Seven men in stiff suits: this is what the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party has looked like for many years. Chinese politics has always been notoriously misogynistic and has become even worse since the Twentieth Party Congress. The one position in the Politburo that always went to a woman disappeared on Sunday. A result of Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism and emphasis on conservative, traditional family values.
The CCP – communist after all – likes to present itself as egalitarian. Mao Zedong makes the statement that ‘women hold up half the heavens’, and Xi Jinping himself insisted on gender equality in his opening speech. In reality, the party forms a typical patriarchal pyramid: 29 percent of the party members are women, but only 5 percent of the Central Committee, which contains the 205 most powerful members. The Standing Committee, the ultimate top, has never even had a woman.
Deemed to bear children
A small consolation was always the Politburo, with 25 members. Since 2002, one position has always gone to a woman. This time too, there was speculation about candidates in advance. Shen Yiqin (62) stood a good chance as party secretary of Guizhou. Just like her namesake Shen Yueyue (65), the number two in the Organization Department, the powerful CCP personnel service. On Sunday, none of them turned out to be the case. The new Politburo has 24 members, none of whom are women.
Xi seems to have banned Yiqin and Yueyue for political reasons. Shen Yiqin just didn’t have enough experience (although that turned out to be no problem for the male members of the Standing Committee). Shen Yueyue made her career as a protégé of former leader Hu Jintao, who was disrespectfully removed from the podium on Saturday and whose faction — which included outgoing Prime Minister Li Keqiang and the more liberal Wang Yang — was sidelined.
But the impoverishment of female political representation is also indicative of Xi, who is striving for a revival of traditional family values. The #MeToo movement has been crushed in China, feminist NGOs have been rounded up, and women are primarily expected to bear children – even more so since the one-child policy was abolished. China dropped from 69th to 102nd place in the World Economic Forum’s gender gap ranking during Xi’s reign.
Not an ounce of equality
“The CCP does not recognize most human rights, including women’s right to be politically represented,” said Willy Lam, a Hong Kong political expert. Xi doesn’t care about western values. He even wants to show the West: in China we only follow the Confucian tradition, a patriarchal philosophy. He doesn’t care about the reaction of the United States and Europe.’
The consequence of Xi’s policy: without women at the political top, it is more difficult to put women’s rights on the agenda. And the private sector, where Chinese women can make it to the top with great difficulty, is increasingly restricted. ‘As an ambitious woman in China, you’d better emigrate to the US,’ says Lam. “In China there is not a shred of equality, not between rich and poor, not between party officials and ordinary people, and not between men and women.”
“If a woman could reach such a high political position, she should behave like a bureaucrat, not a woman,” said a 21-year-old Beijing student, who wishes to remain anonymous. “Her gender was more of a symbol. But even that fig leaf is gone now, they don’t even keep up appearances. It is clear that the space for women is getting smaller and smaller. All I can do is study hard and try to get out of China. Otherwise I will remain unmarried and childless.’