Defining “Women’s Issues” in China: Survey-Based Construction and Institutional Filtering

What do ordinary Chinese women identify as “women’s issues,” and who defines it, in authoritarian regimes? Existing scholarship on women’s representation and gendered policymaking in China (e.g., Jiang & Zhou 2022; Feng et al. 2024) has examined how female legislators advocate gender interests within tightly controlled institutional structures. Yet little research systematically compares bottom-up societal concerns with top-down state attention. This paper investigates how “women’s issues” are constructed, recognized, and filtered in authoritarian China through a two-stage mixed-methods design. Stage one uses national survey data and gender-related modules (2013–2023) to identify which problems Chinese women report as salient. Employing item-level analysis, clustering, and exploratory factor analysis, I derive an empirical taxonomy of “women’s issues,” ranging from care work and employment discrimination to social welfare, safety, and governance. Stage two links this citizen-derived issue set to legislative attention by analyzing National People’s Congress (NPC) proposals and policy documents (2013–2024). Using text-as-data approaches—including topic modeling and semantic matching—combined with qualitative validation, the study maps where citizen concerns overlap with, or diverge from, regime priorities. By comparing matched versus omitted issues, I trace the institutional and informal mechanisms that determine political visibility: party priorities, bureaucratic incentives, and quota-based selection. Methodologically, the project bridges survey-based measurement and computational text analysis, contributing to the dialogue on data-driven approaches in gender and politics. Theoretically, it refines state feminism by showing how authoritarian governance co-opts or silences gendered concerns. The research findings clarify how the Chinese government has transformed scattered female interests into policies that are in line with regime legitimacy.