Imaginechina, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Peng Liyuan performing in Beijing in 2009.
BEIJING — Peng Liyuan, China’s most enduring pop-folk icon, is beloved for her glass-cracking soprano and her ability to take on such roles as a coquettish Tibetan yak herder, a lovelorn imperial courtesan, even a stiff-lipped major general — which in fact she is.
But as the nation begins to absorb the reality that its newly anointed top leader, Xi Jinping, is coming to office with a wife who happens to be a big-haired brassy diva known for her striking figure, palace watchers are daring to ask the question: has China’s Carla Bruni-Sarkozy moment finally arrived?
Ms. Peng, 49, certainly has what it takes to revolutionize China’s stodgy first lady paradigm, in which the spouses of top leaders are usually kept well out of sight or, at best, stand mute behind their husbands during state visits.
For more than two decades she was a lavishly costumed fixture on the nation’s must-see Chinese New Year variety show, often emerging from a blur of synchronized backup dancers to trill about the sacrifices of the People’s Liberation Army, which bestowed on her a civilian rank equivalent to major general. More recently, she has extended her celebrity to public service, comforting survivors of the Sichuan earthquake and gently scolding young people about the dangers of smoking and unprotected sex.
“Peng Liyuan could be an enormously positive thing for China, which really needs female role models,” said Hung Huang, publisher of a fashion magazine. “Just imagine if she turned out to be a first lady like Michelle Obama.”
But experts here agree that there is a major obstacle to Ms. Peng playing a more prominent role on the national stage: Chinese men. Despite Mao Zedong’s feel-good dictum that “women hold up half the sky,” they are barely visible in the inner sanctum of the granite-clad colossus on Tiananmen Square where Communist Party elders selected a new club of leaders.
While there was hopeful, unsubstantiated talk earlier this year that Liu Yandong, a woman, might be named to the seven-seat Politburo Standing Committee, the lineup revealed to the world on Thursday was an unrelieved row of dark suits, drab ties and black hair without a touch of gray. The party did throw out a bone: they added Sun Chunlan to the Politburo, which means the 25-member advisory committee now contains two women.
Chinese women — at least those who dare to speak out — are not pleased. “It’s unhealthy and unfair to have so few women within the Chinese political system,” said Guo Jianmei, director of the Women’s Legal Research and Service Center in Beijing, a nonprofit group. “It just reinforces the traditional cultural view that women are less capable than men.”
By all accounts, Chinese male chauvinism and the fear of the power-hungry vixen has been percolating for a few thousand years. Until the last century, women were kept uneducated and barred from the imperial bureaucracy. In times of famine, boys ate first. A lucky girl might have her growing feet bound so tightly she could barely walk by the time she was married off to the groom’s family as little more than chattel.
CCTV, via YouTube
Peng Liyuan starring in "When the National Anthem is Sung," a patriotic music video aired on CCTV in 2009.
Even today the gender imbalance — with 118 men for every 100 women — is a testament to Chinese favoritism toward boys, expressed through targeted abortions or abandoned baby girls. Many of the nation’s best schools give male students a leg up by requiring higher marks for women. The discriminatory scoring system, according to the Ministry of Education, is designed to “protect the interests of the nation.”
Ms. Guo said men dominate Chinese politics at the top because they keep the door firmly shut at the bottom. In a two-year study her institute recently completed, researchers in rural Heilongjiang Province found precious few female party officials at the village and county level. In questionnaires, she said, respondents did not mince words: men make better leaders.
“No wonder there are so few women at the top,” she said. “It’s a vicious cycle that’s only getting worse.”
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