TL;DR: Yes, Maoism strongly encouraged feminism ideologically, however what this meant practically was very different.
I'm going to assume by 'did the Communist Party in China encourage feminism,' you mean the Maoist period, since the CCP still runs China and still produces feminist-related works and statements.
Feminism was a core tenant in Maoism, and Mao himself believed that 'women hold up the other half of the sky' when referring to the function of society. Mao himself wrote a ton of works dedicated to the liberation of women. Take for example, "Miss Chao's Suicide," which Mao wrote in 1919, well before the formation of the People's Republic: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_05.htm , particularly this part:
If we conduct a campaign in favor of marriage reform, it is first of all the superstitions about marriage that must be demolished, above all the belief that marriages are predestined by fate. Once these beliefs are demolished, the pretext behind which the arrangement of marriages by parents hides itself will disappear at the same time and then the concept of incompatibility of husband and wife' will immediately appear in society. And with the appearance of the concept of incompatibility of husband and wife, the army of the family revolution will arise in countless numbers, and the great wave of the freedom of marriage and of the freedom to love will sweep over China.
After the formation of the People's Republic in 1949, one of Mao's first acts was to pass the Marriage Law of 1950 which most importantly, among other things, finally allowed women to legally divorce their husbands. This law has been subject to a lot of recent scholarly debate; the practicalities of actually divorcing one's husband in 1950-70s China, particularly in the rural areas, was tough. It was originally thought that the law had little-to-no affect on female liberties, but recent scholarship has shown that the law may have been used much more often than we originally thought. I'll leave that at that, and I'll dive into other ideological fronts, such as literature and propaganda.
Literature
There were many women in the CCP who were not shy of vocalizing their beliefs of liberation. Possibly the loudest, or at least best witted, was Ding Ling, who was often critical of what she saw as the lack of care for feminism in the CCP. Ding Ling essentially shifted from writing fictional accounts of female's who would struggle psychologically in Chinese society to portraying female character's struggles with local corrupt officials and capitalism in general, earning her praise among leftist-circles such as the League of Left-wing Writers, which she became a member of. In 1941, she published "When I was in Xia Village" and "In the Hospital," two pieces of feminist-socialist work which were highly critical of women's positions in the revolutionary community. After the foundation of the PRC, Ding Ling tended to conform more with Mao and the Party, becoming less dissident, and even being marked as a "rightist" in 1957 by other feminist literati. She lived until 1986, still a somewhat controversial figure in China.
The "Women of China" was a literature and propaganda magazine which ran from 1949-1966, a media wing of the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF still exists today and the Women of China still runs today, albeit incredibly less radical). The only major media artery in China which was ran by women and not men, the Women of China's task was to set about spreading the final liberation of women all across China through "educational" means. This mainly meant through participation in society. Traditionally, women in Confucian society were to tend to the nei, or the 'inside.' This meant the house, the children, the indoor chores, etc. while men tended to the wai, or the 'outside.' This meant the actual farming (or whatever artisan job one held before the industrial world) and laborious work. Actually, if you go through a lot of pre-modern Chinese literature, you'd notice that women wouldn't even leave the house, because in a proper Confucian society someone's wife was only to be seen (and used) by their husband. Obviously this was not practically true, and women ventured out to do chores quite often. So what the Women of China is trying to do is tear down those traditional barriers. Women were portrayed as operating tractors and plowing the fields, or operating work-cranes and welding steel in an urban environment. Before being shutdown, the magazine was quite popular, earning a surplus of 600,000 yuan in February 1967, the month right before its suspension during the Cultural Revolution (Zhang).
Propaganda
There was been plenty of propaganda published regarding females in PRC China. During the 1950-early 60s, women are portrayed in radically different environments and doing radically different tasks than they are during the Republican era (I recently wrote a thesis on this). To keep it short, while the females are portrayed in the same environments as men, generally women look passive or ignorant compared to men. There is a short break from this during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao (realistically Madame Mao, his wife) orders the portrayal of women more masculine-like and independent, and you do see certain posters pop up of women in their late 20s not yet married and doing scientific research by themselves without male help. By the 1980s, however, propaganda reverts to a pretty pre-CCP level of female-portrayal; as trade with the West is introduced, so too is the reintroduction of using women as an advertisement tool for beauty products, or for other semi-erotic uses. You can check out an extensive library of these posters here: https://chineseposters.net/themes/women.php .
Practicalities of Feminism in Maoist China
So we've seen the ideological output of feminism in CCP China. It was huge; and women's rights and liberation took a front-and-center place in Maoism. Despite this, Chinese culture has been around for a long time. Misogyny in Chinese culture also has been around for a long time (as many of the revolutionaries in 1910-1940s China pointed out, Confucianism itself was inherently misogynist). Things hard to image in the West, such as the infanticide of unwanted female babies, has been a long established practice in China, and a few decades of ideological training in a world where modern media had not yet been organized was practically useless in many areas.
It should first be noted that if any area of China saw immediate progress of female rights, it was definitely the urban areas, especially Beijing and Tianjin. Still, women struggled to penetrate the higher-ranking jobs in the CCP, and most of the boss positions were still held by their male counterparts. As I pointed out, of the dozens of socialist magazines in the early PRC, only one was actually female-ran, and it was shut down in 1967 for "encouraging bourgeois individualism." Industrial jobs were generally reserved for males, while women were often stuck in the agricultural sectors of the economy.
In the rural areas, traditional practices continued either supervised or unsupervised. It was common for corrupt officials to write off rape or assault charges as embellished or untruthful. Divorcing your husband could still be a tricky situation, especially if you were both politically entwined with the local CCP. The practice of infanticide of female babies was still pervasive in many rural areas. So in conclusion, while feminism was a big part of Chinese socialism, it never manifested itself in reality the way female revolutionaries wanted it to.
Sources
Mittler, Barbara. A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution
Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Zhang, Jingyuan. "FEMINISM AND REVOLUTION: THE WORK AND LIFE OF DING LING." In The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, edited by Mostow Joshua S., Denton Kirk A., Fulton Bruce, and Orbaugh Sharalyn, 395-400. Columbia University Press, 2003.
Zheng, Wang. "Creating a Socialist Feminist Cultural Front: "Women of China" (1949–1966)." The China Quarterly, no. 204 (2010): 827-49.