In 1964, Mao Zedong called on the Chinese “masses” to “learn from Dazhai.” Situated in the remote areas of Shanxi province, the village of Dazhai became one of the most famous models of collectivized agriculture during the Mao era (1949–1976). It owed part of its fame to a group of young women who called themselves the Iron Girls Brigade. Doubly marginalized as rural women, the Iron Girls epitomized the ideal robust, hard-working female who by labouring as much or more than men broke down gender barriers in support of a glorious socialist present and Communist future. They were among the women whom China's state feminists had worked to liberate since the 1940s and before. By the 1980s, with Mao dead and China firmly on the road of “reform and opening,” the Iron Girls had been turned into a symbol of “hyper-masculinized, ultra-leftist Maoism.” No longer a feminist role model, many urban intellectuals now used the Iron Girls as an example of everything Chinese women should not wish to be.
The history of how women such as the Iron Girls became first a positive and then a negative role model is the focus of this book. In eight chapters, Wang Zheng examines what she calls the socialist feminist cultural front. Her study focuses on two aspects in particular: the work of the All-China Women's Federation, at the grassroots and nationally, and feminists' work in the film industry. These two aspects were closely connected because state feminists assumed a “shared role” in this front that extended across politics, government, and cultural production.
Chapter one takes us to Shanghai in the early 1950s to examine how state feminists established an urban network for the new Women's Federation. How to position the Federation's work was subject to tense contestations, however. Relegated to the status of a “mass organization,” “women-work” was meant to “assist” the CCP's work in general. Moving to Beijing in 1957, chapter two reconstructs the political manoeuvres of women such as Luo Qiong, Cai Chang and Deng Yingchao to save the feminist movement. With the help of Deng Xiaoping, they re-positioned the Federation and gave it new marching orders (at least for a while): the “two diligences” (“diligently, frugally build the country, and diligently, frugally manage the family”) (p. 55). What seemed a departure from core feminist values was in fact an attempt to ensure the Federation's survival. Chapters three and four trace the history of the Federation's magazine Women of China. They discuss magazine covers, readers' letters and discussion forums, but also the history of how the magazine was produced, how it weathered political storms and how it became, under the leadership of Shen Zijiu and Dong Bian, a profitable publication with over half a million copies per issue. In 1964, Chen Boda fervently (and unfairly) attacked Women of China for disseminating bourgeois ideas about love and marital relations, and called on the magazine to place feminist interests second to the proletariat's class struggle. This was a veiled attack on Hu Qiaomu, colleague and friend of Dong Bian's husband Tian Jiaying. The magazine had become a battleground for personal feuds and it was the end of the Federation's open advocacy for changing gender relations.
Chapters five, six and seven shed light on leading feminists in the film industry: Chen Bo'er and Xia Yan. Chen Bo'er, actress and activist, was instrumental in bringing the socialist feminist movement to the silver screen. Creating new forms of mass line collective film production, she championed the need to engage closely with the everyday realities of people featured in films, turned the rural woman into a film heroine, and pioneered many of the strategies that Mao would later call for in his famous Yan'an Talks. A “senior communist artist-official” (p. 181), Xia Yan, meanwhile, was one of China's leading male feminists whose films and scripts were legendary and hugely popular. Jiang Qing's rise to power during the 1960s marked his fall from grace. Jiang Qing promoted her own feminist vision of masculinist women who were like men. Yet Xia Yan's fall was not the result of opposite political visions –the two were not so far apart – but once more the result of personal animosities that long predated the Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing's take on the state feminist agenda, as chapter eight shows, brought women such as the Iron Girls Brigade even more into the limelight but also tainted them by association once she was denounced after 1976.
The book is an enjoyable analytical tour de force. Wang Zheng argues that two crucial dynamics help explain why the history of these state feminists has not featured prominently in accounts of the Mao era. First, these women practiced a “politics of concealment.” Couching their ideas and projects in the language of Party orthodoxy, and thus de-linking them from their feminist origins, state feminists were able to push some of their agendas forward and “became co-authors of the dominant state discourse” (p. 51). The price for this was anonymity. State feminists' agency in realizing a feminist agenda in Party-state politics was largely lost in the mainstream historical record. Whatever was not lost became subject to the “politics of erasure.” Especially after the end of the Mao era, many urban intellectuals and state officials alike made sweeping generalizations that associated state feminists' accomplishments with the unfavourable parts of the Maoist Party-state, actively erasing a more complex picture of the first three decades after 1949.
The book joins those who have called for more nuanced studies of Communist Party-state politics. Over the past years, scholarship based on new sources – from archival records to “quasi-archival” documents, internal Party publications, memoirs, interviews, and other sources – has made amply clear why we cannot speak (or write) of a monolithic Party-state with omnipresent control during the Mao era. Easy frameworks of “totalitarian” Maoist rule fail to grasp the diversity of experiences and activities that these documents record. By finding women in the state, this book also contributes to reinvigorating debates about the role of national state authorities during the Mao era and gives us a more fine-grained picture of different groups and their shifting agency within the larger entity known as “the state.” The different chapters show how a group of elite women operated among the higher echelons of the Chinese Communist Party and prove that there is much left to uncover about national-level twists and turns, provided that we bring often overlooked agents such as these state feminists back into the picture.
The dates provided in the book's title are slightly misleading. This study extends well beyond 1949 and 1964 to give us a history of CCP feminist activism reaching from the May Fourth movement of 1919 all the way to the first decade of “post-Mao” China. It is filled with rich empirical detail and fascinating arguments that should make for thought-provoking reading for anyone interested in modern Chinese history, contemporary China, the global history of feminism, and the comparative history of socialism.
