Women’s oppression in China after 1949

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the binding of little girls’ feet was still common practice in most of rural China, resulting in adult women hobbling around on three-inch stumps, restricting their movement and ability to work outside the family home.1 Today, women make up over 45 percent of the Chinese labour force. However, there is no linear progress towards women’s liberation and equality. Over 75 years since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, China ranks 103rd in the global gender-gap list measuring various indicators of inequality.2 Official pressure on women to have children within a nuclear family structure is relentless. Unmarried women in their late-20s are referred to in derogatory terms such as “leftover”. In 2023, president and leader of the Chinese Communist Part (CCP) Xi Jinping told the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) to “guide women to play their roles in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation” and “in establishing good family traditions”. They should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing” among women, so they can “respond to the aging of the population”.3

Even today, some on the global left retain illusions in Chinese Communism as superior to the Western capitalist system, and the Chinese state itself selectively uses Marxist terminology to justify its system. Yet, as Hsiao-Hung Pai notes in her book Scattered Sand, “Chinese socialism has become a reactionary ideology of the state, markedly in its suppression of dissent”.4

This article adds a Chinese dimension to Shelia McGregor’s earlier article in International Socialism, “Sexism, socialism and the state”.5 Here, McGregor explains the nature of bureaucratic state capitalism in the Eastern Bloc, describing how the family remained central to the reproduction of labour power and was the root of women’s oppression under Stalinism. In China, there is no question that women’s lives changed after the 1949 revolution. However, this was not liberation; Chinese women were still responsible for raising the next generation and caring for the older generation. The double burden of performing paid work and unpaid domestic care as mothers, wives and daughters remained on women’s shoulders. This is still true today. In China, as in Western capitalism, the family remains central to the reproduction of the next generation of workers and to women’s oppression. As Chanie Rosenburg writes in her book Women and Perestroika, equality is not simply giving women the right to shovel manure.6

The road to the 1949 revolution

The 1949 revolution broke the power of imperialism and warlordism, which dominated a largely rural China. Millions of peasants welcomed it, hoping the birth of a new China would transform their lives, a position shared by millions of people around the world. Many went further, believing that the country would become a socialist society and that this would mean women would be liberated.

Before 1949, across much of China, especially in the north, most women rarely if ever worked outside the home. Common sayings in pre-revolutionary China included: “No matter how good a woman, she will circle the kitchen stove. No matter how inferior a man, he will travel the world.” Someone knocking on a household’s door would be told that “there is no-one home”, if no men were present. Domestic violence was so frequent that another common expression was: “When men get angry, they beat women. When women get angry, men also beat them”.7 The only way that many women escaped a violent relationship was through suicide. In traditional Chinese families, women were “married out” of the family and became responsible for caring for their husbands’ parents as they aged, rather than their own.

The birth of girls was seen as an economic misfortune, because daughters were regarded as goods that lost money as they grew up since they would contribute little or nothing to their birth families. An old Chinese proverb claimed having a daughter was like “water poured into a neighbour’s garden”.8 In some rural areas, parents sold their girl children as child brides to their future husband’s family. This saved the birth parents the cost of raising a child who would inevitably leave the family and join another. For the future husband’s family, it was cheaper to raise the girl than pay the bride price for an adult woman.9 The historian Margery Wolf describes the birth of daughters in traditional China as follows: the first birth was a disappointment; a second brought grief and perhaps death of the infant; a third was a tragedy, and the mother was blamed.10 Female infanticide was common. Agnes Smedley, an American journalist who reported from China in the 1930s, describes villages in Anhwei as having “baby ponds” where unwanted female babies were drowned.11

The 1949 revolution saw the end of child brides and arranged marriages. It also gave women the right to divorce their husbands and to own property.However, this was a national development policy, not a socialist revolution. Following Mao Zedong’s 1927 dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, the revolution was based on the military defeat of the old order, preserving much of the existing state.12 China’s new rulers came from the military leaders who commanded the one-million strong peasant army and for whom the interests of workers and peasants were subordinated to the new state’s aim of building a strong and independent industrial economy able to compete with, and defend itself against, more advanced economies. There was no immediate expropriation of big capital, but by the end of the first decade of the new China, most private capital had been taken under state control, with former owners hired as managers. The CCP was not constructing a socialist society but a version of bureaucratic state capitalism, modelled on that of the early Soviet Union. Far from advancing workers’ control, the 1954 constitution did not protect the right to strike. Instead, it emphasised labour discipline and that work is an “honour”.13

