Shen, 63, is from the Bai ethnic group and stepped down as provincial party chief in December to take on a then unnamed new role.

Until that point, She had spent her entire political career in her home province, serving in leading roles in the party school, propaganda, and political and legal affairs bodies in Guizhou.

She was Guizhou’s first woman governor and when she was appointed the province’s party chief in November 2020, she became the only woman holding a top provincial party position.

Instead, she remained part of the Central Committee, a rung down in the party hierarchy where women account for just 5 per cent of the 205 full members.

Absence of women in China’s new leadership elite a ‘step backwards’

Born in Zhijin county, Shen studied history at Guizhou University and started work at the provincial party school in 1982, rising to be the school’s vice-president in 1995. She also worked her way up through the ranks in the provincial party committee in the late 1990s.

At the prefectural level, she was deputy party chief of the Qiannan Buyei and Miao autonomous prefecture from late 2001, before she becoming deputy party chief of the prefecture-level city Tongren in early 2003.

In April 2007, aged 47, she was appointed a member of the standing committee of the provincial party committee, a rise in her rank to deputy ministerial level. She was also named head of the provincial publicity department a month later, and became an alternate member of the 17th Central Committee.

She was appointed Guizhou’s vice-governor in 2012, and became head of the province’s political and legal affairs commission in 2015. Three years later, she became governor. In 2020, she was further elevated as Guizhou’s party secretary, making her among the few women ever appointed to such a position.

Victor Shih, an associate professor at the University of California San Diego’s school of global policy and strategy, said Shen’s rise was “a milestone”, and her career path showed that “women continue to face a lot of challenges, and frankly, discrimination in the Chinese Communist Party”.

Shih said that while most men who advanced to provincial party secretary positions had experience in top positions at lower levels, Shen had never held top posts in Guizhou’s lower-level units.

He said it was very rare for women to be appointed to top positions at the prefecture and county levels.

“Because women are kind of systematically denied that opportunity, it makes it a lot more difficult for women to move into the No 1 position at the provincial level,” he said.

But Shen’s background in propaganda, party building and ideology is similar to that of several leaders who have been recently promoted, including Cai Qi, Wang Huning and Ding Xuexiang, according to Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese studies at King’s College, London.

Brown said involvement in party work appeared to be a core part of any successful current Chinese leader, and President Xi Jinping seemed to favour people who had a lot of local experience.

“It depends on what people have done … and Guizhou has been a place where people can progress,” he said. “Xi has chosen people who are very focused on party work and this seems to fit Shen’s profile.”

Shen worked under Xi’s allies Li Zhanshu, Chen Miner and Zhao Kezhi during their stints in Guizhou. Former president Hu Jintao was also Guizhou party boss for three years from 1985.

During her time as Guizhou’s party chief and governor, she left her mark on poverty alleviation work, big data projects and infrastructure development.

A hallmark for Shen was loyalty. At a December provincial meeting for leaders and cadres, Shen – who was leaving her role as the Guizhou party chief – underlined the importance of loyalty to the top, saying “loyalty to the leadership core has become the most distinctive political character of party members and cadres in Guizhou, and the most distinctive political colour of the political ecology of Guizhou”.

But her tenure was not without failures – local officials and the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy were the target of a public outcry in September after a bus carrying people to quarantine crashed in Guizhou, killing 27 people and injuring 20.

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As Shen advances to state councillor, she and other women officials are still likely to face limits due to their rank and the male-dominated political system and culture, according to observers.

“I think the big limitation for her going forward is her rank in the party, because she was not put into the Politburo … She will not have the stature and the political power to compel provincial or ministerial-level officials to do her bidding,” Shih said.

And should Shen be criticised as ineffective, Shih said, “she’s ineffective because she wasn’t given the rank to be effective in the first place. So she’s being hampered from the very beginning. And that’s very unfair for her.”

Minglu Chen, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney’s school of social and political sciences and China Studies Centre, said women officials still had less room than men for advancement in China’s political system.

No woman has been a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and except for the wives of revolutionary leaders, it took until 2002 before a woman joined the 24-member Politburo. It was another decade before there were two women on the Politburo at the same time.

And when women did reach these heights, their roles generally aligned with the traditional gender division of labour, Chen noted. “The roles that women take on were still in charge of women’s issues, and portfolios with not a lot of attention and resources,” she said.

Chen said conditions for women in politics now were neither worse nor better than the past, she said. “It’s just never been good.”

Is China doubling down on assimilation of ethnic groups?

Xinhui Jiang, an associate professor of Nanjing University’s department of political science, said a combination of factors including institutional constraints and cultural implications created a dilemma for women working in the political system.

Women officials often found it more difficult to accept opportunities that could lay a foundation for promotion but also involved relocation, because of a gendered division of labour within the family.

But Jiang said she was a bit optimistic about prospects for women in politics, with women accounting for most new civil servants since 2017.

“But I’m still a little bit worried about whether or not this will form a pyramid shape of women’s representation: a huge amount of women in lower-level positions, street-level bureaucrats while there are very few women in the manager position and on the top,” she said.

The lack of female representation in the political system has resulted in problems in policymaking and addressing public concerns.

“It’s a huge problem,” Shih said. “Not just at the central level, but also at the provincial, prefecture and county level, you very rarely find a No 1 leader at the local level who is a woman, and that will bias policymaking in a certain direction, and away from issues that are very important to women.”

Brown also noted that although women in politics in other countries also faced challenges, China seemed to be going backwards.

“That means that the party’s identity is very conservative, very stuck, very male dominated, very lacking in diversity, that makes a very strong system but very limited,” Brown said.

“There’s a lot of challenges China is facing where it’s going to need different perspectives, different views, different kinds of people. But at the moment, it seems to just want to choose one kind of person and one kind of approach.”