China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, pledged unwavering support for women’s rights as he stood on a stage in Beijing, against a backdrop of national flags from around the world. He praised the achievements of women in sports, technology and entrepreneurship. He hailed how China had supported them to lift up “half the sky,” as Mao Zedong famously said.

Mr. Xi was speaking at the 2025 Global Leaders’ Meeting on Women, an event on Monday marking the 30th anniversary of a groundbreaking United Nations conference on women’s rights that was held in Beijing in 1995. During that conference, representatives of 189 countries promised to end violence against women and promote the participation of women in politics and business.

Mr. Xi described Monday’s gathering as a celebration of how China had delivered on those promises. “Chinese women in the new era are participating in the entire process of national and social governance with unprecedented confidence and vigor,” he said. “In China’s new journey of modernization, every woman is a protagonist.”

But beneath the pageantry, the fight for women’s rights in China has in some ways become more difficult in recent years, activists say.

While the 1995 conference was a landmark moment for Chinese feminists, spurring the creation of new, independent groups working on women’s rights, those groups have largely been decimated as Mr. Xi has overseen a crackdown on civil society.

The party sees any independently organized movement as a possible threat to its authority. Women’s issues in particular have shown the potential to mobilize huge numbers of people to both online and even offline action, as recent high-profile incidents of violence against women have shown.

Women’s rights activists have been arrested. Feminist social media accounts have been shut down. State media outlets have warned against “extreme feminism” and said that it is a foreign ideology intended to weaken China.

Mr. Xi has also repeatedly exhorted women to embrace the value of marriage and childbearing, as the government tries to reverse China’s falling birth rate. Local government officials have embraced increasingly invasive tactics to push women to start families.

Monday’s meeting was a testament to the rigidly controlled version of women’s advancement that China has tried to promote instead. In the run-up to the event, Chinese publishers released two books of English translations of speeches and articles by Mr. Xi about women’s issues, in which he exhorted Chinese women’s groups not to blindly subscribe to Western ideas of equality.

The government also released a report on China’s achievements on women’s rights, in which it said the first step toward continued progress was “upholding the overall leadership of the Communist Party of China.”

(Even within the party’s carefully choreographed hierarchy, though, the rise of women has stalled. There are no women in the current Politburo, the Communist Party’s executive policymaking body, for the first time in two decades.)

Lu Pin, an activist who moved to the United States after a prominent online platform for feminist issues that she founded was shut down, said that Monday’s conference showed how little the government was willing to do beyond lip service to women’s rights. After the 1995 conference, activists could take advantage of the government’s rhetoric, and its desire to win global standing, to push for real advances, she said. But as the government had grown more confident in its stature, that was no longer possible.

“The party-state is so confident in its legitimacy that it’s unwilling and doesn’t need to justify itself domestically or internationally by granting women rights,” she wrote in a message. “The state has largely closed the door to negotiation.”

By many measures, Chinese women are far better off today than three decades ago. In 1995, they made up only a third of university students; now they outnumber men in enrollment. As the country has grown wealthier, the rates of maternal mortality and poverty have fallen steeply.

But Chinese feminists said the biggest accomplishment was changing societal attitudes. Divorce, once taboo, has become more accepted. Female authors, comedians and directors have won acclaim by calling out sexism.

Those changing attitudes have also translated into legal victories. In 2016, the government enacted a landmark anti-domestic violence law, though enforcement remains spotty.

The credit for such achievements lies mostly with Chinese women, who have continued demanding equality despite increasing official pressure against their advocacy, said a Beijing-based feminist activist who also participated in the 1995 conference, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation.

An official from the government-run All-China Women’s Federation made clear the government’s disapproval of certain forms of feminism at a recent news briefing.

A reporter from People’s Daily, the party’s official mouthpiece, asked how China should respond to countries that use feminism for “political maneuvering” — the accusation that state media often lobs at critics of China’s record on women’s rights.

The official, Guo Ye, said: “I deeply resent these voices and people.”

She continued: “Those who wield the banner of feminism, and especially extremism in feminism, their goal is to disrupt this country.”