Women as Subaltern Subjects in Revolutionary China

Leo Deng

3/3/23

Modern Chinese History

In Gail Hershatter’s Women and China’s Revolutions, she aims to center Modern Chinese history’s revolutions around women, posing this other half of the globe’s population as the main perspective, which is one that is usually structurally excluded from the writers of history. As Hershatter puts it perfectly, “China’s modern history is not complete, or even comprehensible, without close attention to the changing scope and meanings of women’s labor and Woman as a flexible symbol of social problems, national humiliation, and political transformation.”[1] With women’s specifically oppressed circumstances in China with foot-binding, widow chastity, and suppression of sexual freedom among many other socio-cultural conditions, the inherent intersectionality of their experiences with the tides of radical change and cultural revolutions of Modern China (that speak on cultural backwardness, global competition, and the fight against exploitation) gives a perspective untainted by didacticism of men. Those men are determined to be our storytellers by the uncontrollable force of patriarchy that arguably far proceed the existence of the oppressive forces of political economy.[2] Thus, women constitute a position of precarity and subalternity in Chinese society that revolution and its control on social roles depend on as women suffer under the cultural hegemony of China’s early 20th century’s changing conventions.

Subalternity and Hershatter’s Mission

By centering women in both the objective analysis of Chinese revolutionary history and the subjective telling of women’s point of view, it pulls the reader towards a reading of subalternity that is much closer to a people’s history, a working-class history—a history of the oppressed as opposed to that of the oppressor, whose historically dominating character allows them to write history with them at the center. So, a Marxist Feminist and Radical Feminist lens of interpreting this history is fitting by reaping from theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Anuradha Ghandy, and by nature of Hershatter’s mission, her text is more prone to such interpretations. Spivak helps define the Gramscian term of subalternity as “everybody thinks the subaltern is just a classy word for oppressed, for [the] Other” when in fact “everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now who would say that’s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It’s not subaltern.”[3] This is a strikingly apt concept for women in revolutionary China as even in the tides and strains of progressive nationalism and communism, cultural imperialism or cultural hegemony (as Gramsci or Spivak would say) makes sure even progressive change is at the expense of the women’s fight against patriarchal oppression. Chinese cultural hegemony of patriarchy is rooted in the Confucian fundamentalism that nationalism and communism both fought against, but it says more about how the cultural backwardness against gender liberation permeated Chinese society’s cultural logic temporally and thus, took more time to shift. However, the peculiarity is then why such radical change could be accepted for nationalism and even the overthrow of epochal modes of production rather than gender rights or equality?

Pre-Revolution and Revolutionary Nationalism

The strength of anti-feminist cultural backwardness is then more powerful than expected from the modern perspective (which could support the theory of patriarchy presupposing economic exploitation) and thus, it can be traced to the pre-revolutionary strains of nationalism and anarchism in China. These strains represent the early reactions to patriarchy that have unfortunately vanished into the abyss of obscure history because they did not end up winning. Thankfully, with Hershatter’s re-centering of history towards women, we can see a more nuanced image; for example, Mrs. Archibald’s first-person account of foot-binding in China—a practice that was supposed to signify beauty and marital value, creating a common assumption in predominant history of the immobility of women—that showed the truth of women laboring “in the fields with bound feet, even working as trackers hauling boats attached to ropes up the Yangzi.”[4] The coinciding of the nationalist project and a constant revaluation of what the modern woman should be emerged even before the big debates of the New Culture movement; Shanghai’s Shenbao in the 1880s “called for an end to foot-binding, concubinage, and confinement of women so that foreigners would no longer despise China as uncivilized.”[5] Nationalist-leaning progressives like Xue Shaoli and Qiu Jin would exemplify the ruptures of patriarchal history; the former defended poetic practice for women, rethought pedagogical methods for women to learn foreign possibilities of gender, and formulated a proto-care ethics of sorts by “mothering the world” to renew China,[6] while the latter revolutionary “first feminist of China” urged women to “be awakened on behalf of themselves and the nation,” wore gender-bending male kimonos, and was beheaded into martyrdom for helping with a 1907 uprising where a comrade of hers tried to assassinate the principal of their school.[7] Also, the anarchist rupture that was He-Yin Zhen tied women’s oppression to capitalist exploitation where “bodies of all women were potentially treated as property,” foreshadowing how the communists would take on the Woman’s Question far before their existence.[8] All these examples pushed back against the didactic view of male progressives treating women as mere victims to be liberated and saved, which was for the opportunistic reason to build an image of China being a “civilized” society rather than genuine care for gender liberation.

