The Chinese plans for climate action are ambitious. The country wants to become carbon neutral by 2060, and emissions are supposed to fall by 2030 at the latest. But how is this supposed to work? Christiane Kuehl took a look at the 14th Five-Year Plan. Her finding: The choice of words is unusually clear. But there is still not much concrete information. It will be interesting to see whether the plan will be further refined during the course of the People’s Congress.
Around one in three members of the Chinese Communist Party is a woman. However, only one woman has made it into the extended leadership. Ning Wang investigates the role women are accorded in the party and state leadership – and what influence Xi’s penchant for Confucianism has had on this.
By 2030 at the latest, China wants to reduce its emissions of climate gases, and a carbon-neutral economy by 2060. With the next two five-year plans, Beijing must define in concrete terms how it intends to achieve these goals. The 14th Five-Year Plan (5YP) for the years 2021-2025, which is now to be approved at the National People’s Congress (NPC), must drive the first pegs into place. The 15th plan will then have to get down to the nitty-gritty. In parallel with climate protection, China also wants to combat environmental pollution and improve nature and species conservation.
In October, the Central Committee signed off on the draft of the 14th 5JP. This draft sets the tone but does not yet provide details. The plan will “likely include emissions caps or quotas, more barriers to investment in coal capacity, and support for investment in renewable energy,” Nis Gruenberg and Anna Holzmann expect in a recent study by the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics). They also say the draft envisions “a comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development.” The authors were struck by the fact that the draft used “much stronger formulations” than earlier plans. They also expect Beijing to place even greater emphasis on domestic innovation – with the goal of environmental technology leadership for China in the world. China.Table has prepared an overview of the most important points of the 14th Five-Year Plan for you.
In September 2020, President Xi Jinping surprisingly announced that China will be carbon neutral from 2060. In December, Beijing declared its intention to reach the emissions peak “before 2030” rather than “2030.” This was followed in January by the go-ahead for a National Emissions Trading System. Finally, in February, Xi appointed former environment minister Xie Zhenhua as the new special climate envoy.
Xie is an internationally experienced negotiator and well connected. He is currently conducting research at the renowned Tsinghua University and, together with colleagues, presented a roadmap to 2060 just three weeks after Xi’s announcement, which envisions an energy transition within the next 15 years that is expected to accelerate sharply thereafter and calls for a sevenfold increase in solar power and a fivefold increase in nuclear power. Xie believes near-term changes are needed to meet the 2060 goal. “This goal will be difficult or impossible to achieve if we continue to rely on traditional technologies and continue our traditional ways of producing, living and consuming,” he said recently.
Xie Zhenhua is right. But China’s climate action goals must now be cast in a policy that is also implemented at the local level. This has always proven difficult in China. “Beijing’s green policies are largely sector- or region-specific, are often phased in gradually, and conflict with policies aimed at rapid growth and social stability,” Gruenberg and Holzmann write. Beijing often tests environmental projects with more or less spectacular pilot programs, such as a solar power-generating stretch of highway in Shandong. Some projects simply end without any concrete findings becoming known – like the ten “Zero Waste Cities” in 2020, which were supposed to find new ways of dealing with waste. In the capital Beijing, at any rate, many citizens had a hard time separating waste in colorful garbage cans – because, in the past, they had given waste paper and plastic bottles to a neighborhood recycler in exchange for some spare change.
The biggest challenges for climate and environmental policy are the power sector and heavy industry: coal, metallurgy, steel, cement. Many dirty plants of this kind are still propped up by local politicians in order to preserve local jobs and economic output. China built huge capacities of solar power, wind and hydropower. But in the first half of 2020, 20 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity also came online. China remains the world’s largest emitter of CO2.
However, the draft 5YP still contains little that is truly concrete beyond declarations of intent to reverse the trend. For example, there is a requirement to develop an action plan on how the country will achieve the emissions summit – and above all, the reduction in emissions that will then follow – by 2030. This will then have to be concrete. Interestingly, the government wants to support “appropriate municipalities” in reaching the emissions summit ahead of schedule. The text says little about energy: only that “clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient energy and green buildings will be promoted.” Perhaps this is a sign of how much behind-the-scenes wrangling is going on around these issues of climate protection and the action plan.
