Gender-Responsive Governance and Women’s Political Empowerment in China: Implications for Social Justice and Inclusive Governance

Abstract

This article assesses the relationship between gender-responsive governance, public policy, and women’s political empowerment in the People’s Republic of China. It argues that China has constructed a relatively dense architecture of gender-responsive policy constitutional equality, successive national programmes for women’s development, legislative quotas, and a 2022 revision of the Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests yet this architecture has not been converted into commensurate political power. Women’s share of National People’s Congress (NPC) deputies has risen to 26.5 per cent, and female membership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reached 31 per cent in 2024. However, at the very top of the party-state, women are almost unheard of: for the first time in 25 years, there is no woman in the 20th Politburo; no woman has ever been in the Politburo Standing Committee and no woman has served as a provincial party secretary. The article adopts a gender-responsive governance, gender mainstreaming and gender resources-agency achievement framework developed by Kabeer, and outlines a causal pathway from the design of governance to policy to political participation to empowerment. The chain is demonstrated to be broken in two ways: first, by the uneven implementation of otherwise very ambitious policy; and second, by the lack of link between the descriptive representation of women in legislatures and grassroots committees and their actual influence on decision-making. The idea being that a Leninist party-state can achieve significant social and legal improvements without bringing the male rule of high politics into disrepute. The article ends with suggestions for the binding representation targets, the appointment of women, and improved monitoring and accountability.