Beijing: The Communist Party Congress has laid bare the striking gender imbalance in the upper echelons of Chinese politics, with not a single woman making the 24-person Politburo for the first time in at least a quarter of a century.
As Xi Jinping and his allies concentrated power over the weekend, the party’s highest-ranking woman leader retired.
Veteran politician Sun Chunlan, a vice-premier overseeing China’s health policies, was absent from the Central Committee list published on Saturday, meaning she has stepped down.
In the world’s biggest political party – which counts 96 million active members – women have never held much power, and now hold even less.
They make up just 5% of the party’s new 205-member Central Committee, while the seven-member Standing Committee – the apex of China’s power – remains an all-male club headed by Xi.
Sun, 72, was the only woman in the former Politburo, the party’s executive decision-making body.
But figures like Sun are a rarity in Chinese politics, where male patronage networks and ingrained sexism have stymied the careers of promising candidates, experts say.
It is a far cry from Communist Party forefather Mao Zedong’s pledge that “women hold up half the sky”.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to women’s rights I think is more like a commitment to advance women’s economic rights,” said Minglu Chen, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney.
“It’s really about: ‘women should join the paid labour force’.”
China is hardly unique in its lack of women in politics. A prevailing social conservatism and repression of domestic women’s rights activism have made it difficult for women to defy expectations that they will prioritise family life over their careers.The state has played into these expectations by encouraging women to have babies to offset China’s rapidly ageing population. Young women have especially chafed at this, partly due to the lack of policy support for working mothers.
“A lot of women talk about how they cannot juggle the double roles of being a good mother, wife and worker,” said Chen. — AFP
