In 1928, the 6th CCP Congress resolution on the Peasant Movement accepted that failure to win over the women in the villages would result in the failure of the agrarian revolution. Communist progress was everywhere affected by its attitude to women, by their social status, by their relationship to men and by their symbol as an object of property.
The Jiangxi Soviet set up a Women’s Department with specific responsibility to care for the interests of women. This progressive step was reflected in the many reforms undertaken in the Jiangxi Soviet to improve the position of women. Often these measures were the results of personal efforts by Mao Zedong, “fervent fighter for the liberty of love since the era of the May Fourth Movement.”[22] The conservatism he had to struggle against within the Party can be seen in the editing of Mao’s Collected Works. In the original version of his Report on an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan, Mao made the point: “From the sexual point of view, the poor peasants dispose of a fair amount of liberty. In the villages, triangular and multi-lateral relationships are almost universal among poor peasants.” This was cut out of the official version.[23]
However, the life of peasant women was such that any measure enacted by the CCP meant little or nothing while they were confined to the home and forbidden to speak to any male other than a relative. The CCP established Women’s Associations (WA) which attempted to meet and co-ordinate women in the villages. The first and immediate concern of these associations was to put a stop to the almost universal habit of wife beating – both by husbands and by mothers-in-law – because any woman who attended an association meeting would receive a thrashing when she got home.
The organisers found a practical solution that worked wonders. A violent husband was selected; he would be stopped in public by a group of association members and asked to mend his ways. Invariably the man’s reaction was arrogant disbelief that such a thing could be happening and his reaction would arouse a furious protest from the women surrounding him. Within moments he would be knocked to the ground and given his very own drubbing which did not stop until he promised to cease beating his wife. Soon a visit from a WA representative was enough to bring most erring husbands into line. However, Hinton reports that the first secretary of the WA in Long Bow village was made to resign because her husband, a CCP cadre, demanded she spend more time at home.[24]
In August 1930, the Soviet government of Jiangxi issued a decree that said simply: “Let those men who do not have wives be free to find themselves wives as rapidly as possible, and let those women who do not have husbands be free to find themselves husbands as rapidly as possible.” To the delight of both sexes the CCP, at a stroke, had removed the exorbitant cost of getting married. Immediately, there was a frenzy of activity throughout the entire Soviet zone; within two months nearly all the middle, poor peasants and artisans who had not previously taken wives had done so. As for labourers, the proportion of those married leapt from about 1% to nearly 50%.
The Regulations on Marriage enacted by the Chinese Soviet Republic was a good example of the rapid transformation of a feudal-patriarchal matrimonial system based on a superstitious belief in predestination. Isaac Deutscher looked at this as an application of the Law of Combined and Uneven Development; China, possibly the most archaic of nations, avidly assimilated the latest doctrines and translated them into action before more industrially advanced countries.[25] The Regulations were preceded by a preamble which outlined what could be called the three principles of marriage: (1) In the Soviet areas, the economic independence of men and women being assured, marriage must be concluded according to the principle of free choice. (2) Attention must be paid to the protection of children. (3) The suffering of women under feudalism which included deliberately subjecting them to physical abuse such as having their feet bound, meant that they had not yet succeeded in acquiring complete economic independence. Thus, in the matter of divorce, women’s interests must be protected.
Measured against traditional Chinese morality, these principles were revolutionary. But an even greater innovation is found in the Regulations concerning divorce. There are only two clauses: (1) Divorce is granted if both parties desire it, but it is equally granted when only one of the two parties insists. (This would later be curtailed so that the wives of serving soldiers could obtain a divorce only with the consent of their husbands.) and (2) All divorces must be registered with the authorities of the Soviet zone. There is absolutely no question of having to obtain previous authorisation for marriage or divorce from the local CCP or the local Soviet.
The 1931 Constitution of the Jiangxi Soviet Republic expressly stated that one purpose of the government was “to guarantee the thorough emancipation of women.” During the Jiangxi period the Party formally enacted the Marriage Laws described above but Johnson claims that there was stiff opposition from many local cadres and only when the Party leaders from Shanghai arrived was there any effective attempt to implement the Law. Even then, cadre behaviour was not uniform and some abused their position: in the north zone the local Party men insisted that marriages had to have the prior approval of Party or the local Soviet, and in certain counties women were forbidden to ask for divorce.[26] Official CCP policies regarding women were undoubtedly immensely progressive but their implementation depended on the balance of forces locally and so was neither uniform nor consistent. Thus, there were ongoing simmering differences between Party needs, the conservatism of the male peasants (particularly the richer male peasants), and the drive for greater liberation by peasant women and young CCP cadres.
In practice, a peasant-based strategy made the promotion of women’s rights difficult because the many male peasants who felt their patriarchal rights threatened, vigorously resisted such policies, fearing the loss of their ‘property’. Their conservatism and their material interests made it very difficult for them to tolerate free-choice marriage, divorce, female equality, and women’s roles outside the home. The CCP backed off from implementation of much of the Marriage Law in the face of this male hostility because it needed the support of these people since they produced most of the food for the Red Army and Party officials.[27]
The CCP land reform heroically granted women important property and economic rights for the first time. But in a peasant economy with traditions going back a thousand years and with the traditional family structure largely intact, if a parcel of land was to be redistributed and a woman was to receive a share, the deeds for her share would be ceremonially handed to the (male) head of the household, accepting that the woman’s land de facto belonged to her husband.
Within the CCP a quota system was established in response to the instruction that, “every local party should do its best to reach the goal set up by the Central Committee which requires that women comrades in the movement should occupy one-third to two-thirds of the party positions”, unfortunately even the lower target was rarely met.
Nevertheless, the continual drive to meet the manpower needs of the Red Army meant a shortage of men to work the land and women stepped into the breach. Women who did not have bound feet came out of the home, worked on the land and performed tasks that had previously been for men only. True, the women were expected to surrender these newly-gained positions when the men returned but they demonstrated abilities that culture and tradition said they could not possess.
The move to the countryside and the setting up of peasant Soviets had serious long-term adverse effects on Party ideology, policies, and practices. Despite its initial good efforts, in the end the Jiangxi period imposed a move away from commitment to gender equality. Many Party members felt that in the countryside women’s participation in the revolution was marginalised and that their liberation was restricted in order not to impinge adversely on other Party policies.[28] By the time the Party left Jiangxi in 1934, in conflicts between issues concerning women’s rights and the demands of male peasants, the Party was openly supporting the latter.[29]
Cheng analysed the dynamic of land reform in the Jiangxi Soviet and concluded:
“despite the efforts … of the CCP, the household-based economy and the remnants of patriarchal ideology combined to allow husbands and fathers to manipulate women both to improve their own situations and to subvert the Party’s stated goal to transform the basis of women’s class status. … It seems clear that women cannot have an independent class status within a household-based economy under patriarchy.”[30]
The CCP was, of course, a very long way from challenging patriarchy.
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Chi-hsi Hu, The Sexual Revolution in the Kiangsi Soviet, The China Quarterly, No. 59, 1974, p477-490.
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Chi-hsi Hu, Op cit.
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Hinton, Op. cit. p184-188 and 208.
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Deutscher, I. Ironies of History, OUP, 1966, p89.
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Johnson, K. Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983.
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Duncan, J and Li, P. Women and Land Tenure in China, 2001, Rural Development Institute.
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Kyung Ae Park, Women and Revolution in China, Korea and World Affairs, 1990 14(4)747-774.
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Johnson, K.A. Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China, Univ of Chicago Press, 1983.
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Cheng, OP. cit.