Among the resources President Xi Jinping has deployed to arrest surging COVID deaths in Hong Kong is the Communist Party’s pandemic fighter: a 71-year-old woman whose career at the near-top illuminates the glass ceiling in the world’s most populous country.
Sun Chunlan is the only female vice premier in China’s entrenched patriarchy, the sole woman on its powerful 25-member Politburo and, more recently, the top official overseeing its pandemic control. Now, she’s been marshaled to help across the Hong Kong border, local media including the South China Morning Post have reported.
Unlike the "nice guy” cadres Xi derides for failing to act, Sun’s pandemic response has been portrayed in state media as decisive. After Xi’an hospitals left non-COVID patients to die during a lockdown this year, she ordered medics on the ground to "not turn away patients under any excuse.” When COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, the septuagenarian spent almost 100 days there without vaccines helping authorities isolate each case, a strategy pivotal to Beijing’s unparalleled success in holding back the virus.