The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long portrayed the protection of women’s rights as one of its achievements, but studies have found that their role in public life has diminished in recent years.For decades, the party promoted Mao Zedong’s slogan that “women hold up half the sky” as a guiding principle for gender equality. But the narrative in China’s official media has shifted in recent years, emphasising women’s familial roles, according to a recent study that analysed articles in the People’s Daily, the CCP’s official mouthpiece.The ruling CCP has for decades claimed that women have played an active role in “socialist modernisation and reform and opening up”. However, a widening gap in the portrayal of women began to emerge in the late 1990s, according to the study.Published in the journal Frontiers in Sociology in May, the study found that the People’s Daily had increasingly associated women with domestic and family roles while giving less prominence to their roles in the public sphere. The researchers, Jia Wang of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Ruiyu Zhang of the University of Hong Kong, analysed more than 125,000 articles published in the People’s Daily between 1990 and 2023. They identified vocabulary associated with the public sphere, including terms such as “leading woman”, “fighter”, “career” and “entrepreneurship”, and words associated with the private sphere, such as “family”, “childbearing”, “housework” and “loving mother”.The study found that the association between women and the private sphere remained strong throughout the period analysed, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, which published an article covering parts of the study on Sunday.In the early 1990s, references linking women to public roles were also relatively strong, nearly matching those associated with the private sphere. One example was a 1992 People’s Daily article titled “In the past, women were said to be inferior to men; today, they hold up half the sky”, which described a labour competition and said women played an active role in “socialist modernisation and reform and opening up”.From the late 1990s onwards, however, the gap widened, with references linking women to public roles declining, the study found. In 2017, in 2017, People’s Daily ran an article titled “Giving birth is easy, raising children is difficult”, in which the paper quoted a woman who had quit work when her child entered school.The decline in women’s representation has also been evident at the highest levels of China’s polity. There have been no women among the 24 members of the Politburo since 2022. No woman has ever served on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest-ranking decision-making body. Out of the 31 provincial party heads, only one woman figured. Even in the party membership, about 30% were women among its 101 million members.
