When Socialist Legacy Meets International Norms: Gender Quota Adoption and Institutional Change in China
This event is part of the mini series on "Women in China". Please join us for the other two webinars online.
Women’s Entitlement in China’s Urbanization: Family Division of Relocated Housing Properties (Monday 19 August 2024)
Media, Gender and Politics: Representation of Female Political Leaders in The People’s Daily (Monday 26 August 2024)
Gender quotas have a long history in China, with the earliest gender quota introduced in 1933 in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s border regions. Yet, research on China’s gender quotas has been scarce. This study addresses the gap by examining the process of gender quota adoption in China’s subnational Party-States and the People’s Congresses. Using an institutional approach, we argue that quota adoption in China was a process of “institutional layering” that lasted from the late 1980s to the 2010s, during which domestic actors contested the CCP’s existing personnel rules and strategically exploited the CCP’s ideological commitment to gender equity and its need for an improved international image during the second wave of global gender quota adoption. During the process, we see two changes: the slow diversification of domestic actors, including both state and non-state ones, and the shifting of the actors’ working strategy from an informal and network-based approach to an institutionalized one that operated through formal channels. In so doing, this article expands the comparative literature on gender quotas, which has been preoccupied with quotas in elected parliaments, and enriches understanding of Chinese politics.
About the speakers
Xinhui Jiang is Assistant Professor at Nanjing University, China and her research examines gender and politics, local elections, and representation in China. Her work has appeared on Government and Opposition, The China Quarterly, Regional Studies, and Politics & Gender, among others, and she is the winner of the 2016 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics. She holds a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Delaware, US. Before joining Nanjing University, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Freie University Berlin, Germany.
Louise Edwards (Moderator) is Emeritus Professor of Chinese History at UNSW, Sydney. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the University of Technology of Sydney’s Australia-China Research Institute and a Senior Advisor to Asialink at Melbourne University. In 2022 she was appointed as Chair of the Board to the ANU’s China in the World Centre. Her most recent sole-authored books include Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China (Washington University Press, 2020), Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China (Cambridge University Press 2016), and Women Politics and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford University Press 2008). Edwards is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.
