No one expected that a woman would join Xi Jinping’s inner circle this week when he announced his new leadership team.
But many China watchers were surprised when not a single woman was promoted to the Politburo, the party’s second-most powerful group and its executive policymaking body, a break with a two-decade tradition.
“It does certainly send a message that the Chinese Communist Party does not have an interest in advancing women’s political status,” said Minglu Chen, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney who studies gender and politics in China.
“The Chinese Communist Party really is still a patriarchal institution,” Ms. Chen said.
In his speech at the opening of Communist Party congress last Sunday, Mr. Xi pledged to “adhere to the basic state policy of gender equality.” Yet when it comes to promoting women into positions of power, the party has a poor record.
A woman has never been on its highest decision-making body, the Standing Committee. In the party’s seven-decade history, eight women have made it close, sitting on the larger Politburo.
One of those women, Sun Chunlan, had the credentials to be elevated to the Standing Committee, but she will step down from the Politburo this week, having surpassed the typical retirement age.
Another woman, Shen Yiqin, had been widely expected to be promoted to the Politburo to take Ms. Sun’s place on the body, which now has 24 members. Ms. Shen was promoted to the 205-member Central Committee, along with 11 other women.
While there has never been an explicit rule that there must be a woman on the Politburo, for two decades it has always had at least one female representative. The last time a woman was not promoted to the Politburo was during the 15th Communist Party congress in 1997. .
Ms. Shen might have made for a strong voice there, had she been promoted. She is the only woman to hold the title of provincial party secretary and is one of just four Chinese women to have ever secured that role. She is also a member of the Bai ethnic minority group, the kind of unofficial qualification that has tended to put female candidates on a fast track.
Chinese state media has not covered Ms. Shen often, but in one rare appearance in 2020, she demonstrated humility when accepting her promotion to party chief of Guizhou Province. “I solemnly promise that I will treat comrades honestly and will never act like a patriarch who calls all the shots,” Ms. Shen was quoted as saying in local state media at the time.
There were other strong female contenders for a position on the Politburo: Yu Hongqiu, the only woman among eight deputies at the Communist Party’s anti-corruption body, and Shen Yueyue, president of the All China Women’s Federation. Only Ms. Shen was promoted to the Central Committee this weekend.
With little female representation in government, some women’s issues are likely to continue to be seen as a direct challenge to the party leadership. A sudden outburst of feminist discussion and support for victims of sexual assault, for example, has been swiftly extinguished over the past few years.
In the United States and Europe, #Metoo claims have forced politicians out of office, but in China they are censored. When the tennis star Peng Shuai accused a top Chinese official of sexual assault, she was silenced by censors and disappeared for several weeks.
Zhang Gaoli, the now-retired official she accused, has not been cast aside by the party. He was given a prominent seat at the opening of the 20th party congress in the front row.
