With the arrival of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leadership (all men), unlike the past, insists on their roles as mothers and wives
In recent years, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which governs China in a dictatorial manner, has taken an increasingly traditional and reactionary stance on the role of women. Conservative attitudes on gender issues have deepened in China with Xi Jinping’s rise to power and are seen, among other things, as a misguided attempt to respond to the deepening demographic crisis facing the country. For about a decade, social and cultural policies aimed at promoting a traditional image of Chinese women as wives and mothers have been established in China, often at the expense of their professional and economic emancipation, but in recent months this process has taken another turn Acceleration.
The communist leadership has also reiterated its reactionary position on the role of women in recent weeks at the National Women’s Congress organized by the Chinese National Women’s Federation (a party-controlled body). During the congress, which took place at the end of October, the participating major (male) political leaders reaffirmed a decidedly traditional view of the role of women, also in contrast to the statements and political positions of previous years.
For example, in Vice Premier Ding’s inaugural speech, he failed to do so. However, on the contrary, Ding called on the Federation to “establish a correct perspective on marriage, love, birth rate and family” (that is, the perspective of the so-called “traditional family”).
This language is very different from that used in the past. During the last congress in 2018, Xi Jinping himself called for “helping women better manage the relationship between family and work,” while this year he said at the conclusion of the congress that policies for women are not just those Development of women concerns women themselves, but also “family and social harmony as well as national development and progress”. In practice, Xi said, women’s autonomy must be subordinated to the (particularly demographic) needs of the state. Xi also urged “cultivating a new culture of marriage and fertility” and “strengthening the orientation of young people’s views on marriage, birth rates and family”: all rather traditional themes.
Members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party, China’s main power body (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
China’s demographic crisis
According to many experts, the main reason for this increasingly reactionary and traditionalist attitude of the Communist Party towards women is the demographic crisis that China has been facing for some time. Given the declining birth rate, the party’s (all-male) leadership is adopting rhetoric and attitudes similar to those of many far-right regimes in the West and beyond.
The demographic crisis in China has rather distant origins. With the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979, Chinese society embarked on a path of radical social reform, which in many ways was a prerequisite for the surprising economic development of the last decades. On the other hand, however, this family policy has significantly reduced the birth rate and thus exposed China to the risk of premature aging.
The impact of this demographic problem is already visible in China, where the population fell last year for the first time in six decades. The demographic peak reached 1,412.6 million inhabitants in the country at the end of 2021, while a year later the number had fallen to 1,411.8 million: with 9.56 million new births and 10.41 million deaths, China’s population fell by about 850,000 in 2022 people back.
The most worrying trend is the lack of new births, which has been declining in recent years. Although the number of newborns fell compared to the previous decade, it remained stable at around 16 million per year between 2003 and 2015, with a peak of 17.86 million in 2016. Since then, however, the birth curve has fallen dramatically and last year for the first time Threshold of 10 million per year fell below. The prospects for the current year are not very encouraging: according to Qiao Jie, head of the Health Science Center at Peking University, the number of newborns this year could even fall to 7-8 million. However, other forecasts are more optimistic and suggest that the number could stabilize at around 10 million in the coming years.
The government has taken several measures to address this crisis. In 2016, the one-child policy was abolished, allowing citizens of the People’s Republic to have up to two children, while in 2021 the limit was raised to three children. In addition to easing restrictions (some of which local governments have even lifted entirely), Beijing has promoted economic support programs for couples who want to have children. However, the measures implemented, such as tax cuts, government subsidies or the extension of maternity leave, did not have the desired effect.
There are several reasons why young Chinese do not have children. The first has to do with the high costs associated with raising a child in China, despite economic aid: the huge cost of education and the lack of newborn care services are two important elements that deter Chinese couples. The second aspect is more related to social changes: when some people have decided to postpone important personal decisions such as getting married or starting a family until the future (particularly given the general climate of uncertainty that China has experienced in recent years). For the population, it is rather a life project that does not include parenthood.
However, according to He Dan, director of the China Population and Development Research Center, some of the responsibility must also be attributed to poor public policies, especially at the local government level. By focusing on supporting families with a second or third child, local authorities often failed to encourage people to have their first child and inadvertently contributed to lowering overall fertility rates.
The Campaign for Family Values
Measures to promote the birth rate are placed in the context of the demographic crisis. In order to address the low birth rate, in recent years the PCC has promoted a campaign that also develops at a cultural level and aims to influence social norms and values that revolve around marriage, family and parenthood. The campaign has often sought to ease the social pressures of starting a family in China: some of the policies issued by the CPC Central Committee in 2021, for example, push to counter outdated and problematic practices such as dowry.
On the other hand, however, the Communist Party has tried to restore, above all, traditional values and images related to the family. The Chinese leadership is now systematically approaching the question of gender roles with a paternalistic attitude, in which individual decisions are subordinated to the political necessity of counteracting the demographic crisis.
Hand in hand with the revival of conservative family values also went the suppression of progressive women’s voices. In recent years, several feminist profiles or those that simply advocate for women’s rights have been closed on Chinese social media: an example of this is the #MeToo movement, which had reached a certain extent in China and numerous cases of sexual abuse had been discovered, but was quickly suppressed by the authorities.
Even from a symbolic perspective, the presence of Chinese women at the highest levels of the party has always been very limited, and recently even this minimal representation has been abruptly interrupted. Since 1997, the Politburo of the PCC (one of the party’s most important governing bodies) has always had at least one woman among its approximately 25 members: last year at the 20th party congress, all positions were available, they were given to men.
The Chinese women’s discourse
The gender issue has seen mixed developments in China. The emancipation of women from the subordinate role assigned to women in traditional Chinese society was a central element of the socialist revolution that Mao Zedong carried out after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In 1954, equality between women and men was explicitly stated “in all areas of political, economic, cultural, social and domestic life”.
The measures for women’s socio-economic inclusion and gender equality promoted with the slogan “Women hold up half the sky” have been instrumental in building a socialist society and have led to some real progress, others more related to the government’s propaganda needs.
For years, the status of women in Chinese society was quite good compared to other developing countries, but political and economic power was always in the hands of men.
With market reforms and gradual economic liberalization that began in the late 1980s, many government policies promoting gender equality gradually weakened. Although Chinese women have significantly improved in terms of education and access to health care in recent decades, inequality between men and women in China in terms of employment and economic well-being has deepened. Today, China ranks 48th in the United Nations Gender Inequality Index ranking, in which Italy ranks 13th (the index measures inequality, the ranking starts with the lowest values).
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