Women fail to crack China’s glass ceiling as party picks new leaders
Reuters|
Updated: Oct 25, 2017, 11.39 PM IST
BEIJING: 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.
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.
