Sun Chunlan, China’s ‘Iron Lady’ and the only woman on the ruling party’s Politburo, will step down at the 20th Communist Party Congress this week. There is no guarantee that another woman will succeed her, providing yet another example of the systemic underrepresentation of Chinese women in leadership positions, which may have very real consequences for the world’s most populous nation.
Sun Chunlan is a special case in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) galaxy: she is the only woman in the Politburo, the powerful executive body of the Beijing regime. But not for much longer. Sun is expected to step down from her post during the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the twice-a-decade week-long meeting that began on Sunday, October 16. At 72, China’s ‘Iron Lady’ has passed the usual retirement age of 68.
The nerve center of Chinese power could therefore be made up solely of men, compounding a chronic problem of gender underrepresentation in the nation’s halls of power.
Since 2017, Sun has embodied the CCP’s image of a party that is not afraid to promote women to the highest positions. She holds the prestigious title of deputy prime minister, one of four that make up the 25-member Politburo.
“Women hold up half the sky”, but men rule
Sun’s ‘Iron Lady’ moniker has been reinforced in the past two years, since President Xi Jinping appointed her as chief of China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
She has been in charge of enforcing Xi’s policy of ‘Covid zero’, proof, if it were needed, that the country’s only female deputy prime minister enjoys the full confidence of the president to manage one of the health crises most serious challenges facing the Chinese leader since he came to power in 2012.
But the management of the controversial slogan of public health is not exactly a political gift. Some Chinese experts believe that Xi has found in Sun an easy scapegoat to sacrifice if his handling of the pandemic becomes too contentious. Furthermore, in communist China, the health record has traditionally been entrusted to women; one of Sun’s predecessors in the Politburo was Wu Yi, who had to deal with the SARS epidemic in 2003.
However, Sun’s departure will leave a void at the top of the formation. There are other candidates for the coveted Politburo post, such as Shen Yiqin, the only woman to have served as party general secretary for an entire province, Guizhou, in southern China. Shen is also from the Bai ethnic minority, “which – cynically speaking – means that she checks both the female and ethnic minority boxes at the same time,” the China Project website noted.
But “nothing compels the CCP to replace Sun Chunlan with another woman,” explained Valarie Tan of the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics). The likely absence of women in the next Politburo, to be unveiled at the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress, would not be surprising, as Sun’s post represents the exception to the rule.
In theory, Communist China claims to be one of the most egalitarian regimes in the world. Schoolchildren across the country are familiar with founding father Mao Zedong’s famous phrase, “women hold up half the sky,” which reinforces constitutional equal rights. “Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the CCP has placed equality between women and men as one of the characteristics that distinguishes the communist state from ‘old China,'” explains Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution, with headquarters in Washington, in a report on female representation in Chinese politics.
A very patriarchal party
But the reality is very different for a country with some 703 million women, who constitute 48.7% of the total population.
Since 1949, there have only been six women on the CCP Politburo. Three of them were the wives of the founders of Communist China. Among the more than 300 members of the Central Committee – which elect the members of the Politburo and endorse its decisions – there are barely 30 women. In short, only “eight percent of party leadership positions have been given to women,” Tan noted.
The Politburo – of which Sun is a member – in turn selects the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. The current Standing Committee has seven members, none of whom are women.
This underrepresentation is not due to a lack of Chinese women choosing political careers. Between January 2020 and June 2021, for example, nearly half of the party’s new members were women.
The 20th Congress could have been the occasion to lead the fight against the glass ceiling of politics, since the meeting offers the opportunity for a major renewal of the upper echelons of the party. But the chances of a significant change in female representation are slim.
To begin with, the reasons for male dominance in high political office have not been questioned. The party’s executive posts are usually reserved for “leaders who have held managerial roles in state-owned enterprises, ministries and regional governments, positions for which women are often bypassed,” said Minglu Chen of the Center for China Studies at the University of China. Sidney, in dialogue with the ‘South China Morning Post’.
Second, promotion within the CCP is “totally based on faction ties and not individual merit,” Bo Zhiyue, a New Zealand-based expert on China’s elite politics, added to South China. Morning Post’. “This has created a situation of great impotence because this is a selection, not an election,” he reinforced.
To get to the top of the political ladder, aspirants need the right support, and women often have less direct access to those few party figures who can promote their protégés.
Xi is also not a champion of women in politics. It embodies “the CCP’s very patriarchal approach to society,” Tan argues. The end of the one-child policy in 2021 was an opportunity for the Chinese president to insist on the importance of “traditional family values.” He has even launched a campaign to extol “the unique physical and mental traits [de las mujeres] to give birth and care for newborns.” In other words, the Chinese leader would rather see women at home than in the office.
A demographic crisis, but women have no voice
This lack of women in leadership has important economic and social consequences, Tan warned. “One of the root causes of the current demographic crisis in China is the underrepresentation of women in important positions,” he explained. “The problems of almost half of the population are not, or barely, represented in the CCP.”
And so the incentive to have children is essentially “money doled out to families, without taking into account the deeper reasons why Chinese women don’t want more children,” Tan said.
Chinese authorities are also not harsh enough in dealing with domestic abuse and violence against women in general, Tan added. The impunity that some powerful men implicated in sexual assault scandals – such as the former vice Minister Zhang Gaoli, accused of rape by the tennis player Peng Shuai – reinforces a “climate that does not make women want to have children,” he stressed.
Senior Communist Party officials who have set priorities in recent years to encourage people to have more children “could have benefited from talks with the women on the Standing Committee,” the China Project noted, referring to the tiny group of members of the Politburo Standing Committee selected by the 25-member Politburo: “Too bad there weren’t any.”
This article is adapted from its French version
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