Shanghai Communist Party Secretary Li Qiang, left, and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan attends the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Oct. 22.Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
Dressed in a bright-red blazer and white shirt, Chinese Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan was easy to spot among the sea of dark suits on the dais of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, as General Secretary Xi Jinping drew the Communist Party’s twice-a-decade national congress to a close last week.
Ms. Sun, 71, taking part in one of her last official events before she retires, was the only woman standing in the spot reserved for members of the Politburo, the second-highest level of Chinese politics.
No woman has ever served on the supreme body, the Standing Committee, and for the next five years there will be no female representation on the broader Politburo either. The 24 names revealed Sunday included no women for the first time since 1997. And women account for just 5 per cent of the next rung of power, the 205-member Central Committee, the same proportion as five years ago.
“Gender equality is one of the lowest priorities for the Chinese government,” said Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese elite politics at the University of California, San Diego. “Women are neglected.”
China’s Xi Jinping secures third term as he packs Communist Party leadership with allies
Ryan Manuel, the Hong Kong-based founder of Bilby, which uses artificial intelligence to predict Chinese policy, said women have found it even harder under Mr. Xi because of changes to how cadres are picked for top jobs. “People with a technocratic background have not been rewarded as much as those running big cities, which says a lot about what is being valued by the leadership right now.”
The new Standing Committee includes the outgoing party bosses of both Beijing and Shanghai, as well as the wealthy southern province of Guangdong. Of the 27 major administrative regions across China, only one, Guizhou, is run by a woman, and most have only ever had men in charge. So to make it onto the Politburo under current conditions, female cadres essentially have to break through two glass ceilings.
Mr. Manuel said he would have “put good money” on Guizhou Party Secretary Shen Yiqin getting the nod, after a strong performance running her native province and frequent prominent mentions in state media. Ms. Shen is also a member of the Bai ethnic minority, which would have been another first had she been promoted, but she did not make it beyond the Central Committee.
“It shows that the path to the top is now largely done through seniority,” Mr. Manuel added. “Women have been structurally blocked from the top for a long time, so they’re not getting the benefits.”
Mr. Shih agreed “that at every level women get marginalized to these positions that are not upwardly mobile.” Ms. Sun was the rare exception who fought her way out of marginal roles into ones with real authority, he said, but many other talented female cadres have struggled to break through.
Despite Mao Zedong’s oft-repeated maxim that “women hold up half the sky,” the Communist Party has long been a deeply patriarchal organization. Women often struggle to advance, facing sexism and harassment in a climate in which it is common for male officials to have mistresses or visit sex workers.
Late last year, China saw its biggest #MeToo scandal when tennis star Peng Shuai accused former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli of sexually assaulting her. Ms. Peng’s account was swiftly censored on the Chinese internet, and she soon disappeared from public view, emerging after intense international pressure, including from world tennis bodies.
After weeks of controversy, she appeared at the Beijing Winter Olympics and said her words had been misinterpreted. At the Communist Party Congress this month, the 75-year-old Mr. Zhang was seated alongside other former senior officials, apparently having shrugged off the scandal.
Outside of elite politics, feminists have come under intense attack online and in state media, accused of being anti-China or in hock to Western forces. Violence against women, which remains a major problem, is often dismissed or minimized; when four women were brutally attacked at a restaurant in Hebei province in June, state media played up the perpetrators links to criminal gangs, not misogyny.
As China faces a looming demographic crisis due to the country’s decades-long one-child policy, pressure is growing on young women to get married and have children, reversing gains made in employment and other spheres.
“Our national policy has always been that men and women are equal,” said Ai Xiaoming, an independent Chinese scholar specializing in gender issues. “But it’s a hollow statement. The result of many policies is that the two genders are not treated equally at all.”
But while women struggle for political representation in Xi Jinping’s China, they are often at the forefront of the Communist Party’s propaganda output, as are ethnic minorities, another group cut off from the highest levels of power.
During the recent congress, female and ethnic minority officials frequently took part in highly controlled news conferences, their performances then highlighted on state TV. As part of efforts to counter claims of widespread human-rights abuses in Xinjiang, Twitter and other social networks have been flooded with videos highlighting the many “beautiful” and “charming” women in the region.
Ms. Ai was skeptical about this visible representation meaning anything in terms of political progress, however; in fact, quite the opposite.
“When China is in opposition to the Western world, the needs of making the gender issue look nicer vanish,” she said. “The space for women in society will be squeezed, and issues such as women’s advancement and women’s rights will be marginalized almost into invisibility.”
With a file from Alexandra Li.