Karl Marx’s concept of revolution is fundamentally different from that embodied by Mao and the CCP, being rooted in the principle that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. For Marx, the transformation of social life and of the dominant ideas in society are interdependent and mutually reinforcing:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.14

That the working class was not the central protagonist in the overthrow of the old order differentiated China in 1949 from a genuine socialist revolution, like that of Russia 1917 prior to the Stalinist counter-revolution. The Chinese masses did not go through the same process of getting rid of “the muck of ages”.15 This placed limits on the impact of the revolution on the lives of women and the degree to which ideas about their role in society were transformed.

Change and continuity

The new government did introduce several measures aimed at improving the lives of women. Article 1 of the 1950 Marriage Law abolished “the arbitrary and compulsory feudal marriage system, which is based on the superiority of man over women, and which ignores children’s interests”. It was replaced with a “New Democratic marriage system, which is based on free choice of partners, on monogamy, on equal rights for both sexes, and on protection of the lawful interests of women and children”. Article 2 prohibited “polygamy, concubinage, child betrothal, interference with the remarriage of widows and the exaction of money or gifts in connection with marriage”. Article 8 made mutual support and respect of spouses a “duty”, alongside their common duty “to engage in production, to care for the children, and to strive jointly for the welfare of the family and for the building up of a new society”. Article 13 made it a duty for parents “to rear and to educate their children”, while children were duty-bound “to look after and to assist their parents”. Parents and children were forbidden to “maltreat or desert one another”; “infanticide by drowning and similar criminal acts” were prohibited. The 1954 constitution could boldly proclaim: “women in the People’s Republic of China have equal rights with men in all spheres of life including the political, economic, cultural, social and family spheres”.16

These legal and constitutional changes were important, but they did not go beyond what any serious modernising government might do in pursuit of national development. The 1950 law did not displace the family from its central place in social reproduction, and it was, in any case, limited in its impact by the tenacious hold of traditional practices. The campaign to implement the 1950 law led many women to seek divorce to put an end to their “old style marriages”. The CCP’s initial support for the right to divorce soon evaporated because the policy was unpopular among male peasants and members of the older generation, who felt they were losing control over their families. Divorce remained a legal right but was actively discouraged out of fear of alienating the peasantry.17

During the 1950s, the land of rich peasants, industrialists, merchants and landlords was confiscated and redistributed to the peasants. Rents and interest payments were reduced, and each person was allocated a small plot of land. Chinese women were allowed to own land for the first time. However, even when land deeds were in her name, a woman’s land typically became the property of her birth family or the one into which she married.18 Land redistribution was widely popular among peasants, but not all were supportive of changes in women’s rights. One old peasant commented that “this land reform is very good; the only trouble is we can’t beat our wives anymore”.19

Living standards improved, as did literacy, education and health care. From 1952 to 1982, state-funded institutions provided health care for all. “Barefoot doctors” offered basic healthcare in village healthcare centres, contributing to a fall in infant mortality from 200 to 34 per 1,000 live births.20 During the same period, life expectancy rose from about 35 years to nearer 65.21 Initially, there was an increase in the number of nurseries, communal dining rooms, laundrettes and sewing rooms. However, from the outset, there was never enough childcare. From 1949 to 1951, the number of childcare centres increased ninefold, reaching 15,700 centres caring for 520,000 children. These were supplemented by new seasonal nurseries in rural areas looking after 800,000 children during busy farming periods. Yet, this only covered 2 percent of the 100 million Chinese children, while in the urban areas, by 1955, only 16,500 children were cared for in childcare centres.22

The provision of collective nurseries, dining-halls and laundries would have had a major impact on the unpaid labour shouldered by women in the rural areas, but the state was committed instead to diverting resources towards the industrialisation of urban centres. Rural women’s unpaid labour continued to subsidise economic development.23 Women’s work outside the home was constrained by a persistent sexual division of labour allocating women to roles regarded as unskilled, for which they received lower pay than men.

