Xi Has No Place in Women’s Bedrooms
China’s president wants women to have more babies to fulfill their national service. It’s not working and is covering for the real problem: There aren’t enough jobs for everyone.
Photographer: Pool/Getty Images AsiaPac (2023)
It’s been a tough start to the year for Chinese President Xi Jinping. He’s had to contend with the election victory of Taiwan’s pro-democracy party leader — the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lai Ching-te — a stock market rout and increasing signs that the economy is in the doldrums. Evidence to show that citizens are upset about the situation has been quickly swept aside on social media, but the murmurings are there. So much so that this week, there’s been a renewed focus on what has been called the “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture,” introduced last October, as a way to decipher what he has in store for the nation’s rejuvenation.
It’s a big theme for him — and an extension of Xi’s desire to reshape the country in his own image. Last October he started talking up the responsibilities for women, saying they need to step up and make more babies for the good of the nation. This is a classic chauvinist-regime trope, and women need to do their best to reject it. The Communist Party has always tried to control the wombs of the other half of the population, but even under Mao Zedong, who famously said “women hold up half the sky,” there was a relative degree of egalitarianism between the sexes that you don’t see under Xi today. It sets a dangerous precedent.
The economy — namely, the lack of jobs — is the real reason this this is happening. The other? “Xi is a male chauvinist,” Xia Ming, political science professor at New York's City University told me.
“He believes in the patriarchal hierarchy and wants to control Chinese women,” Xia said, adding that the president wants them to retreat from professional affairs and have babies. “This would help in two ways: It would give more opportunities to Chinese men during a period of high unemployment but would also help to in theory increase the birth rate, as China is facing a demographic challenge.”
The unemployment rate is so bad that last year, the country stopped releasing the data, only to reestablish the criteria upon which it is calculated and rerelease it this year — this time with rosier figures. China said its youth jobless rate improved in December to 14.9%, after policymakers spent months tweaking their methodology on the figure that hit a record high last summer, according to the statistics department.