MCLC: Peng Liyuan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Peng Liyuan
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Be sure not to miss the accompanying video of a Peng song.

Kirk

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Source: NYT (11/16/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/asia/peng-liyuan-first-lady-of-chin
a-dimmed-her-star.html

A Star in China Both Rises and Sets
By ANDREW JACOBS 

BEIJING — Peng Liyuan, China’s most enduring pop-folk icon, is beloved for
her glass-cracking soprano and her ability to take on such roles as a
coquettish Tibetan yak herder, a lovelorn imperial courtesan, even a
stiff-lipped major general — which in fact she is.

But as the nation begins to absorb the reality that its newly anointed top
leader, Xi Jinping, is coming to office with a wife who happens to be a
big-haired brassy diva known for her striking figure, palace watchers are
daring to ask the question: has China’s Carla Bruni-Sarkozy moment finally
arrived?

Ms. Peng, 49, certainly has what it takes to revolutionize China’s stodgy
first lady paradigm, in which the spouses of top leaders are usually kept
well out of sight or, at best, stand mute behind their husbands during
state visits.

For more than two decades she was a lavishly costumed fixture on the
nation’s must-see Chinese New Year variety show, often emerging from a
blur of synchronized backup dancers to trill about the sacrifices of the
People’s Liberation Army, which bestowed on her a civilian rank equivalent
to major general. More recently, she has extended her celebrity to public
service, comforting survivors of the Sichuan earthquake and gently
scolding young people about the dangers of smoking and unprotected sex.

“Peng Liyuan could be an enormously positive thing for China, which really
needs female role models,” said Hung Huang, publisher of a fashion
magazine. “Just imagine if she turned out to be a first lady like Michelle
Obama.”

But experts here agree that there is a major obstacle to Ms. Peng playing
a more prominent role on the national stage: Chinese men. Despite Mao
Zedong’s feel-good dictum that “women hold up half the sky,” they are
barely visible in the inner sanctum of the granite-clad colossus on
Tiananmen Square where Communist Party elders selected a new club of
leaders.

While there was hopeful, unsubstantiated talk earlier this year that Liu
Yandong, a woman, might be named to the seven-seat Politburo Standing
Committee, the lineup revealed to the world on Thursday was an unrelieved
row of dark suits, drab ties and black hair without a touch of gray. The
party did throw out a bone: they added Sun Chunlan to the Politburo, which
means the 25-member advisory committee now contains two women.

Chinese women — at least those who dare to speak out — are not pleased.
“It’s unhealthy and unfair to have so few women within the Chinese
political system,” said Guo Jianmei, director of the Women’s Legal
Research and Service Center in Beijing, a nonprofit group. “It just
reinforces the traditional cultural view that women are less capable than
men.”

By all accounts, Chinese male chauvinism and the fear of the power-hungry
vixen has been percolating for a few thousand years. Until the last
century, women were kept uneducated and barred from the imperial
bureaucracy. In times of famine, boys ate first. A lucky girl might have
her growing feet bound so tightly she could barely walk by the time she
was married off to the groom’s family as little more than chattel.

Even today the gender imbalance — with 118 men for every 100 women — is a
testament to Chinese favoritism toward boys, expressed through targeted
abortions or abandoned baby girls. Many of the nation’s best schools give
male students a leg up by requiring higher marks for women. The
discriminatory scoring system, according to the Ministry of Education, is
designed to “protect the interests of the nation.”

Ms. Guo said men dominate Chinese politics at the top because they keep
the door firmly shut at the bottom. In a two-year study her institute
recently completed, researchers in rural Heilongjiang Province found
precious few female party officials at the village and county level. In
questionnaires, she said, respondents did not mince words: men make better
leaders.

“No wonder there are so few women at the top,” she said. “It’s a vicious
cycle that’s only getting worse.”

But Lei Yi, a historian at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said such
tales are wild exaggerations, the product of male bias. “Back then all
rulers were vicious,” he said. “Let’s face it, throughout history men
wanted a monopoly on power, and when things went wrong, they blamed it on
women.”

There is no shortage of ancient proverbs, some still in popular use, that
describe what happens when women get close to power. “A great beauty will
bring about the downfall of cities and nations,” goes one of them.

More recently, such sentiments were reinforced by Jiang Qing, the former
actress and third wife of Mao, who was saddled with much of the blame for
the Cultural Revolution and received a commuted death sentence. The fact
that she was in show business before she turned rabid revolutionary has
probably not helped Ms. Peng.

She appears to have followed a set of unwritten rules about the
comportment of women attached to important men. The higher her husband
climbed the Communist Party ladder, the less visible she became. She once
told a Singapore publication that she performed as many as 350 concerts a
year in the 1990s, including one at Lincoln Center in New York. But these
days she no longer accepts paid appearances “for the sake of the party.”
Since her husband’s ascension to the Politburo Standing Committee in 2007
she has all but disappeared from the annual Spring Festival gala.

Ms. Peng, who was born in a small town in the northeastern province of
Shandong and joined the army at age 18, found fame long before she met Mr.
Xi. When the couple was introduced by a mutual friend in 1986, she was
already known as “the peony fairy” and the “outstanding songbird of the
century.”

MR. XI, the son of a revolutionary hero, was a midlevel official in Fujian
Province, newly divorced from his first wife. Ms. Peng, who turns 50 on
Tuesday, is nearly a decade younger than Mr. Xi. In an interview she gave
to Zhanjiang Evening News in 2007, she said she was unimpressed with him
at first glance. “Not only did he look rustic, but he also looked older
than his years,” she said. But once Mr. Xi opened his mouth, her
objections faded. They married a year later.

Their relationship has required many compromises. The two are seldom
together, she said, and in 1992, his official duties during a typhoon in
Fujian forced him to miss the birth of the couple’s daughter, now a
student at Harvard University. Even being in the same city does not
guarantee face time. “People would gossip if I bring my wife with me all
the time,” he reportedly told her. “It’s not good for our images.”

Her public image has gone through a makeover since Mr. Xi was set on the
path to becoming party secretary, even losing her voluminous gowns for
matronly pantsuits or crisp military uniforms. The censors have also
clipped her wings, removing all but the most anodyne information about her
from the Web and blocking her name on China’s version of Twitter.

Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said
the party would be wise to use Ms. Peng as a soft power weapon, both at
home and abroad.

“If people see that Xi has such a beautiful wife, it would make the party
seem more humane and less robotic,” she said.

But she is not counting on much change. “Obama trots out Michelle because
it brings him popular support,” she said. “The Communist Party has no need
for that, because when you already have all the power, what’s the point of
bringing out the wife?”