The Merics authors report on individual energy pilot programs. Jilin Province, for example, subsidizes special pumping technologies for air conditioning in energy-efficient buildings. The government is also pushing for low-carbon data centers. According to the report, 23 percent of all data centers in the world are located in China; most of them run mainly on coal-fired power. However, a roadmap for phasing out coal would be more of a big deal.
For more sustainable development, the draft says the government wants to “better control spatial planning and land use” and “strengthen legal and political support for environmentally friendly development.” These phrases may conceal plans for better enforcement of environmental policies. Beijing also wants to promote clean production and environmental industries, as well as retrofit existing industries to be environmentally friendly. Currently, China is building a system of standards for all aspects of environmentally friendly production, from resource use to emissions reporting to environmental friendliness of design. The system is expected to be in use across all industries by 2025, Gruenberg and Holzmann said, “It’s moving fast.” The framework is in place, they said, with hundreds of standards in the works. China already counts 2120 “green factories” and 170 “green industrial parks,” for example, that operate in a water- and power-saving manner, they said. There are also a number of pilot cities testing the circular economy, including the port city of Tianjin near Beijing. Sometimes the measures are clearer than the texts.
On environmental protection and nature conservation, the draft states, “We will strengthen environmental awareness throughout society and deepen the difficult fight against pollution.” The plan is to “build a natural protected area system in which national parks play the main role.” The text also targets “major biodiversity protection projects.” In May, China will host the UN biodiversity summit in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, which is famous for its natural wealth. Even though this will probably take place digitally: It will look good for China as the host to be able to demonstrate success here.
The numbers speak for themselves: 1950, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 – these are the birth years of the women represented on the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. All of them are women who are close to retirement age if they are not already. Like Sun Chunlan, who turns 71 this year and is the only woman in the 25-member extended Politburo. She is responsible for culture and education, but also for public health care, and was responsible for the deployment of medical personnel in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic.
So there are a handful of women on the Central Committee, but no female representative has ever made it to the ranks of the Politburo Standing Committee – a threshold that must be cleared to belong to the innermost circle of power and, in turn, to become a candidate for the post that has been occupied exclusively by men in the party’s previous history: The post of head of state or head of party, as it Xi Jinping now likely to hold for life after amending the constitution in 2018 to remove term limits for presidents.
And Sun could retire as early as next year. Shen Yiqin (born 1959), the party leader of Guizhou Province, and Shen Yueyue, the 64-year-old president of the All Women Federal Association, China’s women’s association, are being considered as her successors. The latter has also lost influence under Xi, for example, due to control measures and a rather reserved attitude. Xi Jinping’s policies are said to revive Confucianism, which sees the role of women in a patriarchal order.
What Shen Yiqin and Shen Yueyue have in common, and seem to be essential for Xi Jinping in positioning people within the party, is their loyalty. Sun Chunlan has proven her loyalty to Xi in her long career – she joined the party in 1973 – including as head of the united front: Through soft power, for example, she strengthened influence abroad and the party’s goals by promoting so-called friendship associations of Chinese living abroad and student clubs.
Shen Yueyue is known to have worked closely with Li Zhanshu and Chen Min’er in Guizhou Province, one of China’s poorest provinces. Both men have risen to high posts within the party under Xi.
Around 25.6 million of the more than 91 million current members of the Chinese Communist Party are women, according to figures published most recently in 2019. The year the People’s Republic celebrated its 70th anniversary, women thus made up around 28 percent of the party. However, even though the proportion of women is slightly higher than that of the CDU (26 percent women), for example, their influence has tended to shrink over the past seven decades.
Seventy years ago, women’s participation in the country’s economic recovery and improving women’s literacy were at the top of the Communist Party’s agenda to build “socialist modernity.” For feminists in the party, this enabled them to “exercise socialist state power,” as Wang Zheng, professor of gender studies and history at the University of Michigan, describes it.
When the Communist Party came to power in 1949, it gave women more rights than they had before. For example, the right to work and the freedom to marry whomever they wanted. And while the party had only 530,000 women members in 1949, which was only 11.8 percent of the total membership at the time, they rose to official positions in administrations. These ranged from central government to urban offices – to rural communities, depending on seniority and education level, as Wang Zheng explains in a newly edited paper titled “Feminism with Chinese Characteristics 1995-2018.”
