The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era

Women's Life Stories in Contemporary China

Xin Huang

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438470627
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Chine

This book traces how the legacy of the Maoist gender project is experienced or contested by particular Chinese women, remembered or forgotten in their lives, and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Xin Huang examines four women's life stories: an urban woman who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976), a rural migrant worker, a lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and an urban woman who has lived abroad. The individual narratives are paired with analysis of the historical and social contexts in which each woman lives. Huang focuses on the shifting relationship between gender and class, fashion and shame in the Mao and post-Mao eras, queer desire and artwork, and contemporary transnational encounters. By rethinking the historical significance and contemporary relevance of one of the twentieth century's major feminist interventions—socialist and Marxist women's liberation during the Mao years— The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era provides insight into current struggles over gender equality in China and around the world.

1

Born into the Mao Era

Lin’s Life Story

I start my examination of the gender legacy of the Mao era with the life story of Lin, a fifty-year-old urban woman who grew up in the Mao era and now lives in Beijing. Lin’s narrative sheds light on the configuration of the Maoist funü and how gender, class, and political membership intersect to define who qualified as one. Her narrative reveals how the production of the Maoist funü as the normative ideal was sustained through “socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility” (Butler 1999, 23), which delegitimated those gendered beings that failed to conform to the prescription. Furthermore, spanning the Maoist and post-Mao eras, Lin’s life story demonstrates how the once dominant, now marginalized Maoist gender project interacts with multiple gender models in China and abroad and plays out in an individual woman’s life, as well as how the ideal of Maoist funü haunts present-day gender construction. This chapter examines the Maoist legacy in terms of both the content and the narrative structure of Lin’s life stories. It analyzes how the suku (诉苦, speaking bitterness) narrative model contributes to Lin’s interpretation of her life and the construction of her subjectivity, and discusses the revision of her life story through a telling and retelling interview method. To contextualize her life story, I begin with a brief introduction of the class system in Mao era China.

Context: The Class System in the Mao Era

Parallel to the reorganization of gender relations through the construction of a new category of women, funü, was the reorganization and new interpretation of social relations which reversed the hierarchy of the class system and sought to eliminate it. Funü was never a category encompassing all the women of China but was mainly reserved for a designated group of women from certain classes—namely, workers and peasants, or the proletarian women who experienced class oppression and were thus potential revolutionaries. Funü is defined as a political category in conjunction with the new class system, as represented by socialist workers and peasants, and excluded other women who did not fit into that category.

Class was an alien concept in prerevolutionary China. Following the Marxist-Leninist tradition, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) analyzed Chinese society and politics primarily in terms of class struggle. It defined the Chinese revolution as the overthrow of the class order of the “old society” and the creation of a new egalitarian society free of class exploitation and oppression by eliminating the ruling class and property owners such as capitalists and landlords.1 Theories of class structure and class struggle were understood as providing a scientific account of social reality (Billeter 1985). The idea of class introduced by the CCP is regarded by some as a misapplication of Marxist ideas. For instance, Jean François Billeter (1985) argues that category of class division is a misrecognition of the real nature of Chinese agrarian society. Arif Dirlik (1983) points out that, differing from Marx’s initial conceptualization of class in relation to the means of production, the Maoist conceptualization of class located actors within hierarchies of power in terms of relations of exploitation. Furthermore, Ernesto Laclau (1990) reminds us that in Marxist theory, the category of class is a discursive ascription rather than a truthful reflection of reality, intended to institute a new order to social relations that would replace the existing system of social division. The translation of class as an abstract theoretical category to the historically and geographically located subject of revolutionary activity thus involves the exertion of brute force since there is no pure concept of class to start with, and no objective class as social groups preexist their articulation in the symbolic order (Lefort 1986).

The class concept not only reorganized social groups during the revolution, it also provided a different interpretation of the social relations. As Guo Yuhua and Sun Liping (2002) and Li Lifeng (2007) have shown in their studies, class conflict was not in fact the major conflict in rural life. The difference between social groups, especially between the rich and poor, were understood to be the result of bad fate or personal failure; upward mobility was possible and promised by hard work, accumulation, and incremental change. Furthermore, as Ann Anagnost (1997) notes, the older categories of status from the Confucian social order were defined not in terms of antagonistic relations but in terms of reciprocity and hierarchy, with vertical ties of patron and client, landlord and tenant, and the hierarchies of the Confucian family structure. The Darwinian struggle for existence embedded in the Marxist theory of class interprets history and society as a struggle between warring classes and reorients the social relations toward a horizontal line of class antagonism (as well as solidarity) (Anagnost 1997).

