No more women leaders in China’s Communist Party

BEIJING: The Communist Party Congress has laid bare the striking gender imbalance in the upper echelons of Chinese politics, with not a single woman making the 24-person Politburo for the first time in at least a quarter of a century.

As Xi Jinping and his allies concentrated power over the weekend, the party´s highest-ranking woman leader retired. Veteran politician Sun Chunlan, a vice premier overseeing China´s health policies, was absent from the Central Committee list published Saturday, meaning she has stepped down.

In the world´s biggest political party -- which counts 96 million active members -- women have never held much power, and now hold even less. They make up just five percent of the party´s new 205-member Central Committee, while the seven-member Standing Committee -- the apex of China´s power -- remains an all-male club headed by Xi.

Sun, 72, was the only woman in the former Politburo, the party´s executive decision-making body. Often dispatched to inspect Chinese cities in the grip of surging Covid-19 outbreaks, the former party chief of Fujian province and Tianjin municipality became the public face of the zero-Covid policy, commanding tough measures wherever she went, prompting the nickname “Iron Lady”.

But figures like Sun are a rarity in Chinese politics, where male patronage networks and ingrained sexism have stymied the careers of promising candidates, experts say. It is a far cry from Communist Party forefather Mao Zedong´s pledge that “women hold up half the sky”.