Currently, however, critics no longer see women, as Mao Zedong once put it, “sharing half of heaven” – or, rather, receiving the allotted half from the Party: The Party “aggressively perpetuates gender norms and reduces women to their roles as dutiful wives, mothers and baby breeders in the household in order to minimize social unrest and give birth to future generations of skilled workers,” author Leta Hong Fincher wrote in her 2018 book “Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.”
Yet the female population would be well trained for leadership positions: The one-child policy that applied in the People’s Republic from 1979 to 2016 had substantially increased the number of women who attained university degrees. In 1999, about 37 percent of higher education students in China were female; by 2012, their share had risen to more than 52 percent. Meanwhile, the number of young men taking the gaokao, China’s high school graduation exam, declined from 66.2 percent in 1999 to 39.7 percent in 2008 – which in turn led to men being admitted to certain fields of study with lower performance than women. Universities continue to tend to have more men, as research on gender inequality shows. For example, at the prestigious Tsinghua University, the ratio of women to men in 2018 was 34 to 66. At Peking University, the ratio was 48 to 52. According to the study, however, women were also more likely to study abroad.
Discriminatory admissions policies at the state’s universities continue to be common, even though they have actually been prohibited for a long time. One of them, for example, is that female students must achieve a higher score. As recently as late January, the Ministry of Education announced that “with the exception of some special institutes such as those for military, national defense and public security, schools are not allowed to set gender quotas for the admission of new students.”
In October of last year, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Xi himself emphasized that equality between men and women was a fundamental state policy in China. In doing so, he stressed that China had established a legal system that included more than 100 laws and regulations to fully protect women’s rights and interests. China has largely closed the gender gap in compulsory education, Xi said in a video message. For example, women make up more than 40 percent of the country’s workforce, he said.
But the aging population, declining birthrate – in 2019 it fell to its lowest level since 1949 – and maintaining social stability in the face of more difficult economic growth are readily used as arguments to bring women back into their “traditional roles.” “In fact, overt gender discrimination in employment has been a well-known reality since the economic reform,” Wang Zheng said in her paper. Many branches of government have taken it upon themselves to publish job advertisements that cater only to men, according to Wang Zheng.
Another complicating factor is that the national retirement age is currently 60 for men and 55 for female civil servants and employees of state-owned companies. For all other female employees, it is 50 years.
In addition, women have less time to pursue a career in the party alongside their studies and family. And time is of the essence. It’s a long way to the top in the cadre; even at the provincial level, a lot of groundwork has to be done to climb further up the party career ladder. Women can be found in mid-level leadership positions within the party, but very few rise to the top positions at the highest level. The fact that in the near future there will also be a (女) in brackets after the name of the Chinese head of state or government is currently a distant dream.
It is not known whether Jack Ma is interested in the annual billionaire ranking of the Chinese Hurun magazine. But if he were to take a look at the latest edition of the list, which was published this week, he would have to note that he has been overtaken by no less than three of his compatriots and thus dethroned as China’s richest man.
While the Alibaba founder’s fortune was last estimated at $56 billion, Colin Huang, founder of Chinese online retailer Pinduoduo, came in at just under $70 billion. The fortune of Ma Huateng, founder of tech giant Tencent, was put at just over $74 billion. However, one man eclipses them all: With an estimated fortune of 76.6 billion dollars, a man named Zhong Shanshan is now the new richest man in the People’s Republic.
The sources of the fortune of Zhong Shanshan, who is hardly known abroad, have nothing to do with a huge tech or real estate empire, as is often the case in China. The 66-year-old has amassed much of his wealth by selling mineral water. He owns Nongfu Spring, the largest and best-known water producer in China. The plastic bottles with the red band and white company lettering can be bought on every street corner. 0.5 liters cost 2 yuan (about 25 cents) at the kiosk and as little as 1.5 yuan at the supermarket.
The sudden jump in Zhong’s fortune, however, is not only related to the successful sale of water bottles but to two major IPOs that the entrepreneur is behind. In addition to Nongfu Spring, Zhong also owns the Beijing-based pharmaceutical company Wantai Biological, which he took public last April. This was followed by the announcement that Wantai was working on a Covid vaccine that can be administered as a nasal spray. Although the substance is still in the testing phase, the news still sparked share price fantasies among investors. Since the IPO, the share price has risen by more than 1,600 percent.
