Page 131 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

118 LOUISE EDWARDS
organizations, one of which is the ACFW, so much of this 17 per cent would be involved
solely in ‘women’s work’. Mass Organizations serve to link specific groups within society
and integrate them with national and local political affairs. They are also charged with
defending the legitimate rights and interests of their constituency, but in effect, these
organizations are CCP organs. The Communist Youth League of China, and the All China
Federation of Trade Unions are two other examples of Mass Organizations. Similarly,
women represent only 10 per cent of the full-time Leading Cadres in enterprises and only
8 per cent of Leading Cadres in state organs. Ye Zhonghai describes these data as revealing
that, ‘While women hold up half the sky in society in general, they only hold up a little
bit [of the sky] within the ranks of the leadership’ (2000:231).
In the Chinese Communist Party, whose members comprise the vast majority of
members of the higher echelons of state power (that is, NPC) as well, the situation for
women is similar (see Tables 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7). Women are congregated at the lower
levels of Party organizational structures—and moreover, the CCP compares badly with
other communist parties around the world on this ranking, according to Kuang Shiying
(1992:238). Stanley Rosen noted in 1995:

Since the founding of the CCP in 1921, only three women have been full members
of the party’s Politburo, while two others have been alternate members. No
woman has ever made it to the innermost circle of power, the standing committee
of the Politburo
(Rosen 1995:317).

In 2002 Wu Yi, an expert in foreign trade and the petroleum industry, was elected to the
Politburo, she is the first to have been elected to this committee who has not had marital
connections to top men. Of the three women members of the Politburo prior to her
recent election, each was wife to a politically powerful man: Jiang Qing was the wife
of CCP Chairman Mao Zedong, Ye Qun was the wife of Lin Biao, and Deng Yingchao was
Table 5.5 Female members of the Political Bureau of the CCP in post-1949 China

Sources: Adapted from Rosen (1995), p. 318; China Internet Information (2002); People’s Daily
Online (2002).