The performing arts—from song and dance to plays and operas—played a crucial role in the formation of the People's Republic of China after 1949. In recent years, new historical work—based on fresh archival documents, oral history interviews, personal records, and other exciting sources—has once more demonstrated convincingly that the performing arts were mediators of China's revolution. Studies have explored the individuals and groups that made the performing arts, and their different experiences over time and in different localities: from the perspective of those who created scripts and storylines, to those who performed, practiced, and experienced performances. In mediating the revolution, the performing arts made abstract concepts such as revolution, nation, state, and law more tangible and relatable.

As Xiaoping Cong's rich book Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940–1960 demonstrates, many of the stories narrated in such performances were based on the personal experiences of individuals and families whom Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres and intellectuals encountered in the border regions during the 1930s and 1940s. Tracing how these storylines developed from locality to stage is a difficult task requiring painstaking detective work. But it can help connect cultural history and the performing arts to social, political, and—in this case—legal history.

At the heart of the book is the story of one 1943 legal case, Feng vs. Zhang, in Gansu Province's Huachi County. It might seem a simple case at first: a man surnamed Feng sued Zhang Bo and his father for kidnapping his daughter Peng'er and forcing her into marriage. Peng'er had been engaged to Zhang Bo from a young age, but Feng had used the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region's marriage regulations to dissolve the engagement, with Peng'er's consent, under the pretext of “freedom of marriage.” Then he had engaged her to another man who had offered a higher caili (betrothal gift). Soon after, the Zhangs kidnapped her. Feng argued that the Zhangs had had no right to abduct Peng'er. It seemed another clear violation of freedom of marriage, and the county court ruled in his favor and annulled the marriage. Peng'er, however, surprisingly appealed. She actually wanted to marry Zhang Bo, having met him in person after her father dissolved their engagement. The kidnapping was therefore consensual. To evaluate Peng'er's appeal, the Prefect Ma Xiwu—himself soon to become a symbol of revolutionary law—visited the county, spoke to villagers, and investigated. Having established that the kidnapping was a means to achieve freedom of marriage, he repealed the county court's verdict.

In three parts, the book traces the events that led to Feng vs. Zhang, the court proceedings as they unfolded, and the social and legal historical context of the case. We learn how the case became the basis for a popular local opera and ballad, and eventually also for the nationally famous Ping opera and the feature film Liu Qiao'er. The trajectory from courtroom to theater stage was anything but linear, and by the mid-1950s the real Peng'er and the stage character Liu Qiao'er shared few similarities. Peng'er had been a woman trying to navigate between her father's wishes and her own. Qiao'er became a much-molded symbol of CCP governance and the revolutionary fight against feudal marriage practices. The case and the different narratives about Peng'er/Qiao'er reveal how “the Chinese revolution and its legal practices produced new discourses, neologisms, and cultural symbols” (p. 9). This included new terms such as “self-determination” (zizhu) in marriage: a term that was popular in the border region during the 1940s but only made it into national law at the end of the Mao period. Cong explains why the border region's marriage regulations granted women new rights but also deprived them of some of their earlier autonomy to navigate the traditional frameworks of engagement, marriage, and sexuality. She shows how the legal system developed around such local specificities, how legal workers developed intricate yet flexible strategies to deal with complicated cases such as Feng vs. Zhang, and why many of these strategies were discarded or lost after 1949. And she reveals how gender roles were constructed and reconstructed by a diverse group of women of different ages and backgrounds, from Yan'an in the 1940s to Beijing and beyond in the 1950s.

Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940–1960 successfully pushes us to rethink the history of CCP marriage and legal reform, to take account of the conceptual history of key terms (freedom/ziyou and self-determination/zizhu), and to pay attention to generational and regional differences and developments across the watershed year of 1949. The analysis can sometimes be difficult to follow, given the intricacies of the story and Cong's ambition to provide detailed accounts of imbricated legal, political, cultural, and social developments that led to Feng vs. Zhang and the making of Liu Qiao'er. Nonetheless, the book is a significant contribution to the fields of social, legal, and cultural history.