BEIJING -- Women in China "hold up half the sky," the founder of modern China, Mao Zedong, was fond of saying. But these days the fairer sex is not holding up much of anything.
Women account for just 1 percent of the mayors in China and only one of the 29 ministers in the State Council, China's Cabinet. When Song Xiuyan was named governor of Qinghai province, just north of Tibet, in January, she became only the third woman to head a province in 56 years of Communist Party rule.
The Communist Party has achieved some remarkable advances for women, such as slashing female infanticide and female illiteracy and banning arranged marriages and the painful tradition of foot-binding. Mao and the early revolutionaries also encouraged women to enter politics, providing training and setting quotas.
But as the planned economy gave way to capitalism, politics has increasingly become a man's world. After decades of improvement, women's participation in politics is dropping in all levels of government, from village committees to the Communist Party's Central Committee.
In the last Party Congress, in 2002, the percentage of women in the 198-member Central Committee dropped to 2.5 percent, an all-time low in the party's history, from a high of 10 percent in 1973.
One of many reasons cited for the decline is that government has become more decentralized and the party less intrusive as the economy has opened up. The competitive pressures of the new market economy have brought out biases that had been suppressed in the collective era.
Ironically, the very organization that exists to help women -- the All-China Women's Federation -- doesn't serve them well in the country's new era, analysts said.
...."Often at the local level they will be training women to work as domestic servants," said Nick Young, editor of China Development Brief and an expert on social development in China. "That's a bit weird."
Many of its top officials see their primary task as supporting Communist Party rule. That means blocking the development of any independent women's movement.
"The Women's Federation is very hostile to women organizing independently," Young said.
Women in top positions are often promoted into leadership posts at the Women's Federation itself, simply because they're women.
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