Beijing: In China, vice-premier Sun Chunlan is known as the “Iron Lady” for spearheading the fight against Covid-19 and strictly implementing President Xi Jinping’s “zero-Covid” policy. She is also known for being the only woman in the 25-member Politburo of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the second-most powerful body in the CPC hierarchy.
Only eight women till now have been members of the CPC Politburo since 1949, of which three were the wives of the CPC’s founding members, including Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong. And no woman has ever served on the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), China’s supreme decision-making body, since 1949.
According to leading China scholar and director of John L Thornton China Centre at US-based think tank Brookings Institution, Li Cheng, the representation of women in the ruling party’s leadership has always been inadequate. Only one member of the 11-member Executive Committee of the State Council (China’s Cabinet) — which consists of China’s premier, vice premiers, and state councilors — is a woman. That role belongs to Sun.
“There are 30 women among the 376 full and alternate members of the (current) Central Committee (7.9%). Only one woman serves on the current 25-member Politburo (4%), and no woman has ever served on the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), the supreme decision-making body in the country,” Li recently wrote in a commentary for China-US Focus website.
“At the subnational level, among the 31 provincial administrative units of the PRC, there is only one woman serving as Party secretary and one serving as governor (3% for each position),” he added.
DISMAL NUMBERS
Sun, 72, is set to retire at the ongoing CPC 20th national congress where Xi is set to return as the party leader for an unprecedented third time. While few know whether another woman will succeed Sun, her impending retirement raises a question: Why, despite so much talk about gender equality by the CPC, is the number of women in elite politics in China so dismally low?
“When Mao talked about women holding up half the sky, he was basically talking about his wife,” says Bo Zhiyue, founder and president of Bo Zhiyue China Institute New Zealand.
According to Bo, who focuses on elite politics in China, the fact that the CPC came to power by battle and women played little role in the battlefield might explain the gender bias.
“The men needed wives and partners in revolution, but in association with them, not because of the independent nature of women,” said Bo, suggesting that though times have changed, there has been little change in the patriarchal nature of Chinese society.
The imbalance becomes especially stark when comparing the country’s leadership with its society.
“Chinese women fare well in many aspects. For example, in business. Half of the world’s top self-made business women are Chinese. There, they can just get on with their world, using their wit and talents; in the political world, whether a woman can make it or not, not only depends on her talents or effort, but also others, her bosses, mostly male,” said London-based Zhang Lijia, who once worked in a rocket factory in China before becoming an author who has written extensively on women’s issues.
Having said that, the private sector isn’t free from bias, as per Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang.
“Gender inequality has deepened following Reform and Opening in China — pls add a line summarizing what this refers// referring to chinese economic reform etc etc. In employment, as HRW has documented, government and private sector job ads often specify a requirement or preference for men, which affects both who applies and ultimately who gets hired,” she says.
Interestingly, democratically-run Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, currently has a woman president in Tsai Ing-wen, and Hong Kong, China’s special administrative region, was run by a woman leader — Carrie Lam, until very recently.
Democracy gives more opportunities to women in politics, says Maya.
“The higher you go in government, this gender imbalance becomes more severe, and as a result at the top level there are few women. Political rights are often correlated with gender equality, with democracies and higher quality democracies generally see greater gender equality,” she said.
“The reverse is also true: under authoritarianism, women have fewer rights. The fact that the Chinese top leadership has few women illustrates its deepening authoritarianism.”
The situation is unlikely to change soon, and certainly not at the ongoing national congress.
“This year, the situation is unlikely to change,” says Bo, despite “nearly 49% of the population” being made up of women.
“Unless Zhongnanhai (the CPC leadership compound) prioritises vigorous institutional mechanisms to address this issue now, the inadequate representation of women leaders will remain a notable deficiency of the new leadership formed this fall, and more broadly, in the Chinese party-state system in the years to come,” according to Li from Brookings.
Earlier this year, Chunlan made it to the list of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2022. It hardly made news back home.
“China’s only current female [vice-premier] and Politburo member climbed the party ziggurat from working on a watch-factory floor to lead the freewheeling coastal province of Fujian and later the port city of Tianjin,” said Time magazine.
Maybe it is time that Chinese politics got more such stories.