At a state level, despite propaganda about gender equality, only a handful of women ever played a role in the CCP leadership under Mao, mostly because they were married to important men (such as Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing). Overall, the experience of most Chinese women reinforced Leon Trotsky’s argument: “As long as woman is chained to her housework, the care of the family, the cooking and sewing, all her chances of participation in social and political life are cut down in the extreme”.24

Work points

In 1953, the CCP’s First Five-Year plan mirrored the developmental model of Soviet state capitalism, based on the maximum extraction of surplus labour to fund urban industrialisation. The working day was extended from ten hours to twelve or even eighteen. In 1955, private land ownership was abolished, replaced by large cooperatives, which issued work points to individual adults in exchange for their labour. These points were never allocated fairly. A man doing field labour typically earned ten points per day, whereas no matter how long and how hard a woman worked, she could only earn between six and eight. The only way to eat was to work in the fields and earn “work points”. This forced women to go to work soon after giving birth, resulting in many long-term medical problems. Collective childcare was never a reality for most peasant women; it was usually inadequate and often too far from where they lived. At best, older people would look after children in exchange for “work points”. At worst, children and babies were left on their own, or carried on women’s backs while they worked in the fields.25 One woman describes what she did with her kids while working in the fields:

I went to work in the fields and left the children on the kang [a large family bed that also acted as a cooker and heater in Chinese homes]. I only dressed them in tops and left their bottoms naked. I tied them with a rope to the window frame. When I came back, their poop was all in a line.26

In a further attempt to speed up China’s economic development in 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward (GLF), involving forced collectivisation. In rural and urban areas, production units were brought together into large communes. These communes were then divided into production brigades of 5,000 or more households. Communal kitchens and nurseries were set up, but this was to enable women to work in the fields, not to release them from the drudgery of domestic work.27 Unachievable production targets were introduced, resulting in factory workers losing their meal breaks, and safe working practices were removed. At the beginning of the GLF, in the summer and autumn of 1958, households were told to hand over their food supplies to the collective, and families were expected to donate their pots and woks for smelting, thereby forcing them to eat in the collective dining-hall. Initially, women were generally happy because they no longer had to rush home from the fields exhausted and prepare food for the family.28 However, communal dining halls soon became unpopular, as their gigantic scale gave rise to long queues and cold food, while the failures of the GLF meant that from 1959 many even ran out of food.29

The GLF’s failures were partly due to economic mismanagement, over-reporting of production to ward off punishment from above, and inefficient distribution of food. They were also due to Mao’s specific policies and campaigns, such as “the four pests’ campaign” under which people were told to eliminate sparrows, rats, mosquitoes and flies. The elimination of sparrows resulted in increased numbers of locusts and other crop-destroying insects, undermining the ecological balance. Along with droughts and floods, this led to the Great Famine that killed up to 50 million people. By 1960, grain production had fallen by 26.4 percent in just three years, and by 1961, economic output collapsed by 20 percent.30 During this time, family relations and structures remained largely unchanged: women were still responsible for feeding and maintaining the family.31 Despite the marriage laws, sons were still seen as the permanent members of the household, while daughters continued to be married out of their birth family.

After the disaster of the GLF and Great Famine, Mao was isolated in the CCP leadership—effectively a figurehead with no power. The Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, was an attempt to re-establish his control. As Simon Leys argues, there was “nothing revolutionary about it except its name and nothing cultural about it except the initial pretext. It was a power struggle waged…behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement”.32 Propaganda posters from this period show young women in the Red Guard dressed like male soldiers with short hair, wide belts and armbands.33 Echoing these images, which showed women could do just as much as men, Mao proclaimed: “women hold up half the sky”. There was also a suggestion that inequalities would disappear if women could be more like men.34 However, the rhetorical promotion of equality—including the posters of heroic peasants, “iron girls” and working women—disguised the reality; actual inequalities and the double burden were ignored. The drive for economic growth and accumulation precluded anything more than tiny steps towards gender equality.35

The Cultural Revolution unleashed a rebellion in the cities to which the leadership responded by sending the youth to the countryside. This created a limited sense of freedom for many young women as they left behind the social structures in which they had grown up. At the same time, work and conditions in the countryside were a harsh reminder of the limited nature of the changes since 1949. The CCP’s reforms had produced formal legal equality between men and women, and women were no longer trapped in closed and isolated family units, but the lives of most remained dominated by the daily grind of work, including almost exclusive responsibility for housework and childcare.

