Women, Work, and the Party: The promises & gaps in China’s new White Paper

China’s latest white paper, ‘China’s Achievements in Women’s Well-Rounded Development in the New Era,’ offers both a celebration of progress and a carefully curated narrative of state benevolence.

The framing is celebratory — Chinese women are portrayed as standing at the “forefront of the times,” enjoying unprecedented opportunities thanks to socialism with Chinese characteristics. Yet beneath the rhetoric, the document conceals more than it reveals. The paper highlights statistics, achievements, and Xi Jinping’s personal role in steering gender policies, while also projecting China as a global leader in women’s empowerment.

The white paper stresses that since 2012, gender equality has been woven into the CPC’s modernisation blueprint, with Xi Jinping championing reforms, laws and programmes. It highlights expanded educational opportunities, poverty alleviation benefits for women, and greater access to healthcare and employment. But when juxtaposed with lived realities, the narrative collapses under the weight of contradictions.

For instance, while the paper foregrounds women’s role in national rejuvenation, China is grappling with a shrinking population for the first time in six decades. Facing a rapidly aging workforce, Beijing has moved from strict population control to actively encouraging childbirth, offering subsidies and longer parental leave. Yet far from empowering women, these policies often backfire. Employers perceive women as “costly hires,” leading to workplace discrimination. Women report being asked about marriage or childbearing intentions during job applications, far more often than men. This illustrates the paradox of state-directed gender policy: measures designed to stimulate fertility are undermining women’s labor market equality.

Confucian legacies still linger, reinforcing gendered hierarchies. While the Party frames gender equality as a socialist achievement, cultural expectations — women as caretakers, men as breadwinners — remain deeply embedded. Surveys reveal women earn significantly less than men, face a glass ceiling in management, and even suffer appearance-based pressures in recruitment processes. The white paper’s optimism on “broad prospects” rings hollow against such realities. Nonetheless, it would be remiss to overlook the substantial advances Chinese women have made in areas such as education, healthcare access and poverty reduction. Women now account for more than half of university graduates, and female literacy rates have risen dramatically compared to a generation ago.

In rural areas, targeted poverty alleviation campaigns have improved maternal healthcare and expanded opportunities for women to engage in non-agricultural employment. These gains have not only enhanced individual life prospects but also helped narrow regional gender gaps, suggesting that state-led interventions have produced measurable benefits in raising the baseline for millions of women. However, there remains significant work to be done.

Representation in politics is another gaping void. Despite women comprising nearly half the population, they remain nearly invisible in senior Party and state leadership. After the 20th Party Congress in 2022, there were no women in the Politburo for the first time in 25 years. The absence is not incidental but emblematic: as observers have argued, the Congress’ all-male composition reflects a system that neither cultivates female cadres at local levels nor encourages vertical mobility for women in the Party hierarchy.

A USCC (US-China Economic and Security Review Commission) report from 2023 notes that women remain severely underrepresented in CCP central leadership and within executive positions of state institutions. The USCC underscores that while occasional symbolic appointments are made at lower levels, they rarely translate to real influence or structural pathways to senior power. Women account for less than 8 per cent of senior leadership positions in the CCP, and their presence in provincial leadership, ministerial roles or the military remains negligible. The white paper’s claim that women are “fully leveraging their proactive role” in governance thus reads more as aspiration than fact. Unless the Party loosens opaque cadre promotion mechanisms and fosters real pipelines for women — not just ceremonially but with political power — the claim of “well-rounded development” in representation will remain more propaganda than progress.

At the corporate level too, progress stalls. While Chinese women have high workforce participation and often exceed men in educational attainment, their ascent to executive ranks remains stunted. Only 19 per cent of executives are women, compared to about 25 per cent globally. Structural barriers — family responsibilities, unconscious bias, and lack of sponsorship — continue to sideline women’s leadership potential. Even international studies underscore that gender-diverse leadership improves governance and financial performance, yet China seems unable — or unwilling — to institutionalise reforms that would disrupt entrenched male dominance.

Historical context deepens the critique. From Confucian obedience codes to foot-binding and arranged marriage, patriarchal controls have long constrained Chinese women. While the Communist revolution and Mao’s dictum that “women hold up half the sky” briefly elevated women into the workforce, subsequent decades revealed cyclical patterns: women mobilised when useful to the state, then relegated to domesticity when political priorities shifted. Today’s white paper appears to be another iteration of this instrumentalist logic. Women are framed not as autonomous citizens but as demographic resources, mobilised for the “Two Centenary Goals” and the cause of national rejuvenation.

This instrumentalism is sharpened by demographic anxiety. The reversal of the one-child policy in 2015 was less about expanding women’s choices than about ensuring enough births to sustain. The shift to a three-child policy, coupled with restrictions on divorce and abortion access, reveals the true tension: the Party’s developmental goals often eclipse women’s autonomy. Far from ensuring “well-rounded development,” state policies push women to reconcile impossible roles — productive workers, childbearers, and ideological symbols of modern China.

Furthermore, China has also actively positioned itself as a stakeholder in global gender governance. From hosting the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women to Xi Jinping’s pledges at the UN on gender equality, Beijing has consistently sought to link domestic progress with international leadership. Programmes such as women-focused poverty alleviation initiatives and participation in UN forums on women’s rights have allowed China to present itself as a model from the Global South, emphasising a path to gender equality rooted in development rather than liberal individualism, even as domestic inequalities remain.

In essence, the white paper must be read not as a neutral progress report but as a strategic narrative. Its purpose is two-fold: domestically, to reassure women that the Party is attentive to their needs while subtly nudging them into reproductive roles; internationally, to present China as a responsible global leader in gender equality, echoing its role in hosting the landmark 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women. Yet, statistics on workplace discrimination, pay gaps, political exclusion, and fertility anxieties make clear that Chinese women continue to face deeply entrenched inequality.

The paradox of China’s gender politics is thus laid bare. Women are indispensable to the Party’s modernisation project, but their rights remain contingent — elevated when aligned with national objectives, curtailed when inconvenient. If anything, the white paper illustrates how “women’s well-rounded development” in China is less about emancipation and more about state-led mobilisation. Until women’s autonomy is decoupled from demographic engineering and political expediency, the gap between official narratives and lived realities will only deepen.

(The writer is the Director of the Organisation for Research on China and Asia (ORCA) in New Delhi, specialising in Chinese politics and foreign policy)