Sun Chunlan is the only woman in China’s powerful 25-member Politburo.
Among the resources President Xi Jinping has deployed to stem rising Covid deaths in Hong Kong is the Communist Party’s pandemic fighter: a 71-year-old woman whose career lights up the glass ceiling in the world’s most populous country .
Sun Chunlan is the only female deputy prime minister in China’s strong patriarchy, the only woman in its powerful 25-member politburo and, most recently, the top official overseeing its epidemic control. Now, he has been marshaled for helping across the Hong Kong border, local media including the South China Morning Post have reported.
In contrast to the cadre of “good men” Xi failed to act on, Sun’s pandemic response has been portrayed in state media as decisive. As Xi’an hospitals left non-Covid patients to die during the lockdown this year, he ordered medics on the ground to “not turn patients away under any pretext”. When Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, septuagenarians spent nearly 100 days without a vaccine, helping officials isolate each case, a strategy for Beijing’s unparalleled success in holding back the virus.
“This is not a game of hide-and-seek, it should be enforced strongly,” she told a room of the mostly male cadre at the time, pumping her fist, in rare footage of an internal meeting posted by local media. . In another clip, she called hospitals on mobile phones to find beds. Wearing a thick down jacket and N95 mask, he said, “How many can you take? Three hundred? Very good,” she said.
Sun’s age will force him to retire later this year after a reshuffle and leave the Zhongnanhai leadership complex in Beijing. She will step down without a clear female successor and is removed from China’s innermost sanctum of power, the Standing Committee – a seven-member boys’ club to which no women have ever been recruited.
“This system has been completely unfair to Sun Chunlan,” said Victor Shih, an associate professor at the University of California San Diego who researches elite Chinese politics. “She was recognized as a promising cadre in the 1980s. Having served in provincial and central party leadership positions, she would end her career in the Politburo when several male colleagues entered the Standing Committee Is.”
The lack of female representation in China’s government has attracted more attention after a series of scandals highlighting women’s issues. The National People’s Congress, which held its annual meeting in Beijing this week, is considering an update to the country’s gender discrimination law, but was likely to leave the punishment ambiguous for violating women’s rights.
Unlike Xi, Sun was not born into a family with high-level Communist Party connections. He worked from the floor of a watch factory to the party ranks to head China’s eighth-richest province, Fujian, and then the port city of Tianjin. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, she became one of just eight women out of 160 people to reach the Politburo – including alternate members.
But when her predecessor in Tianjin, Zhang Gaoli – later accused of pressuring tennis star Peng Shuai for sex – was removed from that position on the Politburo Standing Committee, Sun never rose to the party ranks. Don’t go ahead. Instead, in 2018 he was made vice premier and assigned to the low-profile departments of health and sport, while his male counterparts lead climate and business.
“Little effort has been made to rectify gender stereotypes based on old Confucian ideas and a deep-seated political culture favoring men in party propaganda,” said analyst Valerie Tan at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for. China Studies.
He said that as the country grapples with an impending demographic crisis, women are being portrayed primarily as caregivers and child-bearing. According to a 2018 compilation of her comments on family values published in the party’s Study Times, Xi has said that women’s “unique physical and mental characteristics” give them a special role in families.
The #MeToo movement of the country has been crushed for being a vehicle to spread western values. Allegations of abuse by Peng’s party No. 7 official were wiped out from China’s heavily censored internet. The recent trafficking of a chained woman has sparked nationwide outrage and sparked an investigation.
“Instead of creating more room for women’s issues in China, the Meitu movement and the case of Peng Shuai have reminded the leadership of the importance of controlling information and politics in China,” said Natasha Kasam, a former Australian diplomat in China. Said, who is now director of the Lowy Institute’s Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program. “The men in Zhongnanhai worry that other women might speak up.”
In that environment, the road to power has become narrower for women. According to a Bloomberg News analysis, in the 1970s and 1980s, women headed ministries in the chemical industry, textiles, foreign economic relations and even central bank – which are seen as fast-tracked to promotion. . More recently, he has been assigned steering education, propaganda, health and the United Front that influences overseas Chinese, Shih said.
Tristan Kenderdine, research director at consultancy Future Risk, said the Chinese Communist Party forged on the prototype of urban Russian society in the early 20th century, which allowed only nominal female participation in politics. “More than a century after its formation, the CCP is still following the experimental tokenism of the 1920s,” Kenderdine said.
“This is unlikely to change as the party moves into political conservatism,” he said.
While China’s cabinet promised in a September report to increase the proportion of women in the leadership of the legislature, the top political advisory body and above the county level, no target was set. The State Council report underscored the rarity of Sun’s position, saying “there is a long way to go in improving women’s participation in national and social governance and raising awareness of gender equality.”
Technically, Hong Kong’s affairs are not within Sun’s purview. That portfolio belongs to Han Zheng, a highly ranked vice premier who sits on the standing committee. But his rich expertise means he’s been called upon anyway to contain China’s biggest and deadliest COVID outbreak, HK01 reported.
In recent days, she has been instructing through a video link on COVID control from Beijing “at both a macro and micro level”, HKO1 said.
“Sun’s experience shows that women leaders are just as capable as men,” said Neil Thomas, Chinese politics and foreign policy analyst at Eurasia Group. “But the Communist Party does not provide equal opportunities to women to rise above their ranks.”
“This is not an equal opportunity employer,” he said.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)