Reform and opening up

When Mao died in 1976, China entered a period of economic stagnation and remained economically isolated from the rest of the world. After a brief power struggle, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, ended this isolation with a new economic policy of reform and opening up. This introduced special economic zones (SEZs) to attract foreign capital, allowed the market into some state-owned enterprises and replaced rural collectivisation with the household responsibility system. The latter, introduced in 1978, was designed to boost agricultural production by allowing part of the food produced on newly established private plots to be sold on the open market.36 Such changes disproportionately affected women, in both the countryside and the cities.

The One Child policy

In the early 1970s, the Chinese state became increasingly concerned about population growth and introduced the family planning policy of “later, longer, fewer” to encourage couples to marry later, wait longer between having each child and have fewer children overall.37 Community healthworkers went door-to-door checking which method of birth control each woman was using, recording it on a chart in the local clinic.38 Even so, the population had grown from 542 million in 1949 to 975 million in 1979.39 The One Child Policy—a brutal regime of state surveillance and control over women’s bodies—was launched in response. The state used neighbourhood communities, the ACWF and workplaces to regulate women’s fertility. Their methods included huge fines, loss of jobs, forced abortions, forced insertion of intrauterine devices (IUDs) and sterilisations.

Before 2009, there was still no pension provision in the countryside. Women continued to join their husband’s family and leave their own family after marriage. Having boys was therefore an important insurance for old age and the status of girls suffered accordingly. The result was the concealment of girl children and, in extreme cases, female infanticide. This was exacerbated by the new policy, and, despite its recent relaxation, official National Bureau of Statistics figures show nearly 30 million more men than women living in China in 2025.40

Rural versus urban women

Under the new household responsibility system, work was no longer allocated by team leaders but by the head of individual households. Wolf argues that this was a backward step for women:

The new economic arrangements in the countryside are returning women to their pre-Liberation position in relation to the means of production. Now instead of reporting to the team leader for job assignments…a woman will be under the supervision of the male head of her household. He will decide when she works, what she does, and whether she can take time off.41

The break-up of collectives also resulted in an increase in healthcare costs.42 School attendance fell dramatically: at secondary level, from 46 percent in 1978 to 30 percent in 1983. Studies show that girls were more likely than boys to be removed from primary schools because their family unit needed their labour.43

In the cities, instead of being issued work points, workers were allocated to danwei (work units). The danwei controlled all aspects of people’s lives and were promoted as a socialist “family”, where the leader cared for its members. Yet, just as in the private family, it reinforced traditional gender roles and inequality. Jobs were separated into heavy and light, skilled and unskilled, with most jobs in the heavy and skilled sectors assigned to men, leaving women in the lowest-paid jobs. Today, women still make up a high proportion of workers in textiles and light and handicraft industries.

The danwei organised matchmaking, allocated housing after marriage, attempted to keep marriages stable and monitored family planning. Once married, accommodation would be allocated via men’s danwei but childcare via women’s, so women had to transport children to and from work. Danwei leaders also took responsibility for maintaining harmony among residents and workers. This involved marriage guidance that normally put responsibility on wives to resolve any grievances, including when there were extramarital affairs. As Jieyu Liu points out, the common guidance states: “If your husband has someone outside the family, you must examine yourself carefully. If you try your best to be a good wife, generally speaking, he is less likely to turn to someone else”.44

At the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, when the youth returned to the cities, women near retirement age were encouraged to resign from their jobs so their children could take over their danwei place. The Household Registration (hukou) system was introduced in 1958 to restrict rural to urban migration and hence limit pressure on urban accommodation and resources while ensuring adequate food production to feed the industrialisation drive. The hukou is essentially an internal passport to control migration and distribute welfare and resources. Individuals hold either an urban or rural hukou, which is passed down the generations irrespective of where children are born. Workers with an urban hukou employed in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) traditionally received higher than average wages, with life-time job protection, subsidised housing, medical cover and pensions—a system referred to as the “Iron Rice Bowl”. This security began to be removed from the 1980s, in the first stage of reform and opening up to foreign capital and with the introduction of SEZs in the south-east. This accelerated in the 1990s as reforms intensified and China prepared to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, beginning to shut down or privatising SOEs. Women lost their jobs first: in 1987, 64 percent of those dismissed were women.45 From 1993 to 2003, 63 percent of the 50 million made redundant were women.46

Mass migration of rural labour

As millions of women were sacked from SOEs, the development of SEZs provided their rural sisters an opportunity to migrate to new and rapidly-growing cities, gaining economic independence from their families.47 In May 1980, a small town called Bao’an on the Pearl River Delta, north of Hong Kong, was renamed Shenzhen, upgraded to city status, and foreign capital was invited in. The new factories needed workers. Shenzhen was the first city to introduce temporary household registration, allowing peasants with a rural hukou to work and live in the city. In 1988, Foxconn opened its first factory in Shenzhen with a workforce of 150, of whom 100 were rural women. Women were perceived as having desirable attributes such as nimble fingers and docility.

