The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 20th National Congress has laid bare the striking gender imbalance in the upper echelons of politics, with not a single woman making the 24-person politburo for the first time in at least a quarter of a century.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and his allies concentrated power over the weekend, the party’s highest-ranking female leader retired.
Veteran politician Sun Chunlan (孫春蘭), a vice premier overseeing China’s health policies, was absent from the Central Committee list published on Saturday, meaning she has stepped down.
Photo: AFP
In the world’s biggest political party — which counts 96 million active members — women have never held much power, and now hold even less.
They make up just 5 percent of the party’s new 205-member Central Committee, while the seven-member Central Politburo Standing Committee — the apex of China’s power — remains an all-male club headed by Xi.
Sun, 72, was the only woman in the former politburo, the party’s executive decisionmaking body.
Often dispatched to inspect Chinese cities in the grip of surging COVID-19 outbreaks, the former party chief of Fujian Province and Tianjin municipality became the public face of the “zero COVID-19” policy, commanding tough measures wherever she went, prompting the nickname “Iron Lady,” but figures like Sun are a rarity in Chinese politics, where male patronage networks and ingrained sexism have stymied the careers of promising candidates, experts say.
It is a far cry from former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) pledge that “women hold up half the sky.”
“The Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to women’s rights I think is more like a commitment to advance women’s economic rights,” University of Sydney senior lecturer Minglu Chen (陳明璐) said. “It’s really about: ‘Women should join the paid labor force.’”
Chen said that the Chinese Communist Party is by nature a masculine and patriarchal institution, from its roots as a social movement to today.
China is hardly unique in its lack of women in politics. A prevailing social conservatism and repression of domestic women’s rights have made it difficult for women to defy expectations that they should prioritize family life over their careers.
The state has played into these expectations by encouraging women to have babies to offset China’s rapidly aging population. Young women have especially chafed at this, partly due to the lack of policy support for working mothers.
“A lot of women talk about how they cannot juggle the double roles of being a good mother, wife and worker,” Chen said.
She added that most provincial officials selected for promotion have multiple higher education degrees — a prerequisite that disadvantages women.
Many informal patronage networks are also established through frequent socializing at restaurants in heavily male — and often boozy — environments.
“Many of Xi’s former male colleagues in Zhejiang and Fujian are now politburo members,” University of California, San Diego political science professor Victor Shih said. “Yet none of his previous female colleagues have made it into the politburo and not even to top provincial positions.”
China also has low retirement ages for women — 55 for female civil servants compared with 60 for men in the same profession, rising to 60 for female officials at deputy division level and above.
Ministers are expected to retire at 65, while central leaders mostly abide by an informal age cap of 68.
China introduced an informal quota system in 2001, requiring one woman at all levels of government and the party except the politburo, but without a proper supervision mechanism, this was lightly enforced.
“If we had seen a better quota system in place which was reinforced strictly, then we’d start to see different outcomes,” Chen said. “One-party dominance has led to this as well.”
The politburo has only admitted six women since 1948, with only three of them made vice premiers, and no woman has ever made it into the elite Standing Committee.
Observers had hoped Sun would be replaced by Shen Yueyue (沈躍躍), head of the All-China Women’s Federation, or Shen Yiqin (諶貽琴), who became the third-ever female provincial party leader when she was made head of Guizhou — but not one woman was promoted.
Even though women make up about 29 percent of Chinese Communist Party membership, vanishingly few of them manage to ascend from grassroots positions.
For instance, the proportion of women in the Central Committee has hovered at between five and eight percent for the past two decades, Shih said.
“Discrimination at lower levels prevent them from obtaining high-level positions,” Shih said.
“Because women held more marginal positions at lower levels, they enter government later than men and they are forced to retire earlier than male counterparts,” he said.
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