This lack of genuine care for liberating women in the nationalist movement became apparent through the post-revolution New Culture and May 4th movements and the KMT’s betrayal of the Woman’s Question. The KMT became a site of simultaneous action of using the modernization of women for nation-building and a terrain for women to fight against women’s oppression. Tang Qunying would argue for women’s suffrage, defend full citizenship and rights for women, and famously slap Song Jiaoren who helped Sun Yat-sen back out of support for women’s citizenship to gain conservative support.[9] The cultural movements following the revolution’s failure to secure rights and general stability for Chinese people saw authors like Yang Zihua and Ding Ling reinterpret the meaning of a Modern Woman, reacting to the subsequent failure of the new Republic’s handling of the Woman’s Question. Yang wrote about the psychological mishaps between men and women as industrialization required interaction, for the first time, amongst the genders outside of a purely familial or marital context. She thus, tried to teach people that sexual desire was not a signifier of love and to look for characteristic resonance instead; none of these pre-modern elements were even existent before the revolution.[10] Ding would write “Miss Sophie’s Diary” in vernacular about a young woman transitioning into urban life who looks for a man to “love” temporarily, conveying the complexity of promiscuity clashing with love in the drastic change of women’s place in society.[11]

This hope of progression for women’s status in China shines through in the fragments of the KMT movement until the big halt of Chiang Kai-shek’s rise to power. Chiang would lead the party down a dark road of violence as they would betray the CPC and start killing communists and suspected ones in the “White Terror” (1927) and extermination camps (1940-34) and enforce the New Life Movement’s (1934-37) fascist values against female promiscuity and a refocus of women’s place in housework.[12] This shows a pinnacle example of anti-feminist cultural hegemony because the patronizing, paternal attitude towards women is dragged along with dominant modes of thought; even when male progressives fought for women, their inherently blind-sighted views allow for example, Liang Qichao to advocate for women’s education but on how to be better wives and houseworkers, clearly predicated on his backward and uncontextualized view of women being ignorant, uneducated, and prone to petty quarrels.[13] Thus, whether progressive or regressive, women and the women’s movement took the brunt almost always for the sake of the more “important” mission.

Communism and Women

The Communists would stick to a more progressive line on women because of their ideological discipline that the nationalists lacked (the malleability of 3 People’s Principles), but the ramp-up towards revolution and intensifying conditions after the Long March showed yet again the treatment of women as second-class citizens. Both Yang Zihua and Ding Ling from the New Culture and May 4th movements would join the CPC—the KMT turn towards fascism would have repulsed them anyway—with Ding later being a prominent critic of Communist society’s treatment of women. Mao Zedong’s early work would show his astute analysis of Chinese women in Report on Xunwu (1930), where he would say, “although men are no longer serfs, a woman is still a man’s serf or semi-serf, without political rights and personal freedom. No one suffers more than women.”[14] Thus, the time of the Jiangxi Soviet made leaps and strides in the Women’s question, in a way, reviving He-Yi Zhen’s intertwining of patriarchy and economic exploitation with Mao’s thorough analysis of class nuances in China with his Xunwu Report that achieved what was lacking in the Hunan Report (included an economic reductionism of all to either peasant or landlord). The land reform the CPC advocated for revealed that “land reform was often inextricable from marriage reform” for peasant women because powerful landlords demanded sexual access from poorer peasant women, some families were forced into selling their daughters to avoid the prior, and for women like Xie Peilan, the communist revolution guaranteed their choice and freedom in who to marry.[15] This sentiment would be reflected early in anecdotes of violence against oppressive landlords, the organization of women’s associations, and a staggering 90% of divorce cases initiated by women in Xunwu.[16] However, even then, the only policy preventing complete marital equality was that only women married to Red Army soldiers were prevented from exercising those rights—they were not allowed to divorce as a safety guarantee for the husband to not be anxious during their service.[17] Women’s experience would only disintegrate further as the treacherous invasion of the Jiangxi Soviet required the Long March to Yan’an. The famous location of Mao Zedong Thought’s (MZT) fruition would see Ding Ling’s critique of double standards for women of the Party, criticizing men’s abilities to dispose of their wives for younger women, while female comrades are subject to gossip and censure for the utmost particularities of their choices for marriage, having children, and being revolutionary communists at the same time.[18] The utter conflict between the socio-cultural needs for women to still be competent in housework, good mothers, and provide feminine comfort to their husbands while the other option of being single makes them “even more of a target for […] slanderous gossip” shows the lose-lose situation for women in Yan’an.[19] Thus, the ideals of Mao’s feminism and the Mass Line (which should include the voices and needs of the female masses) were confined to the realm of theory alone when in practice, the “real problems” (as Ding Ling would say) of contradictory socio-cultural expectations of women were not properly understood and confronted yet. Therefore, those expectations support the existence of a cultural hegemony burdening women as a subaltern group, posing women’s liberation as among many secondary attributes to a progressive movement.