During the 1980s, it is estimated that 70 percent of new factory workers in the Shenzhen SEZ were women.48 Before 1980, the area around Shenzhen had a population of 310,000 residents, of whom fewer than 30,000 were classed as workers. By the end of 2000, Shenzhen’s population was 4.3 million, of whom three million were workers. However, 70 percent of the population were temporary workers for whom the local state does not have to provide housing, job security or welfare. The mega-factories that still dominate Shenzhen provided housing and food for workers at minimum costs in dormitory style buildings. Temporary workers’ family members are not allowed to live in Shenzhen unless they can find a job.

Patrick McGee points out for Apple in China that rural “people were sending their daughters away to work in these factories, because in one year of work they could bring home a dowry that could sustain them for five or ten years in the small villages”.49 Meanwhile, the cities adopted a hyper-capitalist approach to workers, treating them as so much factory fodder, rather than human beings with diverse needs. As Yuan Yang writes:

The cities wanted rural workers to fuel their factories, but just wanted the labour, not the human beings. So rural Hukou workers are expected to go back to their villages for health care, retirement and for their children’s education. For them, cities are for working not for long term living.50

This situation enables employers to pay even lower wages, as a large share of social reproduction (childcare, education, care for the elderly) remains in the countryside, unpaid.51

Conditions in the factories are dangerous and grim. Workers are required to work long hours, with compulsory overtime, amid a culture of sex discrimination and sexual harassment.52 Rules in factories that manufacture Apple products include: no talking, no laughing, no sleeping during working hours. Punishments could mean losing the monthly bonus or even dismissal.53 This resulted in huge profits: in 2010, for every iPhone sold, Apple took 58.8 percent in profits, with 21.9 percent of the price contributing to component parts and labour receiving only 1.8 percent.54 The conditions in the factories are beautifully described in a worker’s poem found in a dormitory:

We are a mass of dagongzai / Coming from the north / Coming from the west / At first we didn’t know what dagongzai meant / Now we know, toiling from the sunrise to the sunset / Toiling with drops of blood and sweat / Selling our labour to the boss / Selling our bodies to the factory / Do what they dictate to you / No negotiation / No bargaining / But obey / Money is the magic / And what the capitalists bestow on you / A commodity, a commodity.55

Outbreaks of resistance

Throughout these huge changes, economic growth took priority over poverty reduction and human well-being in CCP policy and planning.56 The costs of social reproduction formerly provided by the state were almost completely privatised. Between 1994 and 2005, while the official inflation index showed a 40 percent rise, private healthcare and education spending more than doubled.57 Unsurprisingly, there has been resistance to these changes: on the factory floor, in the streets and online.

Although erased from official media, the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising still haunts the Chinese ruling class. The countrywide revolt began with students protesting corruption and poor learning and living conditions.58 Many Western scholars present the protests as a struggle for liberal democracy, but, in reality, the protests united students and workers in a movement with the potential to overthrow China’s state capitalism. The mass movement lasted for months and spread throughout China. When the state cracked down and killed thousands of protesters the repression was unable to completely stamp out the resistance.59

The Chinese state describes anything that disturbs social stability as a “mass incident”, including strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins, marches, rallies and riots. The number of recorded mass incidents rose from 8,700 in 1993 to 60,000 in 2003 and 120,000 in 2008.60 Women workers participated actively in the strikes that made up a large proportion of these mass incidents. In October 2002, 200 women workers sacked from a steel mill in the city of Long Yan, Fujian province, marched under a banner reading: “Too Early to Retire, Too Old to Be a Whore!”.61 Between 1993 and 2003, most strikes were against mass redundancies, the closure of SOEs as a result of the privatisation drive and the ending of the Iron Rice Bowl. The scale of resistance meant the ruling class could no longer rely simply on repression. The state response has combined repression and concession: increased police brutality and mass arrests, alongside concessions to some of the workers’ demands.

