China today opened a global summit on women’s rights, a marker of its growing diplomatic ambition as well as its own fitful efforts to strengthen gender equality.
The meeting in Beijing is the latest of several high-profile gatherings hosted by China in recent months, including a major summit of mostly autocratic leaders in August followed by a mammoth military parade days later.
Domestically, China says it has added more than 100 laws and regulations to improve women’s rights, and that it has eliminated a gender gap in state education. Yet women make up barely a quarter of the National People’s Congress, its rubber-stamp legislature, and since 2022, all of the members of the Communist Party’s Politburo have been men.
