In Tailwind,in Headwind: Gender Quotas in China

Introduction

Internationally, the generic literature on gender quotas and women’s representation focuses primarily on two aspects: (a) quota design, or the typology of quotas (Krook, 2006, 2007) and (b) how quotas work in different party and electoral systems (Caul, 2001; Htun & Jones, 2002). Gender quotas bring ‘a dramatic increase in women’s representation’ and are defined as the ‘efficient methods’ to ‘reach a gender balance in political institutions’. ¹ Since the United Nation (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, many countries have adopted a gender quota, leading to a notable rise in the number of women parliamentarians in these countries. In Costa Rica, for instance, the percentage of women in parliament jumped from 19 to 35 in one election, while in South Africa women won 36 per cent of parliamentary seats in the first democratic election held in the country (Dahlerup & Freidenvall, 2003).

To study gender quotas in China is, however, a quite different matter, a major challenge being the ambiguous nature of the gender quota system itself together with a scarcity of information on the particular technical details of the quota. Studies of women’s representation in China often rely on very limited and hazy information on gender quotas (Phyllis, 1976; Rosen, 1995), and international scholarship on quotas often applies a number of different and self-contradictory concepts to describe the typology of gender quotas in China (Wang, 2013). Moreover, the stagnation of women’s proportion at 20-plus per cent in the Chinese national assembly since the 1970s casts a deep doubt over whether there is a genuine political will to further women’s representation and the extent to which quotas are effectively implemented to materialise this will.

One thing is clear: gender quotas came into being in Communist China under a historical condition which was fundamentally different from the conditions of quota adoption in most Western democracies or in the new democracies of Latin America, Asia and Africa. In China, quota practice did not derive from a concern over gender balance or women’s right to be included in politics, but was rather an integral part of the Party’s mass mobilisation package deployed to serve the course of revolution and socialist developments. On the one hand, quota adoption was a top-down process initiated by the Chinese Communist Party; on the other, the Party’s overall political agenda and priorities also define the worth of the quota and set conditions for the function of quotas.

This means that (a) the line between the Party’s overall affirmative rhetoric/policies and gender quotas is not always clear cut; (b) quota provisions are vague, often formulated in ideological terms rather than in technical terms; (c) the primary aim of the quotas is to showcase the presence of women rather than to challenge or alter male dominance in politics; (d) the function of the quotas depends on the direct or indirect endorsement of the Party centre; and (e) the worth of the quotas is subjected to reinterpretation in times of political change. Therefore, quotas operate in a way which is highly contingent and conditional, depending on the degree to which the Party’s overall political agenda and priorities converge with the Party’s commitment to women’s conditions. This convergence, I argue, is the key to understanding the characteristics, the function and the paradoxical results of gender quotas in China.

This article applies a broader, more holistic, less technically oriented approach to gender quotas in China. It places gender quotas in the historical context of China’s political development, delineates the changing political silhouette over time and maps the fluctuating ideological and structural conditions for gender equality and hence gender quotas. It shows how the validity of gender quotas depends on the coupling of women’s status to the Party’s overall political agenda. And since the coupling is a rather unstable one, gender quotas meet a tailwind at times and a headwind at others.

Divided into four main parts, this article first gives a brief account of the history of quota adoption in China, which is the background for later quota development. Next, it focusses on gender quotas during the socialist period, especially during the Cultural Revolution (CR). It identifies the ‘fit’ between the Party’s overall political agenda and women’s social and political participation, and analyses the push factors for women quotas derived from this ‘fit’. In the third part, the article focusses on post-Mao China and outlines both the structural and the discursive drives that subvert the idea of gender equality and the value of gender quotas. A brief account of the supporting mechanism for gender quotas in present-day China follows.

