Peng Liyuan. China's famous First Lady

ANDREW JACOBSPeng Liyuan, China's most enduring pop-folk icon, is beloved for her glass-cracking soprano and her ability to take on such roles as a coquettish Tibetan yak herder , a lovelorn imperial courtesan, even a stiff-lipped major general - which in fact she is.

But as the nation begins to absorb the reality that its newly anointed top leader, Xi Jinping, is coming to office with a wife who happens to be a big-haired brassy diva, palace watchers are daring to ask the question: has China's Carla Bruni-Sarkozy moment finally arrived?

Peng, 49, certainly has what it takes to revolutionize China's stodgy first lady paradigm, in which the spouses of top leaders are usually kept well out of sight or, at best, stand mute behind their husbands during state visits.

For more than two decades she was a lavishly costumed fixture on the nation's must-see Chinese New Year show, often emerging from a blur of synchronized backup dancers to sing about the sacrifices of the People's Liberation Army, which bestowed on her a civilian rank equivalent to major general. More recently, she has extended her celebrity to public service, comforting survivors of the Sichuan earthquake and gently scolding young people about the dangers of smoking and unprotected sex.

"Peng Liyuan could be an enormously positive thing for China, which really needs female role models," said Hung Huang, publisher of a fashion magazine. "Just imagine if she turned out to be a first lady like Michelle Obama."

But experts here agree that there is a major obstacle to Peng playing a more prominent role on the national stage: Chinese men. Despite Mao Zedong's feel-good dictum that "women hold up half the sky," they are barely visible in the inner sanctum of the granite colossus on Tiananmen Square .

Until the last century, women were kept uneducated and barred from the imperial bureaucracy. Even today the gender imbalance - with 118 men for every 100 women - is a testament to Chinese favoritism toward boys. Chinese women - at least those who dare to speak out - are not pleased.

"It's unhealthy and unfair to have so few women within the Chinese political system," said Guo Jianmei, director of the Women's Legal Research and Service Center in Beijing, a nonprofit group. Guo said men dominate Chinese politics at the top because they keep the door firmly shut at the bottom. In a two-year study her institute recently completed, researchers in rural Heilongjiang province found precious few female party officials at the village and county level.

"No wonder there are so few women at the top," she said. "It's a vicious cycle that's only getting worse."

Chinese history has a few examples of women gaining power behind the scenes - Empress Dowager Cixi in the late Qing dynasty and Empress Consort Wu of the Tang dynasty were the most prominent examples. Cixi, who is blamed for the downfall of China's last empire, is said to have executed disfavored scholars.

But Lei Yi, a historian at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said such tales are wild exaggerations, the product of male bias. "Let's face it, throughout history men wanted a monopoly on power and when things went wrong, they blamed it on women."

There is no shortage of ancient proverbs, some still in popular use, that describe what happens when women get close to power. "A great beauty will bring about the downfall of cities and nations," goes one of them.

More recently, such sentiments were reinforced by Jiang Qing, the former actress and third wife of Mao, who took much of the blame for the Cultural Revolution. The fact that she was in show business has probably not helped Peng.

She appears to have followed a set of unwritten rules about the comportment of women attached to important men. The higher her husband climbed the Communist Party ladder, the less visible she became. Since her husband's ascension to the Politburo Standing Committee in 2007 she has all but disappeared from the annual Spring Festival gala.

Peng, who was born in a small town in the northeastern province of Shandong and joined the army at age 18, found fame long before she met Xi. When the couple was introduced by a mutual friend in 1986, she was already known as the " outstanding songbird of the century."

Xi, the son of a revolutionary hero, was a midlevel official in Fujian province, newly divorced from his first wife. Peng, who turns 50 on Tuesday, is nearly a decade younger than Xi.

In an interview she gave to Zhanjiang Evening News in 2007, she said she was unimpressed with him at first glance. "Not only did he look rustic, but he also looked older than his years," she said. But once Xi Jinping opened his mouth, her objections faded . They married a year later.

Their relationship has required many compromises. The two are seldom together, she said, and in 1992, his official duties during a typhoon in Fujian forced him to miss the birth of the couple's daughter. Even being in the same city does not guarantee face time. "People would gossip if I bring my wife with me all the time," he reportedly told her. "It's not good for our images."

Her public image has gone through a makeover since Xi was set on the path to becoming party secretary, even losing her extravegant dresses for stylish outfits or military uniforms. The censors have also clipped her wings , removing all but the most anodyne information about her from the Web and blocking her name on China's version of Twitter.

Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the party would be wise to use Peng as a soft power weapon, both at home and abroad.

"If people see that Xi has such a beautiful wife, it would make the party seem more humane and less robotic," she said.

But she is not counting on much change. "Obama uses Michelle because it brings him popular support," she said. "The Communist Party has no need for that, because when you already have all the power, what's the point of bringing out the wife?"