China’s official rhetoric on women has increasingly emphasised family and domestic responsibilities, while references to their roles in public life have declined, according to a study analysing more than three decades of articles in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The CCP has long presented the advancement of women’s rights as one of its achievements. For decades, it promoted Mao Zedong’s slogan that “women hold up half the sky” as a guiding principle of gender equality.
However, the study found that the portrayal of women in China’s official media has gradually shifted towards their familial roles.
The ruling party has historically highlighted women’s contributions to “socialist modernisation and reform and opening up”. According to the researchers, however, a widening gap between the portrayal of women in public and private roles began to emerge in the late 1990s.
Published in the journal Frontiers in Sociology, the study analysed more than 125,000 articles published in the People’s Daily between 1990 and 2023. Researchers Jia Wang of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Ruiyu Zhang of the University of Hong Kong examined vocabulary associated with women’s public and private roles.
Terms associated with the public sphere included “leading woman”, “fighter”, “career” and “entrepreneurship”, while private-sphere terms included “family”, “childbearing”, “housework” and “loving mother”.
The researchers found that references associating women with the private sphere remained strong throughout the period examined.
In the early 1990s, references to women’s public roles were also relatively prominent and at times approached the level of references to their private roles.
A 1992 People’s Daily article titled “In the past, women were said to be inferior to men; today, they hold up half the sky”, for example, described a labour competition and highlighted women’s contribution to “socialist modernisation and reform and opening up”.
From the late 1990s onwards, however, the gap between public and private portrayals widened. References linking women to public roles declined, while their association with family and domestic responsibilities remained strong.
A 2017 People’s Daily article titled “Giving birth is easy, raising children is difficult” featured a woman who had left her job after her child entered school, reflecting the growing emphasis on motherhood and family responsibilities.
Declining representation in political leadership
The decline in women’s representation has also been evident at the highest levels of China’s political system.
There have been no women among the 24 members of the Politburo since 2022. No woman has ever served on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest-ranking decision-making body.
Women remain significantly underrepresented among provincial party leaders as well. Of China’s 31 provincial-level party heads, only one is a woman.
Women account for around 30% of the CCP’s membership, which stands at approximately 101 million members.
The findings suggest that the changing portrayal of women in official media is occurring alongside their limited representation in China’s political leadership, raising questions about the country’s evolving approach to gender equality and women’s participation in public life.