Quota Adoption in China

The earliest evidence of quota adoption by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dates back to the 1920s and the 1930s in CCP-controlled base areas. Here women were given 25 per cent of seats in the local soviets (Du, 2012; Gu, 2010). The quota policy at that time reflected both the CCP’s theoretical stand on women and the pragmatic need for women to run the base areas. The CCP’s theory on women derives partly from the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which ‘criticized “traditional” Chinese culture and the cultural oppression of women’, especially ‘the so-called oppressive structure of the Chinese family’ (Gilmartin, 1995; Johns, 2010, p. 10), and partly from the work of Friedrich Engels, who saw women’s oppression as stemming from ‘women’s exclusion from “productive” labour’, or labour outside the home (Johns, 2010, p. 10). In the eyes of the CCP, women could be liberated only when they ‘left home and participated in production’. They would then ‘no longer need to rely on husbands and male family members for survival’, and based on ‘their economic independence’ they would enjoy an equal position with men in society (Croll, 1978; Johns, 2010). Participation in local soviet affairs is both an extension and a logical development of women’s productive participation.

Pragmatically, the CCP’s policy on women in base areas grew out of the fact that, as Johns points out, ‘women were, as a group and as individual activists, an instrumental part of the Chinese Communist Party from its beginning in the 1920s (Johns, 2010, p. 9). The CCP came to these areas to make a revolution. Without a radical change of the traditional gender order and an end to the cloistering of women within the home, the CCP would never have gained a strong footing in the base areas. Besides, the survival of the base areas at that time depended highly on military success. While adult peasant men were drafted into the Red Army, fighting on the front, women became urgently needed in both production and the administration of base areas (Hershatter, 2007, p. 59). Training and selecting local women cadres and activists hence became a matter of necessity, and the CCP had to develop a series of measures to mobilise women and increase the number of women cadres (Gu, 2010). A quota of 25 per cent of women in local soviet assemblies testifies to the importance of peasant women in running local soviet affairs.

Quotas in Tailwind

The CCP inherited the ideology and strategy of women’s liberation from earlier periods and continued the line of women’s mobilisation after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. During the 1950s massive economic campaigns, especially during the Great Leap Forward, the number of women in leadership positions increased markedly, owing to the colossal expansion of women’s share in the labour force and the policy of high priority given to women’s political participation (Wang, 1999a). The 1953 Electoral Law and the 1954 Chinese Constitution state that ‘women in China enjoy equal political, economic, cultural, social and familial rights with men’; ‘women enjoy the same rights to vote and to be voted with men’; and ‘the state will see to train and select women cadres’. The All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF), China’s then official mass organisation for women, also played an active role in facilitating women’s inroads into leadership positions (Wang, 1999a). The then high-profile ACWF leaders, such as, Cai Chang and Deng Yingchao, according to a number of Chinese Internet sources, put into effect a kind of appointment system during the 1950s to boost the number of women cadres. ² The progress achieved during this period was, however, mainly witnessed at various basic levels (Wang, 1999a).

Women’s political participation reached a climax during the CR, especially in the 1970s (Wang, 1999a, 1999b). Whether it was in the highest decision-making body of the CCP, the Politburo, or in the CCP Central Committee, the National People’s Congress, and the central or provincial governments, the proportion of women’s participation reached its peak in the history of the PRC. Apart from having ‘marked the high tide for women at the top of the political system’, the CR also ‘introduced’ ‘important changes’ ‘at middle and lower levels’ (Rosen, 1995, pp. 328–329). For this very reason, the CR period has gone down in history as the golden age of nannü pingdeng (equality between men and women) and women’s political representation.

The historically unprecedented political prominence of women during the CR was, however, premised on class politics rather than on gender politics. That is to say, not only was the term ‘women’ class coded, referring to working-class women (workers and peasants), but also the worth of women’s participation had to be justified by the role of the masses in waging the ‘continued revolution’ Mao found necessary for China. The impact of the CR’s class politics was thus twofold: While intellectual and politically established women were identified as the ‘enemy’ of the people and thus persecuted together with their male counterparts, worker–peasant women were accorded high social and political status. The CR blew a strong tailwind for the political participation of worker–peasant women at both ideological and structural fronts, with Mao and his leadership as the main driving force.

