Women left out of China’s top spots
CHINA’S Communist Party leaders will gather this fall for a closely watched congress to decide who will take the party into its eighth decade of power. Yet for all the speculation about who will emerge at the top of the ruling party, one result seems certain: Few, if any, will be women.
Not once since the Communists came to power in 1949 has a woman sat on the party’s highest body, the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee now led by President Xi Jinping. The 25-member Politburo has just two women, though that is the highest number since the Cultural Revolution, when the wives of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong and of Lin Biao, his designated successor, were given seats in 1969.
Despite China’s constitutional commitments to gender equality, discrimination remains widespread, academics and feminists say, summed up by the saying that a woman with power is like “a hen crowing at dawn” – an augur of the collapse of the family and state.
Mandatory early retirement for women doesn’t help.Women must retire up to 10 years earlier than men, on the assumption that they are the primary caregivers for grandchildren and elderly relatives. That removes them from contention just as their careers begin to peak.
So as Beijing’s sultry sum- mer deepens, Guo Jianmei and a group of fellow lawyers and feminists are rushing to complete a document urging the Communist Party to promote more women to leadership positions. They hope to distribute the document to party leaders to stimulate discussion before the congress, Guo said.
She declined to provide details, saying the issue was sensitive because it touched on party power. “It’s unusual for members of civil society to raise an issue with the party like this,” said Guo, 57, a longtime women’s rights advocate at the Qianqian Law Firm in Beijing.
Twice in the past, she and others have appealed to the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, but this is their first approach to the supremely powerful party.
Theirs might be a quixotic venture, but they are pressing ahead anyway. “At least it’s doing something,” Guo said.
The party has long publicly championed women’s rights. At the United Nations in New York in 2015, Xi announced a $10 million donation to UN Women, the UN office working for gender equality.
Yet political power in China remains overwhelmingly male. Xi, 64, who was appointed party general secretary in 2012, is expected to serve a second fiveyear term.
“It would take a miracle for a woman to become head of the People’s Republic of China in the foreseeable future,” Cheng Li, director of the John L Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a recent essay.
The percentage of women among full members of the party’s Central Committee has declined in recent years, from 6.4 percent in 2012 before the last party congress to 4.9 percent today.
The figures signal that China is out of step with global trends. According to UN Women, more than twice as many women lead a country today than about a decade ago, though the number is still low at 17.
It is also out of step with its Chinese-speaking neighbours.
Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China claims as its territory, elected its first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, last year. In Hong Kong, the former British colony that rejoined China 20 years ago but retains its own political system, the first female chief executive, Carrie Lam, was sworn in this month.
“If the party wants to survive, to move forward, they should be more inclusive,” Li said in an interview, expressing optimism that this would happen eventually, noting that the party acted to broaden its base under former President Jiang Zemin, who drew in businesspeople in the 1990s.
Still, the likelihood of a woman being appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee at this year’s congress is low, he said.
“The chance is probably only 5 percent,” said Li, naming as the long-odds candidate Sun Chunlan, 67, one of the two female Politburo members and the head of the party’s United Front Work Department.
The official retirement age for most male party cadre is 60, though that is often ignored at the top, where men may serve until at least 67, by unofficial agreement. The retirement age for female party cadre, civil servants and employees of state enterprises is 55. Other female workers retire at 50.
The second female Politburo member, Liu Yandong, also an exception at 71, is expected to retire this fall, Li said.
“I would be shocked if a woman were named to the Standing Committee,” Leta Hong Fincher, author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, wrote in an email.
“I believe the government has no intention of doing anything substantive to improve its dismal record on women’s political representation,” Fincher said. “Instead, China is merely giving lip service to gender equality in order to appear more responsible as it vies for a more prominent global leadership role.”