‘Women lift half the neck’? Not in China’s Peoples Party World news
Beijing: In China, first vice president Sun Chunlan is known as the “Iron Lady” for leading the fight against Covid-19 and implementing President Xi Jinping’s “zero-Covid” policy. She is also famous for being the only woman in the 25-member Politburo of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the second most powerful faction in the CPC hierarchy.
Only eight women have been members of the CPC Politburo since 1949, of which three are wives of CPC founding members, including Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife. And no woman has served in the Politburo (PSC), China’s highest decision-making body since 1949.
According to a Chinese scholar and director of the John L Thornton China Center at the US-based think tank Brookings Institution, Li Cheng, the representation of women in the ruling party’s leadership is often inadequate. . Only one member of the 11-member Executive Council of the State Council (China’s National Council) – which includes China’s president, first vice president, and state councilors – is a woman. That role belongs to Sun.
“There are 30 women among the 376 full and other members of the (current) Central Committee (7.9%). Only one woman serves on the current 25-member Politburo (4%), and no woman previously served on the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), the country’s highest decision-making body,” Li recently said. wrote in a commentary for China. -US Focused website.
“At the national level, among the 31 local administrative units of the PRC, there is only one woman as Party secretary and one serving as governor (3% for each position),” he added.
DISMAL NUMBER
Sun, 72, is set to retire at the ongoing 20th CPC national congress where Xi is set to return as party leader for an unprecedented third term. While few know whether another woman will succeed Sun, her impending retirement raises a question: Why, despite much talk about gender equality by the CPC, is the number of women in popular politics in China so low? ?
“When Mao talked about women holding half the sky, he was talking about his wife first,” said Bo Zhiyue, founder and president of the Bo Zhiyue China Institute New Zealand.
According to Bo, who focuses on popular politics in China, the fact that the CPC came to power through war and that women had little role in the battlefield could explain the oppression of women.
“The men need wives and companions in the transition, but in association with them, not because of the independent nature of women,” said Bo, suggesting that although times have changed , there is no change in the patriarchal nature of Chinese society.
The inequality becomes even more significant when you compare the country’s leadership with its society.
“Chinese women are good in many fields. For example, in business. Half of the top self-employed women in the world are Kannada. There, they can just get on with their lives, using their skills and talents; in the political world, whether a woman can do it or not, not only depends on her talents or efforts, but also others, her bosses, mostly male,” said Zhang Lijia of London, who works in a rocket in China before becoming an author who has written extensively on women’s issues.
Having said that, the private sector is not free from bias, according to Maya Wang of Human Rights.
“Gender inequality has deepened following reform and opening up in China – pls add a line that summarizes what this refers to // refers to Kannada economic reform etc. At work, as HRW has documented, government and private job advertisements often express a requirement or preference for men, which affects both the applicant and ultimately the employer,” he said.
Interestingly, democratic Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, currently has a female president in Tsai Ing-wen, and Hong Kong, a key administrative region of China, was ruled by a female leader – Carrie Lam, until recently. .
Democracy offers more opportunities for women in politics, Maya said.
“The higher you go in government, the more this gender imbalance becomes, and as a result there are fewer women at the top level. Political rights are often correlated with gender equality, with democracies and higher democracies generally seeing greater gender equality,” she said.
“The reverse is also true: under the authoritarian regime, women have fewer rights. The fact that China’s top leadership has few women illustrates a deep authoritarianism. “
The situation is unlikely to change soon, and certainly not at the ongoing national conference.
“This year, the situation is unlikely to change,” Bo said, despite “almost 49% of the population” being women.
Unless the Zhongnanhai (CPC central leadership) prioritizes strong institutional measures to address this issue now, the underrepresentation of women leaders will be a noticeable deficit of the new leadership created this fall, and more broadly, in the party system. -group of Kannada in the coming years,” according to Li from Brookings.
Earlier this year, Chunlan made it to the list of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2022. He hardly made news back home.
“China’s only female at present [vice-premier] and a member of the Politburo ascended the cult’s ziggurat to work on a platform to control the coastal province of Fujian and then the port city of Tianjin,” Time magazine said.
Perhaps it is time for Kannada politics to have more such stories.