Marxist Feminism to Maoist Internationalism (Conclusion)

Retrospectively, the subalternity of women in China’s revolutionary history is clear in the few instances provided as the Woman’s Question was always either instrumentalized for a movement (nationalism) or merely part of a bigger, more “significant” oppressive issue (communism). Hershatter’s amplification of women’s voices and stories allows for a counter-didactic, genuine view of women that shows the fight against the specific strain of Chinese patriarchal cultural hegemony. The progressive female voices either directly (He-Yin) or in an accumulative fashion (nationalists and communists) contributed to the Marxist Feminism that stands to this day,[20] which can be hinted at by the CPC’s early work and Mao’s writings. Although MZT became the ironic monolith of the CPC that pays lip service to Marxism, especially after the Capitalist Roaders era after 1976, Maoism proper[21] developed by arguably the PCP (Communist Party of Peru) or RIM (Revolutionary Internationalist Movement) in the 1980s, seeing full-on implementations of protracted people’s war and the mass line in Philippines, Turkey, Bangladesh, Peru, Nepal, India, and Manipur have also continued in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line of self-criticism on feminism.[22] This self-criticism can be most accredited to Anuradha Ghandy of CPI(Maoist)[23] who recognized the anti-feminist currents within her own party and theoretically reconciled Capitalist Patriarchy with the Marxist conception of Base and Superstructure.[24] As stated before, the patriarchal backwardness of China’s revolutions proved to be strong enough to withstand overhauls of state systems, although partly withered or restored in each, the fight for women’s liberation within Maoism and the globe shall continue in solidarity!

Bibliography

Atwill, David, and Yurong Atwill. Sources in Chinese History. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2021.

De Kock, Leon. “Interview With Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa,” 1992, 45–46.

Ghandy, Anuradha. Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement. Utrecht: Foreign Languages Press, 2016. https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/S02-Philosophical-Trends-in-the-Feminist-Movement-9th-Printing.pdf.

Hershatter, Gail. Women and China’s Revolutions. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018.

Karl, Rebecca E. Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History. Durham NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010.

Moufawad-Paul, J. Critique of Maoist Reason. Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020. https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/N05-Critique-of-Maoist-Reason-5th-Printing.pdf.

Redstockings. “Redstockings Manifesto.” Redstockings, July 7, 1969. https://www.redstockings.org/index.php/rs-manifesto.

Weiner, Benno. “Lecture: From Jiangxi to Yan’an: The Long March and the Rise of Mao Zedong.” Presented at the Modern Chinese History: From Mao... to Now, Wean Hall 5310, February 20, 2023.

Weiner, Benno. “Lecture: Manchukuo-Rural.” Presented at the Modern Chinese History: From Mao... to Now, Wean Hall 5310, February 15, 2023.

[1] Gail Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018), xiii. [2] Anuradha Ghandy, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement (Utrecht: Foreign Languages Press, 2016), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/S02-Philosophical-Trends-in-the-Feminist-Movement-9th-Printing.pdf., 82. This comes from Ghandy’s paraphrasing of Iris Young’s view on Heidi Hartmann’s “dual system makes patriarchy some kind of universal phenomenon which is existing before capitalism.” Also, many other feminists and movements come to mind like the Redstockings saying, “male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination.” Redstockings, “Redstockings Manifesto,” Redstockings, July 7, 1969, https://www.redstockings.org/index.php/rs-manifesto. [3] Leon De Kock, “Interview With Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa,” 1992, 45–46. [4] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 66. [5] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 70. [6] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 71. [7] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 79-80. [8] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 84. [9] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 87-89. [10] David Atwill and Yurong Atwill, Sources in Chinese History, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2021), 183-184. Yang Zihua’s “Love and Socializing between Men and Women” (July 1922). [11] Atwill and Atwill, Sources in Chinese History, 185. [12] Benno Weiner, “Lecture: Manchukuo-Rural” (Modern Chinese History: From Mao... to Now, Wean Hall 5310, February 15, 2023). [13] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 61-62. [14] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 154. “Source: Mao Zedong, Report from Xunwu, translated by Roger R. Thompson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 212-13.” [15] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 167-68. [16] Hershatter, Women and China’s Revolutions, 168. [17] Benno Weiner, “Lecture: From Jiangxi to Yan’an: The Long March and the Rise of Mao Zedong” (Modern Chinese History: From Mao... to Now, Wean Hall 5310, February 20, 2023). [18] Rebecca E. Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Durham NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010), 66-67. [19] Atwill and Atwill, Sources in Chinese History, 234-35. Ding Ling’s “Thoughts on March 8, Women’s Day” (1942). [20] Alexandra Kollontai, Shulamith Firestone, Angela Davis, Anuradha Ghandy, Juliet Mitchell, Maria Mies, are some figures who come to mind. [21] As opposed to merely referring to the ambiguous associations, theoretical and practical, of a figure like Obamaism. [22] J. Moufawad-Paul, Critique of Maoist Reason (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/N05-Critique-of-Maoist-Reason-5th-Printing.pdf. See also author’s renowned book on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism Continuity and Rupture. [23] Communist Party of India (Maoist). [24] Ghandy, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, 93-94.