[China has 22 provinces, five autonomous regions and four
centrally controlled municipalities, but only one — Anhui province in the east
— is run by a woman governor, Li Bin, who was appointed in February. And there
is only one female Communist provincial chief, Sun Chunlan, the party secretary
in Fujian province, on the east coast.]
 |
| Alexander F. Yuan/AP - Chinese State Councilor Liu Yandong attends the opening ceremony for the Diplomatic Conference on the Protection of Audiovisual Performances in Beijing, China on June 20, 2012. |
BEIJING — Mao Zedong was arguably the father of Chinese feminism, with his
famous observation that “women hold up half the sky.” But when Mao’s Communist
Party heirs take to the stage in November to unveil their new
leadership lineup, there aren’t likely to be many females — if any — among
the country’s new rulers.
Only one woman, State Council member Liu Yandong, has been
mentioned as a possible candidate for the powerful Politburo Standing
Committee, which effectively runs the country. But her chances appear to be
slim, particularly amid suggestions that the Standing Committee could be cut
from its current nine members to just seven.
Besides Liu, the only woman on the 25-member Politburo, the list
of women in top positions in China’s Communist Party hierarchy is remarkably
short.
China has 22 provinces, five autonomous regions and four centrally
controlled municipalities, but only one — Anhui province in the east — is run
by a woman governor, Li Bin, who was appointed in February. And there is only
one female Communist provincial chief, Sun Chunlan, the party secretary in
Fujian province, on the east coast.
In the past 30 years, China’s Communists have appointed only four
women as provincial governors. And Sun is only the second woman Party
provincial chief in the 63-year history of Chinese Communist rule.
Since China’s top Party ranks, the Politburo and the more
important Standing Committee, are most often filled by officials who have
served as provincial chiefs and governors, the future for women here does not
look bright. The latest statistics from the Party’s Organization Department
show that at the minister level or above, only 11 percent of officials are
female.
“If we talk about power-sharing, they don’t want women holding up
half the sky — or even one-third of the sky,” said Feng Yuan, a women’s rights
activist.
“Generally speaking, I think more women want to be involved more
than the positions they already have,” Feng said. “On the other hand, many
women don’t want to adjust themselves to the current political culture — the boys’
club, the drinking culture.”
China’s women, in their minuscule numbers in China’s top Party
jobs, fare better in one respect than ethnic minorities. Han Chinese make up
more than 90 percent of the population of 1.3 billion people, and the country’s
55 other minority groups have no chance of getting one of their own anywhere
near the Standing Committee.
China’s five ethnic-minority autonomous regions do have minorities
in the governor’s positions, and the Party has been trying to recruit more
minorities into the provincial governments in Xinjiang and Tibet as a way to
ease tensions. But the minorities are Communist stalwarts who have undergone
intense scrutiny and are largely there to help the Party maintain its grip.
Also, the more important Party secretary jobs typically stay in Han Chinese
hands.
Advances in the private sector
Women have had more success advancing in the private sector. While
women still languish in the Communist Party’s lower ranks — more likely to be
serving tea in local or provincial offices than leading the meetings — many
females have climbed to the top in the businesses world.
According to a Chinese entrepreneurs’ association, about 30
percent of entrepreneurs are women. Six of the top 14 women on the Forbes list
of self-made women billionaires are from China. Not far from where the
Communist rulers will soon reveal their new, likely all-male team, one of those
women on Forbes list, Zhang Xin, the chief executive of Beijing’s largest real
estate development firm, on Saturday unveiled her new project, a massive retail
and office complex called Galaxy Soho.
“People look at China and they see the powerful women in the
business world. You have CEOs of state-owned enterprises advertising companies,
lawyers, but you see a clear lag in government,” said Hong Huang, a prominent
female publisher of a fashion magazine. “You just don’t see women in top
political positions. I have friends who were in government positions who
dropped out eventually because it’s an old boy’s club. They’re not comfortable
there. There’s no policies to support them.”
