The new Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo will once again contain no women. In the course of the last seventy years no woman has ever been a member of that all-powerful body of the CCP. A few women have made it to longer rungs in the party hierarchy. But the Chinese Communist Party remains a strictly patriarchal organization. It is dominated by elderly men who seek to make themselves look alike as much as possible in their dark suits, white shirts, discrete ties, and their carefully groomed and blackened hair. They form a male phalanx to which no woman will have an easy entrance.
The normal course of successful political parties is from obstreperous upstart to preserver of the status quo. The CCP is no exception. Its revolutionary energies have dissipated and traditional patterns of thinking have come to prevail. This consolidation of power may look like strength, but it reveals in fact a growing weakness. Parties age, just like people. They forget that they once meant to be a vanguard of social change and they retreat to the comfort of what is and has always been.