Even more important for Zhong, however, was the disproportionately larger IPO of Nongfu Spring, which made its debut on the Hong Kong trading floor in September and broke records there.
Zhong was born in 1954 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, just like Jack Ma. Both Alibaba and Nongfu Spring are headquartered there today. Before embarking on a career as a successful entrepreneur, he spent some time as a construction worker, then found employment as a newspaper reporter in the 1980s.
After five years on the editorial staff of Zhejiang Daily, he built up his own newspaper. Later, he tried his hand at business himself, founding the pharmaceutical company Yangshengtang, which is now the holding company of Wantai Biological. Finally, in 1996, Zhong founded Nongfu Spring and shaped it into the nation’s largest water seller.
Neither Jack Ma nor Zhong would be where they are today if they and their companies did not have government contacts. But what Beijing should like about the country’s new richest man is his extremely low-key demeanor.
As is well known, Jack Ma has recently had to pay for what the government sees as his brash behavior. At the end of October, he gave a speech in which he sharply criticized the Chinese government’s financial policy. The regulators’ response was not long in coming: Ant’s IPO was put on hold. Then the Chinese antitrust authority also started investigations against Alibaba.
Such a thing would hardly happen to the more cautious Zhong, who has the reputation of a lone wolf who, unlike Ma, who has great entertainer qualities, does not like to be in the spotlight.Gregor Koppenburg/Joern Petring
He sees himself as a mediator and translator between two worlds: As Chief Executive Officer of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Germany (CHKD), 37-year-old lawyer Duan Wei represents the interests of what are now 350 Chinese companies so that they can gain a sustainable foothold in Germany. At the same time, he is trying to “build up China competence” in Germany, as he says: “I want to reduce the fear of my home country.” In the future, Duan says more companies from the fields of electromobility, medical technology, smart cities and artificial intelligence want to invest in Germany. “They are creating more jobs and an innovative future in Germany.” In light of this development, Germany would do well to have a little more competence and knowledge in dealing with Chinese companies, he hints diplomatically. “And to achieve that,” he says, “I’m happy to do more explaining.”
Although Sino-German relations are becoming increasingly frosty, Duan is optimistic. “I continue to believe in an innovative partnership between Germany and China,” he says. Just a year ago, he publicly complained about the increasing accusations against China’s economic policy. He described the business climate between Germany and China as the “worst in history so far.” The conflicts – such as tighter investment controls in Germany and the dispute over Germany’s 5G network and Huawei – have not diminished since then. Duan, however, seems more conciliatory: “Clearly, many improvements are needed in the relationship,” he says. “But as my child is learning at daycare right now, when there is a disagreement, you should always seek compromise.”
Duan lives with his wife and two children in Berlin-Mitte, where he says it is “very easy to live”. He is originally from the city of Xuancheng in Anhui Province, west of Shanghai. He usually travels to his home country several times a year to visit his parents. The Covid-19 pandemic makes that impossible. “My mother worriedly asked at the beginning of the lockdown if I had enough to eat in Berlin.” Like many of his generation, he is an only child.
Duan was drawn to Germany because of his fascination with German law. “It has been a major influence on Chinese law,” he says. “I really wanted to understand the country and its philosophy better.” He came to Leipzig in 2004, learning the German language for a year before studying law at the university there. “Fortunately, my fellow students in the lectures understood just as little as I did at the beginning.” He passed his state exams in 2012 and found his first job at the law firm Simmons & Simmons in Düsseldorf.
When China’s first Chamber of Foreign Trade in Europe was to be founded in Berlin in 2013, he successfully applied to become deputy managing director: “I saw the internationalization of Chinese companies as a great opportunity for the future. I wanted to accompany this process.” He has been CHKD’s chief executive since 2019. How CHKD has developed since then fills him with pride. More than 40 percent of its members are among the top 500 companies in China, such as technology groups like Huawei and ZTE, which have been established in Germany for some time, he said. New members are technology companies such as Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo or the EV start-up Nio. Adrian Meyer
The Chinese plans for climate action are ambitious. The country wants to become carbon neutral by 2060, and emissions are supposed to fall by 2030 at the latest. But how is this supposed to work? Christiane Kuehl took a look at the 14th Five-Year Plan. Her finding: The choice of words is unusually clear. But there is still not much concrete information. It will be interesting to see whether the plan will be further refined during the course of the People’s Congress.
