Chinese President Xi Jinping pressed today for the world to step up efforts to improve women's rights, but his effort was clouded by his own country's detention of feminists.
Paying his first visit to the United Nations, Xi invited fellow world leaders to a special session to mark 20 years since a landmark UN conference on women in Beijing.
Xi announced a USD 10 million pledge to the UN agency for women and said China would in the next five years build 100 health centers and an equal number of school start-ups for girls in the developing world.
"China will do more to enhance gender equality as its basic state policy," Xi said, citing a Chinese proverb that women were "half the sky."
"In many parts of the world ... Inequality still exists between men and women in rights, opportunities and access to resources," he said.
But China earlier this year detained for one month five young feminists on the eve of International Women's Day.
China, which clamps down on any sign of domestic dissent, rounded up the women as they prepared to hand out leaflets about sexual harassment on public transport.
US President Barack Obama, who was flying Sunday to the United Nations, shunned Xi's meeting.
Hillary Clinton, who is campaigning to succeed Obama as the first female US president, condemned Xi and voiced support for the #FreeThe20 campaign that aims to release 20 women activists around the world.
"Xi hosting a meeting on women's rights at the UN while persecuting feminists? Shameless," Clinton wrote on Twitter.
Clinton, then US first lady, gave a speech at the 1995 Beijing conference that was considered influential in bringing women's role to the level of a fundamental universal right.
But as Obama's secretary of state, Clinton also sought a smooth relationship with China and faced criticism from some human rights activists.
Xi has been seeking to highlight China's growing global role.
He pledged USD 2 billion in development aid yesterday and a day earlier announced greater action on climate change as Obama welcomed him at the White House.
But in an open letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who joined Xi, the five formerly detained feminists said that at home China was increasingly stifling civil society.
"This is an unexpected and shameful setback, as well as a historical mistake" 20 years after the Beijing conference, they wrote.
The 1995 conference declared that "women's rights are human rights" and called for women's full incorporation in schools and government as well as control over reproductive health.
