As China Prepares for New Top Leaders, Women Are Still Shut Out

China is a one-party state and the Times is fussing over the percentage of women on the Politburo! How narcissistic and parochial can American feminists get?

we urge the united states to elect a female president

While the Communist Party has never have a woman leader in its eighth decade of power; the United States have yet to elect a woman president since the dawn of American democracy more than 240 years. In fact, when giving the choice Americans chose a staggeringly incompetent man, a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who by any standard his not qualified for the office over a woman with more than 50 years of public service.

Unlike here in America, the government of China will wait until a person, man or woman, demonstrates the qualifications to fill a position before they are appointed. Equality in numbers is not equality in competence and our attempt to make the numbers count as much as experience and knowledge has been a failure over the last quarter century - bringing the nation to its knees and Trump to standing at the top of the ladder with his neocon minions.

Nobody among the Democrats wants to hear this, let alone say it - so the Republicans will rule with their numb skulls until the Brown Shirts are visible while the Disappearing Demos shrivel to invisibility.

But sloganism may be the extent of our educations and Mrs. DeVos will continue the downward trend.

Our competition, the Chinese and Russians, have very authoritarian governments, but they are vast improvements over what they each had 50 years ago. They have more varied and complex nations to run than ours, because their attempts to turn their publics into sheep were not successful.

We want everything to change instantly every time we stamp our foot and wail. Give them time. They will change while we dribble away our remaining economic and intellectual resources.

"Shut out" gives the impression that someone is actively working to exclude women from political office in China. If anyone's shutting Chinese women out of government, it's their scheming grandmothers, for reasons I will explain.

If they feel unwelcome in government, it's the usual 'boys club' ethos common in many national governments. Guys accustomed to obscenities and sharp elbows find themselves nonplussed fighting...girls in pink dresses???

No, grandmothers discourage graduate granddaughters from entering government because the guokao (Civil Service Examination) with its .03% pass rate requires delaying marriage and grandchildren for a year beyond graduation. And a PhD–which allow her to start three rungs from the bottom of the 25-rung ladder and is now the hot ticket for admission–adds 3-5 five more years.

Then it gets tough.

Politically ambitious young civil servants must enroll in the current version of Mao's Up the Mountain and Down to the Countryside, which President Xi experienced in its original, seven-year form and frequently praises.

They spend 3-5 years in a flyblown wilderness village on the edge of the Gobi desert as Assistant Deputy Vice-Mayoral Adviser demonstrating their sincere commitment improving the lives of poor people whose speech they don't understand and who have no idea of what a PhD is.

Try getting a date there. Try explaining that to your grandmother.

Why do we continue to do business with China? Their conduct in the world is the opposite of everything we say we stand for. They treat their own people badly, they are a major polluter world wide, they steal ideas from companies that do business there and their state sponsored hackers routinely attack our businesses and government. We are financing their military and trouble making with our trade. We are enriching our enemy whose stated goal is to replace us as leader of the world. Note that I did not say free world, because China does not believe in freedom.

There are plenty of countries that want to be our friend and would gladly make our goods. We could even, in an act of humanity, give some of our business to countries in Africa in order to begin lift them up in to the modern world. In short, we have alternatives, we should stop doing business with a country who means us harm.

There may be discrimination at the top, but having a policy that women can retire at 50 or 55 is great. I wish half the population of the US could retire at an earlier age to enjoy life, rather than having to work well into one's social security years. Early retirement is a policy that benefits working class women (the vast majority), although it may harm professional career women.

As important as the gender issue maybe, this year there is every indication that major battles are brewing within the top lair of the party apparatus as to who will join Xi Jinping for his expected 5 remaining years as General Secretary and President. That outcome will submerge the former as newsworthy for some time.

The Chinese women I know are outspoken, assertive and empowered. They are well-represented in business and they've created more self-made billionaires than the US and Europe combined. Many, if not most, of the European and US women billionaires on the Forbes list inherited their wealth.

If the NYT is genuinely concerned about the welfare of women in Asia, please go after the world's largest democracy, India--where women are genuinely oppressed and subject to some of the most horrific abuses in their day to day lives.