Around one in three members of the Chinese Communist Party is a woman. However, only one woman has made it into the extended leadership. Ning Wang investigates the role women are accorded in the party and state leadership – and what influence Xi’s penchant for Confucianism has had on this.
By 2030 at the latest, China wants to reduce its emissions of climate gases, and a carbon-neutral economy by 2060. With the next two five-year plans, Beijing must define in concrete terms how it intends to achieve these goals. The 14th Five-Year Plan (5YP) for the years 2021-2025, which is now to be approved at the National People’s Congress (NPC), must drive the first pegs into place. The 15th plan will then have to get down to the nitty-gritty. In parallel with climate protection, China also wants to combat environmental pollution and improve nature and species conservation.
In October, the Central Committee signed off on the draft of the 14th 5JP. This draft sets the tone but does not yet provide details. The plan will “likely include emissions caps or quotas, more barriers to investment in coal capacity, and support for investment in renewable energy,” Nis Gruenberg and Anna Holzmann expect in a recent study by the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics). They also say the draft envisions “a comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development.” The authors were struck by the fact that the draft used “much stronger formulations” than earlier plans. They also expect Beijing to place even greater emphasis on domestic innovation – with the goal of environmental technology leadership for China in the world. China.Table has prepared an overview of the most important points of the 14th Five-Year Plan for you.
In September 2020, President Xi Jinping surprisingly announced that China will be carbon neutral from 2060. In December, Beijing declared its intention to reach the emissions peak “before 2030” rather than “2030.” This was followed in January by the go-ahead for a National Emissions Trading System. Finally, in February, Xi appointed former environment minister Xie Zhenhua as the new special climate envoy.
Xie is an internationally experienced negotiator and well connected. He is currently conducting research at the renowned Tsinghua University and, together with colleagues, presented a roadmap to 2060 just three weeks after Xi’s announcement, which envisions an energy transition within the next 15 years that is expected to accelerate sharply thereafter and calls for a sevenfold increase in solar power and a fivefold increase in nuclear power. Xie believes near-term changes are needed to meet the 2060 goal. “This goal will be difficult or impossible to achieve if we continue to rely on traditional technologies and continue our traditional ways of producing, living and consuming,” he said recently.
Xie Zhenhua is right. But China’s climate action goals must now be cast in a policy that is also implemented at the local level. This has always proven difficult in China. “Beijing’s green policies are largely sector- or region-specific, are often phased in gradually, and conflict with policies aimed at rapid growth and social stability,” Gruenberg and Holzmann write. Beijing often tests environmental projects with more or less spectacular pilot programs, such as a solar power-generating stretch of highway in Shandong. Some projects simply end without any concrete findings becoming known – like the ten “Zero Waste Cities” in 2020, which were supposed to find new ways of dealing with waste. In the capital Beijing, at any rate, many citizens had a hard time separating waste in colorful garbage cans – because, in the past, they had given waste paper and plastic bottles to a neighborhood recycler in exchange for some spare change.
The biggest challenges for climate and environmental policy are the power sector and heavy industry: coal, metallurgy, steel, cement. Many dirty plants of this kind are still propped up by local politicians in order to preserve local jobs and economic output. China built huge capacities of solar power, wind and hydropower. But in the first half of 2020, 20 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity also came online. China remains the world’s largest emitter of CO2.
However, the draft 5YP still contains little that is truly concrete beyond declarations of intent to reverse the trend. For example, there is a requirement to develop an action plan on how the country will achieve the emissions summit – and above all, the reduction in emissions that will then follow – by 2030. This will then have to be concrete. Interestingly, the government wants to support “appropriate municipalities” in reaching the emissions summit ahead of schedule. The text says little about energy: only that “clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient energy and green buildings will be promoted.” Perhaps this is a sign of how much behind-the-scenes wrangling is going on around these issues of climate protection and the action plan.
