In China, the road to power for women has narrowed
Beijing:
One of the means that President Xi Jinping has deployed to arrest the rising Covid deaths in Hong Kong is the Communist Party’s pandemic fighter: a 71-year-old woman whose career has reached the top of the glass ceiling in the world’s most populous country lit up.
Sun Chunlan is the only female deputy prime minister in China’s entrenched patriarchate, the only woman in the powerful 25-member Politburo and, more recently, the top official overseeing pandemic control. Now she has been called upon to help across the border into Hong Kong, local media outlets including the South China Morning Post have reported.
Unlike the “nice guy” mocked by Xi executives for failing to act, Sun’s pandemic response has been portrayed as decisive in the state media. After hospitals in Xi’an allowed non-Covid patients to die during a lockdown this year, she ordered on-site medics to “don’t send patients away under any excuse”. When Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, the twenty-seven-year-old spent nearly 100 days there without vaccines to help authorities isolate each case, a strategy critical to Beijing’s unparalleled success in containing the virus.
“This is not hide-and-seek, it must be carried out resolutely,” she told a hall of mostly male executives at the time, pumping her fist, in rare footage of an internal meeting posted by local media. In another clip, she called hospitals on a cell phone to find beds. ‘How many can you take? Three hundred? Very good,’ she said, dressed in a thick down jacket and an N95 mask.
Sun’s age will likely force her to retire after a reshuffle later this year and leave Zhongnanhai’s leadership in Beijing. She will step down without an apparent female successor and after being expelled from China’s deepest shrine of power, the Standing Committee – a seven-member boys’ club where no woman has ever been admitted.
“The system has been extremely unfair to Sun Chunlan,” said Victor Shih, an associate professor at the University of California San Diego who studies elite Chinese politics. “She was identified in the 1980s as a promising cadre. After serving in provincial and central party leadership positions, she will end her career in the Politburo when many male colleagues with thinner qualifications have entered the Standing Committee.”
The lack of female representation in the Chinese government has attracted more attention after a series of scandals highlighting women’s issues. The National People’s Congress, which held its annual meeting in Beijing this week, is considering an update to the gender discrimination law, but would likely remain unclear about the penalty for violating women’s rights.
Unlike Xi, Sun was not born into a family with high-level connections to the Communist Party. She worked her way up the party ranks of a watch factory to lead China’s eighth richest province, Fujian, and then the port city of Tianjin. In 2012, she became one of only eight women out of about 160 people to have ever reached the Politburo — including deputies — since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Super Eight
But while her predecessor in Tianjin, Zhang Gaoli – later accused of pressuring tennis star Peng Shuai into sex – was catapulted from that position to the Politburo Standing Committee, Sun never advanced in the party ranks. Instead, she became deputy prime minister in 2018 and was assigned the seemingly inconspicuous portfolios of health and sports, while her male counterparts led climate and trade.
“Very little, if any, effort has gone into reforming the gender stereotypes based on ancient Confucian ideas and the entrenched political culture that favors men in party promotions,” said Valarie Tan, an analyst at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies.
As the country grapples with a looming demographic crisis, women are increasingly portrayed as caretakers and carriers of children, she added. Xi has said women’s “unique physical and mental characteristics” give them a special role in families, according to a compilation of his comments on family values published in the party’s Study Times in 2018.
Sun Chunlan at the NPCSun Chunlan, top row, during the opening session of the Beijing National People’s Congress on March 5.
The country’s #MeToo movement has been crushed for being a vehicle for spreading Western values. Peng’s allegations of assault by the party’s No. 7 official were wiped from the heavily censored internet in China. The recent case of a chained woman who had been trafficked sparked a nationwide outcry and sparked an investigation.
“Instead of creating more space for women’s issues in China, the MeToo movement and Peng Shuai’s case have reminded leaders of the importance of controlling information and politics in China,” said Natasha Kassam, a former Australian diplomat in China who is now director of the Lowy Institute’s Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Programme. “The men in Zhongnanhai are concerned that other women can make their voices heard.”
In that environment, the path to power for women has narrowed. In the 1970s and 1980s, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News, women headed ministries of the chemical industry, textiles, foreign economic relations and even the central bank — seen as quick jobs for promotions. More recently, they have been assigned to direct education, propaganda, health and the United Front influencing overseas Chinese, Shih said.
Who’s next?
Tristan Kenderdine, research director at Future Risk consultancy, said the Chinese Communist Party was forged on the prototypes of urban Russian society in the early 20th century that allowed only nominal female participation in politics. “More than a century after its inception, the CCP still clings to this experimental 1920s symbolism,” Kenderdine said.
“This is unlikely to change as the party retreats further into political conservatism,” he added.
While the Chinese cabinet promised in a September report to increase the proportion of women in the legislature, the highest political advisory body and leadership above provincial levels, no targets were set. “There is still a long way to go to improve women’s participation in national and social governance and raise awareness of gender equality,” the state council report said, underscoring the rarity of Sun’s position.
Technically, matters in Hong Kong are not within Sun’s jurisdiction. That portfolio belongs to Han Zheng, a high-ranking deputy prime minister who sits on the Standing Committee. But her rich expertise means she has nevertheless been called upon to contain China’s largest and deadliest Covid outbreak ever, HK01 reported.
In recent days, she has provided instructions “both at a macro and micro level” about Covid control from Beijing via a video link.
“Sun’s experience shows that women leaders are just as capable as men,” said Neil Thomas, Chinese political and foreign policy analyst at Eurasia Group. “But the Communist Party does not offer women equal opportunities to advance in its ranks.”
“It is not an equal opportunity employer,” he added.
