Xi Jinping-led CCP appoints no women to powerful Politburo for the first time in 25 years

China Communist party CCP under President Xi Jinping has been muscling women away from power and has abandoned traditional gestures towards equality. Chinese officials described that China's path has historically been framed as incorporating gender egalitarianism. As per media reports, a junior fellow at the Center for China Analysis at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, Johanna Costigan stated in Nikkei Asia that the last month’s 20th National Congress of the China Communist Party broke tradition by elevating 24 men and no women were appointed in party’s Politburo, omitting its usual token female for the first time in 25 years. Women took just 11 of 205 seats on the new party Central Committee.

'No women' in Xi Jinping's CCP 

In Xi's CCP, the major determinants of officials’ prospects for promotion are loyalty and utility to the top leader which is being given more importance than the qualifications or affirmative action-style standards. According to Johanna Costigan, the party leader doesn't feel obligated toward gender equality any longer. A senior researcher at the US campaign group Human Rights Watch, Yaqiu Wang said, “I never thought the CCP really cared about women’s rights, but they at least paid lip service to it, in part by putting women in select powerful positions.” Further, she added that women's emancipation is part of the founding ideology of communism. As reported by Nikkei Asia, Xi’s ideological directives have been picking and choosing aspects of that founding ideology, conveniently ignoring socialist feminism, which supports equal rights for women and advocates for women’s political participation. Xi has invoked Marxist principles to justify policy positions like “common prosperity. 

For china, the party needs to have a clear definition of what it thinks is and is not Chinese. China Communist Party’s anti-feminist stance has been successful in crafting a clear definition of gender roles within the family and society. China has implemented policies that affirm traditional values, including a crackdown on private tutoring, restricting media depictions of “sissy men” and limiting what kinds of products, celebrities, and influencers are allowed to endorse. Costigan mentioned that amendments to the women’s rights law adopted last month included nice language prohibiting discrimination, sexual assault, kidnapping, and trafficking of women, but women’s rights advocates' enforcements are uneven. Xi's CCP asserted that there is an “appropriate number” of women in leadership positions within state organs but the reality of that  “appropriate number” appears to be zero. The anti-feminist stance of the CCP goes hand in hand with its attempts to suppress ethnic minority cultures.