An abysmal record
The question is, why does a party that is officially committed to
gender equality have such an abysmal record at promoting women within its
ranks?
Under Communist rule, educational opportunities for women have
opened, particularly at universities. Forced marriages were banned. The
one-child policy has helped erase the age-old idea that girls were not as
valuable as boys. Birth control is readily available to women who want it.
The advances have been huge compared to the pre-Communist era,
when Chinese women were generally subjugated to men, marriages were arranged
between families, some women were forced to become concubines, females could
not inherit land and a woman’s sole job was to produce male heirs. The
Communists also were able to stamp out the age-old practice of binding women’s
feet.
But the progress still weighs against some deeply entrenched
traditions and a paternalistic, male-dominated culture.
Advertisements seeking employees can list “attractive” as a
qualification. Chinese cities are replete with karaoke bars filled with young
“hostesses.” During the Euro 2012 soccer championships this year, a Guangdong
television station decided to attract viewers by having young women wearing
barely there bikinis read the weather for European cities during the matches.
And then there is the ubiquitous mistress culture.
Communist Party officials exposed for corruption are routinely
found to have had multiple mistresses. Liu Zhijun, the railway minister sacked
in February 2011 for allegedly embezzling
more than $150 millionwhile building China’s high-speed rail network, was
said in the local media to have kept 18 mistresses. When deposed Chongqing
Party chief Bo Xilai was expelled from the Communist Party in September, among his
alleged misdeeds was “improper relationships with a number of women.”
“This is an organic component of the paternalistic, male-dominated
culture,” Feng said. “Owning several mistresses” is, she said, for many
officials “evidence that he is a strong man.”
Women are also still fighting the negative stereotype — hardened
by Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing of the Gang of Four, and reinforced through a daily
diet of television period dramas — that women can be ruthless and conniving
concubines who have used their beauty and wiles to attract men and end up
causing the destruction of ancient dynasties.
Impediments to advancement
There are other impediments to women’s advancement in China. One
of the most prevalent is the disparity in the retirement age.
For most professional jobs, including the civil service, the
normal retirement age is 60 for men but 55 for women. The difference has many
practical effects, such as reducing the size of a woman’s pension, which is
calculated by the number of years worked. More important, women have fewer
hopes of advancing past their mid-to-late 40s, because employers know they will
have to retire soon.
Women say part of the problem is that China’s predominantly male
political leadership doesn’t recognize that the imbalance is a problem.
Instead, many of the country’s leaders hold the view that it doesn’t matter how
many women are in the top ranks, as long as men make decisions that benefit
women.
But women say that’s not necessarily what’s happening. They say
women’s voices need to be heard on issues large and small, such as the design
of city subways and buses — where the handrails are too high for the average
Chinese woman — and the manufacture of agriculture equipment, which is still
made to the specifications of men, although women, with typically smaller
frames, are now doing most of the farm work.
Hong Huang said the Party should also view the inclusion of more
women as an issue of its own survival.
“Don’t you think it would help preserve the system if you had a
Communist Party that was gentler, sweeter?” she said.
Liu Liu and William Wan in Beijing contributed to this report.
[Sproul’s firms and political consulting operations have faced
questions over the past eight years, including investigations and formal
charges of suppressing Democratic votes, destroying voter registrations and
other election violations. The charges against Small came a month after voter
registration work by a Sproul company prompted a fraud investigation
in Florida.]
By Carol
D. Leonnig and Tom
Hamburger
 |
| Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office - Colin Small, a former employee of Strategic Allied Consulting, a contractor for the Republican Party of Virginia, had been scheduled to appear last Tuesday before a grand jury after he was charged with tossing completed registration forms into a recycling bin. |
The investigation into the arrest of a man on charges of dumping voter registration forms
last month in Harrisonburg, Va., has widened, with state officials probing
whether a company tied to top Republican leaders had engaged in voter
registration fraud in the key battleground state, according to two persons
close to the case.
