Since the mid-20th century, the concept of feminism has become a political and social movement globally. Feminism influences law, politics, and economics, but the outcomes diverge across regions. In 2024, the World Economic Forum report on Global Gender Gap demonstrated that the Nordic states were high in terms of parity, while democracies like the US were in 43rd position.
Today, two dominant models of feminism exist: Western liberal feminism and China’s state feminism. The focus of the Western model is legal equality, representation, and market participation, whereas China’s model embeds women’s rights in state building through labour, health, and education. The former is rooted in civil society activism, and the latter is mediated by state organs such as the All-China Women’s Federation, rather than grassroots initiatives.
Even though Western feminism advances legal rights, it fails to solve care economy crises, such as mental health and childcare. Moreover, it also suffers from policy whiplash in the form of abortion rights in the US. China’s state-led model, on the other hand, constrains civic feminist agency but delivers material outcomes, including improved maternal health, higher labor-force participation among women, and parity in education.
Western Feminism is Rights Without Outcomes
In the US and much of the West, the rights of women are protected by three mechanisms: Title VII, the Equal Pay Act, and gender quotas in politics. Despite legal protections, outcomes remain limited due to individual market participation. Nancy Fraser also criticised that this is co-opted into neoliberal feminism, where empowerment depends on markets and private households rather than state support.
Even though the US is a high-income country, it fails in maternal health. The US mortality rate in 2022 was 22.3 per 100,000 live births, which is three times higher than most OECD peers. This shows how even advanced economies falter without structural health guarantees. In addition, black women face a higher risk of maternal health problems than white women, which reveals structural inequalities within the US. This means legal equality is not sufficient to eliminate structural inequalities.
Due to abortion bans in various US states after the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs ruling, women have had limited access to reproductive health, resulting in poor mental health and negative socio-economic impacts. Rights being overturned highlight policy whiplash despite decades of activism. The US faces a care burden due to the lack of a universal childcare system. With child-care costs often taking up over a third of family income, and women leaving the labour market due to their care duties proves how market reliance can undermine equality.
Consistent representation of women has failed to close the persistent pay gap. Slow progress since the 2000s has made women earn around 83 cents for every dollar a man earns in 2023. The major reason behind this gap is the motherhood penalty. Women often are paid less and promoted more slowly than men who don’t have children. Even with increased representation in Congress and boardrooms, women remain economically disadvantaged unless they are provided with structural support (childcare and family leave).
Western liberal feminism has failed to transform the material conditions of women’s lives. Without providing a care-state, stagnation remains in substantive gender equality.
The Chinese Feminist Movement
In contrast to the US feminism model, where progress was stalled despite formal rights, China’s feminism model takes an opposite route of restricting civic agency yet delivering material outcomes. Historically, China has emphasised the “women hold up half the sky” by integrating women into the workforce and education system to link gender equality with socialist modernisation (Mao Era). ACWF’s (All-China Women’s Federation) institutionalisation of state feminism aims to mediate between women’s interests and party priorities.
China outperformed its developing peers in achieving material outcomes by cutting its maternal mortality ratio from 61.9 per 100,000 in 1991 to below 17 in 2020. In 2024, the female labour-force participation was around 60%, which is not only above the global average but also higher than in the US. In addition to China’s legacy in state mobilisation of women in labour, Chinese women now outnumber men in tertiary education. While in secondary and higher education, gender balance has already been reached.
Post the 2021 demographic crisis, new policies were introduced in response to declining birth rates. To ease burdens, China introduced child-care allowances and parental leave extensions. Despite that, workplace inequality persists. Women still face workplace discrimination and sexual harassment, which motivated China to revise its Women’s Rights and Interests Law in 2022.
In contrast to all material gains of China, there are certain limitations on state feminism. Civil society organising is tightly controlled, with feminist activities, particularly “Feminist Five,” facing censorship and surveillance. At the National People’s Congress, women are underrepresented. In the Politburo and the senior CCP, women are almost absent in leadership roles. At the same time, Hukou burden further limits migrant women’s access to childcare, health, and welfare benefits, reinforcing inequality.
In short, China’s model of feminism delivers tangible outcomes in health, education, and labour. These outcomes indeed prove the power of structural support. However, restricted civic feminist agency and limited women’s political power remain top-down, completely dependent on state priorities instead of grassroots.
Comparative Analysis
Models of both China and the US diverge since Chinese feminism embeds the ideology in state priorities, whilst the US guarantees rights, but with a weak welfare architecture. China provides structural support in maternal health, education, and labour participation, while the US, on the other hand, has no universal childcare and maternal policies around reproductive rights. China, with its structural support, produces measurable improvements, whereas the outcomes of the US lag despite vibrant feminist activism.
The US model has a strong civil society with weak structural backing. Its reliance on the market for care hinders its progress, increasing the pay gap and maternal mortality. On the other hand, the movement in China holds strong state provisioning but lacks space for civil society. This leads to restricted bottom-up feminist agency and underrepresentation of women in elite decision-making.
While both share shortcomings, their outcomes diverge. Both countries face failure when it comes to gender pay parity and the presence of women in top leadership roles. However, China outperforms the US in terms of measurable outcomes, such as health, labour, participation, and education parity. Divergence stems from state capacity vs. state retreat. While the US relies on civil society and markets, thus leaves material gaps unfilled, China mobilises the state to produce outcomes.
Simply speaking, the U.S. model is vibrant from below but fragile at the top; China’s is durable from above but fragile from below. China needs to open its space for bottom-up feminism for the sustainability of its material gains, and the US should enforce care-state reforms to shift from formal rights to substantive support.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Ramsha is a student of international relations and is currently working for an NGO. She has worked as a Millennium Fellow and campus director for the UN Academic Impact and MCN. Furthermore, she has previously written for The Diplomatic Insight and has led some research and youth development initiatives, particularly in the fields of education and women's empowerment in Rawalpindi.