A glance at history suggests it is easier for a Chinese woman to orbit Earth than to land a spot on the highest rung of Chinese politics.
In June, a 33-year-old air force major marked a major feminist milestone by becoming the first Chinese woman to travel in space. With a once-a-decade leadership transition set to start on Nov. 8, many are now waiting to see if another ambitious Chinese female, State Councilor Liu Yandong (劉延東), can win one of the nine spots at the apex of Chinese power.
Liu is a smiley 67-year-old with a degree in chemical engineering and a penchant for pearls and red lipstick. Her portfolios include education, sports and cultural affairs. Experts say she is well-connected and state media paints her as a diligent civil servant with a human touch.
In May, she donned scrubs and stroked the forehead of a hospitalized teacher who lost her legs pushing two students away from an oncoming bus.
“You are so young, so beautiful,” state media quoted Liu as telling the teacher, Zhang Lili. “From now on, you can call me big sister.”
Leadership transitions only happen once a decade in China. This year, Liu is the only female with an outside chance of landing a position at the top, and if she does, she will have made history. However, rocketing into space seems simple compared to busting into the boys’ club of Chinese politics.
“It’s relatively easy to have a Chinese female astronaut because that’s only about winning glory for China and not about actually divvying up political power,” said Feng Yuan (馮媛), a Beijing-based women’s rights advocate.
There are quotas meant to boost participation of women in the political process, but they are not strictly enforced.
Since the founding of Communist China in 1949, no woman has ever served on the Politburo Standing Committee, the topmost leadership clique where major policy is set. Only two women have served as provincial party secretaries, powerful positions seen as stepping stones to national leadership posts.
Chinese former vice premier Wu Yi (吳儀 ) — known as the “Iron Lady” for her tough negotiating skills and ranked by Forbes as the second most powerful woman in the world in 2007 — failed to advance past the politburo, the group of about 25 from which standing committee members are recruited.
Willy Lam (林和立), a historian at Chinese University of Hong Kong, says the climb to power typically begins with a local leadership post that gets parlayed into jobs overseeing increasingly large constituencies until, ideally, one is running a province or a big city.
Those are the people who end up running China from the leafy, high-walled Zhongnanhai leadership compound in central Beijing.
However, to get those positions can be hard for a woman, for sometimes maddening reasons.
“To become a mayor of a big city or a governor of a province you have to be sort of one of the boys, you have to drink a lot and maybe womanize a bit and also be reasonably corrupt,” Lam said. “There’s no lack of corrupt women in China, but this to-be-one-of-the-boys phenomenon, I think, is holding some promising female cadres back.”
Feng, the Beijing rights advocate, has run training workshops on women’s rights around China. She says aspiring female politicians complain to her about the “drinking culture” in Chinese politics, but many say sexual politics also holds them back.
It is common for powerful Chinese men to have mistresses, which can make it difficult for women to curry favor or even cooperate with their male superiors without inviting suspicion.
One female deputy director of an agency told Feng that if she went to the office of her male boss to discuss work, he would typically stand at the door to talk to her. If they had to be in his office, he insisted on leaving the door open.
“This was to prevent rumors,” Feng said. “If you have to be that careful in day-to-day work, imagine how hard it would be to actually promote a female. People would talk, they would wonder about just how close the relationship was.”
Though China’s communists have done much to improve women’s lives by increasing their access to education, health care and jobs once reserved for men, they have failed to meaningfully increase women’s political participation.
Since the 1970s the number of women serving in China’s parliament has actually fallen, and less than a quarter of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) members are women. Also, women typically get shunted into positions considered “women’s work,” such as family planning or public relations.
In 2009, female cadres accounted for just 11 percent of leadership positions at the ministerial or provincial level, 13.7 percent at the local and departmental level, and 16.6 percent in county-level offices. That was only slightly better than figures for 2000, which were 8 percent, 10.8 and 15.1 percent.