A radical left-wing youth of the May Fourth generation himself, Mao believed in egalitarianism and revolution/continued revolution as the means to transform human relations and social structures. ³ As women belonged to the most oppressed social category in traditional Chinese society, Mao and the revolutionaries of his generation regarded women’s liberation pivotal to the course of socialist revolution. Thus, although Mao’s personal life bears little indication of genuine gender equality (Chang & Halliday, 2005), as a statesman he saw women as an important resource and strongly advocated the widening of women’s social and political engagement. ⁴ From the early 1960s, Mao grew increasingly frustrated with conservative tendencies within the Party. The CR became ‘Mao’s last desperate attempt to revive a revolution he believed was dying’ (Meisner, 1999, p. 291). To carry out this zealous, wide-ranged and somehow Utopian political project, Mao resorted to the masses in the hope that they (both men and women) would be able to personify the true value of Maoism by virtue of their class stance as well as purify the Party and hence keep the revolution going.

To the extent that Mao ‘saw patriarchy and gender inequality as antithetical to the new socio-political order he sought to create’ (Yin, 2010, p. 3), the all-round involvement of the working class in the struggle against the conservative Party establishment figured centrally in the politics of the CR. The question of getting more women into politics was thus neither discussed nor handled in a merely procedural or methodical manner. On the contrary, it was treated as a highly ideological and politicised issue that set the line between the correct and incorrect, the genuine revolutionary and the fake revolutionary (Min, 2012; Wang, 1999a). The Party, as Howell points out, ‘produces the official gender ideology, works out the strategies for resolving female oppression, and organises the process of social change’ (Howell, 2002, p. 48). And the Party’s monopoly ‘on the explanation of women’s oppression on the management of social change and on the imagination of an alternative’ (Howell, 2002) proved to be superbly powerful in ruling out overt if not covert reversals and in creating conducive psychological, cultural and social environments for women’s political advancement. From the early 1960s and all the way through the 1970s, sweeping ideological and propagandist campaigns arrived in waves one after the other to boost the idea that ‘women can do whatever men can’. Models of young female labour mushroomed in agriculture and industry, their heroic deeds widely publicised while they were honoured and emulated nationwide as living examples of the true revolutionary spirit Mao stood for (Han, 1998; Sheridan, 1976). Many of these models were quickly promoted to high political positions and became the new political stars of Mao’s court (Han, 1998; Sheridan, 1976; Wang, 1997; Witke, 1975).

Apart from intensive ideological campaigns the CR also brought structural changes in the country’s power apparatus and hence opened up new channels for women to access high- and middle-level leadership positions (Han, 1998; Wang, 1997). The violent seize-power movement by the Red Guards and workers’ groups not only paralysed the conventional Party and government institutions but also created power vacancies. As a substitute, a new power structure called the Revolutionary Committee (RC) was instituted and it was a tripartite body (Wang, 1997) consisting of three interest blocks: the old (but trustworthy) cadres representing the pre-CR establishment; mass representatives representing the Red Guards and various worker–peasant factions; People’s Liberation Army (PLA, the military), the keeper of order during the most violent stage of the CR. Since a third of the leading positions in the country’s RCs would go to mass representatives, the RC constellation widened the gateway for women to be incorporated into the RC power structure as a part of the revolutionary masses (Howell, 2002, p. 45; Johnson, 1983; Wang, 1981, 1997, 1999a).

