Opinion As China backslides on women’s rights, the U.S. can step up
Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, represents Illinois’s 8th Congressional District. Kathy Castor, a Democrat, represents Florida’s 14th Congressional District and serves on the committee.
Mao Zedong once declared that “women hold up half the sky.” Yet even the pretense of that belief has been abandoned in today’s China.
President Xi Jinping, Mao’s current successor as Communist Party chairman, has turned back the clock on the role of women in society and the workplace. His policies have driven women out of political decision-making, out of the workforce and back into subordinate roles in all aspects of modern life. This backsliding by China gives U.S. policymakers an opportunity to offer women and girls worldwide a better model for their lives.
Despite initial progress after the Communist Revolution and the “Reform and Opening Up” that started in 1978, women in the People’s Republic of China have never reached parity with men in either leadership or social status. While they nominally enjoyed the same rights as men, the societal preference for boys over girls persisted, as demonstrated by the results of the one-child policy, which more often favored male children over female.
In recent years, even after the relaxation of the one-child policy, China has experienced a considerable decline in birthrates as its society rapidly ages. This has resulted in calls from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for women to exit the workforce and the public sector to focus on childbearing and more traditional roles in the home.
For the first time in two decades, there are no women in the Politburo, the CCP’s executive policymaking body. The absence of women leaders in China’s top tiers of government reflects broader systemic and cultural factors within the CCP. Xi called on female attendees at the National Women’s Congress in Beijing last year to leave the workplace, return home, get married and have children. In a concerted effort over the past few decades to compel young women to marry early, state-controlled media have shamed unmarried women in their late 20s as “leftover women.”
The CCP has tightened divorce laws, making it difficult for women to leave abusive marriages, and regressed on reproductive choice, announcing in 2021 that it would seek to reduce abortions for “nonmedical reasons” — presumably because of the declining birthrates. (This doesn’t apply to the Uyghur minority, subject to an ongoing genocide, whose birthrates the CCP has reduced by means that include forced sterilizations.)
The challenges women face in political leadership are a feature of the CCP and not a reflection of the country as a whole. Although women are not nearly at gender parity, there are several very successful female chief executives and entrepreneurs who show that women can be a dynamic force in China’s economy.
Under previous leadership, China had an emerging civil society, including feminist groups, but the CCP under Xi has cracked down, accusing women’s rights activists of “subverting state power.” This began with the 2015 arrest of five young feminist activists who protested sexual harassment on the eve of International Women’s Day and has continued with actions such as the suppression of the #MeToo movement.
The U.S. Congress should show the world an alternative to the CCP’s treatment of women by supporting women’s rights here at home, including reproductive freedom. Passing the Women’s Health Protection Act, the Equal Rights Amendment and the Paycheck Fairness Act would be important steps toward ensuring that American women have an equal opportunity to succeed.
Abroad, Congress must support funding for international women’s empowerment programs, advance initiatives to combat gender-based violence and promote women’s participation in government. Congress should also codify gender-based violence as a ground for seeking asylum in the United States.
Finally, Congress must consider expanding international sanctions against individuals or entities responsible for human rights violations, including violations of women’s rights.
No country can reach its full potential without full participation and equal rights for women. Mao might have believed that women hold up half the sky, but the United States can show it takes a democracy to truly lift women up.