WUNRN
CHINA - HIGH RANKING GOVERNMENT
STANDING COMMITTEE - NO WOMAN
QUESTIONS ON GENDER EQUALITY &
EMPOWERMENT IN CHINA
Liu Yandong
(right) was passed over for a seat on
With
connections to both the elite and populist factions within the Communist Party,
impeccable credentials and a mild charisma, Liu Yandong was already the most
influential woman in
But when
the seven new members of the Standing Committee strode to their places at the
front of the red stage in
Leta Hong
Fincher, a doctoral candidate at
"They
still haven't named a woman to the Standing Committee," she said.
"There has not been any concrete achievement at all for women in the last
couple of decades and there is evidence that the status of women is actually
decreasing."
With this
month's leadership change the percentage of women in the 205-member governing
Central Committee has fallen from 6 percent to just 4.8 percent, only slightly
more than in 1956. A second woman, Sun Chunlan, joined Liu on the Politburo,
though most did not see this as compensation for the continued exclusion of
women at the highest tier of government.
Unlike the worldwide stirring caused by Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2008 bid
for the presidential nomination, Liu's disappointment went largely unnoticed by
a younger generation of female students, writers and office workers interviewed
by Women's eNews.
'Not as Sensitive to Gender
Discrimination'
At
"I
think Chinese people are not as sensitive to gender discrimination as
Americans," Liu, the student, said. "None of my friends even know
about Liu Yandong. We don't decide anything. It's like a play. We watch and
clap."
The term
"gender equality" occurred just once in the 33-page translation of
outgoing President Hu Jintao's report at the 18th Party Congress, a speech
meant to lay out the ambitions of the party over the next five years. The
reference appeared in a section on the social welfare of the elderly, disabled
and "other entitled groups."
The word
"women" was mentioned just three times in the entire speech and it
was not until the sixth paragraph of the 12th and final section of the report
that the issue of women in politics was raised.
"We
should make greater efforts to train and select outstanding young officials,
attach importance to training and selecting officials from among women and
ethnic minorities, and encourage young officials to work and gain experience in
local communities and in hardship areas," Hu said, according to a
translation posted in the Global Times newspaper.
This
bureaucratese comes in stark contrast to the slogans of Mao Zedong, who made
women's rights a founding ideal of the Communist Party and famously proclaimed
that women "hold up half of the sky."
In 1973,
at the height of Mao's Cultural Revolution, 10 years of chaos that punished
intellectuals, deprived a generation of Chinese of education and gutted the
country's institutions, women played a more powerful role in government than
they do today, taking more than a 10th of the seats on the Central Committee.
With Mao's
death, leaders repudiated his policies, including quotas for women in national
politics, deeming them "undemocratic," and women's participation at
all levels of government rapidly fell.
"Even public intellectuals, those people who always speak a lot about
national policy or society, even they don't think that women's issues are
important," said Xiong Jing of the Beijing-based Media Monitor for Women
advocacy group. "They think, we want democracy, we want human rights, but
women's rights? Just leave them behind; they're not important. So it's really
hard for women's rights to be seen by the public."
Falling Finances
As
Hong
Fincher, of
Across
China, women earn between one half to two thirds of what men do, according to a
2010 national survey, despite outperforming men academically, according to a
2010 book published by the China Youth and Children Research Association.
Safety is
also a problem. A government survey found that 1-in-4 married women in
Among the
young women interviewed by Women's eNews, the idea that power was unfeminine
was pervasive.
"At
our university there is a joke," said 21-year-old Shao Yixue, who plans to
pursue a graduate degree in art history overseas. "There are three
genders: male, female and female Ph.D."
Like so
many grassroots organizations, independent women's groups tend to be quashed by
the government before they have time to transform such attitudes.
"We are so small and the government is too big," said Xiong of
Media Monitor for Women.
Creative Campaigning
In recent
months, however, a new generation of activists, who, thanks to the one-child
policy, have not had to sacrifice their educations to brothers, have used the
Internet to wage creative campaigns to avoid government censure.
This
summer, Xiong's group used social media to organize the occupation of men's
toilets in cities across
Then, when
several universities were found to be requiring higher scores for women than
for men, the activists shaved their heads and collected pictures of the shaved
scalps of their supporters on the Chinese micro-blog site Weiboa. Though the
government meticulously censors what appears on Weiboa, it is far more
difficult to cull specific pictures.
"Especially
in the cities, girls have an equal chance to go to school," said Xiong.
"When they leave school and come to society, they find a lot of inequality
and they are disappointed. They have learned to expect more and they are more willing
to change than maybe their mothers or grandmothers."