Creating a Feminist Cultural Front

Challenging the assumption of “Party propaganda,” this chapter finds a feminist cultural front in the ACWF’s flagship magazine Women of China and illuminates state feminist discursive maneuvers that targeted masculinist practices in and outside the CCP.State feminist visionswere embodied in the magazine’svisual representation of laboring women who broke gender segregation in public arena, signifying feminist pursuits of women’s double liberation of gender and class, continuing a New Culture anti-feudalistagenda, and shaping new socialist subjectivity. Editors’ practices of the “mass line” in cultural production created a public space for women’s voices that expressed their own concerns, contrary to the assumption of the seamless domination of a party/state. The strategies of its feminist founding editors Shen Zijiu and Dong Bian to juggle multiple and often contradictory demands of the Party and diverse women groups areexamined against the fluid political contexts.

Introduction

Starting with a brief history of feminism in China and women in the Communist Revolution to contextualize the emergence of socialist state feminists, the chapter introduces key findings of the book, highlights a politics of concealment and a politics of erasure, explains how “anti-feudalism” served as a coded phrase for socialist feminist agendas developed by the gender-based mass organization–ACWF from its paradoxical position of both being a part of the state power and a subordinated group in the power structure of the male-dominated CCP. The chapter emphasizes the cultural front as an important arena of feminist engagement with a patriarchal culture, and explains the two-part-structure of the book that examines the relationship between the ACWF and the CCP, and the relationship between a socialist feminist revolution of culture and the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Origins of the Cultural Revolution

Locating a turning point in socialist film industry in 1964, this chapter demonstrates a crucial moment when a socialist feminist revolution of culture was replaced by the ascending Cultural Revolution in the cultural realm. An anti-feudalism agenda was defined as revisionist and bourgeois by radicals in the CCP in their propagating of a Maoist class struggle. Underlying the political maneuvers were personal animosities that led to Xia Yan’s downfall and Jiang Qing’s ascendance to the power center.The chapter presents a gender analysis of Jiang Qing’s revolutionary model theaters and suggests a re-location and re-periodization of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the cultural realm in 1964.

Fashioning Socialist Visual Culture

Xia Yan, the underground leader of the left-wing films in the 1930s and top official of the film industry in the PRC since 1954, embodied the cultural history of the CCP. A brief biography of this Communist feminist artist leader disrupts the reductive dichotomy of the Party vs. artists in film studies and illuminates a tension-ridden history of socialist filmmaking that constituted a highly contentious site in the socialist revolution. Situating his politically engagingartistic creativity inside ashiftingpolitical process, this chapter traces Xia Yan’s major role in transmitting the New Culture agenda of transforming a patriarchal culture in socialist cultural production and delineatesdiverse and contradictory politicalpositions and artistic preferences in artists’ innovative experimentsofcreating a socialist new culture. It also analyzes his films that continued the paradigm of revolutionary heroines.

Feminist Contentions in Socialist State Formation

Focusing on the Shanghai Women’s Federation’s organizing and mobilizing efforts at the grassroots since the CCP took over Shanghai in 1949, this chapter traces the ACWF’s institutional development and feminist contentions in the early stage of socialist state formation. It illuminates contentious gendered power struggles in the process of demarcating differences between the “government” and the “mass organization” that structured an appearance of a socialist state as well as regulated a subordinated status of the WF system in the power structure of the new socialist state. Feminist critical voices found in the archives demonstrate a relaxed political atmosphere in the initial stage of the CCP’s rule, while the battles over the grassroots organization Women’s Congress reveal male hostility towards feminist endeavors in the CCP upon the founding of the PRC. A politics of concealment was identified in this early stage.

When a Maoist “Class” Intersected Gender

In 1964 the CCP’s journal Red Flag openly criticized Women of China for its alleged bourgeois and revisionist line in its advocacy of “women question.” Investigating this mysterious case, this chapter discovers the crucial moment when the masculinist male authority in the Party successfully deployed a Maoist concept of class struggle to suppress ACWF’s efforts to transform gender relations, especially in the domestic setting. Underlying this attack on ACWF was personal entanglement among the top echelon of the Party. Political rhetoric camouflaged personal animosities; and the political was indeed inseparably blended with the personal. State feminist endeavors became casualties of personal politics, a case revealing marginalization of the ACWF in the power structure as well as drastic deterioration of the political dynamics in the CCP.

Conclusion

Summarizing socialist state feminists’ struggles in the early PRC, this chapterpoints out thatwithout a conscious feminist transformation of the entrenchedmale supremacisthierarchical mentality,the CCP male leaders’ pursuit of a Communist dream was inherently flawed, and eventually redirected by an inner masculinist drive to reproduce male dominance. Analyses of causes of the failure of a socialist revolution are followed with an examination of socialist state feminist legacies in contemporary China. The chapter ends with a discussion of transformed political fields of Chinese feminism in the age of global capitalism whenthe ACWFno longercommands a unified women’s movement and is not in the position to continue a socialist feminist revolution, instead embracing a UN mandate of gender mainstreaming;and growing numbers of young feminists operate outside the official system via the cyber space interacting with feminists transnationally, rising as a dynamic political force challenging male dominance.

Chen Bo’er and the Feminist Paradigm of Socialist Film

This chapter presents a life story of a feminist revolutionary founder of socialist film industry, Chen Bo’er, and debunks a fast held assumption that patriarchal authority dominated the cultural production that propagandized masculinized women. Tracing the life course in which Chen evolved from a left oriented feminist movie star of the 1930s to a leaderwho created a feminist paradigm of socialist films, this chapter identifies heritages as well as transformation of May Fourth feminism in the cultural realm of the PRC. Revolutionary heroines emerged as a dominant symbol that challenged male supremacy and promoted women’s empowerment as a result of feminists’ conscious efforts in cultural production. Chen’s life story also offers evidence for re-interpretation of Mao’s Yan’an Talks. The politics of erasure of feminist endeavors is also examined.

The Iron Girls

The meanings of “Iron Girls” changed drastically from a socialist cultural symbol of laboring women’s double liberation from gender and class oppressions to apost-socialist symbol of women’s “masculinization” in the socialist period. This chapter locates an ideological rupture in the 1980s and demonstrates discursive maneuvers by urban educated elite that succeededin dismantling socialist ideologies and institutional mechanisms for gender and class equality. A masculinist backlash against women’s social advancement in the socialist period operated in a politics of erasure that obliterated socialist feminists’ endeavors of transforming gender and class hierarchies and that legitimized restoration of pre-socialist “normalcy”based on gender and class inequality. It enabled class reconfiguration in neo-liberalist restructuring of China and solidified “women’s masculinization” as a truth in knowledge production about socialism. The life stories of the Iron Girls in Dazhai are analyzed in contrast with the urban elite’s discursive construction.

The Political Perils in 1957

The work report of the ACWF at the third National Women’s Congress presented a conservative theme of “two diligences” for women-work, an obvious reversion from its previous commitment to equality between men and women and women’s liberation.Investigating the puzzle in the context of the Anti-Rightest Campaign in 1957, this chapter exposes ferocious gender contentions in the Party Central and a moment of grave crisis that threatened the existence of the ACWF. Informal power of the ACWF top leaders was highlighted in the examination of this struggle when they obtained the support of Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi,which enabled the survival of the ACWF. The ACWF’s rapid switch of its position in the Great Leap Forwardrevealed both state feminists’ persistent feminist commitment to women’s liberation and their differentemphases on practical gender interestsandstrategicgender interests.