An Economist leader declares, “China’s rulers have a woman problem.” It may look familiar:
China no direct translation of the word “manosphere” but it is plagued by one nonetheless—indeed, the abuse of women on social media is every bit as poisonous there as it is in democracies. The difference is that, in a country where censors rush to silence posts they dislike, the authorities tolerate the manosphere’s vitriol and instead focus their energy on women. The cyberspace regulator’s crackdown on harmful content specifically lists “extreme feminism”, including posts that promote singledom.
Alas, it is not as different here as I would prefer.
This is just one symptom of a much broader problem that China’s old, male rulers have with the opposite sex. Unlike Asia’s other two big powers, Japan and India, China has never been led by a woman in modern times.
Unless we’re counting Edith Wilson, neither have we.
As China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has consolidated power, he has also sidelined women. The powerful Politburo, which usually has 24 members, has been exclusively male since 2022. No woman has ever made it to the more important Politburo Standing Committee. No wonder China has been tumbling down international rankings of gender equality.
There are indeed women in our cabinet, although quite a few fewer than there were months ago.
At the heart of Communist Party policies towards women is a crushing error. The party is worried about the country’s demography. But it imagines the solution lies in browbeating women and telling them, in traditional tones, to be “virtuous wives and good mothers”. The result is an approach to women that will not only fail to realise the party’s narrow aims, but will also make countless women miserable.
Again, there are similarities here.
Mao Zedong famously claimed that women hold up “half the sky”, but you would never know it today. The party’s disastrous one-child policy, in place until 2015, led to millions of female fetuses being aborted. The inevitable result is that millions of women are now missing.
Here, thankfully, we diverge considerably. While I understand the demographic challenges that led to the One Child Policy, the consequences were predictable and, indeed, predicted.
Their absence leads to other terrible outcomes. Counting men aged 23-37 and women aged 22-36, China has 22.5m more men than women. To be a catch, a man needs an education, a solid job, a flat and, in many regions, to pay a hefty fee to his bride’s family. Around a third of young male migrants who intend to marry think they have only a 50% or lower chance of doing so by the age of 30.
As a result, resentments abound: many men, especially rural ones, are chauvinists. The sense of bitterness is likely to spread. Women make up more than half of those in higher education; men who lack education or economic prospects risk falling ever further behind.
Again, we see this here. While we don’t have the same gender imbalance (although high incarceration rates for Black males does create a milder version of it in that demographic), women have gone on to college at considerably higher rates for decades now. Since women seldom mate below their socioeconomic station, there are huge swaths of men who are essentially unmarriageable. Especially with the more desirable women to whom they feel entitled.
The prescribed policy changes are mostly China-specific:
The Chinese government cannot suddenly conjure up millions of missing women to alleviate the situation. But it could introduce policies that boost the marriage rate among Chinese women while improving the choices available to them.
One idea is to ensure that women have proper rights within marriages. The enforcement of laws on harassment, marital rape and domestic violence is woefully inadequate. More might marry if they were assured of fair treatment in cases of divorce, including payment of child support. If it were easier for wives to divorce bad husbands, more might remarry.
Still, many OECD countries have tried to encourage women to have more children, with very little success. Indeed, political, social, and economic equality makes it very difficult, indeed, to entice them to do so, given that they bear a disproportionate amount of the sacrifice.
