Can women still ‘hold up half the sky’ in China’s future?

These past few years, Beijing has stressed its commitment to women’s employment rights — from publicized State Council outlines to reports from the Supreme People’s Court working jointly with the All-China Women’s Federation — particularly as it encourages women to have more children in the face of a demographic problem. But then came the 20th Party Congress, where no woman was selected for the Politburo, the first time this has happened in 25 years. Moreover, according to the most recent amendment to the Women’s Rights and Interests Protection Law, the opening chapter calls on women to respect “family values.”

How can President Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 continue to extol the importance of the role of women in Chinese society — part of his Chinese dream — if he so overtly ignores their needs, both in government and society?

Population concerns put extra pressure on women

During the congress, Xi acknowledged China’s slowing population issue, calling to “establish a policy system to boost birth rates and pursue a proactive national strategy in response to population aging.” Yet as government efforts pressure women to become child-bearers, with rising costs of living and increasing difficulties in career growth, women feel disincentivized from having large families.

“The issue with the current incentives is that they are ineffective,” Liao Qihua*, an employment lawyer from Shanghai, said. “There is not enough for women to feel safe to have a family while working. Some provinces have experimented with allowing families to buy an additional house if they have additional children. But incentives like these miss the point. How can a family afford an additional house if they can’t even afford to take care of an additional child?”

Liao went on to detail how, because of the one-child policy and traditional Chinese values, women are concerned that, if they have two or three additional children, they would also have to take care of both sets of grandparents and her husband on top of childcare. “There just isn’t enough financial support to cover this,” Liao said. “The costs of living and housing are becoming increasingly cost-prohibitive.”

Some women fear that 2021’s “three-child policy” will make employers even less likely to pay for maternity leave. Han Luoning, a student from Shenzhen, noted that while there has been more flexibility when it comes to maternity leave, she has yet to hear about paternity leave expansions. Several firms also force women to sign “no-pregnancy contracts.”

China’s vow to reduce “medically unnecessary” abortions has also raised concerns that this push to increase births may become coercive. As such, women have been progressively pushed out of jobs and into conventional gender roles. This is often referred to as the shēngyù chéngfá 生育惩罚, or the “motherhood penalty.” According to a report by Boss Zhiping in 2020, roughly 85% of the working mothers who were surveyed felt that their parenthood had hindered their career advancement “in a significant way,” as many companies continue to discriminate against women with children. And recent progress in implementing company benefits has been meager and ineffective.

Representation in society and government

When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was formed in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) valued women’s rights as an economic measure. Specifically, promoting women’s participation in the labor force aimed to serve the interests of the CCP for decades, mobilizing women to support the agricultural and steel production goals of the Great Leap Forward. This pivoted the role of women in contemporary Chinese society to being, at least theoretically, equal in the workforce.

However, many forms of discrimination persist in today’s China. Arguably, this is due to a top-down, deeply-rooted structural issue; according to the China Data Lab at UC San Diego, less than 10% of elite delegates at the 2017 National Congress were women. Never has a woman sat within China’s highest body of decision-making, the Politburo Standing Committee. This is a result of China’s structured and controlled public policies contradicting its goals of economic growth and a stable society. In her 2018 book Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, Leta Hong Fincher writes, “China’s all-male rulers have decided that the systematic subjugation of women is essential to maintaining Communist Party survival,” and has worsened since the appointment of new party leaders in 2017. Unsurprisingly, this was reflected again in the recent leadership reshuffling of the 20th Party Congress: of the newly announced Central Committee of 205 members, 11 are women.

“No one in my friend group is surprised that there aren’t any women on the Standing Committee,” Han said. “There are no expectations for women to join the committee. Perhaps this is because deeper cultural issues are at play.”

Sexual harassment and MeToo

Neither Han and Liao are optimistic about the future of women’s rights in China. For one, they are concerned that divorces are getting increasingly difficult to obtain. “It’s already difficult to obtain a divorce,” Liao said. “Usually your case in court has to fail the first time and will only have a chance of succeeding the second time you visit court. It’s already troublesome.”

In addition, Liao detailed that companies are usually not held liable for sexual harassment cases unless they are Western branches. “If they are Western-affiliated companies, then employers have more incentives to follow a specific code of conduct. In China, there are no such liabilities. It’s usually the victim, who is usually not in a position of power, versus the abuser, who might have a lot of power. The company is not held accountable.”

Other women have been sacked or punished — like former intern Zhōu Xiǎoxuán 周晓璇 or tennis sensation Péng Shuài 彭帅 — for sexual harassment complaints. Authorities have imprisoned vocal female activists and attempted to regulate the country’s burgeoning #MeToo movement. An article about Chinese women’s rights in the Global Times, a state-owned newspaper, wrote off the “so-called MeToo movement” as another way for the West to attack China.

“If I can find a silver lining in all of the high-profile sexual harassment cases,” Liao said, “it’s that because all of these cases obtained high coverage and there have been widespread responses from working women, lawmakers have revised China’s women’s rights laws. These laws have directly responded to workplace sexual harassment implications and protections.”

The future for women in China

Women are vital human resources, making up 43.7% of China’s workforce. At a high-level meeting on the 25th anniversary of The Fourth World Conference on Women in 2020, Xi said, “In pursuing development, we need to protect women’s rights and interests and improve their lives, and ensure that women’s development goes hand in hand with economic and social development. We need to remove barriers and create an enabling environment in which women are motivated, their creativity is unleashed to the full, and they truly feel satisfied, happy, and secure.”

And yet, in the last year, the government has only gagged women’s rights protests and online conversations over gender equality.

If there is a glimmer of hope, it is that in China, knowledge of gender discrimination is widespread. Instead of clamping down on all discussions, Chinese state media has recently reported on some domestic abuse cases.

Pressure grows in Beijing to abandon invasive family planning policies and overhaul an economic paradigm based on a massive population. Weak social safety nets and legal protections for family growth continue to irritate many Chinese, showing inconsistent expectations of career growth versus child-rearing. While the old boys’ club of the standing committee remains stronger than ever, shifts in China’s women’s rights law suggest that leadership is mindful of the importance of women in Chinese society.

If Xi’s government wishes to preserve economic progress and a growing society, it must demonstrate a prioritization and valuation of the role of women in China’s future with effective policies, instead of mere lip service.

*Names have been changed per the interviewees’ request.