Chinese Communist Party summit to maintain female absence after congress

It can be said that there are two very likely outcomes at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which began last Sunday (16) in Beijing: Xi Jinping will consolidate his power in the country, and Chinese women do not foresee great advances in terms of equality of rights. genre.

During Xi’s decade as the party’s general secretary and leader of the dictatorship, the presence of women in politics and the government elite has declined, and gender disparities in the workforce have widened, according to activists and academics — who say feminist voices have been silenced and that the regime is placing increasing emphasis on the value of women’s traditional roles as mothers and caregivers.

In a famous phrase, Mao Tse-tung, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, said that “women hold half the sky”, and gender equality is enshrined in the Constitution.

Under Xi, however, power was much more concentrated than it was 15 years ago, when opposing coalitions sought the approval of women, a fact that has led to an increase in female political representation, says Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution. “The current trend is for women to generally be deputy or occupy more symbolic positions.”

The party congress must retain the all-male composition of the party’s top leadership group — the Politburo Standing Committee, which now has seven members.

The only woman seen as a candidate to join the 25-member Politburo is provincial party chief Shen Yiqin. The only member of the Politburo today is Sun Chunlan, who led China’s Covid zero policy. She is 72 years old and is expected to retire from politics.

The next entity in the party hierarchy is the Central Committee, in which women currently occupy 30 seats, or 8% of the total, among the total of 371 full and alternate members. It is less than in 2007, when 10% of the vacancies were occupied by women. And, of the 31 governors of provinces, only 2 are women.

The absence of women at the top level seems to be at odds with a broad campaign by the Communist Party to increase the representation of this part of society. The campaign reportedly led to the proportion of women among party members rising from 24% in 2012 to 29% in 2021.

There are sectors in which women have advanced significantly in the country, especially in companies. Last year, 13.8% of board directors at Chinese firms were women, up from 8.5% in 2016, according to an MSCI report. The regime also claims that 55% of tech startups in the country were founded by women.

But, according to experts, the absence of women leaders in government translates into real setbacks for the population. “It ends up having effects on things we see in society: women’s rights, birth rates, the pay gap, domestic violence,” says Valarie Tan, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.

The regime’s women’s rights body did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.

According to a Sept. 27 statement posted on the organization’s website, China has made “steady progress in women’s causes” over the past 10 years, and the country’s women have equal rights with men.

‘Good wives, good mothers’

At a time when many countries have moved to reduce the gender gap, China is now ranked 102nd out of 146 in the World Economic Forum’s theme rankings — down from 2012, the year Xi came to power. , when it occupied the 69th position.

“The environment has definitely gotten worse,” says Grace Wang, 28. “That doesn’t mean it was good before — it was always bad, but now exploration is even more convenient.” She says she was passed over for a promotion in a previous job because of her gender and that she faces similar problems in her current job. “In my professional life I limit myself to trying to earn enough to pay my bills.”

Last December, China signaled a plan to overhaul a law to give women more protection from discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. Tens of thousands of people have already suggested amendments to the reformulation of the law.

But activists are concerned about Beijing’s intensifying discourse on the value of traditional female roles as it seeks to tackle national demographic crises: one of the world’s lowest birthrates, a growing reluctance to have children and a growing population. of accelerated aging.

In a speech in July 2021, for example, Xi spoke of the importance of gender equality, but also said that Chinese women must be “good wives and good mothers” and that they must take on “the mission of their time: to bind their future and its destiny closely to the future and destiny of the country”.

Experts also point to more concrete setbacks in women’s rights.

In August, the National Health Authority saw backlash on social media when it announced that China would discourage abortions except in cases of medical necessity. And a new law that requires people who have filed for divorce to wait 30 days to reconsider has been met with widespread outrage, including among groups working with victims of domestic violence.

Feminist activism, which appeared to be gaining traction in China in 2018 with a nascent #MeToo movement, is quickly smothered by the regime with forced cancellation of events, censorship of online debates and the arrest of activists.

“The feminist movement is very weak today and has no freedom to evolve,” says Lu Pin, activist and founder of the Chinese online channel Vozes Feministas, which went offline. Today she lives in New York. “Many social movements have been silenced, and women don’t have free will.”