Communism, family, gender and political movements after 1949

Communism seemed to usher in a new society for China.  In many ways, it did.  Communism abolished polygamy (which was first abolished by the republican government in 1912 but never completely carried out), established gender equality and legitimated free love and marriage (in contrast to arranged) in its 1950 Marriage Law, leading to a 50 per cent divorce rate in rural marriages in the first few years of its implementation.  Communism upheld high principles and sought to overcome traditional Confucian social relationships, including its byproduct nepotism and other forms of corruption,  with these principles.  But within Communism there were many unresolved problems.  Gender equality did not lead to a respect for women.  The supremacy of communism and revolution led to a de-emphasis of the family, and the Communist call for equality could not overcome the deep-seated mistrust and lack of communication between the urban/educated and rural/illiterate Communists.  Reflected at a higher level, the question was what goals should Communist policies reflect: a technocratic focus on economic development, or a continuous emphasis on political revolutions and mass mobilization.  The continuous political movements that followed indicated a lack of effective new means for the Communists to bind the country together except for the traditional forms of mass political mobilization, which the Communists applied successfully in the late 1940s and early 1950s to win the masses over.

1. Gender and politics in Communism:

Communist China emphasized gender equality, but this emphasis was to make the two sexes more united in the building of socialism. Therefore, gender was not emphasized and from the story of Chang’s mother, one can see that her role as a woman was subsumed under her role as a Communist. She was expected to obey Communist rules, e.g. not taking a car befitting her status after her child birth, and going on food gathering in bandit infested areas when she was pregnant. Love and marriage were also secondary to revolution. Another consequence of the emphasis on gender equality in China was many educated women’s looking down upon household chores and child rearing. Work came first, and household duties second.

2. Love and marriage vs. revolution. 

Because Communist Party came first, like gender differences, everything was subsumed under the guidelines of the Communists, including permission to get married, and with whom.  the family and its needs were subordinate to the needs of the revolution.

3. Communist principles versus Confucian social relationships.

Communism purportedly was to establish a completely new society based on new universal principles.  Born during the New Culture Movement in the 1920s, Chinese Communism bore the imprint of the New Culture Movement and the latter's iconoclastic attack on Confucian learning and Chinese tradition.  The most exemplary of Communist practice was the father's treatment toward the mother and his own relatives: avoiding granting them privileges, treating them worse than they would otherwise have been treated under the leadership of others, to avoid nepotism or following Confucian social relationships.

4. Chasm between the urban/educated and rural/uneducated Communists.

While Chang's father, coming from a small town and experiencing long years of guerrilla warfare, served as something like a bridge between the two groups of the urban/educated and rural/uneducated Communists, Chang's mother and her female supervisors with working class, guerrilla backgrounds at the Women’s Federation in Jinzhou, northeastern China, in 1948 well illustrates the conflict between these two groups of Communists. From the beginning, there was a rift between the Communists of a bourgeois background and a proletariat/peasant background. This rift was at the root of several major political movements in Communist China, including the Anti-rightist movement (1957) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

5. Political movements and mass mobilization as the Communists' means of establishing social control.

Because of the tension among the different social groups within Communism, and because the Communists lacked effective new policies to establish social control, in the face of foreign threat (e.g. the Korean War, 1950-53, and the possible U.S. landing in China via Taiwan as well as north Korea), Chinese Communists often triumphed against dissenting colleagues who argued for a technocratic approach that focused on the urban areas and on economic/industrial development, and resorted to the traditional strategies of mass political mobilization, which they had used in the 1940s and early 1950s, in having peasants condemn their landlords, redistributing land, abolishing arranged marriages, etc., thus winning over a large spectrum of lower classes in Chinese society.  To establish a unified society, Communist China often used coercive measures in the 1950s-60s to define who did not belong to the proletarian classes, designating enemies of the people, and coercing them to recant and reform. Communist China (1949) and political movements Social classification (p.173)  The Three Anties campaign (1951) (p.182).  Campaign against hidden revolutionaries (1955) (p.195). Antirightist campaign (1957) (204- ) How Chang's family was involved: Chang’s grandmother’s criticism.  Chang’s mother’s confinement.