Gender Inequality and Legitimacy in China

In this essay, I ask how gender inequality affects the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) legitimacy.

But first, what exactly is legitimacy? And how prolific is gender inequality in China?

Context

I define legitimacy as the ‘right to rule’, through the public’s acceptance of the appropriateness of a certain government or set of institutions to rule a country.

Also, The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021 ranks China 107th out of 156 countries according to the Global Gender Gap Index, which measures women’s economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. While economic participation has improved overall, large gaps remain in terms of labour force participation as well as in terms of senior roles, where only 11.4% of board members are women and 16.7% of senior managers are women. Additionally, there is a large gap in political empowerment, and only 24.9% of parliamentarians and 3.2% of ministers are women. China also continues to have a relatively large health and survival gap: 93.5% of this gap has closed to date, the lowest level among all 156 countries assessed by the index.

The rise of feminism in contemporary China

The Permanent Mission of the People's Republic of China to the UN states on its website that women account for about half of China’s population, and therefore the promotion of gender equality is “of great significance for China’s development.” In this respect, half of the CCP’s legitimacy, which centres on the public’s acceptance, comes from women. Thus, if women feel that the government is not adequately addressing the issue of gender equality, the CCP’s legitimacy is negatively impacted, and this is because scholars have long asserted the significance of performance as a legitimation strategy in China. Hence, the rise of feminism in contemporary China is of particular importance to understanding how gender inequality impacts the CCP.

In her book, Betraying Big Brother (2020), Leta Hong Fincher examines how a feminist awakening has emerged, arguing that it poses the greatest challenge to China’s governing regime today. She evidences the 2012 'Occupy men’s toilets' movement, which aimed to help solve the issues surrounding women having to wait for public toilets. Rong Weiyi, a member of the China Association of Marriage and Family Studies, noted that many women have suffered from urinary diseases as a result of having to wait for so long. So, the issue is one of health contributing to gender inequality according to the Global Gender Gap Index. Additionally, the rise of feminism can be witnessed in the so-called ‘feminist five’ who were jailed on the eve of International Women’s Day 2015 for planning a demonstration against sexual harassment on public transportation. After 37 days of mounting political pressure, the women were released. Fincher argues that this incident was a catalysing force for a powerful post-2015 feminist movement which is constantly adapting and resilient.

Another example of the rise of feminism post-2015 and of the movement’s resilience is the #metoo movement. Chen Chen and Xiaobo Wang posit that networked digital technologies have presented new opportunities for netizens and activists, and that the government’s control over the internet has “resulted in more creative and innovative ways” of online expression, such as by using puns and images instead of sensitive terms that are subject to censorship. When ‘metoo’ was banned, netizens translated ‘metoo’ to ‘米兔’ (rice bunny), pronounced as ‘mi tu’. This leads Chen and Wang to conclude that discursive strategies, when used to dodge the censorship system, can be persuasive because they draw attention to feminist messaging. Supplementing this, they conclude that China’s development of technologies and social media platforms has “led to a technofeminism that is resilient and sustainable.” This might signify that Fincher’s ‘feminist awakening’ is aided by social media and the internet.

While some scholars assert that online censorship in China is too powerful to overcome, there is evidence to the contrary and Rongbin Han suggests that “the censorship regime is overly rigid, arbitrary, and fuzzy, thus providing room for both intermediary actors and netizens to maneuver.” Additionally, I assert that resilience to online censorship is dependent on awareness of its existence – and ‘metoo’ being disseminated as ‘ricebunny’ undoubtedly made the online community aware that the government had already censored ‘metoo’. What is most interesting is that when this happens, the CCP positions itself as antagonistic to gender equality. When netizens pour their energy into overcoming the online censors, sexual harassment is no longer the enemy but rather the CCP itself, and this is detrimental to its legitimacy.

Further evidencing this, Pan Wang writes of a “rising ‘feminist consciousness’” during COVID-19 “that extends beyond activist circles to a growing awareness of gender inequality.” From February 2020, #SeeingFemaleWorkers went viral on Weibo – with 630 million reads and 901,000 users joining the discussion until 22 July – this online movement called for the recognition of women’s contribution to the pandemic. A catalyst for this may have been a Chinese doctor in Wuhan, Ai Fen, who was one of the first to encounter the virus and alerted her colleagues. She was reprimanded for 'harming stability' and her interview with People Magazine was posted on social media but was deleted within three hours. Interestingly, to evade censors, the interview was reposted in foreign languages, emojis, pinyin, morse code, and oracle bone scripts, which would again suggest that the online feminist movement is creative and resilient, contributing to a rising feminist consciousness amid the pandemic, and raising awareness of the CCP’s oppressive online censorship.

Feminism and legitimacy

In so far, I have argued that feminism is rising in China and that online censorship will not supress its growth. I will now explain its effect on the CCP’s legitimacy.