Mao’s fight against the Party-state bureaucracy also invalidated the normative procedure of political selection and recruitment formalities (Lee, 1991; Manion, 1985, p. 205; Wang, 1997). Political selections and appointments during the CR were characterised by strong central control and an ad hoc top-down command. Higher authorities often interfered in individual recruitment cases, either vetoing a decision that had been made below or bypassing the relevant personnel authority at the lower levels (Wang, 1997, 1999a). A typical recruitment practice during the CR was the so-called rise by helicopter, or jumping from non-political, basic-level functions to a high political position, skipping several intermediate steps of the ranking hierarchy (Shen & Zhao, 1995; Wang, 2003). Normally, such skipping would hardly be possible, and the step-by-step advancement to the top would take many years. The strong ad hoc intervention from the centre in political selection and the wide usage of abnormal recruitment practices during the CR helped to remove several intermediate-level institutional barriers and made it possible for mass representatives (including women) to reach top positions much faster than normal procedure would have allowed.

As a result, the CR brought in new blood and witnessed a rapid increase of women in various leadership positions (Johnson, 1983; Maloney, 1975; Wang, 1999a, 1999b). At the national level, a whole cohort of women made their entrance into some of the topmost positions. For the first time in CCP and PRC history, two women acquired full membership of the Politburo (Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and Lin Biao’s wife Ye Qun), another woman became vice premier of the State Council, and the percentage of women in the CCP Central Committee rose to 7.6 per cent and then to 10.3 per cent, the highest record to date (Rosen, 1995; Wang, 1997, 1999b; Witke, 1975). In 1975, ‘more than one of every four standing committee members was a woman’ (Rosen, 1995, p. 319), and ‘the number of women cadres increased at an unprecedented rate and range’ at various local and basic levels (Zhou, 1991, p. 196). A county-level study cited by Rosen shows that the percentage of women admitted into the local-level rural Party branches was 8.6 per cent from 1977 to 1982 and 5.9 per cent from 1983 to 1990, whereas during the CR (1966–1976) the percentage reached an average annual high of 13.5 per cent (Rosen, 1995, p. 331).

Quotas in Headwind

In sharp contrast to the CR period, post-Mao China recorded a decline and stagnation in the number of women in politics (Du, 2012; Min, 2012, p. 3; Yu, 2012). In fact, the transition to a market economy wheeled gender relations backwards, and the downturn in women’s representation was just one manifestation of the many negative consequences of the reform (Guo & Zhao, 2009; Rosen, 1995; Wang, 1999a). This raises several questions. If the CR period enlarged the number of women in politics through ‘state-mandated official quotas’ (Rosen, 1995, p. 339), why has the reform period failed to do so? Why has women’s representation suffered in the economically affluent and politically relaxed reform-era China? Why can the record of women’s representation created by the CR period not been maintained or duplicated? What forces have worked to hinder the progress of women’s representation?

To answer these questions, we must first consider the shift from class politics to the economy. Different from Mao, the post-Mao Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping stood for pragmatic policies (Morton & Lewis, 2004). His major concern was the development of the economy and allowing the people to get rich. To reach these goals, the Party discarded the class struggle and introduced liberal economic policies to restore household-based farming in the countryside and stimulate the growth of market and private enterprise in cities. The ‘enemy’ classes ‘no longer existed in China’ and class struggle ‘was no longer the main contradiction of Chinese society’ (Ding, 2001, p. 8). The end of the class struggle entailed a fundamental reconfiguration of social relations and bore widely felt consequences. The glory of the proletariat (worker–peasant) faded away, their status as the revolution’s backbone died out, and women’s social and political advancement as part of the worker–peasant class lost both value and ground. The moment the Party abandoned its revolutionary radicalism and shifted to a pragmatic course cracks appeared in the historical alliance between the Party and proletarian women.