In the early days of Chinese Communist rule, the wives of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), Lin Biao (林彪) and Zhou Enlai (周恩來) were all given positions on the politburo, but their tenures did little to pave the way for other women.
Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing (江青), led a series of purges that, after Mao’s death in 1976, resulted in her being sentenced to death for counterrevolutionary crimes. Though some see Jiang as a cautionary tale against the ruthlessness of power-hungry females, she claimed she was only following orders.
“I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite,” Jiang told the court.
Pre-communist history offers similarly scant inspiration for aspiring female politicians. Annals are rife with scheming concubines who helped unseat emperors by distracting them with carnal pleasures, a perception that Hong Kong University history professor Zhou Xun says still lingers.
“Historically, women were quite often seen as trouble, as linked to the downfall of dynasties,” Zhou said.
The last woman to rule China, the Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后), who died in 1908, is remembered as a leader who resisted reform and left China vulnerable to Japanese and western powers.
Today, the CCP’s intolerance for grassroots campaigning has left little room for the growth of a feminist movement that could bring women into the streets to demand equal pay for equal work or more female political participation.
One of the few independent Web forums dedicated to women’s issues, Feminst.cn, has been repeatedly shut down by authorities.
Liu is seen as a long shot for the standing committee, but there are a few other women competing for posts on the politburo, including corruption watchdog Ma Wen (馬文) and Fujian Party Secretary Sun Chunlan (孫春蘭) — only the second woman since 1949 to head a province as party secretary.
Cheng Li (李成), an expert in Chinese politics at the Brookings Institute, says one or two of them are likely to make it — a bleak horizon for women’s empowerment.
However, he says he expects more women to push their way into government in the coming 10 to15 years as younger women come of age with more education and social freedom than their mothers.
Feng says she has noticed more women trying to run as independent candidates at local government level, suggesting an awakening of political consciousness.
“We ought to be even more bold in our questioning and not just ask why there are no women on the standing committee but we ought to ask why there are no women competing for the post of Communist Party secretary or for prime minister,” Feng said.
A gap appears to be emerging between Washington’s foreign policy elites and the broader American public on how the United States should respond to China’s rise. From my vantage working at a think tank in Washington, DC, and through regular travel around the United States, I increasingly experience two distinct discussions. This divergence — between America’s elite hawkishness and public caution — may become one of the least appreciated and most consequential external factors influencing Taiwan’s security environment in the years ahead. Within the American policy community, the dominant view of China has grown unmistakably tough. Many members of Congress, as
The Hong Kong government on Monday gazetted sweeping amendments to the implementation rules of Article 43 of its National Security Law. There was no legislative debate, no public consultation and no transition period. By the time the ink dried on the gazette, the new powers were already in force. This move effectively bypassed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. The rules were enacted by the Hong Kong chief executive, in conjunction with the Committee for Safeguarding National Security — a body shielded from judicial review and accountable only to Beijing. What is presented as “procedural refinement” is, in substance, a shift away from
The shifting geopolitical tectonic plates of this year have placed Beijing in a profound strategic dilemma. As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) prepares for a high-stakes summit with US President Donald Trump, the traditional power dynamics of the China-Japan-US triangle have been destabilized by the diplomatic success of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Washington. For the Chinese leadership, the anxiety is two-fold: There is a visceral fear of being encircled by a hardened security alliance, and a secondary risk of being left in a vulnerable position by a transactional deal between Washington and Tokyo that might inadvertently empower Japan
After declaring Iran’s military “gone,” US President Donald Trump appealed to the UK, France, Japan and South Korea — as well as China, Iran’s strategic partner — to send minesweepers and naval forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. When allies balked, the request turned into a warning: NATO would face “a very bad” future if it refused. The prevailing wisdom is that Trump faces a credibility problem: having spent years insulting allies, he finds they would not rally when he needs them. That is true, but superficial, as though a structural collapse could be caused by wounded feelings. Something
RSS