China’s male leaders are signaling to women that their place is at home

At China’s most important political gathering for women, it was mainly a man who was seen and heard.

Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, took center stage at the meeting opening of the National Women’s Congress. A close-up of him at the conference was splashed across the front page from the Chinese Communist Party newspaper the next day. From the head of a large round table, Mr. Xi gave lectures to female delegates during the closing meeting on Monday.

“We must actively promote a new kind of marriage and culture of childbearing,” he said in a speech, adding that the role of party officials was to challenge young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family.” to influence.

The Women’s Congress, held every five years, has long been a forum for the ruling Communist Party to demonstrate its commitment to women. Although the gesture is mainly symbolic, this year it has taken on more meaning than ever for the first time in twenty years no women in the party’s executive policymaking body.

What was striking was the way officials downplayed gender equality. Instead, they focused on using the meeting to highlight Xi’s goal for Chinese women: to get married and have children. In the past, officials had discussed the role women play both at home and in the workforce. But in this year’s speech, Mr Xi made no mention of women in the workplace.

The party desperately needs women to have more babies. Like China, China has entered a demographic crisis the birth rate has fallen, causing the population to shrink for the first time since the 1960s. Authorities are scrambling to reverse what experts say is an irreversible trend, trying one initiative after another such as cash handouts and tax breaks to encourage more births.

Faced with a demographic crisis, a slowing economy and what it sees as an intractable rise of feminism, the party has chosen to push women back into the home, calling on them to raise the young and care for the elderly. The work is, in Mr. Xi’s words, essential to “China’s path to modernization.”

But to some, his view sounds more like a worrying decline.

“Women in China have been alarmed by the trend and have fought back over the years,” said Yaqiu Wang, research director for Hong Kong, China and Taiwan at Freedom House, a nonprofit group based in Washington. “Many women in China are in power and united in their struggle against the dual repression in China: the authoritarian government and the patriarchal society.”

The party has failed to address many concerns and views some issues raised by women as direct challenges to its leadership. On social media, outbursts of discussion about sexual harassment, gender violence and discrimination are silenced. Support for victims often disappears. Feminists and outspoken advocates have been jailed, and a #MeToo movement that briefly flourished in 2018 has been pushed underground.

The language used by senior officials at the Women’s Congress in Beijing was a new glimpse into how the party sees the role of women. Mr Xi has pushed a tough agenda to advance his vision of a stronger China, which includes a revival of what he sees as traditional values. At the congress, he encouraged women leaders to “tell good stories of family traditions and guide women in playing their unique role in promoting the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation.”

In a departure from 20 years of tradition, Mr Xi’s deputy, Ding Xuexiang, failed to opening speech at the conference a stock phrase: that gender equality is a fundamental national policy.

And while Mr. Xi nodded to gender equality, he spent most of his speech expounding on family, parenthood and fertility.

This is in stark contrast to a decade ago, when top officials emphasized the importance of both equality and women’s self-realization, says Hanzhang Liu, a professor of political studies at Pitzer College, who has covered speeches by senior officials at several conferences over the past two years. investigated. decades.

“Women’s work was once about women for themselves, women for women’s sake,” Ms. Liu said, referring to the party’s jargon for gender issues. “What they are saying now is that women’s rightful place in society – where they can do the most meaningful work – is in the home with the family.”

But the Women’s Congress is not the place where the fight for their rights takes place. Organized by the All-China Women’s Federation, a group dedicated to advancing party policies and funded by the party, it tends to represent the political status quo.

As a result, much of the discussion this year has focused on encouraging party leaders to promote traditional family values. The language reveals the calculation officials have made: that extolling the virtues of China’s past will inspire women to focus on family. They hope this will help improve the demographics.

Sending women back home and out of the workforce is also useful at a time when China faces its biggest economic challenge in four decades and the government is under pressure to improve a social security system that is seriously underdeveloped and unable to provide a support a rapidly growing economy. aging population.

“Women have always been seen as a tool of the state in some way,” says Minglu Chen, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney who studies gender and politics in China. “But now we have to think about China’s political economy. It benefits the party to emphasize the return of women to the home, where they can care for children and the elderly.”

However, the trend toward fewer marriages and births has been years in the making, and Mr. Xi is forcing women into roles they have long rejected. Many young and educated women in China’s largest cities have enjoyed it financial independence and are wary of marriage because of the pressure on them to have children and give up everything.

Young adults do ambivalence expressed about getting married and settling down, and they worry about the future economy collapses And unemployment is rising. So is China one of the most expensive countries in the world to raise a child.

For all of Xi’s calls for women to commit to having babies, the party’s efforts are unlikely to increase the birth rate enough to reverse the country’s population decline. That is, unless the country is willing to resort to harsher measures to disadvantage or marginalize women who choose not to have children.

While unlikely, it’s something that isn’t completely out of the question, according to Fubing Su, a professor of political science at Vassar College. During the one-child policy, the party resorted to fines, forced abortions and sterilizations in an attempt to slow population growth for decades until ended the restrictions in 2015.

“If the Party could sacrifice women’s bodies and birthrights for its one-child policy,” Mr. Su said, “they could once again impose their will on women.”

Zixu Wang research contributed.