The inauguration of reform and the subsequent post-socialist socio-economic development in China had multidimensional consequences for women and women’s political representation (Wang, 1999a). One immediately felt consequence was the abolition of the Revolutionary Committees and the dismissal of the mass leaders (men and women) who had gained political eminence during the CR. Since at least one woman had been required at each leadership level, the dissolving of the RC squeezed a large number of women out of the power structure and discredited what the CR had achieved in women’s political participation. During the 1982–1983 provincial leadership reshuffle associated with the abolition of the RC, between one-third and two-thirds of the removed cadres were women (Wang, 1999, p. 30). Later, the abolition of the people’s commune in the countryside caused further setbacks for women cadres at each level nationwide (Wang, 1999). The leadership restructuring process affected both men and women of the working classes, discharging them and deeming them unsuitable and unwanted, but the consequences for women were far more severe. This is because the proportion of women in politics during the CR was, after all, relatively low, and therefore the decline caused by the reshuffle seemed both swift and drastic.

Soon the consequences of the economic reforms began to mount, throwing women into a situation of high risk and vulnerability which they may never have expected. China’s economic reforms since the 1980s led to the collapse of collective farming under the people’s commune system and the smelting down of the danwei ⁵ system in urban China. These economic structures had once facilitated women’s socio-economic participation and gender equality by providing, for instance, day care, housing, medical insurance and other welfare services (Ding, 2001). Now, with the removal of collective or state-owned structures, women are thrown either back to the family or into the newly emerged labour market, where they often face inequality, insecurity, discrimination and exploitation and have to rely on their own personal resources and individual strategies to secure their wellbeing. Rural women returned to their families after the adoption of the household responsibility system in the early 1980s, but urban industrial women began to lose jobs and became unemployed (Howell, 2002). The vulnerable position of women due to the economic reforms in turn hampers their political advancement, given the correlation between socio-economic status and political responsibility.

In terms of political selection, a series of changes have taken place with the reforms in China, creating unfavourable conditions for women. One such change is the reformulation of the selective criteria. As four ‘modernisations’ ⁶ have been set as the ultimate goal for China, attributes, such as, knowledge, skills and ability have replaced class background, revolutionary consciousness and loyalty as sought-after qualities (Lee, 1991; Morton & Lewis, 2004; Wang, 1997). Concurrently, the notion of ‘gender’ has changed, giving rise to the idea of naturalised gender difference and demarcation between masculinity and femininity (Wang, 2001; Yang, 1999). The ‘quality’ discourse intertwines the ‘femininity’ discourse, casting a negative reinterpretation on women’s role in politics. On the one hand, women in general are considered as lacking in quality due to their socio-economic disadvantages brought on by economic reform. On the other, women are required to be the ‘soft, beautiful, and caring’ other gender and will, at the same time, be branded unsuitable for leadership positions due to these gender attributes (Wang, 2001). The emphasis on ability and quality in political selection discriminates against those of ‘low quality’, regardless of gender, but women are doubly discriminated against because of the contrary requirements of quality and femininity.

Furthermore, the value of gender equality and women’s representation was openly challenged following the gradual adoption of open competition in the cadre selection process. According to Professor Li Huiying, there co-exist three different cadre-selection mechanisms in current China: the appointment system for cadres at bureau level and above, contracts and open competition for cadres at the deputy-bureau level and below, and democratic election for cadres at village and township levels. ⁷ As the last two methods gain more and more weight in cadre selection, the belief in fair competition, equality before merit and the survival of the fittest has also set in, casting a dark shadow on the legitimacy of gender quotas. Gender fairness is seen as a contradiction to ability-based meritocracy, gender quotas being more and more regarded as a transgression to the holy principle of fair competition (Wang, 1999a), and the idea of having more women through quotas is met with doubt, scepticism and open resistance.

Prior to the reforms, the central organising authority of the CCP exercised more power in supervising and monitoring political selection at lower levels (Wang, 2003). By virtue of its strong ideological rhetoric, its centralised control over personnel assignments (Manion, 1985, p. 205), ‘mass campaigns and the manipulated reinvention of revolutionary struggle’ (Howell, 2002, p. 45), the Party centre was both willing to intervene and capable of doing so whenever it found it necessary. A central element of such a personnel-control mechanism was the so-called nomenklatura, ‘a system in which positions and individuals [were] ranked and matched, with appointments made by superior Party committees at appropriate levels of the CCP hierarchy’ (Goodman, 2000, p. 161). The nomenklatura system governed the management of all formally appointed cadres at five levels: the national level; the provincial and ministry level; the district, city and department level; the county and division level; and the section level (Goodman, 2000). Following a three-level-down principle, the CCP’s Central Committee controlled cadre selection from the national level to the city–district–department level directly, and it had the power to either confirm or veto the candidates nominated by the Party organisations at these levels.