The Merics authors report on individual energy pilot programs. Jilin Province, for example, subsidizes special pumping technologies for air conditioning in energy-efficient buildings. The government is also pushing for low-carbon data centers. According to the report, 23 percent of all data centers in the world are located in China; most of them run mainly on coal-fired power. However, a roadmap for phasing out coal would be more of a big deal.
For more sustainable development, the draft says the government wants to “better control spatial planning and land use” and “strengthen legal and political support for environmentally friendly development.” These phrases may conceal plans for better enforcement of environmental policies. Beijing also wants to promote clean production and environmental industries, as well as retrofit existing industries to be environmentally friendly. Currently, China is building a system of standards for all aspects of environmentally friendly production, from resource use to emissions reporting to environmental friendliness of design. The system is expected to be in use across all industries by 2025, Gruenberg and Holzmann said, “It’s moving fast.” The framework is in place, they said, with hundreds of standards in the works. China already counts 2120 “green factories” and 170 “green industrial parks,” for example, that operate in a water- and power-saving manner, they said. There are also a number of pilot cities testing the circular economy, including the port city of Tianjin near Beijing. Sometimes the measures are clearer than the texts.
On environmental protection and nature conservation, the draft states, “We will strengthen environmental awareness throughout society and deepen the difficult fight against pollution.” The plan is to “build a natural protected area system in which national parks play the main role.” The text also targets “major biodiversity protection projects.” In May, China will host the UN biodiversity summit in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, which is famous for its natural wealth. Even though this will probably take place digitally: It will look good for China as the host to be able to demonstrate success here.
The numbers speak for themselves: 1950, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 – these are the birth years of the women represented on the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. All of them are women who are close to retirement age if they are not already. Like Sun Chunlan, who turns 71 this year and is the only woman in the 25-member extended Politburo. She is responsible for culture and education, but also for public health care, and was responsible for the deployment of medical personnel in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic.
So there are a handful of women on the Central Committee, but no female representative has ever made it to the ranks of the Politburo Standing Committee – a threshold that must be cleared to belong to the innermost circle of power and, in turn, to become a candidate for the post that has been occupied exclusively by men in the party’s previous history: The post of head of state or head of party, as it Xi Jinping now likely to hold for life after amending the constitution in 2018 to remove term limits for presidents.
And Sun could retire as early as next year. Shen Yiqin (born 1959), the party leader of Guizhou Province, and Shen Yueyue, the 64-year-old president of the All Women Federal Association, China’s women’s association, are being considered as her successors. The latter has also lost influence under Xi, for example, due to control measures and a rather reserved attitude. Xi Jinping’s policies are said to revive Confucianism, which sees the role of women in a patriarchal order.
What Shen Yiqin and Shen Yueyue have in common, and seem to be essential for Xi Jinping in positioning people within the party, is their loyalty. Sun Chunlan has proven her loyalty to Xi in her long career – she joined the party in 1973 – including as head of the united front: Through soft power, for example, she strengthened influence abroad and the party’s goals by promoting so-called friendship associations of Chinese living abroad and student clubs.
Shen Yueyue is known to have worked closely with Li Zhanshu and Chen Min’er in Guizhou Province, one of China’s poorest provinces. Both men have risen to high posts within the party under Xi.
Around 25.6 million of the more than 91 million current members of the Chinese Communist Party are women, according to figures published most recently in 2019. The year the People’s Republic celebrated its 70th anniversary, women thus made up around 28 percent of the party. However, even though the proportion of women is slightly higher than that of the CDU (26 percent women), for example, their influence has tended to shrink over the past seven decades.
Seventy years ago, women’s participation in the country’s economic recovery and improving women’s literacy were at the top of the Communist Party’s agenda to build “socialist modernity.” For feminists in the party, this enabled them to “exercise socialist state power,” as Wang Zheng, professor of gender studies and history at the University of Michigan, describes it.
When the Communist Party came to power in 1949, it gave women more rights than they had before. For example, the right to work and the freedom to marry whomever they wanted. And while the party had only 530,000 women members in 1949, which was only 11.8 percent of the total membership at the time, they rose to official positions in administrations. These ranged from central government to urban offices – to rural communities, depending on seniority and education level, as Wang Zheng explains in a newly edited paper titled “Feminism with Chinese Characteristics 1995-2018.”
