Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based journalist.
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In the United States, Hillary Clinton is calling on voters to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling of them all by electing a woman as their president. In Britain, Theresa May was catapulted into the prime minister's role to manage the thankless task of extricating the country from the European Union. Standing in the wings is another woman, Nicola Sturgeon, who will decide whether to try to extricate Scotland from the United Kingdom once Brexit is achieved.
Everywhere one looks, it seems, there is a woman in charge. Angela Merkel, of course, has been Germany's Chancellor for 12 years. In Asia, Taiwan has a new female president, Tsai Ing-wen. South Korea, too, has a female president, Park Geun-hye.
China is not happy with some of these women. It is putting pressure on the Taiwanese leader to be more like her male predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, and to accept a "one China" concept. China is also unhappy about Ms. Park's decision to deploy an air-defence system to defend against North Korean missiles, because China considers the system a threat to its own security.
And while Beijing hasn't said anything publicly about the U.S. election, it is known to oppose Ms. Clinton who, as secretary of state, championed the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia" policy, which China believes to be aimed at its containment.
The new British prime minister, meanwhile, seems to be less well disposed toward China than her male predecessor. Ms. May has delayed final approval for the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant, partly financed by China. The "golden era" of British-China relations launched last year was brief, indeed.
While the rest of the world now considers female leaders normal, this is not so in China, where there are no women at the highest level of power – the Communist party's Politburo Standing Committee. All seven current members, headed by President and General Secretary Xi Jinping, are men.
The previous committee, chosen in 2007, had nine members, all men. When its five-year term ended in 2012, seven members had to step down because of their age; only Mr. Xi and Premier Li Keqiang remained. In theory, then, there were seven seats to fill from among the 25-member Politburo. Several were of the right age and experience – including Liu Yandong, then a state councillor and the highest-ranking female politician in the country.
Two other talked-about candidates were Wang Yang, then Guangdong party secretary, and Li Yuanchao, then head of the party's organization department. Both men were young enough to serve more than one five-year term on the committee.
That may have been the reason why they were excluded. Of the seven current members of the committee, only President Xi and Premier Li are young enough to serve another term; all the others have to step down in 2017. The presence of younger members may be seen as posing a challenge to Mr. Xi.
Ms. Liu, however, would not have constituted such a threat, since she would be 72 in 2017. But promoting her would have resulted in an even number of committee members, something that has traditionally been avoided.
Logically, promoting Mr. Wang and Mr. Li would have done the trick. It would have kept the committee at nine members and ensured that there were two others besides Mr. Xi and Mr. Li to provide continuity into another term. But this was clearly not what Mr. Xi wanted – and Ms. Liu provided a convenient excuse. If the two men had been promoted, she would have been the only one kept back and it would have looked bad to exclude the woman while promoting the men. So, Mr. Xi might well have argued, it is better for the sake of appearance to trim the size of the committee to seven members.
Come 2017, Ms. Liu will have to retire. But now, for the first time, there is a second woman in the Politburo, Sun Chunlan, who is five years younger than Ms. Liu. Will she, like Ms. Liu, also be bypassed? We shall see.
Chairman Mao Zedong said that women hold up half the sky. But when it comes to real power, it seems things are different. Only Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, ever came close to wielding genuine power in China – and that was only because of her relationship with a man.