Official profiles reveal more of China's top leaders have daughters
With girls outnumbering boys among leaders 'children, some foresee rise of the 'princesslings'
Are we going to see a growing number of golden sons-in-law in the Chinese political arena in the future? As Xinhua recently reported, most of the current leaders have daughters not sons.
To mark the completion of China's once-in-a decade power transition over the past few months, state-owned news agency Xinhua published a series of official profiles of the new political stars. The reports revealed the number of children each leader had and their gender.
Some careful readers pointed out that most of the top national leaders have daughters not sons - President Xi Jinping , Premier Li Keqiang , chairman of the national parliament Zhang Dejiang, and three of the four vice-premiers all have a daughter.
Some internet users asked if they should be called "princesslings", a female take on the concept of the princelings, a term coined to describe the privileged sons of past Chinese leaders who benefited from their family's influence and connections and took senior political posts.
But unlike their male counterparts, these daughters might find it hard to succeed politically. The number of women in senior positions in Chinese political institutions still lags far behind the number of men. None of the most powerful seven Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) members is female and only two of the 25 Politburo members are women.
If this trend continues, it might be the husbands of these privileged daughters that benefit from the political inheritance of their fathers-in-law.