Currently, however, critics no longer see women, as Mao Zedong once put it, “sharing half of heaven” – or, rather, receiving the allotted half from the Party: The Party “aggressively perpetuates gender norms and reduces women to their roles as dutiful wives, mothers and baby breeders in the household in order to minimize social unrest and give birth to future generations of skilled workers,” author Leta Hong Fincher wrote in her 2018 book “Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.”
Yet the female population would be well trained for leadership positions: The one-child policy that applied in the People’s Republic from 1979 to 2016 had substantially increased the number of women who attained university degrees. In 1999, about 37 percent of higher education students in China were female; by 2012, their share had risen to more than 52 percent. Meanwhile, the number of young men taking the gaokao, China’s high school graduation exam, declined from 66.2 percent in 1999 to 39.7 percent in 2008 – which in turn led to men being admitted to certain fields of study with lower performance than women. Universities continue to tend to have more men, as research on gender inequality shows. For example, at the prestigious Tsinghua University, the ratio of women to men in 2018 was 34 to 66. At Peking University, the ratio was 48 to 52. According to the study, however, women were also more likely to study abroad.
Discriminatory admissions policies at the state’s universities continue to be common, even though they have actually been prohibited for a long time. One of them, for example, is that female students must achieve a higher score. As recently as late January, the Ministry of Education announced that “with the exception of some special institutes such as those for military, national defense and public security, schools are not allowed to set gender quotas for the admission of new students.”
In October of last year, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Xi himself emphasized that equality between men and women was a fundamental state policy in China. In doing so, he stressed that China had established a legal system that included more than 100 laws and regulations to fully protect women’s rights and interests. China has largely closed the gender gap in compulsory education, Xi said in a video message. For example, women make up more than 40 percent of the country’s workforce, he said.
But the aging population, declining birthrate – in 2019 it fell to its lowest level since 1949 – and maintaining social stability in the face of more difficult economic growth are readily used as arguments to bring women back into their “traditional roles.” “In fact, overt gender discrimination in employment has been a well-known reality since the economic reform,” Wang Zheng said in her paper. Many branches of government have taken it upon themselves to publish job advertisements that cater only to men, according to Wang Zheng.
Another complicating factor is that the national retirement age is currently 60 for men and 55 for female civil servants and employees of state-owned companies. For all other female employees, it is 50 years.
In addition, women have less time to pursue a career in the party alongside their studies and family. And time is of the essence. It’s a long way to the top in the cadre; even at the provincial level, a lot of groundwork has to be done to climb further up the party career ladder. Women can be found in mid-level leadership positions within the party, but very few rise to the top positions at the highest level. The fact that in the near future there will also be a (女) in brackets after the name of the Chinese head of state or government is currently a distant dream.
It is not known whether Jack Ma is interested in the annual billionaire ranking of the Chinese Hurun magazine. But if he were to take a look at the latest edition of the list, which was published this week, he would have to note that he has been overtaken by no less than three of his compatriots and thus dethroned as China’s richest man.
While the Alibaba founder’s fortune was last estimated at $56 billion, Colin Huang, founder of Chinese online retailer Pinduoduo, came in at just under $70 billion. The fortune of Ma Huateng, founder of tech giant Tencent, was put at just over $74 billion. However, one man eclipses them all: With an estimated fortune of 76.6 billion dollars, a man named Zhong Shanshan is now the new richest man in the People’s Republic.
The sources of the fortune of Zhong Shanshan, who is hardly known abroad, have nothing to do with a huge tech or real estate empire, as is often the case in China. The 66-year-old has amassed much of his wealth by selling mineral water. He owns Nongfu Spring, the largest and best-known water producer in China. The plastic bottles with the red band and white company lettering can be bought on every street corner. 0.5 liters cost 2 yuan (about 25 cents) at the kiosk and as little as 1.5 yuan at the supermarket.
The sudden jump in Zhong’s fortune, however, is not only related to the successful sale of water bottles but to two major IPOs that the entrepreneur is behind. In addition to Nongfu Spring, Zhong also owns the Beijing-based pharmaceutical company Wantai Biological, which he took public last April. This was followed by the announcement that Wantai was working on a Covid vaccine that can be administered as a nasal spray. Although the substance is still in the testing phase, the news still sparked share price fantasies among investors. Since the IPO, the share price has risen by more than 1,600 percent.