Since the 1980s, however, the nomenklatura system has been reformed to reduce the number of posts controlled by the Party’s Central Committee (Burns, 1987). The aim is to spur local initiatives and stimulate local development (Burns, 1987) by giving local Party authorities more autonomy on personnel matters. The reform readjusted the power division between the central and the regional-local Party authorities. As a result, the power of central personnel control was restrained to two levels down in 1980 and further to one level down in 1984 (Burns, 1987; Manion, 1985). The shrinking of nomenklatura control coupled with the ideological retreat from egalitarianism/gender equality has rendered to the Party centre a rather passive role in matters concerning women’s representation in politics. It no longer enforces hard sanctions against leadership lists that lack women (Howell, 2002; Wang, 1999a), nor is the Party centre itself any longer the front runner of gender equality. The CCP’s 11th National Congress held right after the CR in 1977, for instance, elected no women members at all to the Politburo.

Direct elections down to the village–township level were introduced in the early 1980s to promote democracy and villager participation in local affairs. In theory, fair representation of gender is the core of democracy (Phillips, 1995), and the experience of quota implementation worldwide also suggests that ‘the transition to democracy, or the reform of the political system has provided opportunities for putting women’s rights on the political agenda and introducing potentially controversial measures such as quotas’ (Pande & Ford, 2011, p. 5). In China, however, the introduction of direct elections caused a drastic decline of female cadres at the basic levels, especially during the first-round direct election in the 1980s (Howell, 2006; Min, 2012; Rosen, 1993; Wang, 1999a). According to Professor Li Huiying, there is a widespread tendency among rural voters to identify/associate women candidates with their traditional gender roles and hence they avoid voting women to major leadership positions. ⁸ There is also evidence from Jilin and Hebei provinces that the majority of voters see male candidates as more capable than women for top positions and other leading managerial and technical functions (Howell, 2006; Min, 2012; Rosen, 1993; Wang, 1999a). Thus, although the transition to local democracy should in theory create better conditions for women achieving public office, conservative gender ideologies and the voters’ gender bias seem to have worked hand in hand, minimising opportunities for women to be elected to public office in rural China (Guo, Zheng & Yang, 2009; Howell, 2006; Rosen, 1995; Wang, 1999a). ⁹

But how is gender equality (socio-economic as well as political) valued and weighted in the political mindset of today’s China? How do various mainstream ideologies respond to the idea of gender equality (and subsequently gender equality in politics)? Let us first consider the rejection of the CR by the post-Mao leadership and the discursive implications of this reversal. Similar to the ‘de-communism politicking’ that occurred in the former Soviet Union and other East European countries (Verdery, 1996), China also undertook a drastic ideological shift away from the Maoist version of socialism in order to embrace market reforms and a market economy. The shift reversed what had been achieved or extolled during the socialist period, resulting in a partial discredit of Mao the person and a wholesale denunciation of the CR, Mao’s largest and also last political project. ¹⁰ As the CR was denounced, the socialist legacy of gender equality and women’s political participation was also openly questioned, discredited and ridiculed. The post-Mao ideological ‘relocation’, however, necessary for Deng Xiaoping’s reform programme, proved to be utterly unfortunate, for it triggered a conservative turn in Chinese society in terms of gender and gender relations (Rosen, 1995; Wang, 1999a). The positive experience of the CR in promoting women’s representation was negated and its relevance denied.

