Revolution and Counterrevolution in China by Lin Chun

Author:Lin Chun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

From women’s liberation to reinventing feminism without socialism

The communists in China held the liberal and Marxist conviction of the necessity of women’s liberation. Marx and Engels in The Holy Family affirmed Charles Fourier’s idea that ‘the change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the progress of women towards freedom … The degree of emancipation of women is the natural measure of general emancipation.’65 But beyond theory, it was the extraordinary subordination and suffering of women in traditional Chinese culture that helped motivate and justified the revolution. In the sexual hierarchy, women were treated as perpetual minors or inadequately human – in addition to experiencing class and other inequalities. In his 1927 report on the peasant movement, Mao famously called for the breaking of the ‘four chains’: political regime, clan patriarchy, superstition and the patriarchal family. The cause of women’s liberation in China had been pioneered by educated republican revolutionaries, such as Qiu Jin and He Zhen, along with their male comrades.

The communists went many miles farther by engaging the ‘woman-work’ of consciousness raising and mass mobilization. In Ruijin 1934, ‘citizens of the Chinese Soviet Republic’ were declared equal ‘without distinction of sex, religion or nationality’. The ‘thorough emancipation of women’ sought freedom from marriage: material support for women’s independence from domestic bondage, as well as their public and political participation. Such cultural products as the ‘white-haired girl’ (who fled abuses by a landlord to survive on wild plants in the mountains before joining the revolution – a true story) and the ‘red detachment of women’ (who fought the white army in Hainan – also a true and legendary tale) promoted these values in popular culture of the bravery and beauty of revolutionary feminism. It took China over a century of reforms and revolutions to shatter many of the old forms of female oppression along with other fundamental social changes – a landed patriarchal structure, the fixed gender division of labour and the customary perception of women as an inferior class. The strenuous struggle by and for women, bound up with those for equality and justice across social arenas, is a significant dimension of communist revolution and its legacies.

Socialist modernization in the PRC continued to align socialism and feminism in a form of ‘state feminism’ – a term borrowed from the Nordic social democracies to indicate a women-friendly state obliged to equalize gender relations by legal and policy means. The communist government, through its ‘transmission belt’ infrastructure and particularly the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF) with its local branches down to the villages and work units, eliminated foot-binding, child brides and the trafficking of women; it also outlawed forced widowhood chastity, arranged marriage without individual consent, domestic violence and workplace discrimination. The landmark Marriage Law (1950) set up a moral standard for the new society. A new version of this law was made in 1980 to ease divorce for the willing female partner, and again revised in 2001 to improve protection for women and children in a market environment where rich men were engaging in polygamy and other exploitative relationships.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.