In 2008, the government introduced its new Labour Contract Law, improving workers’ rights: employers would henceforth have to provide written contracts, pay social security contributions, and address health and safety issues. This alerted the new rural migrant workers to their rights and, rather than subduing the strikes, it boosted action, including to force employers to implement the law locally. From 2007 to 2016, millions of workers took strike action, particularly in the textiles, electronics and car industries. The strikes were unofficial and spontaneous and could involve setting up roadblocks, organising demonstrations and blocking government buildings, often culminating in confrontations with the police. Women workers played a significant role, putting themselves at the front of picket lines and demonstrations and, when facing arrest, calling out sexual harassment by the police.62

When new Apple products are about to be launched, workers at Foxconn factories assembling them face increased production targets, compulsory overtime and speed-ups. Although the suicides at Foxconn are a well-known response, workers soon learned their collective strength and tend to slow down production, going on strike for improved rights and better working conditions.63 In 2007-16, these Foxconn struggles contributed to a massive strike wave, which was based on a developing working-class confidence. This in turn was bolstered by labour shortages that were, in part at least, a long-term consequence of the one child policy, forcing firms to compete with each other to increase wages.64 The contradictions of China’s state capitalism increased and began to embolden workers, with women workers at the heart of the developing radicalisation.

Xi Jinping: oppression and resistance

In the face of this wave of struggle, the current CCP general secretary, Xi Jinping, along with the wider party-state leadership, has increased the coercive power of the state.65 The crackdown has been especially hard on women. Xi has projected himself as the “father of the nation”, stating that “foreign hostile forces” use “Western feminism” to interfere in China’s affairs. He appealed to the most sexist aspects of Confucianism to tighten ideological controls and promote the traditional family as the only way to bring up children. This is part and parcel of an overall increase in nationalism and shift to the right, mirroring similar developments internationally.

On 5 March 2015, five women, soon dubbed the “Feminist Five”, were arrested in Beijing for handing out stickers in preparation for a planned International Women’s Day protest against sexual harassment on public transport. They were released 37 days later, after several protests across the world and within China. The campaign to release the “Feminist Five” was backed by labour activists in Guangdong and Hong Kong.66 In 2016, Xi Jinping advised heads of universities and CCP officials to tighten ideological control on campuses and to transform universities into “strongholds of party leadership”, one result of which was the closure of a number of gender studies programmes.67

The eruption of the international #MeToo movement in 2017 gave confidence to Chinese women to organise. State censors went into overdrive, adding words and phrases like “MeToo”, “MeToInChina” and “sexual assault” to the list of sensitive words and removing posts from social media. To evade censorship, Chinese women started using the emojis for a bowl of rice and bunny, because mi and tu, meaning “rice bunny” when run together, are phonetic Chinese translations of “me” and “too”.68

Despite four decades of spectacular economic growth from 1979, the gender income gap has widened. In 1990, average women’s wages were 34.7 percent lower than those of men; in 2023, the gap was 41 percent.69 According to the broader measure of gender inequalities used by the World Economic Forum for its Global Gender Gap Index, China ranked 69th when Xi came to power in 2012; in 2024, it ranked 106th.70 In addition, under the 2011 Marriage Act, property is not divided equally after a divorce as ownership is determined by the names on the property deeds. In 2012, 30 percent of marital home deeds included the wife’s name, even though over 70 percent of women contribute towards the purchase of property. By 2022, only 25 percent of married women had their name on the property deeds, compared to 92 percent of married men.71 If women leave violent relationships, they also lose their homes. The Chinese government estimates that one in four women are victims of domestic violence, despite introducing a law against it in 2016.72 Women are close to half the working population but still do more housework than their husbands, spending an average of four hours a day on housework and childcare compared with the hour and half that men do.73

The lack of official commitment to addressing these issues is mirrored by the relative absence of women in leadership positions in the CCP and the state it controls. In August 2025, only 13 of the CCP’s 203-strong Central Committee were women, and women made up only 8 percent of SOE executives.74 One-third of CCP members were women, but ever since the party’s formation, they have been largely absent from the leadership. Since 1949, no woman has ever been a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the CCP’s top decision-making body.