In reforms-era China, two competing trends of thought have made a deep impress on the country’s ideological landscape and influenced the direction of state policies. One is neo-liberalism and the other is the so-called New Left (Christensen, 2010; Song, 2008, 2012). Neo-liberalism advocates a free market and the primary role of the market principle is governing human relations (Song, 2012). It is both the thought and the driving force behind the policies of privatisation, separation of production from reproduction and minimisation of social welfare. According to Professor Song Shaopeng, neo-liberalism and the government’s economic policies coined in the neo-liberal fashion have had serious detrimental consequences for Chinese women. Not only has the neo-liberal preoccupation with the market left little space for a collective alternative but the prevalence of neo-liberalism in economic and social polices has also cast a dark shadow on social solidarity and gender equality (Song, 2012). Mainland liberals, according to Li (2013), solemnly believe that women’s rights can be fully subsumed in the liberals’ more general human rights abstraction and hence do not need to be given special attention. Some of them even allege that China had gone too far in terms of gender equality and women’s rights and that the question facing China now is how to retrench instead of going forward.

The New Left is different. It argues for a strong state and a role for the state in regulating production and in redistributing social wealth (Carter, 2010; Chen, 2013). However, gender equality, especially gender equality in politics, is not a primary concern of the New Leftists although they do see social disparity as a major problem, and they do urge the state to reverse societal polarisation through the development of social policies and welfare schemes. As Song points out, the basic contention of the neo-liberalists and the New Leftists is over more market or more state. Neither of them cares about the situation or position of women in society, nor are they interested in discussing gender-related issues and questions (Song, 2012). The Chinese New Left is deeply rooted in the intellectual soil of post-modernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism (Chen, 2013, p. 4). These ‘post-isms’ provide powerful ammunition for the New Leftists to wage criticism against West-centrism and global capitalism. On the other hand, the anti-Western/anti-modern posture seems also to have carried the New Leftists away and pushed them down the road of Chinese egocentrism. While rightfully questioning and opposing the universal value of the Enlightenment, Eurocentric sentimentality and Orientalism, the New Leftists have somehow moved closer to guocui zhuyi—that is, cultural nationalism—and slipped into the trap of cultural arrogance and chauvinism. They emphasise Chinese-ness and the unique Chinese path to modernisation, champion Chinese cultural traditions and basically refute the value of anything that is, or associated with, the West (Chen, 2013). Gender, they claim, is a ‘trivial problem’ and a concept that does not apply to China because it is derived from Western social theories (Song, 2008).

The aloofness of the Chinese New Leftists towards gender issues is also related to their aspiration to be disassociated from the ‘the old hardliner leftists who genuinely wish for a return to Mao’s era’ (Hook, 2007, p. 9). They strive to draw a line between their vision of development and the obsolete Maoist version of socialism. For this purpose, there was critical reflection upon the high tide of Mao’s socialism, the CR, and a critical re-evaluation of Mao himself (Chen, 2013). Thus, although the New Leftists are placed on the political left by virtue of their advocacy for social equity, they have obviously taken a political right position in rejecting the CR and what it had done for women (Wang, 2014).

The revival of Confucianism in 21st-century China was potentially another ideological challenge to Chinese feminism and the course of gender equality. The revival, according to Song, came as a result of the concerted effort of ‘government officials, educational institutions, intellectual input, the New-leftists’ avocation for a Confucian socialism and the general public yearning for tradition and traditional culture’ (Song, 2008). Confucianism embodies traditional gender concepts, such as, the virtuous wife and the good mother, exalting males while demeaning females, that form the ‘fundamental tenets to assess a woman’s behaviour and aspirations, and her status relative to that of men’ (Leung, 2003, p. 361). Although ‘the promotion of Confucian values’, from the government’s point of view, ‘has several advantages’ and ‘many intellectuals have turned to Confucianism…to think of ways of dealing with China’s current social and political predicament’ (Bell, 2008, p. 9, 11), it evokes negative consequences for gender equality and women’s rights (Song, 2008) because ‘cultural revivalism’, in A.E. McLaren’s words, ‘stresses an essential national character and the importance of traditional, cultural, family and ritual issues’ (Leung, 2003, p. 368). As a manifestation of such cultural revivalism, the ‘re-invented Confucian ideology’ attempts to ‘revive selected aspects of the Chinese pre-revolutionary heritage’ (Leung, 2003), hence providing justification for gender discrimination and gender injustice, as in the stressing of family responsibilities on women and ‘denying them access to certain jobs and hindering their career advancement’ (Leung, 2003).

