While their role in society is more than relevant, this group still fails to break the glass ceiling of the political sphere
Mao Zedong said that “women hold up half the sky”, and there is no denying that the coming to power of the Communist Party of China, in 1949, is key to understanding the role women play in society. of the Asian giant, much more economically relevant than in more developed neighboring countries, such as South Korea or Japan. They represent 48.7% of the country’s 1,400 million inhabitants and 44.5% of the country’s workforce, and it’s not hard to see them on boards of directors – 26.3% have a woman as finance director – and even in the company’s softest armchair. The three richest businesswomen in the world are Chinese, a country that dominates seven positions in the top 10 (and one of the remaining three belongs to a Hong Kong entrepreneur).
However, there is a glass ceiling it cannot break: that of the dome of Chinese power.
To confirm this, it is enough today to see the photos of those who are part of the Central Committee of the Party and the exclusive clubs of the Politburo and its Standing Committee: they represent only 7.9% of the 376 members of the first, there is only one of the 25 members of the second (4%) and none of the seven accompanying Xi Jinping at the helm of the second world power. As if that weren’t enough, their numbers have not grown over time. On the contrary: in 1977 there were 37 women on the Permanent Commission, 11.4% of the total. And their weight has been decreasing since 2007, when they accounted for 10%. In total, the People’s Republic has had only six female Politburo members, and three of them were the wives of Mao Zedong, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and Deputy Prime Minister Lin Biao.
At the foot of the Chinese political pyramid, however, nearly 29% of CCP members are women, and in 2017 they held 52.4% of new official positions. In general, they are considered more efficient and less erratic. Especially those born after 1980, when the one-child policy was introduced and because of the traditional preference for a male successor, became ‘little emperors’.
Many young women have a vague view that the political atmosphere does not reflect the changes that Chinese society is going through. “It annoys me that the photo of the standing committee members of the Politburo is of a homogeneous group of very old men,” said Li Caixian, a 30-year-old from Shanghai who works in the administration department of a Chinese multinational engineering project company. “The fact that all the main leaders are men hinders progress in equality policies and makes it more difficult to fight the machismo that still prevails. Now that it is a matter of promoting the birth rate, I fear that a more conservative view of women will be promoted at the expense of the independent character we have forged,” he stresses, emphasizing that male dominance “also facilitates a disconnection between those who rule us and society”.
She’s not the only one who thinks so. Chen Minglu, a professor at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney, points out that “the biggest barrier is that the Communist Party itself is very patriarchal” and that “there is a perception within it that women lack the qualities to become politicians.” to be “.
Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, adds that “at a time when male dominance at the top of power is being challenged in much of the world, both the Chinese public and the Chinese community will pay more attention to the great gender inequality of China’s political elite.” However, few changes have been made. “Unless strong institutional mechanisms are put in place to change the situation, the inadequate representation of women will remain a notable leadership flaw,” the Communist Party’s XX National Congress said. “And of the one-party system in the coming years,” he shoots.
Source: La Verdad
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