For Women in China’s Communist Party, It’s Lonely at the Top
By Alexandra Stevenson, Oct. 19, 2022, NY Times

HONG KONG — As anger simmered in Wuhan over the mishandling of the first coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, the Communist Party of China sent top officials to deal with the growing political crisis. One of them, Sun Chunlan, stayed for three months,
rallying local cadres and sourcing protective gear for health workers and hospital beds for patients.

Calling for absolute loyalty in a war against the virus, Ms. Sun warned that any deserters would be “nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever.”

Now known as China’s “zero-Covid” czar, Ms. Sun has become the enforcer of the country’s strict pandemic restrictions. When she arrives in a city in the midst of an outbreak, she is often the online target of derision and frustration, cast as a
doomsayer that a lockdown is coming.

As the rare woman in the upper echelons of Chinese politics, she has become accustomed to the role, driving the Communist Party’s will and bearing the country’s criticism. “Women most of the time get pushed to the front line when male politicians
don’t want to deal with a crisis,” said Hanzhang Liu, assistant professor of politics at Pitzer College.

Mao Zedong famously waved the banner of gender equality as a core principle of China’s Communist Party. But seven decades on, the party has failed to promote women to positions of political power.

Since 1949, just eight women have risen to the powerful 25-member Politburo, including Ms. Sun, who at 72 is expected to step down from the body this week. Three of the women were married to the Communist Party’s revolutionary founders. No woman has
ever been let in to the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest governing body.

The Communist Party congress this week, when China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to secure a groundbreaking third term, is again a typical scene of suits and ties — fewer than a third of the delegates are women.

The gender imbalance is reinforced at the highest levels by a political agenda that has increasingly promoted conservative ideas about family structures and the role of women in society. Like many women with ambitions for public office, Ms. Sun was at
times pushed into positions considered politically unimportant. But as she rose, she built her own network of supporters, including former President Hu Jintao, allowing her to create the kind of résumé — and patronage — needed to make it to the top.

“Sun Chunlan is an incredible politician in any context,” said Victor Shih, an expert in Chinese politics at the University of California, San Diego. “In a democratic system, a politician with these qualities likely would have been elected as the
national leader.”

The opportunities for women in politics are so limited that only a handful of women have risen high enough to likely be considered for the next Politburo.

Officials typically climb Communist Party ranks by showing that they can bolster the economy in the cities and provinces they oversee. But women are rarely given those jobs, said Minglu Chen, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney who studies
gender and politics in China.

Instead women in the party are often placed in roles overseeing what are considered softer areas like health care, education and culture. “That also limits their possibilities to be promoted,” Ms. Chen said.

Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for women, Chen Muhua, the chair of the All-China Women’s Federation and the second woman to become deputy prime minister, pushed for a quota system in the 1990s, said Xinhui Jiang, an assistant professor at
Nanjing University. When she thought the first version didn’t go far enough, she wrote to Mr. Hu, who would go on to be president of China, pointing out the deficiencies.

Out of her efforts was born of a party mandate that there be at least one female leader in every layer of government up to the provincial level. The requirement stops before the Politburo.

Ms. Sun, who has no family ties to the party’s revolutionary founders, started as a worker at a factory that made watches in the northeastern city of Anshan. She climbed up the ranks, working various party manager positions at two factories and later
serving as the director of the municipal women’s federation.

A former colleague who lived in the same building as Ms. Sun recalled how she would knock on the door each day to offer a ride to work in her car. “What impressed me most about her was that she was easygoing and didn’t put on bureaucratic airs,”
the colleague told state media in 2009.

In a rare interview, Ms. Sun spoke with pride about her blue-collar past. “I come from a worker’s background, and I have a very deep and special feeling for organized labor,” she told the Dalian Daily.

As party secretary of Dalian, a city in northeastern China, Ms. Sun honed her political acumen. She clashed with her predecessor, Bo Xilai, a brash politician from a prominent family whose meteoric rise would come to a crashing end in 2012 and pave the
way for Mr. Xi to take power. She blocked Mr. Bo’s appointees and built up her own political base in the city, said Cheng Li, a scholar at the Brookings Institution.

“Bo came from a princeling family — he never hid that he was born red and entitled to many things,” Mr. Li said. “Sun came from a very humble background, and so, from Day 1, both people could not get along well.”

In 2009, Ms. Sun was named party secretary in the southern province of Fujian, where Mr. Xi had served as governor a decade earlier. When Mr. Xi was elevated to party leader in 2012, she was named to the Politburo, eventually overseeing health, education,
sports and culture.

During the early days of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, Ms. Sun led a group of experts to Wuhan on Jan. 27, four days after officials sealed the city off. The mayor of Wuhan had just offered to step down for moving too slowly.

As the death rate shot past 4.1%, Ms. Sun invoked wartime measures. The sick were rounded up and transported to makeshift quarantine camps. Officials wielding temperature guns went house to house hunting for the virus.

Under the guidance of Ms. Sun, the authorities refined measures that would become an integral part of China’s “zero-Covid” policy and the idea that ordinary people would have to sacrifice for the greater good of the country.

A month and a half later, Mr. Xi traveled to Wuhan to declare that the efforts had “turned the tide.”

That early wartime mentality has remained even as the threat of the virus has changed. The authorities still closely track the virus and use punishing lockdowns, but public support is waning.

Ms. Sun has become the target of growing anger, much of it expressed online and quickly taken down by censors. These days, her arrival in a city has come to be seen as a bad omen.

On the internet, she has been derided as the “Lockdown Aunty” and the “Witch Sun.”

Nearly two decades earlier in 2003, one of Ms. Sun’s female predecessors on the Politburo, Wu Yi, also inherited a crisis after the health minister resigned amid accusations of covering up the scale of a SARS outbreak.

State media played up Ms. Wu’s reputation as an “Iron Lady,” for being a tough negotiator during trade discussions with the United States throughout the 1990s and the 2000s on intellectual property rights and China’s acceptance into the World
Trade Organization. Reporters described her as a “tomboy,” noting her short hair and what they saw as an assertive nature.

“When you look at how the general public view female leaders, there is a gendered lens that casts a negative view,” said Fubing Su, a professor of politics at Vassar College.

As the party now readies itself for a new group of leaders, Chinese experts see three women — all in their 60s — as having the potential to join the Politburo. Shen Yiqin is the party secretary of Guizhou Province in China’s southwest and the only
woman at the highest provincial level. Yu Hongqiu is the only woman among eight deputies at the Communist Party’s anti-corruption body. Shen Yueyue is the president of the All-China Women’s Federation.

“For young Chinese women who would like to pursue a career in politics, they just don’t have a lot of examples to follow,” said Ms. Chen of the University of Sydney. “They don’t have all these figures to look up to and to be their inspiration.�
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/business/china-women-communist-party.html

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