Under President Xi Jinping, women are second-class citizens. “Feminism” has become a peaceful but powerful weapon against the regime.
by Marco Respinti


In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), feminist activists are arrested and jailed for voicing opposition. This is not surprising, as the Communist government in Beijing fears all kind of organized dissent.
Women have never been allowed to take their rightful place in the PRC ever since the days of Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976). His grandiose assertion, “Women hold up half the sky” notwithstanding, their role in society has been in fact clearly downsized. But today, under President Xi Jinping, women are not only pushed back, but the whole idea of gender equality has been completely reversed.
The demographic problem as an excuse
In a 2022 meeting with the new leadership team of the All China Women’s Federation—a women’s rights organization established by the regime in 1949 and until 1957 named All-China Democratic Women’s Foundation—, Xi explained that the priority of women should not be their own development. As the official state press agency, Xinhua, reported Xi called women to prioritize family harmony and social development, urging them “to actively cultivate a new perception of marriage and childbearing, give better guidance to young people in their understanding of marriage, childbirth, and family, improve and implement policies supporting childbirth, improve the overall quality of the population, and actively respond to population aging.”
This may sound reasonable, and even attractive to those ears that are inclined to uphold natural and traditional family values, and of course has something to do with the decreasing birth rate of the PRC. In fact, it has “too much” to do with the decreasing birth rate of the PRC.
While cracking down on the idea of gender equality, Xi wants Chinese women confined to the role of giving birth to more children, as demography is becoming a fundamental problem in the PRC as it is in other countries. This confinement of Chinese women is not the same thing as upholding traditional family values, which are not part of the CCP’s ideology. It is also a fact that many young Chinese women do not want to have children, or more than one child, due to factors that include high childcare costs as well as hindrances in career and gender discrimination.
The declining favor of Chinese women toward motherhood is not completely similar to that prevailing in other industrialized countries. In the Global West, higher social and economic standards influence the dominant idea of the family, especially among women. In the PRC, despite all the rhetoric and lies on the “end of poverty,” the Communist leadership does not really care about welfare and the living standards of common people. A higher population means only a larger low-cost workforce employed in factories, which would produce more wealth that would largely fill the coffers of the CCP’s nomenklatura—or an expansion of the military. In 2011, “Forbes” estimated that over 90 percent of the richest people in the PRC were either officials or members of the Party. If it is not the same, the situation today may be even worse.


An all-male regime
The cynical use of motherhood by the Chinese regime—which thus affirms its total control of the lives of its citizens, including in the bedroom—is confirmed by the historically records of Communist China. During the seven and half decades since the Communists grabbed power in the PRC, the Chinese society has always been dominated by males, all the hype about Mao’s wife Jiang Qing notwithstanding.
It was men who took the leadership in trying to take the PRC out of the chaos created by the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the famine ignited by the folly of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). The rapid growth of the Chinese economy during the regime of Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) was essentially led by men. Now, with “women’s lib” and “gender equality” being the buzzwords in all countries, and with the Chinese women becoming more aware of themselves, different women’s groups have started demanding their place in Chinese society. Deputy Regional Director for Asia at Amnesty International Sarah M. Brooks has termed this the “courageous wave” of younger Chinese activists. But for the misogynistic Communist leaders in the PRC, this is unacceptable.
The Politburo of the Party elected in 2022, during the congress in which Xi received the mandate for an unprecedented third term in power, includes no women. For the first time in 25 years, the 24-member executive leadership of the CCP is all male, but the precedent situation was not ideal either. In fact, in the overall history of the CCP, only six women have ever been full members of the Politburo. No woman has ever been a part of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the innermost sanctum of executive power of the regime. In 2022, only 11 women were elected to the Central Committee of the Party, numbering only 5.4 percent of the full members of the Central Committee.
She comes back
Women react. As they can. With creativity and initiative. They in fact give birth to secret nooks to assemble and raise their voice: at nondescript bars in backyard alleys, in salons, or in bookstores. They discuss the role of women in the country, watch films made by women on women, go to female shops to read books on the feminist movement. At quietly advertised venues, they question Communist prejudice against women in China.
The powers that be in China have, however, cracked down on the proponents of gender equality. It started with the 2015 arrest of the “Feminist Five.” They were a group of five Chinese women who were arrested in Beijing on March 6, 2015, for planning a protest against sexual harassment in public transports. Following international outrage, they were released on bail; but even after their release, and after almost a decade, they are still under public criticism and state surveillance. These arrests politicized women’s rights in the PRC and paved the way for gender animosity. The government has encouraged citizens to smear and attack feminists online. Netizens have disparaged women’s rights activists for their militancy. And the leading Chinese social media platform, WeChat, has repeatedly closed the accounts of women’s rights movements.
The story of Chinese tennis champion Peng Shuai is still fresh in the public memory. In November 2021, she vanished after she had accused Zhang Gaoli, former Vice Premier of the State Council of the PRC, of having sexually assaulted her. Later she resurfaced and withdrew her charge. Zhang was present at the 2022 congress of the Party in full glory.


One of the victims of the state-sponsored animosity against female activists in China has been the organized movement protesting the sexual abuse of women. The paradigmatic case of Sophia Huang Xueqin, detained in 2021, speaks for all. A freelance journalist, she was a prominent figure in the Chinese “MeToo” movement, bringing to light the first such case in 2018, when she helped a graduate student to go public with accusations against her Ph.D. supervisor. She also wrote about her personal experiences of sexual harassment while working in a Chinese news agency. As a result, she was charged with subversion and was still being held in jail in 2023. She languished in solitary confinement in one of the secret locations known as “black jails.”
Yes, reality is richer than fantasy. While in the West radical feminism contributed to the dismantling of the natural family, in a repressive country like the PRC it is a lively force for combating totalitarianism.