Too few children

China’s population has been falling since 2021 and, after years of state pressure on women to have no more than one child, it is now pressuring them to have more.75 However, women have resisted the exhortations of officials and rejected the ideological vision of “happy families”. In 2024, the number of marriages fell to an all-time low of 6.1 million. In the same year, 2.6 million couples filed for divorce despite the introduction of a cooling off period in 2021.76 Those who remained married had fewer children. Average family size shrank from 3.4 persons in 2000 to 2.6 in 2020.77

To maintain the national population, each women would have to have at least two children, but they are currently having less than one. There is constant pressure on Chinese women to marry and reproduce. The derogatory expression “leftover women”, aimed at women who are still unmarried at the age of 27, was introduced by the ACWF in 2007. Cash incentives were introduced to encourage higher birth rates following legal changes in 2016 and 2021, which respectively allowed women to have two and then three children. The school curriculum has been adjusted to emphasise the importance of family and marriage. The images in school textbooks have been changed: images of mothers with one child have been replaced by pregnant women with two children. Local state officials phone women with no children asking: “When did you have your last period and when are you going to get pregnant?”.78 None of this is working, and the number of children being born continues to fall. Meanwhile, the size of the working-age population has been shrinking for over a decade, and China faces the demographic problem of an aging population.

Another contradiction the state faces is that it wants to increase the retirement age, while many families still rely on grandparents for childcare. When parents retire, the probability that their daughter will have a child increases by between 44 percent and 61 percent, so the state would have to provide more creches and childcare if parents worked longer.79

Part of the pro-family propaganda, anathema to Marxism and feminism alike, can be seen on stone monuments across China quoting the words of Xi Jinping on “Family Style”:

The family is the basic cell of society.
The first school in life.
No matter how much life changes,
No matter how big the changes are, we should pay attention to family building.
Focus on family, family education,
Family tradition, closely combined with cultivating and promoting socialism,
The core values of socialism, carry forward the great Chinese nation,
The traditional family virtues of the nation promote family harmony, promote the love between family members, promote the healthy growth of the next generation, and promote the care of the elderly.
Millions of families have become an important basis for national development, national progress, and social harmony.

This reactionary twaddle is reminiscent of the eulogies to the nuclear family in the 1930s as Stalinism reversed the gains of the Russian Revolution. For millions of migrant families, it is a joke. For them, the hukou system means that children do not live with their parents but are cared for by their grandparents, while one or both parents labour in a faraway city for most of the year. In 2000, there were 20 million of these “left behind children”, but, by 2020, this figure had increased to 108 million, 46 percent of rural children.80

LGBT+ oppression

For most of Chinese history being LGBT+ was not an issue: emperors often engaged in open romantic and sexual relationships with male members of their courts.81 Since 1949, official attitudes towards the LGBT+ community have gone through various changes. During the Cultural Revolution, sex between men was condemned as Western degeneracy, and it was regarded as immoral until the 1990s.82 Consensual sexual acts between people of the same sex were considered “hooliganism”, with punishments ranging from imprisonment to execution.83 From the late 1990s and early 2000s, the visibility of LGBT+ people in China increased, alongside organisations and online community groups. The law changed and medical definitions were replaced. In 1997, homosexuality was decriminalised, with the crimes of sodomy and “hooliganism” removed from the criminal code. In 2001, in preparation for joining the WTO and opening-up to some “Western” values, “homosexuality” was removed from the classification of mental disorders. Use of the Internet to access and share information and establish relationships reinforced the developing sense of freedom for LGBT+ people.

During the past decade, however, the Chinese state has returned to a more repressive stance, echoing similar trends in the West. Mama Rainbow, a 2015 film about young gay women and their relationships with their supportive parents, has been removed from all Chinese websites. From 2018 onwards, the US sitcom Friends had all LGBT+ references removed, and the hashtag #FriendsCensored was itself censored shortly after.84 The Chinese version of the film Bohemian Rhapsody, about the lead singer of Queen, Freddy Mercury, had all mention of his sexuality and his AIDS diagnosis deleted.85 Two years later, China shut down the leading lesbian dating app Rela, which had five million users.86

In May 2023, the well-established Beijing LGBT+ centre was closed due to “forces beyond our control”, an expression used when official state pressure is applied.87 Thirteen months later, Roxie, one of the few lesbian bars in Shanghai, was closed, again due to “forces beyond our control”. The CCP has always had a prudish and conservative attitude to sexuality, and the state has long intruded into people’s private lives. However, if some in the CCP believe that making it harder for lesbians to meet will encourage them to pair off with men, they will be disappointed. “I don’t know where Roxie’s regulars will go now”, said one netizen, “but I’m sure they won’t go home to have children”.88