A former employee of Strategic Allied Consulting, a contractor for
the Republican Party of Virginia, had been scheduled to appear last Tuesday
before a grand jury after he was
charged with tossing completed registration forms into a recycling
bin. But state prosecutors canceled Colin Small’s grand jury testimony to
gather more information, with their focus expanding to the firm that had
employed Small, which is led by longtime GOP operative Nathan Sproul.
State authorities are seeking to learn whether any of Small’s
supervisors instructed him or any of his 40 co-workers in Virginia to ask
potential voters about their political leanings during registration drives, the
two sources said. Asking such questions could be a violation of state election
law.
John Holloran, who along with co-counsel Justin Corder represents
Small, said ethics rules prevented him from commenting on the probe. Marsha
Garst, the commonwealth attorney overseeing the case, said Friday she could not
describe the nature of the case, but said, “This is a very important
investigation to the state, and we intend to prosecute Mr. Small to the fullest
extent.”
Sproul’s firms and political consulting operations have faced
questions over the past eight years, including investigations and formal
charges of suppressing Democratic votes, destroying voter registrations and
other election violations. The charges against Small came a month after voter
registration work by a Sproul company prompted a fraud investigation
in Florida.
Nine Florida counties reported in September that hundreds of voter
registration forms submitted by Sproul’s firm contained irregularities such as
suspicious, conflicting signatures and missing information.
A spokesman for Sproul, David Leibowitz, said Sproul and his
company are cooperating with election authorities in Florida and Virginia and
“will continue to do everything within our power to uncover any unethical or
illegal activity.”
After the Florida investigation became public, the Republican
National Committee said it was severing
ties with Strategic Allied Consulting. At that time, Strategic stopped
overseeing registration workers in Virginia and Pinpoint, Strategic’s staffing
contractor, began overseeing the work.
Investigators have gathered information showing that Small
asserted that he worked for Strategic to voters, according to two persons close
to the probe.
Leibowitz emphasized that at the time of the arrest in Virginia,
“Small had no connection to Sproul and the company was no longer working in the
state.”
He said Sproul is accustomed to hearing complaints about his
tactics. “As a political operative you get accused of all kinds of things by
all sides. This kind of allegation has been investigated and he (Sproul) has
been cleared time and time again.”
Companies created or led by Sproul have received more than $3
million in payments from the Republican party during this election campaign.
Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign paid Sproul’s firm $71,000 late last year
for “field consulting.”
American Crossroads, the political organization that Republican
operative Karl Rove helped found, paid Sproul’s firms $1.5 million in the week
before the 2010 midterm elections for get-out-the-vote efforts and voter phone
calls, according to a review of election records.
In total, companies led by Sproul have received $21 million from
Republican campaign committees for voter outreach work since 2004. Much of the
2012 payments came from the national party to pay for voter registration in the
key states of Florida, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia.
Small, 23, of Phoenixville, Pa., was arrested Oct. 18 and charged
with eight felonies and five misdemeanors involving election fraud.
Rob Johnson, the manager of a local discount goods store, said he
had seen a man toss a bag into the store’s cardboard recycling bin and then had
found that the bag contained registration forms. Johnson said in an interview
that he called authorities the next day when he spotted the man’s car, with
Pennsylvania plates, parked at the Harrisonburg-Rockingham County Republican
Party headquarters.
The commonwealth’s attorney had planned to question Small about
his employers and training before a special multi-jurisdiction grand jury based
in Stanton, Va., according to the two persons familiar with the probe. But
state officials changed course when they realized that Virginia law would give
Small immunity from election-law charges if he were questioned about his
superiors.
His first formal court date, largely a formality to determine if
he understands his rights to counsel, is now scheduled for Monday.
Alice Crites and T.W. Farnam contributed to this report.
