the red folk dress she wears liu lei The dark suit adds a touch of color among all the sober men who occupy most of the seats in the main auditorium of the Great Hall of the People, a sprawling 171,800-square-meter building west of Tiananmen Square that houses the annual meeting. Hosts the Chinese Parliament.
Liu is 38 and since the age of 24 he attends a once-a-year political convention in Beijing, known as the National People’s Congress (PNA). she is the only representative of the younger Heze ethnic group, With a census that barely exceeds 5,000 members. They all live in different counties in Heilongjiang in northern China, on the border with Russia.
Liu’s work
Heze experiences the annual visit of his representative to Peking every year as an opportunity to convey his demands to the political center. In the weeks before the big meeting, which usually takes place between March and April, Deputy Liu visits villages in Heilongjiang to meet with her neighbors and write down their complaints. She always travels to the capital with dozens of pages with proposals, Knowing that decisions in the PNA are already made by the leaders of the Communist Party of China (CCP), all men.
Liu has submitted nearly a hundred proposals to all PNA meetings, most of which are aimed at preserving the Heize culture. was the last Enrollment of students from ethnic minorities in universities will increase. His popularity in the corridors of the Chinese legislature has helped him so that those ruling in another world power once supported him so that the Heize language, which was spoken only by the elders of his ethnic group, did not disappear and the young people were forced into certain schools. You can study it as an optional subject.
elected representatives of 55 ethnic minor The recognized ANP represent barely 13% of the 3,000 politicians in China and rarely hide their proposals in sessions. Most of them are not even career politicians.
Liu is the director of an ethnic development center through which she manages Grant who come from Beijing for tourism and development of their region.
other representative
Another well-known parliamentarian, author Jiang Sengnan, in the last session of the parliament, voiced the need for a wider ban. Surrogate mother and judicial clarity on child custody after divorce.
Several women representatives in the Chinese Assembly.
Jiang shares a seat with Tian Chunnan, an engineer on the Beijing delegation, who proposed that Maternity leave has been extended for six months. They shape China’s small female legislature. Slowly they are managing to make themselves heard in the capital, but always on secondary issues in a country where women have never been on the political front.
a century without women
In July 1921, when a dozen Chinese revolutionaries led by a young Mao Zedong secretly founded the Communist Party of China (CCP) in an old house within the French Concession of Shanghai, no women were present In a historic event that will mark the future of the Asian giant.
More than a hundred years have passed and Chinese politics is still dominated by men. The CCP now has over 95 million members. There are more Chinese party cards than there are people in Germany. but The percentage of affiliated women does not reach 30%. Within Parliament, female representation is 25%.
quota system
Since 2007, there is a requirement that women represent at least 22% of total duties. China occupies, according to the latest classifications from the Geneva-based Interparliamentary Union Ranked 86th out of 192 passes For their representation of women in the National Parliament.
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, no woman has held a seat in the supreme political body, which is made up of seven members. Calculate the permanent. He is the leader of the Politburo consisting of 25 politicians where there is only one female face, that of the Deputy Prime Minister. Sun Chunlan (71 years old).
In local governments, the gender gap is even greater. 10% of leadership positions at the provincial, municipal and county levels are considered reserved for women, but those quotas rarely meet Because of a deep preference for male leadership.
“It takes time for women to climb the provincial ladder before they are considered for elite positions. But for By the time they reach the national level, many of them are already close to retirement, Five years earlier for female party cadres, civil servants and employees of state-owned enterprises in China than their male counterparts,” explains an Al Jazeera analysis of women in Chinese politics, noting that they generally keep them. In areas like education and social policies, specialties that do not help in that push to the elite controlling the country later.