The connotations of class in revolutionary China have also changed over time. In the preliberation and immediate postliberation period, the CCP leadership defined class primarily in socioeconomic terms. A person’s jieji chengfen (阶级成分, class membership) was assigned according to the source of the economic support in the three years preceding 1949. The “class origin” of children followed the class of their parents, usually the father’s, and children experienced all its advantages or disadvantages (G. White 1976; Billeter 1985; Croll 1984).2 By 1952, most of the Chinese population had been classified by class origin (Hinton 1997; Chan et al. 1992), since “there is no one on earth who is not a member of a class” (Li Zhongyang 1956, 9, cited in Kraus 1981, 40).

People’s class status appeared in their papers and the files that concerned them, and it was of great importance in the working world, social relations, and especially political life. A discursive construction now became a lived reality, when the category of class status became representational and had material consequences, such as structuring the distribution of resources (Kraus 1981; Watson 1984; Billeter 1985). Class determined the distribution of property, rights, opportunities, power, and prestige. In short, a person’s social reality was largely defined in terms of her or his class label (G. White 1976; Billeter 1985).

In the 1960s, there were two institutionalized definitions of class in China, which Gordon White called the “old” and the “new” class systems (G. White 1976; Schram 1984). The “socialist transformation” of 1955–56, the land reform and the subsequent collectivization of agriculture in the countryside, and the socialization of private industry and commerce in the city had destroyed the foundations of the propertied classes. However, the “old” class system had never been updated, and it became a frozen set of markers of social status that indicated one’s historical location in a property-based stratification system that no longer existed (Kraus 1981). Mao Zedong redefined “class” as an ideological category, which differs from Marx’s purely economic definition. In Mao’s work, the word “class” confuses class strata, occupations, and political attitudes, dissolving all these into “the people.” The terms “proletariat,” “peasant,” and “capitalist” refer not to objective categories based on different relationships to the means of production but to subjective factors such as political attitudes and degrees of support for the Communist Party (Harris 1978). This “new” class definition takes into account personal jieji chengfen (阶级成分, class status), sixiang (思想, subjective attitude) toward the socialist regime, and biaoxian (表现, individual behavior) (G. White 1976; Billeter 1985). The “old” socioeconomically based class categories are overlaid rather than replaced by the “new” understanding of class (G. White 1976).

This new explicit system of class status was introduced to control the comprehension of social relations, and the strict categorization of people created a new stratification system that institutionalized inequalities. Ironically, in a system ostensibly aimed at achieving equality, all the designations, whether derived from standard class analysis or referring to professional categories, constituted a new system of inequalities and established a society fashioned even more than before on a hierarchy of status that governed every individual’s life and relationships with others (Billeter 1985).

In official rhetoric, the triad of gong nong bing (工农兵, worker-peasant-soldier) was glorified as the most progressive and leading force in socialist China.3 However, in urban areas, two elite groups emerged: a party-power elite with its own sense of superiority with a lifestyle based on special economic and social privileges, and a new group of social elite composed of university-trained specialists and professionals (G. White 1976; Harding 1981; Kraus 1983; Wu 2014). These two groups were called ganbu (干部, cadres) and constituted a class unto themselves, with special rights and prestige based on the ranks (Billeter 1985; H. Y. Lee 1991).

In the work grades categorization of 1956, the ganbubianzhi (干部编制, cadre category) belonged to a special system with its own ranking managed (Wu 2014). A university graduate was classified into the cadre category on entering the workforce, and other employees, including workers and lower ranking civil servants, belonged to the gongren bianzhi (工人编制, worker category). The two distinct groups received different treatment in terms of salary, health benefits, housing, medical care, and retirement pensions. The cadres became a new elite group distanced from other citizens, and their children enjoyed superior status and privileges (Kraus 1981; Wu 2014). The growing number of cadres facilitated the rise of the “new bourgeoisie” and the increasing emphasis on “class struggle” from the late 1950s on, and became part of the reasons for launching the Cultural Revolution (Wu 2014). This new class hierarchy is an essential component in Lin’s life story.

