Holding Up Half the Sky? Are Chinese women given equal rights in political participation?

Abstract

In the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, women were promised equal rights with men in “all spheres of life,” including political participation, career opportunities, family building, as well as social freedom. The late Chinese leader Mao Zedong also envisioned a China in which women would hold up “half the sky.” Sixty years after the declaration of Chinese women’s liberation from patriarchal burden, the continuous effort to promote gender equality has yielded rather a disappointing result in politics: twenty-one percent of female representation in National People’s Congress (NPC) in 2008. Furthermore, the country report on the state of women in urban local government released by United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in 2001 suggested that Chinese women’s participation in political affairs is low and “unequal opportunities still exists”. This paper draws on statistical data from Chinese government and related studies, in hope to conceive and understand the factors causing gender disproportion in today’s China politics.\r\nThe first part of this paper traces the introduction to Chinese women’s liberation to the early 1940s. While many scholars have offered rich findings on gender bias in early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) system, the authors try to provide a condensed review of under which circumstances and to what extent were women given opportunities. The overture would be followed by available statistic reports of representation of Chinese women in politics today. To sketch out main impediments to women’s full participation in politics, the authors wish to elaborate on the statistics by cross-referencing them with a qualitative study based on various social report, documents, and academic work. In the last part the authors locate and conclude the possible reasons—political ideology, political institution, and/or patriarchal social system—that hinder Chinese women from further advancement in political participation.