Push Factors for Women’s Political Participation

Women’s political representation today faces the daunting challenge of advocating women’s rights and right-based gender fairness in politics in the context of the market economy and capitalist development. In principle, gender equality still remains one of the tenets of fundamental state policies of China (Guo & Zhao, 2009. p. 53), but due to the rise of the market, political decentralisation and the readjustment of state– society relations, the commanding capacity of the Party and the state has reduced to such a degree that it ‘can no longer do this as effectively’ (Howell, 2002, p. 54; Wang, 1999a).

While ‘state-derived feminism has become increasingly unable to resist any backlash against women in the changing circumstances of market reform’ (Howell, 2002, p. 54), two forces have come to the fore to defend gender equality and women’s representation. One is the All-China Women’s Federation, the former national organisation for women but now acting in the fashion of an non-governmental organisation (NGO) (Howell, 1996), and the other is women NGOs (Croll, 2001; Howell, 2004, 2007; Morton, 2006). The women NGOs consist of both university-based academics and project/issue-based activists, each with their own networks and channels of organisation (Howell, 2003; Hsiung, Jashock & Milwertz, 2001; Milwertz, 2002). ¹¹ The university-based academics engage mainly in theoretical research into women’s political participation, while the activists work primarily on in-field investigation, training, pilot projects and policy recommendations. Operating within their demarcated political spaces, both the ‘old’ and the new women’s organisations have aired the urgent need for more positive action to achieve a greater degree of gender balance in politics. The ACWF, for instance, ‘has continuously made efforts to promote…affirmative action since the 1990s’ (Guo & Zhao, 2009, p. 59) by demanding a more ambitious gender quota scheme and more effective measures to enforce quotas.

Another factor pushing for women’s political participation in China is international influence (Guo & Zhao, 2009; Min, 2012). With China opening up to the outside world in the 1980s, transnational and international cooperation and exchange on gender-related issues began to rise. China signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1980 and hosted the UN’s Fourth Conference on Women in 1995. The international ranking of female parliament members exerts a certain impact on China’s image, the rankings often used by women’s organisations and activists to elicit keener government and policy response. As a result, ‘affirmative action was re-established…as China responded to the international community before and after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing’ (Guo & Zhao, 2009, p. 54). Various projects under the joint auspices of international organisations and Chinese women’s organisations are under way to boost women’s participation at local levels. One example is the project to promote female village leaders in Shaanxi. As a fruitful result of the cooperation between a feminist civil organisation and the provincial Women’s Federation, the province has succeeded in lifting the percentage of women village heads from 0.6 per cent in 2003 to 4.5 per cent in 2009 (Gao, 2010). Another example is the joint project run by UN Women and the All-China Women’s Federation. Unfolding in the three provinces of Hunan, Heilongjiang and Shaanxi in 2011, the project will run for three years with the aim of improving women’s participation and representation in select areas. ¹²

Concluding Remarks

This article applies a broader, more holistic, less technically oriented approach to gender quotas in China. It situates gender quotas in the historical context of China’s political development, delineates the changing political silhouette over time and maps the fluctuating ideological and structural conditions for gender equality and hence gender quotas. It shows how the validity of gender quotas depends on the coupling of women’s status to the Party’s overall political agenda. And since the coupling is a rather unstable one, gender quotas meet a tailwind at times and a headwind at others.