Even more important for Zhong, however, was the disproportionately larger IPO of Nongfu Spring, which made its debut on the Hong Kong trading floor in September and broke records there.
Zhong was born in 1954 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, just like Jack Ma. Both Alibaba and Nongfu Spring are headquartered there today. Before embarking on a career as a successful entrepreneur, he spent some time as a construction worker, then found employment as a newspaper reporter in the 1980s.
After five years on the editorial staff of Zhejiang Daily, he built up his own newspaper. Later, he tried his hand at business himself, founding the pharmaceutical company Yangshengtang, which is now the holding company of Wantai Biological. Finally, in 1996, Zhong founded Nongfu Spring and shaped it into the nation’s largest water seller.
Neither Jack Ma nor Zhong would be where they are today if they and their companies did not have government contacts. But what Beijing should like about the country’s new richest man is his extremely low-key demeanor.
As is well known, Jack Ma has recently had to pay for what the government sees as his brash behavior. At the end of October, he gave a speech in which he sharply criticized the Chinese government’s financial policy. The regulators’ response was not long in coming: Ant’s IPO was put on hold. Then the Chinese antitrust authority also started investigations against Alibaba.
Such a thing would hardly happen to the more cautious Zhong, who has the reputation of a lone wolf who, unlike Ma, who has great entertainer qualities, does not like to be in the spotlight.Gregor Koppenburg/Joern Petring
He sees himself as a mediator and translator between two worlds: As Chief Executive Officer of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Germany (CHKD), 37-year-old lawyer Duan Wei represents the interests of what are now 350 Chinese companies so that they can gain a sustainable foothold in Germany. At the same time, he is trying to “build up China competence” in Germany, as he says: “I want to reduce the fear of my home country.” In the future, Duan says more companies from the fields of electromobility, medical technology, smart cities and artificial intelligence want to invest in Germany. “They are creating more jobs and an innovative future in Germany.” In light of this development, Germany would do well to have a little more competence and knowledge in dealing with Chinese companies, he hints diplomatically. “And to achieve that,” he says, “I’m happy to do more explaining.”
Although Sino-German relations are becoming increasingly frosty, Duan is optimistic. “I continue to believe in an innovative partnership between Germany and China,” he says. Just a year ago, he publicly complained about the increasing accusations against China’s economic policy. He described the business climate between Germany and China as the “worst in history so far.” The conflicts – such as tighter investment controls in Germany and the dispute over Germany’s 5G network and Huawei – have not diminished since then. Duan, however, seems more conciliatory: “Clearly, many improvements are needed in the relationship,” he says. “But as my child is learning at daycare right now, when there is a disagreement, you should always seek compromise.”
Duan lives with his wife and two children in Berlin-Mitte, where he says it is “very easy to live”. He is originally from the city of Xuancheng in Anhui Province, west of Shanghai. He usually travels to his home country several times a year to visit his parents. The Covid-19 pandemic makes that impossible. “My mother worriedly asked at the beginning of the lockdown if I had enough to eat in Berlin.” Like many of his generation, he is an only child.
Duan was drawn to Germany because of his fascination with German law. “It has been a major influence on Chinese law,” he says. “I really wanted to understand the country and its philosophy better.” He came to Leipzig in 2004, learning the German language for a year before studying law at the university there. “Fortunately, my fellow students in the lectures understood just as little as I did at the beginning.” He passed his state exams in 2012 and found his first job at the law firm Simmons & Simmons in Düsseldorf.
When China’s first Chamber of Foreign Trade in Europe was to be founded in Berlin in 2013, he successfully applied to become deputy managing director: “I saw the internationalization of Chinese companies as a great opportunity for the future. I wanted to accompany this process.” He has been CHKD’s chief executive since 2019. How CHKD has developed since then fills him with pride. More than 40 percent of its members are among the top 500 companies in China, such as technology groups like Huawei and ZTE, which have been established in Germany for some time, he said. New members are technology companies such as Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo or the EV start-up Nio. Adrian Meyer
