Scholars have long recognized marriage reform as an important aspect of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) competition with the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD), an importance that continued during the People's Republic of China's socialist state-building after 1949. The scholarship to date produced on communist marriage reform has largely focused on either the role of elite women activists or the experiences of women from lower social groups in top-down campaigns and reforms. Xiaoping Cong's book convincingly demonstrates that rural and illiterate women and men successfully carved out a space of agency for themselves in the face of the state's reformist agenda. In this process of negotiation, court practices, judicial institutions, and legal discourses were shaped by local customary contexts that resisted the revolutionary state's idealistic designs.

Xiaoping Cong achieves her goal of studying the interaction between the rural population and law in the communist-controlled Shan-Gan-Ning Border Region (SGNBR) by focusing on a 1943 legal case, Feng v. Zhang. In this case, Feng Peng'er resorted to court intervention to enforce her marriage with her fiancé who had kidnapped her after Peng'er's father cancelled her engagement in favor of a suitor who provided a higher bride price. Judge Ma Xiwu, based on the principle of “self-determination in marriage” (hunyin zizhu), ruled in Peng'er's favor despite the fact that Peng'er's marriage with her fiancé also involved bride price and thus technically qualified as a buying/selling marriage prohibited by communist regulations. Feng v. Zhang was used by the revolutionary state as a model case to train legal workers in the SGNBR, was adapted into popular art forms to promote marriage reform among the populace, and was propagated in Nationalist-controlled regions as an example of the good governance of the CCP. The three parts of the book trace the development of Feng v. Zhang from the local to the high court, and then to its adaptation on the national stage. Throughout, Cong deftly integrates detailed discussions of local conditions in Northwest China, classical and modern Chinese understandings of justice, the reconstruction of the SGNBR court system, and legal popularization through art and media.

The author provides impressive and meticulous analysis of the evolution of a few key legal concepts that have been fundamentally important in law, society, and politics in China since the nineteenth century. For example, Cong insightfully reveals that ziyou, which is used in the modern Chinese language as an equivalent to the Western concepts “liberty” or “freedom,” has its root in classical Chinese with a linguistic structure hinting at exercising one's will without restraints. This indigenous meaning was widely appropriated by the rural population in the SGNBR to assert unlimited parental power to rearrange marriages for children, which led to a significant divergence between elite understandings of marriage reform and local practice. The adoption by the revolutionary state of new legal terms such as ziyuan (self-willingness) and zizhu (self-determination)—together with the introduction of new court techniques such as popular opinion solicitation, open court, and separate questioning of women litigants and their families—empowered women in the particular historical context in which the SGNBR legal system operated. This in turn shows the flexibility of the CCP's strategies during its early state-building. The author also mentions that the indigenous, negative meaning of ziyou was used by communist leaders such as Mao Zedong to oppose “zi-you-ism” (liberalism). Against this cultural background, zizhu (self-determination) has been featuring prominently in political discourse concerning sovereignty and autonomy in modern China. A thorough etymological examination of ziyou and zizhu reveals the intimate relations between law and translation and between law and politics, which is highly valuable within and beyond empirical studies of domestic law in China.

Cong also provides a deep investigation into the complex meanings of the notion qing, which, together with li (principle) and fa (law), was a dominant ideal in legal justice in imperial and modern China. In the energetic debates among scholars over the cult of qing, the sentimental aspect of the term qing (emotion/feeling) is often emphasized, whereas the objective aspect of the term highlights circumstances and situations that to a certain extent have been omitted or marginalized. Cong shows, through her discussion of Feng v. Zhang and many other related marriage disputes, that it was precisely the compounding of historically constructed situations and locally specific sentiments that motivated local people, women included, to engage the revolutionary state with initiatives and innovations. The CCP, at least in its own struggle for survival during the 1930s and the 1940s, was willing and able to integrate local interests and sentiments (qing) into pragmatic and strategic state-building projects, using its success in legal reform to promote its own image as a democratic and effective state. This flexibility, or lack of “high-modernism” despite its modernist agenda, as Cong puts it, partially explains the CCP's victory in 1949 in the face the GMD's formidable but formalist legal regime. It also distinguishes the CCP in its early years from the highly centralized and ideologically driven national power it eventually became in the 1950s and the 1960s.

Both interdisciplinary and law focused, Marriage, Law, and Gender in Revolutionary China combines empirical richness and reader friendliness, allowing its audience to walk across the boundaries of social history, cultural history, legal history, and gender studies without losing the excitement of its storytelling. It is a “must read” for any scholar of law or communist state- building in China, and a good reference for historians and legal scholars who are interested in approaching twentieth century legal modernization and family reform from a comparative perspective.