This Day, That Year: Sept 4

Editor's note: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China.

On Sept 4, 1995, the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women opened at Beijing International Convention Center, as seen in the item from China Daily.

During the 11-day conference, delegates from home and abroad discussed and adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action that aimed at achieving greater equality and opportunity for women.

Thanks to decadeslong efforts in promoting gender equality, increasing numbers of Chinese women have ventured and excelled in fields that used to be dominated by men.

In 2012, Liu Yang became the country's first female astronaut and took part in the 13-day Shenzhou IX mission. In 2013, the country's first two female oceanauts were selected, and they carried out their inaugural dive in the submersible Jiaolong, in the southwest Indian Ocean in 2015.

The same year Tu Youyou, an 85-year-old female pharmacologist, was awarded the country's first Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for creating an anti-malarial drug that saved millions of people across the world.

With a marked improvement in the status of women, China has also striven to accelerate the global women's movement and promote gender equality in the world.

In 2015, during a high-level summit at the UN headquarters in New York, President Xi Jinping put forward a four-point proposal on promoting gender equality and women's all-around development worldwide, such as developing vocational and lifelong education opportunities for women.

To support women's development worldwide and the work of UN Women, China donated $10 million to the UN for the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the realization of the related goals in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015.