Women pushed even further from power in Xi Jinping’s China

Women pushed even further from power in Xi Jinping’s China



Across seven decades of turmoil and change, one thing about China’s leadership has remained unchanged. It is all-male.To get more news about famous chinese women, you can visit shine news official website.

Men led China into the famine of the Great Leap Forward, through the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution and during the economic opening of the 1980s and 90s. In Xi Jinping’s “new era” of digital authoritarianism, men remain in charge of the country.

The Communist party has run China for 70 years, and in that time no woman has ever been a member of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the small group that runs the country, much less led the party or been made president or premier.

Today under Xi, the CCP took a step back, also eliminating women from the next level of power too, the now 24-member Politburo. The new all-male line-up was revealed the day Xi formally extended his rule for a further five years, after the closing of the 20th Communist party congress in Beijing.Since 1997, there had always been at least one female Politburo member, and briefly two. A quota system required at least one woman in senior leadership at each level below that, contributing a small but steady stream of candidates.

The Covid tsar, Sun Chunlan, was the only woman on the outgoing Politburo, and one of only three women who have made it that far as political operators in their own right – rather than as wives of powerful men or propaganda tools – in over 70 years of Communist rule.

Her politburo seat was thought to be earmarked for another woman after she stepped down, with two candidates named as likely frontrunners.

But in a weekend of disturbing surprises, including the manhandling of former President Hu Jintao off the stage, the CCP revealed an all-male Politburo.

“Chinese women have been excluded from the centre of political power at both local and central levels,” said Hsiu-hua Shen, professor of Sociology at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University, before the conference closed.

“Without specific affirmative actions … it is very difficult for Chinese women to be able to enter political systems and shape policies.”The party was formed during a civil war, in a highly patriarchal society and has been based on “masculine violence” and power struggles since its establishment, Shen added.

The CCP has nearly 100 million members, but less than a third of the rank and file are women, and the numbers thin out, the higher up its ranks you climb.“China’s patriarchal political structure limits women’s upward mobility,” said Pan Wang, senior lecturer in Chinese and Asian studies at the University of New South Wales.

“From the bottom to the top of the pyramid, women get fewer at each step of the hierarchy (from CCP members, to the party congress, central committee and the politburo). This can create biases in the nomination and selection process for leading positions in the party/state.”

Chinese women are held back by a variety of factors, Pan said. They include cultural expectations that women do more in the home, a career structure that forces them to retire earlier than men, just as they might be reaching their professional peak, and education and socialisation that discourages them from political ambitions.

The CCP has always had an uneasy relationship with feminists, in part because Communists claim to have liberated women themselves. Mao’s slogan “women hold up half the sky” became famous as half-tribute, half-promise to China’s women.

That makes any woman still fighting for her rights potentially subversive, particularly at a time when Xi is openly distrustful of any civil organising.

There have been repeated crackdowns on feminists, including arrests of women protesting against issues that do not obviously challenge the political system, such as sexual harassment. China’s #MeToo movement has made little progress.