Corrected: ANALYSIS-Women fail to crack China's glass ceiling as party picks new leaders

SOHO China

26/10/2017 08:50

(Changes pronoun to "he" from "she" to correct gender of quoted 
delegate in final paragraph) 
    * New Politburo's 25 members include only one woman 
    * Elite Standing Committee consists of seven men 
    * Just 4.9 percent of the 204 Central Committee members are 
female 
    * China doesn't pay enough attention to gender equality - 
critics 
 
    By John Ruwitch 
    BEIJING, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Every time China's ruling 
Communist Party convenes a major gathering, like the congress 
that just ended in Beijing, the list of delegates is 
hand-crafted in part to burnish the party's image as 
"representative of the masses" - including giving some 
prominence to those in more menial jobs and ethnic minorities. 
    Yet one group is chronically under-represented among the 
political elite: women. 
    The founding father of communist China, Mao Zedong, may have 
once said that women "hold up half the sky" but when the 
twice-a-decade party congress selected a new batch of top 
leaders this week, females weren't holding up much at all. 
    No women made it onto the elite Politburo Standing 
Committee, the group of seven men at the pinnacle of the party. 
None ever have. 
    In the new Politburo, only one of its 25 members is a woman 
-- Sun Chunlan, head of the party body charged with outreach to 
non-Communists. It is her second term and she is likely to 
retire in five years. On the previous Politburo, there were two 
women, Sun and Vice Premier Liu Yandong - who is past retirement 
age and has stepped down from the Politburo. 
    One rung down, just 4.9 percent of the new Central 
Committee, a mere 10 of the body's 204 members, are women. That 
number was unchanged from the outgoing Central Committee, which 
presided for five years, but lower than in 2007-2012 when there 
were 13. 
    The State Council Information Office, which doubles as the 
party's propaganda department, did not respond to faxed 
questions for comment on why there are so few women in senior 
party positions. 
    By way of comparison, five members of U.S. President Donald 
Trump's 24-member cabinet are women, and about 20 percent of the 
U.S. Congress are female. In Japan, two out of 20 members of the 
cabinet are women as are about 10 percent of the lower house 
lawmakers newly elected on Sunday. 
         
    ASTRONAUTS AND HOUSEKEEPERS 
    At the Chinese party congress itself, the overall numbers 
were stronger: about a quarter of its 2,287 delegates were women 
- roughly commensurate with the proportion in the roughly 90 
million-member party. 
    But with most senior leadership posts in the hands of men, 
activist Xiong Jing, an NGO project manager who edits a feminist 
social media site, said many of the women delegates to the party 
congress were there merely as "decoration". 
    "This problem is a cliché," she said. "With the political 
system as it is now, I think even if more women were involved, 
whether as party congress delegates or in government, they may 
be very limited in what they can do." 
    The party takes the appearance of representativeness 
seriously when it comes to some groups. 
    At party congresses and annual sessions of parliament, there 
are delegates from China's 56 different ethnic groups, every 
branch of the military and police, private businesses, the state 
sector and, of course, the government. 
    The party congress this year featured delegates who were 
astronauts, athletes, actors, judges, farmers and more. There 
was even a delegate representing housekeepers, who showed up in 
her apron and maid's cap. 
         
    "PARTY OF THE PEOPLE" 
    For women in general in China, political empowerment is 
lacking. China ranked 74th in political empowerment of women out 
of 144 countries in the World Economic Forum's global Gender Gap 
Report last year. In 2006, it was no. 52 out of 115. 
    Leta Hong Fincher, a New York-based sociologist and author 
of the forthcoming book "Betraying Big Brother: The Rise of 
China's Feminist Resistance", says women in China are losing 
ground amid a resurgence of traditional gender norms. 
    "It's my impression that the Communist Party is 
fundamentally not interested in having women at the senior 
levels at all," she said. 
    In China's pre-reform command economy under Mao, women were 
drafted into the workforce and recruited into nation-building. 
    The most powerful woman since the communist takeover in 1949 
was Mao's third wife, Jiang Qing. She and members of her "Gang 
of Four" were arrested after Mao's death in 1976 and blamed for 
the excesses of the chaotic Cultural Revolution. 
    More recently, Hong Fincher says, the party has been spooked 
by China's demographic challenges - an aging population, 
shrinking labour force and falling birth rates - and has 
aggressively promoted the idea that women should be getting 
married and having babies. 
    To be sure, in Chinese business there are some prominent 
female chief executives, such as Zhang Xin at real estate 
developer Soho China  0410.HK  and Zhou Qunfei, the billionaire 
founder of Lens Technology  399433.SZ . 
    And the party and government pay lip service to gender 
equality. The state constitution guarantees women the same 
rights as men. 
    "The government ... wants to appear to be taking gender 
equality seriously, when in reality it is not. It is actually in 
full retreat with regard to gender equality," Hong Fincher said. 
    The election process for party congress delegates is tightly 
controlled, with candidates vetted for their loyalty to the 
party and leadership. 
    But congress delegate Tang Jialing, who is a crew member on 
a deep-sea research submersible, suggested that the lack of 
women reflected the will of the people. 
    "We are the party of the people. It's the people who voted 
in more men than women. It's the people's choice," he said. 
  
 
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Women in China's Communist Party IMG    http://tmsnrt.rs/2lcfg0w 
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 (Additional reporting by Liangping Gao, Stella Qiu, Pei Li and 
Benjamin Kang Lim in BEIJING and Kiyoshi Takenaka and Linda Sieg 
in TOKYO; Editing by Martin Howell) 
 ((john.ruwitch@tr.com; +86 21 6104 1786; Reuters Messaging: 
john.ruwitch.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net; Twitter: 
@jruwitch)) 
 
Keywords: CHINA CONGRESS/WOMEN (CORRECTED, ANALYSIS, PIX, GR