3. Excellence in a Flourishing Culture
In developing a thriving socialist culture, China has given full play to women's role in creating cultural wealth and cultivated female talent in the cultural sector. Through innovation and with creativity, women have made a significant contribution to preserving cultural heritage and promoting the best of traditional Chinese culture.
Demonstrating vitality at the forefront of culture and communication. Women have become a pillar of cultural prosperity and development and are playing an increasingly important role in cultural creation, communication and studies. Female writers and artists have produced masterpieces that have shaped the image of women in the new era, as varied as the Peking Opera Mother, ballet Yimeng, prose works My Altay, TV series She and Her Girls, movie Huang Wenxiu, documentary Aunt Haiyun, variety shows The Daughters of Chinese Villages and Sisters Who Make Waves 2024, and short drama Got Old Recently.
By the end of 2023, about 456,900 women across the country were employed in the radio, television, and online audio-visual sectors, comprising 43.14 percent of the total employees. In the senior professional title evaluations for the journalism section organized by the National Press and Publication Administration in 2024, women accounted for 44.1 percent of those receiving senior professional titles and 50.6 percent of those gaining associate senior ones.
Women constitute 27.5 percent of participants in key talent initiatives in the field of public communication and culture, including 45.2 percent of successful candidates in the cultural talent program and 42.5 percent in the youth cultural talent program under the National Cultural Talent of Excellence Initiative. Through their work in culture and communication, women have vigorously committed themselves in the promotion and practice of the core socialist values.
Showing strengths in preserving and vitalizing ethnic cultures. By passing down traditional crafts and facilitating cultural innovation and dissemination, women are injecting new vitality into ethnic cultures. Among the 3,997 recognized representative bearers of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) items on the national list, 25 percent are women. The research and training program for ICH bearers has provided training for 51,000 people, with women accounting for 57 percent. Under the plan on revitalizing traditional Chinese craftsmanship and the specialized initiatives to revitalize rural areas by promoting ICH, many women have played a leading role in transforming local natural resources and rural cultural assets into cultural products and industries. Handicraft brands such as "Dove Flower: Songtao's Miao Embroidery" in Guizhou and "Weiyuan Tu Ethnic Coiling Embroidery" in Qinghai are shining examples of this transformation.
New business models – often fronted by women – such as "ICH plus guesthouses", "ICH plus cultural products", and "ICH plus study trips" have also been launched in recent years, breathing new life into traditional ethnic cultures. The rise of digital technology has allowed traditional culture to flourish again, and an increasing number of young women now play a central role in promoting the "China-Chic" trend and preserving and vitalizing ICH, facilitating ICH's integration in modern life and helping it reach a global audience.
Excelling in both competitive and mass leisure sports. The Outline for Building a Strong Sporting Nation has explicitly set the goal of achieving balanced development between men's and women's events. The Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games issued a Gender Equality Commitment covering 14 specific areas, including equal participation, gender-equal and fair portrayal, and gender equality in leadership and workforce.
The number of female elite athletes in China has witnessed rapid growth, and the proportion of international-level female athletes has remained above 50 percent. Since 2012, across the four consecutive Summer Olympic Games, female athletes have accounted for over 55 percent of competitors and won over 60 percent of the medals. During the same period across the four Paralympic Games, women have made up 50.22 percent of participants and secured 55.62 percent of the medals. Female athletes fight for their nations, collaborate in unity, and challenge their limits, playing an equal role as their male counterparts in competitive sports. The fighting spirit of the Chinese women's volleyball team has inspired the Chinese people to this day.
Extensive fitness-for-all programs are carried out nationwide, and a program of cultivating female community sports instructors in rural areas has provided training for over 65,000 women in 10,000 villages. By the end of 2024, there were about 3.71 million community sports instructors across the country, among which 56.1 percent were women, demonstrating women's leadership and responsibility in advancing China's fitness-for-all initiative in the new era.
(Source: SCIO White Paper China's Achievements in Women's Well-Rounded Development in the New Era)
Editor: Cui Rui
