Sun Chunlan is vice-premier of the State Council, so what in particular do you mean by “highest instance?” This was also an election within the CPC, not the PRC itself, which, contrary to what the West says, has more than one party, so the makeup of the CPC proper isn’t inherently the makeup of the PRC as a whole.

For instance, the State Council Minister of Ecology isn’t a CPC member, though he’s currently the only non-CPC member holding a rank as high as State Council Minister.

As far as the recent CPC elections, there weren’t many women placed in high position, however you can’t say none. The CCDI (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection) is the part of the party tasked with dealing with corruption and malfeasance. Yu Hongqiu was elected a deputy secretary (1 of 8), and Wang Xiaoping and Mu Hongyu are with her in the CCDI’s Standing Committee.

It’s a record low, true, but given the prevalence of women in the CPC since 1949 and the adoption of the Resolution on Women as far back as 1922 (more than twenty years before the party gained power), using representative metrics is a pointless task that capitulates to the West’s neoliberal narrative that assimilating token representatives of oppressed minorities into the power structure has any sort of reflection of the real conditions they face.

The fact is, that with the rise of “traditional values,” the clawing back of reproductive autonomy in the US, and the across the board vilification of queer people (while simultaneously China is taking strides to dissolve barriers and improve access to care for queer people), the West is truly in no position to talk about what constitutes women’s equality. It certainly isn’t girlbosses perpetuating imperialism.