The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China addresses female elite politicians’ role in Chinese socialist state-making and rethinks the Mao-era women's policy and the actors, large and small, who became its political agents. In nine chapters divided into two sections, political scientist Kimberley Ens Manning demonstrates that women's praxis arose out of historical circumstances, that affective imagination and attachments, elements of any credible social theory, motivated action and that “family ties and the women at their center … are the revolutionary story” (x, my emphasis).

Part one, “States of Action” analyses why people act politically. Since family is the analytic subject, Manning shows women acting in families. She creates terms like “political attachment,” to describes how, as do men, women politicians drew on intimate kin (blood and fictive) to extend “the affective enactment of family ties in political struggle” (p. 2). Manning proposes that a revolutionary “party family” is “a gendered site of kinship-based belonging, obligation and conflict that is enacted in … wider political struggle,” meaning that passions condition intentional acts. Unlike theoretical individualism's internality, family ties “congeal through the imperatives that hover just outside of consciousness” (p. 3), and are the extra-rational, collective dreams underlying political creativity. Manning roots each chapter in actual historical political sequences, so her analytical language remains strictly inside its own scope of reference. The term “new woman,” chapter one, is a state of action initiated in the May Fourth Movement; chapter two, on a Chongqing Coalition, establishes the symbolic of women as social reformers; chapter three, on the Long March, describes the launch of a contemporary woman warrior figure; and chapter four, “Land reform,” proffers the loyal, soldier woman. Family is never a descriptor here, a synonym or euphemism for “patriarchy” or “neopatrimonialism.” “Family ties” means a set of “affective, geopolitical enactments” in worldly activities, motivating emotional and intellectual commitments to war, land reform, mass line leadership and revolutionary violence. Historically concrete, “new woman,” “social reformer,” “woman warrior” and “loyal soldier” are, in Manning's view, imaginary states available historically to new female political subjects. Women literally acting in fidelity to events. The “party families” formed around Cai Chang, Li Fuchun, Deng Yingchao, Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, Song Qingling and Cai Hesen were also important, particularly in the Great Leap Forward (GLF), and showcased desirable relationships in the struggle to transform society.

Manning's theoretical innovations make two decisive changes. First, because material chronologies leave behind organic states of activism, Marxist maternalism (equality in sexual social difference) is historically rooted, not imposed. Second, to be credible, social theory must recognize affect or human feelings, imagination, family dramas and sexualities. Thus, “a state of activism is not always comprehensible” because it resides in the social unconscious, the ideologically inscribed imperative “that may remain obscure or hidden to even the most critical of revolutionaries” (p. 9). Analysis never establishes objective social facts because our species is intersubjective, which is to say that we cannot observe ourselves beyond our world.

In part two, “State Capacity and Contention,” Manning establishes women's bodily contributions to socialist state formation. Chapter five, “Maternal bodies,” roots revolutionary history in the brute fact of women's physicality in human reproduction. With this foundation, she analyses struggles around birth, midwifery, marriage, household and eugenic policies, and shows that revolutionary women politicians and their allies made resolving women's suffering in sexual reproduction a justice claim, as they simultaneously valorized maternal labour. Chapter six, on the Marriage Law, scrutinizes struggle over marriage, policy ambivalence about divorce, wife abuse and the host of social contradictions confronting the revolutionary state. Manning clarifies that “women's improved status was not a right in and of itself, but rather a means to a larger end,” and it rested on what political scientists called “relational repression,” an individually oppressive message underlining “the chaos and loss they would create for others by pressing for divorce” (p. 170). Chapter seven argues that in newly established households, women were enabled and constrained. Scholars of the political category of “housewife” have struggled to make sense of it, but when Manning invokes “revolutionary attachments in family,” she shows a comprehensible subject form, not an afterthought or disparagement. Acutely during the GLF housewives were the family managers most active in procurement.

Chapter eight, “Shock troops” lies at the centre of the book: the GLF “could not have taken place, much less been conceived, without the labor of rural women” (p. 205). Others, most familiar to me Fabio Lanza's work on collectivization and Gail Hershatter's oral histories, have struggled with the historical fact that the mobilization of women out of domestic abuse led, in the end, to additional suffering and starvation. Manning shifts our focus away from this agon. To her, GLF total war mobilization empowered women into politics. Women, situated between various initiatives, were, under War Communism policies, liberated out of individual family reproductive labour and into various forms of socially productive labour. Again, the PRC's abortive move to abolish the family succeeded in shifting attachment away from patrilineal patrilocalism directly to state.

What distinguishes Manning's work in this area are her political science skills. Reading the book, I could see how historians might handle the material differently. Manning, however, provides overviews and shows that policymaking is a power struggle over revolutionizing social relations of production, which allows her to link “motherhood,” a key political category, to “the big family of socialism.” Political reinvention of motherhood significantly drew “a specific recognition of the subjectivity of motherhood” (p. 231). Because subjects in the political world act, this shift in understanding Maoist language valorizes intent and policy, successes and catastrophic failures, in action-oriented, dialectical language. We see the All-China Women's Federation as vital to the state's imagination, underscoring that, for better and worse, “family ties and the women at their center … are the revolutionary story” (x, my emphasis).

Squeamish colleagues are going to have troubles with Manning's vocabulary. Habitus shift, states of activism, relational agency, agentic forms, couple ties and revolutionary widowhood are analytic descriptions of vital relations among people generally, but specifically people in revolutionary movement. But this vocabulary puts female activity, labour and reproduction at the centre of political explanation; say goodbye to “agency,” “patriarchy” and social reproduction, even “women in revolution” (the latter because women are never “in” anything, women are what revolution is). Efforts to internalize these terms will pay off. As Manning argues in her conclusion, women-directed and -oriented policies in the GLF form a history of feminism strikingly unlike normative curriculums in US and European women's history and gender classes. Suzy Kim's Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) has made the same point, as have I and scholars of the former USSR like Anna Krylova, Kristen Ghodsee and Wendy Z. Goldman, that Communist parties made women's leadership central to their governance structures. Women in East Asia now are measurably not equal to men in social or political terms, but women are also not invisible. They are, as Manning helps us see, categorically present as both subjects and creators of revolution.