Susan Shirk Quoted on Women in China's Communist Party
Women Knowing China Men Rule Prove Mao’s Half the Sky Remains Unfulfilled
06/22/2011
Bloomberg News
Li Rong had checked all the boxes for entry into China’s governing class.
A Communist Party member and head of student government for her department at Beijing Normal University, she had an offer to join the staff at a local party propaganda department upon graduation in 1999. She said no, avoiding government service in a country where few women rise to the top.
“Women leaders are assigned to be in areas like health, and all the departments with real power over the economy will be run by men,” said Li, now 34 and studying for a doctorate in education at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. “I don’t see the possibility for a future.”
Li’s experience is the rule, not the exception. More than 40 years after Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky” and a week before the Communist Party celebrates its 90th anniversary, women are barely represented in the top echelons of China’s government and the biggest state- owned companies, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg.
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Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS.
She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.
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