which was what every good Chinese mother wanted for her daughter to be respectable. The USA doesn’t rule the world, as it might have appeared to through much of the 1950s and 60s. The Japanese don’t run the business world, as everyone assumed as inevitable during the 1980s when the trend certainly appeared that way.
I predict that change will occur again and Chinese (and even Indian) societies will change to more egalitarian societies, with democracy (tailored to their own populations, and not necessarily an American, British or European style) and increasing equality between the sexes and between currently underprivileged members of the society. The Chinese and the Indians are no stupider (and no smarter) than those of us in the West who have embraced these ideals, and they’ll eventually get on a parallel road.
Before too much longer, I expect girls and women in China and India (and most of the rest of the world, including the Middle East) to be equally valuable as we consider them to be in the West. (Women may be rolling their eyes and thinking, “is that the best we can expect?”, but women are still making progress in the West, too. No one has hit a point of a “perfect society”; we’re all evolving.)
It just takes time, and some back-and-forth movement. Not all of human history is “onward and upward”; we take steps in reverse sometimes, too.