Scholars have promoted the importance of performance-based legitimacy in China: Christian von Soest and Julia Grauvogel note that China has “focused strongly on their allegedly positive socio-economic and political performance in order to substantiate their rule.” Jinghan Zeng also argues for its centrality, but disagrees with conventional wisdom that “[economic] performance stands alone as the sole source of legitimacy in China”, arguing instead that performance extends to “all government function”, and that it compliments other legitimation strategies. With Zeng’s extended definition, I can argue that the issue of gender inequality affects the CCP’s performance-based legitimacy.

While feminist movements such as #seeingfemaleworkers and #metoo don’t explicitly target the government, movements are the result of the CCP’s inadequate response to these issues. In #seeingfemaleworkers, for example, controversy surrounded a policy enacted by the local government of Jinan in Shandong province – when schools were closed during lockdown, officials suggested that in families with small children where both parents were employed, women should apply for leave to care for the children. The policy was critiqued for being sexist and many accused the government of reinforcing gender inequalities in the job market. Additionally, the #metoo movement was a response to sexual harassment and one its leaders, Zhou Xiaoxuan, notes that “MeToo’s spread has made a huge push on this matter of law”. She filed her sexual harassment case in court under ‘personality rights’ because sexual harassment was not recognised as a legal cause of action. As such, the government is consequently responsible for gender inequality. Further examples include movements that push for the government to address domestic violence and gender discrimination at work. The CCP’s failure to address these issues is harmful to its legitimacy as performance based.

But while performance legitimacy is key to the CCP’s resilience, it is not the only legitimation strategy. Heike Holbig argues that “ideology still plays an indispensable role in the quest to legitimise authoritarian rule.” China’s rich revolutionary legacy is a source of pride for its people, and nationalism (part of ideology) has also been evidenced as a legitimation strategy. This is interesting as contemporary China’s feminist movement doesn’t conflict, but is supported by a commitment to gender equality during the revolutionary period, and Mao Zedong famously said that women hold up “half the sky”.

The first official act passed by the new government after the CCP won the revolution was the Marriage Reform Law, which addressed the most prominent issues faced by women in regard to marriage and family life including: abolishing forced marriage, brideprice, concubinage, and child betrothal. Moreover, it guaranteed women equal rights in the ownership and management of family property, equal right to petition for divorce, and the right to keep their own family names – an act that would have been considered radical by Western standards at the time. So, if nationalism is built on the country’s rich revolutionary legacy, and if nationalism is a legitimation strategy, it would seem that the CCP’s repression of feminism contradicts its own historical narrative and thereby affecting its ‘right to rule’. But although this is true in theory, whether or not the population actively recognise this is another question, and the CCP’s propaganda efforts and control over the dissemination of history is a powerful mechanism at its employ.

If the CCP is losing its ‘right to rule’ by actively suppressing the feminist movement – through performance and ideology – and also through situating itself as against feminism when it enacts pervasive online controls, it is important to ask why the CCP isn’t taking drastic measures to combat gender inequality. Alice Hu's statement that “moving toward true gender equality requires nothing short of a revolution” is telling since the CCP remembers the heavy price of revolution. However, a better argument can be realised in the fact that some of the world’s most gender equal countries have low birth rates. Edwin Rubenstein attributes the declining birth rate in the U.S to the fact that “when women take control of their fertility, they opt for smaller families and longer, more lucrative careers.”

Perhaps then the CCP is not only worried about the revolutionary potential of rising feminism, but its effect on China’s fertility rate of 1.3, among the lowest in the world. The CCP is concerned about the effect this will have on its slowing population growth and therefore on its working-age population which, according to the 2020 census, has declined by 40 million since the 2010 census. Hence, China might want to reinforce traditional patriarchal norms and encourage women to stay at home and have more children to ensure a sustainable labour force and strong economy in the future. China’s recent introduction of a three-child policy would support this. Thus, since economic performance is a source of regime legitimacy, the CCP may actually benefit in some respects from gender inequality. But while this could be true for China’s future, economists have argued that gender discrimination at work is (at present) impeding on the economy and therefore negatively affecting CCP legitimacy that is derived from economic performance.

In an article by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, they argue that policies that have led to a decline in state-sponsored childcare has resulted in an “underutilisation of human capital [which] has weakened labour market efficiency and imposed a drag on China’s economic growth.” Additionally, a 2015 estimate by the McKinsey Global Institute evidences that closing the gender gap could add $2.5 trillion to $4.2 trillion (USD) to China’s GDP by 2025. Consequently, although the state’s suppression of feminism might be to ensure economic performance based legitimacy in the future, gender inequality is detrimental for the current CCP.

Conclusion

In this essay, I accounted for the rise of feminism in contemporary China, argued that pervasive online controls will not hinder its growth, and noted that by doing this, the CCP makes the public aware that it is against feminism which affects its legitimacy. Building on this, I outlined how the CCP attains legitimacy from its performance, and through ideology and nationalism. I then accounted for the impact of rising feminism in response to gender inequality on these legitimation strategies. Finally, I asked if the issue is negatively affecting the CCP, why the government isn’t adequately responding. I posited that feminism is dangerous as a revolutionary idea, and that it may contribute to declining birth rates and a shrinking labour force in China’s future. In 2021 however, gender inequality is a barrier to economic growth and therefore the CCP’s performance-based economic legitimacy.