Among the perversities of a Washington Post op-ed by two congressional Democrats who serve on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Raja Krishnamoorthi and Kathy Castor, is the lament that the policies of Xi Jinping have “driven women out of political decision-making….” (“As China backslides on women’s rights, the U.S. can step up,” July 1, 2024).
Xi has doubtless driven women “out of political decision-making.” Xi has also driven men “out of political decision-making.”
What kinds of decisions?
This driving out is being done in the context of a totalitarian dictatorship. Those who remain a welcome part of the regime and please Xi are those who help him achieve his dictatorial goals. Mass surveillance, mass censorship, mass indoctrination, mass torture, mass rape, mass murder, plus endless bullying of Taiwan, the Philippines, and other countries—these are the type of thing one implicitly accepts and furthers if one is part of “political decision-making” in China.
Krishnamoorthi and Castor also write: “For the first time in two decades, there are no women in the Politburo, the CCP’s executive policymaking body.”
It’s a start. Now kick out all the men. Kick everybody out of this evil regime, be they male, be they female. Let them all go home and make babies.
Are there many, or any, members of the Chinese Communist Party with jobs in the Chinese government who are advocating or working to implement unfettered laissez-faire capitalism and full protection of individual rights in China and an end to mass surveillance, mass censorship, mass indoctrination, mass rape, mass murder, bullying of other countries, transnational repression?
I doubt it. But I don’t know. Maybe there are such people—deep, deep under cover—and maybe some of them are women. Anyway, Krishnamoorthi and Castor don’t consider this possibility.
It is true that Xi and other male CCP officials in China are telling women “That Their Place Is in the Home.” According to an October 2023 New York Times report: “ ‘We should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,’ [Xi Jinping] said in a speech [at the 13th National Women’s Congress], adding that it was the role of party officials to influence young people’s views on ‘love and marriage, fertility and family.’ ”
After decades of brutally stopping women from making babies, the CCP has now decided that there are too few babies. It wants more babies.
Still working
On the other hand, it’s not as if it has now become illegal in China to hold a job if you are a woman.
A World Bank graph says that “based on data obtained from International Labour Organization and United Nations Population Division,” the percentage of females in the total Chinese labor force was about 45.6% in 1990, dipped to about 44.4% by 2010, and by 2023 was about 45.1%.
A Wall Street Journal piece from 2022 says that female participation in the workforce “has steadily decreased since 1990, according to the World Bank, and dropped further under Mr. Xi, to 62% in 2021 from 64% in 2012.”
Such statistics are guesstimates. But we have no reason to believe they err by more than a parsec or two, and we’d have heard about sudden mass layoffs of tens of millions of women.
So despite Krishnamoorthi and Castor’s complaint about how women in China are being “driven out of political decision-making” (decision-making about how best to conduct mass surveillance, mass censorship, mass indoctrination, mass rape, mass murder, bullying of other countries, transnational repression, etc.) and how women are being driven “out of the workforce and back into subordinate roles in all aspects of modern life,” it doesn’t look as if all the women in China are being fired.
Female spokesmen for the Chinese government seem to be still around, continuing to spout the CCP line on cue. These women, at any rate, have not been required to devote all their time and energy to making babies.
What would be a non-subordinate role in Chinese society?
China is a totalitarian dictatorship. Granting that women suffer more restrictions or oppression than men in various contexts, it is nonetheless true that everybody—male, female—is stuck in a subordinate role. Everybody is being ground down. Everybody is being surveilled and censored, told what to do, subject to being imprisoned and tortured if they get out of line.
Krishnamoorthi and Castor have not entirely mastered the history of the actions of Mao, who ruled the People’s Republic of China from its founding in 1949 until his death in 1976. “Mao Zedong once declared that ‘women hold up half the sky,’ ” they write. “Yet even the pretense of that belief has been abandoned in today’s China. President Xi Jinping, Mao’s current successor as Communist Party chairman, has turned back the clock on the role of women in society and the workplace.” That’s all they have to say about Mao, that he said that thing.
It’s unclear from this passage whether the authors think that Mao’s assertion that “women hold up half the sky” was only a pretense. It’s unclear whether they think that merely pretending to believe the Right Thing about some important social question is better than not pretending to believe it. But somebody should tutor them about how Mao’s policies and power games killed tens of millions of people—males and females.
Yes and no
The authors and I agree that it’s bad for the CCP to tighten divorce laws, “making it difficult for women to leave abusive marriages.” But it is peculiar to say that the party has “regressed on reproductive choice” by seeking to reduce abortions for “nonmedical reasons” when for decades CCP policies to limit the number of children included forced abortions. Were forced abortions a superior policy?
They add that the CCP’s regression on reproductive choice “doesn’t apply to the Uyghur minority, subject to an ongoing genocide, whose birthrates the CCP has reduced by means that include forced sterilizations.”
That’s right. The party state wants more babies from the mothers who belong to the “right” ethnic groups and fewer babies from the mothers who belong to the “wrong” ethnic groups, like the Uyghurs.
Krishnamoorthi, Castor, and I also agree that Xi’s crackdown on women’s rights activists is objectionable. As are all China’s crackdowns on all rights activists.
They conclude by proposing that the U.S. Congress show the world a better way by passing “the Women’s Health Protection Act, the Equal Rights Amendment and the Paycheck Fairness Act” to ensure that “American women have an equal opportunity to succeed.” It’s allegedly much harder for an American woman to get a job and succeed than it is for an American man to do so, and we need to push United States in a more communist direction to fix this.
My alternative proposal is to remove all the shackles that make it harder for both men and women to succeed in the American economy. Slash taxes and regulations. Don’t add more. Instead of emulating the Chinese Communist Party by increasing governmental interference with employment agreements, institute and safeguard the opposite of China’s dystopian nightmare: freedom.