Lin’s Life Story

Outline

I got to know Lin when I worked at a university in Beijing in the late 1980s; our husbands were friends, which is how we met.4 I called her “Older Sister Lin,” but she and I did not usually have much direct personal contact. We often had lunch or dinner together with our husbands. After I moved out of the university in the 1990s and divorced, I had gone back occasionally to visit Lin, but never by myself. Though I knew her for almost twenty years, Lin and I had been just the wives of two men who were close friends; we liked each other, but our relationship was never the center of the connection. Interviewing Lin for her life story was the first time I had an in-depth personal conversation with her about her life, of which I knew very little. The interview changed our relationship, and after it I felt that Lin and I were now friends on our own terms.

Lin grew up in the Mao era, in one of the new elite cadre families. Her paternal grandfather was an old-style private school teacher and a doctor. Her paternal grandmother, referred to as Nainai (奶奶) was illiterate and had bound feet. She had married into the family as the grandfather’s concubine and had been a widow since her thirties. She lived with the family of her son, Lin’s father, who went to university in Beijing and became the principal of a high school there. Lin’s mother was a government employee working in the Machinery Bureau in Beijing.

Lin was born in 1956 and was fifty years old at the time of the interview. Lin was brought up by her Nainai and was very close to her. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Lin’s father was beaten by the Red Guards and sent to a labor camp, and her mother was sent to work in a factory in Shaanxi Province. Lin finished high school and was sent to live and work in the countryside for two years (1974–76, when she was aged eighteen to twenty). In 1976, Lin went back to Beijing and worked in a post office for five years. In 1980, she got a job as a librarian where her mother worked. In 1985, Lin quit that job and began work as an office administrator for a small company that was part of a university. She was still in this position when I interviewed her.

Lin married her husband, a doctor in the hospital of the same university, in 1984 at the age of twenty-eight and has a daughter.5 She lived in a three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Beijing and drove to work.6 Lin’s daughter was in New Zealand, having just finished her university education, and was looking for a job there. Lin wanted to travel or live abroad with her daughter after retiring.7

Lin’s interview is composed of two parts: her telling her life story (part 1), and our further discussion about her life based on open-ended questions (part 2). I use information from both parts of the interview in my analysis and indicated the sources of the extracts by noting whether they are from the first or second part. At the end, I compare the two parts of the interview and explore how the telling and retelling of Lin’s life helped generate new ways of representing and understanding her life as a woman.

Between Jiatingfunü Nainai and Maoist Funü Mother

In Lin’s family, there were two adult women in the house: Lin’s mother, who worked outside the home, and Nainai (奶奶, paternal grandmother), who lived with them as an housekeeper and primary caregiver. Lin grew up between two models of being a woman: the traditional domestic jiatingfunü (家庭妇女, woman of the family, or housewife) represented by Nainai, and the “liberated” working Maoist funü represented by her mother.8

I actually was brought up by my Nainai, because my parents … at that time everyone was a bit busy, so Nainai looked after me. … My Nainai didn’t read a single word. She was a jiatingfunü. But my Nainai was a typical Shandong person. She was very bold and uninhibited, upheld justice and was very loyal to her friends. … She stood up against the Japanese, and … because she had lived as a widow since she was in her thirties, she was very tough. Apparently my Nainai was my grandpa’s concubine. (Lin interview 2007, part 1)

Illiterate, with bound feet, and a former concubine, Nainai in many ways fits the stereotype of the traditional funü, who is simultaneously the victim and embodiment of traditional Chinese patriarchy. Lin’s narrative reveals her ambivalent attitude toward Nainai as a jiatingfunü, which is how she identifies her in the narrative. The word “but” in the narrative indicates that Lin was aware of the negative connotation attached to Nainai’s social status and tried to contest it. She strategically deploys Nainai’s multiple identities and prioritizes her regional identity as a person from Shandong Province. Shandong located in the eastern part of China, is where the famous Chinese Robin Hood story took place, a story made famous by a novel called Shuihuzhuang (水浒传, The Legend of the Water Margin, also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh, or All Men Are Brothers), which is one of the four traditional Chinese literary classics. As the novel makes clear, the Shandong people are often considered upholders of the high code of brotherhood, a masculine quality highly valued in traditional Chinese society. She also emphasizes Nainai’s moral qualities as a loving, nurturing, and upright person.

Lin’s strategic mobilization of Nainai’s other identities in the narrative challenges the negative perception of jiatingfunü at that time. In response to the often unacknowledged contribution and invisible social position of the jiatingfunü under the Maoist reconstruction of funü, Lin repeats several times in her narrative that she was brought up by her Nainai, giving her credi...