Mon, Oct 16, 2017 page7

• In China, women have not been able to touch the political glass ceiling

  • By Tom Phillips / The Guardian, BEIJING
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  “Times have changed ... today men and women are equal,” Mao Zedong (毛澤東) pronounced more than half a century ago. “Whatever men comrades can accomplish, women comrades can too.”

  Unless, of course, you mean running the country.

  Not once since Mao’s communists took power in 1949 has a woman been appointed to China’s top political body, the Politburo Standing Committee, let alone become the nation’s top leader.

  Few expect that to change on Wednesday when the Chinese Communist Party’s great and good congregate in Beijing to celebrate the start of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) second five-year term and conduct a highly scripted reshuffle of the party’s upper echelons.

  “Taiwan has a female president. Even Hong Kong has a female chief executive, but I think the communist party would have to collapse before you actually saw a woman leading China as a country,” said Leta Hong Fincher, author of a forthcoming book called Betraying Big Brother: China’s Feminist Resistance.

  “All the signs indicate that the communist party does not want women to have power. It wants women to return to the home and take care of the families while men stay on the front line and do the important work of the nation,” she said.

  Brookings Institution Chinese politics expert Cheng Li (李成) said it was not inconceivable that a woman could clinch one of the seven spots on the Standing Committee during this month’s transition.

  He gave Sun Chunlan (孫春蘭), the 67-year-old head of the United Front Work Department, a secretive group charged with fortifying the party’s influence at home and abroad, a 5 to 10 percent chance of breaking that glass ceiling.

  However, there were similar hopes for Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong (劉延東) before the last party congress in 2012 that came to nothing.

  “[The race] for the seats ... is so tight — so competitive — that usually various forces will not let a woman leader enter,” Li said.

  Council of Foreign Relations director for Asia studies Elizabeth Economy predicted that the committee would remain a club for the boys.

  “I think it’s going to be a pretty conservative group that is comfortable with the more authoritarian and politically repressive state-directed tendencies of Xi,” she said.

  Mao famously proclaimed that women “hold up half the sky” and they did enjoy unquestionable advances after the 1949 revolution, as China’s leader fought to simultaneously liberate women and harness their economic potential.

  However, women continue to play a peripheral role in Chinese politics.

  There are just two female faces on the party’s expanded 25-member politburo, and only 10 of the 205 full members of its Central Committee are women, down from 13 in 2012.

  According to Li’s research, not a single one of China’s 31 provincial governments is run by a woman. There are only two female governors.

  “The absence of female voices in politics is a global phenomenon, but considering that the communist regime flaunts the idea that ‘women hold up half the sky,’ it hasn’t set the example it should have,” women’s rights campaigner Feng Yuan (馮媛) said.

  Hong Fincher said that an array of structural reasons helped explain why the pinnacle of Chinese politics was so overwhelmingly male.

  “There are far fewer women who are members of the Communist Party; there is a huge gender gap in the mandated retirement age, so women are expected to retire up to 10 years before men; and there is rampant discrimination, actually throughout Chinese society, but particularly in Chinese politics,” she said.

  However, the dearth of female politicians also reflected a broader deterioration in women’s rights that has seen authorities crack down on China’s nascent feminist movement and push propaganda campaigns to convince women to marry earlier and have more children.

  Hong Fincher said that a looming demographic crunch — which means that by 2050 more than a quarter of China’s population will be over 65 — had convinced Beijing that women were now needed more in the home than in the halls of power.

  “Communist party leaders are extremely alarmed at the demographic trends in China, so this is a big reason why they are pushing women into marrying and having babies,” Hong Fincher said. “They see women as just biological vessels to reproduce. Babies for the future of the nation.”

  “Women are better educated than before in Chinese history. So why isn’t the Communist Party tapping into this incredible resource? I believe it’s because Communist Party leaders fundamentally just see women’s roles as being wives and mothers,” she added.

  Despite the crackdown, the lack of female participation in Chinese politics has not gone unchallenged.

  In the lead-up to the 19th National Congress, women’s rights advocate and lawyer Guo Jianmei (郭建梅) was among a group reported to be preparing to circulate a document urging China’s leaders to correct the gender imbalance of the nation’s political scene.

  However, Guo, whose legal aid center was forced to close down last year amid a crackdown on civil society, declined to discuss the initiative this week citing the tense political atmosphere that has enveloped Beijing before the five-yearly event.

  “I’m very sorry. I was told yesterday that I couldn’t give interviews or take legal cases,” she said. “This period is too sensitive.”

  Feng said there was an increasing clamor among Chinese women for change.

  “It is a pity that their voices have not yet been heard,” she said.

  Additional reporting by Wang Zhen
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