The population is less homophobic than the government, especially among urban, educated youth.89 The LGBT+ Pride 2021 Global Survey found that in China, 43 percent believe that gay people should be allowed to marry and a further 20 percent that they should be allowed legal recognition short of marriage. Only 18 percent believe they should not be allowed either.90 The central state still prohibits gay marriage and adoption by gay couples, but in recent years, several cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have given legal recognition to mutual guardianship by same-sex couples, who are entitled to the same benefits as married couples, including power of attorney and inheritance rights.91

Chinese trans people face similar difficulties to those in the West. A 2019 national survey discovered that 56 percent of trans people reported a history of suicidal thoughts or major depression. Some 90 percent of trans women and 84.5 percent of trans men experienced “intense conflict with their parents”.92 After gender reassignment surgery, someone can change their official documents, but they cannot change their names on academic qualifications, which can lead to employment difficulties. Trans women are required to notify family, prove they have no criminal record and receive psychological treatment to be allowed a prescription for Hormone Replacement Therapy. At the same time, however, trans woman talk show host Jin Xing has attracted over 150 million TV viewers.

Oppression of Uyghur women

The oppression of women in contemporary China is multiplied many times over for Uyghur women. In 1949, roughly 75 percent of the population in Xinjiang province were Uyghur Muslims and only 2 percent Han Chinese, but by 2020, these percentages had changed to 45 percent Uyghur and 42 percent Han.93 Since the formation of the People’s Republic, the Uyghurs and other minorities have, at different times, faced a combination of oppression and exploitation.94

The Chinese state encourages Han Chinese college educated students to marry and have children but simultaneously discourages and intimidates ethnic minority women from doing the same. This especially affects Uyghur women from Xinjiang province. For decades, ethnic minorities were allowed to have three or more children, but in January 2015, Hou Hammin, a CCP official from Xinjiang, said the government needed to combat “worryingly high birthrates” as “this negatively affects not only the physical and mental health of children and women, but also the population quality in the region, posing risks to social stability”.95

Measures to curb the birthrate amongst Uyghur women include forced sterilisations and abortions. Moreover, in 2017, the CCP banned Muslim babies from having Islamic or Quranic names, and Uyghur women were no longer allowed to wear the niqab in public.96 Young Uyghur women are put under pressure by CCP officials to marry Han men, schools only teach Mandarin and up to a million Uyghur children have been removed from their families and put into boarding schools.97

Conclusion

The national development initiatives since 1949 have outlawed many of the most oppressive practices that had blighted the lives of Chinese women for centuries. Over the following decades, women have been drawn into the paid workforce in greater numbers and given a glimpse of economic independence, even as they shouldered the double burden of paid and domestic labour. Yet, women’s liberation demands far more than access to largely low-grade jobs in workplaces over which they have no control. The state capitalist nature of early post-1949 China denied women (and most men) this control, while also bolstering the family structures that lie at the root of women’s oppression.

The essential patterns of women’s oppression of the Mao era have persisted into the reform period and up to the present day, including the almost total absence of women from leading positions in party and state apparatuses. Women’s labour is mobilised when required (women comprise well over one-third of migrant workers for example), but the party-state glorifies domesticity and the family when it is more difficult to absorb women into production.98

As China’s economic growth model faces mounting problems amid a long, drawn-out crisis of debt, deflation and the bursting of a property bubble, the ruling class around Xi Jinping has turned towards increased authoritarianism. Strikers and labour, non-governmental organisations, radical students, ecologists, feminists and others have faced increased state surveillance and violence. Official rhetoric directed at feminists suggest difficult times ahead for China’s women.

Still, there is hope. Chinese women have repeatedly demonstrated resilience and courage in the face of state power in the past decade and more. They have demonstrated their capacity to organise and lead collective resistance, and to place themselves at the front of pickets and protests to reduce the likelihood of police violence.99 This experience will be vital in the years ahead and will contribute to the struggle for freedom for both women and men. In China, as elsewhere, women’s liberation can only be achieved with the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the construction of collectivised social reproduction.

Sally-Ann Robinson is a long-standing member of the SWP from West Yorkshire.

Notes