Social Changes under Mao by 1966
Quote
In order to build a great socialist society, it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production. Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of hte socialist transformation of society as a whole.
–Mao Zedong, introductory note from ‘Women have gone to the labor front’
Status of women before 1949
- China was a Confucian, patriarchal society dominated by MEN
- it was one big mojo dojo casa house
- san gang: the 3 relationships holding society together
- loyalty of ministers and officials to the emperor
- respect of children to parents
- obedience of wives to husbands
- practice of concubinage, foot-binding and arranged marriages
- foot-binding was intended to make women petite and thus ‘attractive’
- also, so they can’t run away from their husbands
- Iron Widow moment
- women were commodities (bride-price/dowry), discriminated against
Mao and CCP’s reforms
Summar
Freed women, then oppressed men & women’s personal liberty equally.
- outlawed foot-binding and traditional practice of killing unwanted baby girls
- killing babies = killing prospective state workers
- sweeping marriage reforms
- concubinage (established cultural practice) abolished
- arranged marriages discontinued
- dowries & bride-prices forbidden – farmers & families were so poor they went into debt marrying off their daughters
- some debts were never paid, carrying onto generations
- women (and men) who had been forced to marry were allowed to divorce their partners
- all marriages had to be officially recorded and registered
- propaganda campaigns run – e.g. ‘Marriage of self-choice and working together to bring about happiness, by Bi Cheng, 1953, issued by People’s Arts Publishing House’
- making your own choice in marriage leads to freedom and happiness
- 1950: laws passed, allowing women the right to sell and own land and property
- unheard of in a patriarchal society where women were disempowered
- ultimately undermined by collectivization
- 1953: Election Law passed. Gave women the right to vote and join the government and People’s Liberation Army
- [] [1958 Great Leap Forward#Communes|commune life]] released women from traditional household roles & chores
- e.g. cooking
- larger factories, communal nurseries and kindergartens freed women from child-minding, allowed them to work even as mothers
- led to social alienation between parents & children; allowed the state to indoctrinate the new generation wholly
Problems with Reforms
- 📈 huge increase in divorce rates – ==1.3 million divorces== recorded in 1953 → resulted in a drive against hasty action
- many men in the PLA faced divorce; they complained to their commanders, who fed it up the chain
- ultimately the government folded as they couldn’t alienate the men in the army
- 📈 between 1949 and 1966, proportion of women rose from 8% to 29%
- jobs were demanding, and women had to juggle responsibilities as workers and mothers
- social values & attitudes couldn’t change as fast as laws did → women had to compete with ingrained sexist notions of their inferiority
- in rural and Muslim areas, government interference was resented and arranged marriages continued
CCP Restrictions on Women
- 👤 Ding Ling: feminist who joined the CCP, ended up shocked by the Party’s hypocrisy when it came to the value of women. In practice, Party women were treated as inferior
- 👤 Soong Qingling: one of the few women to hold a high position in the PRC government under Mao. Later complained that her Party colleagues didn’t treat her as an equal, and couldn’t accept female comrades’ key roles in the government and Party
- 📉 women made up only 13% of CCP membership
- if women “held up half the sky”, shouldn’t there be higher numbers of women?
- rise in the number of women in the National People’s Congress during Mao’s regime; never on a scale to suggest that the CCP prioritized women within its ranks
- age-old social structure ultimately pigeonholed women into traditionalist views running contrary to new laws
Women and the family
- Mao’s reforms prevented a sustained advance in women’s status
- radical and violent character of reforms increased female vulnerability
- e.g. Collectivization → a direct and deliberate assault on the traditional Chinese family unit and by extension Confucianism
- no matter how much women sought emancipation, few were happy that their roles as mothers and raisers of families were now written off as unnecessary
- effectively, Mao & CCP assumed every woman sought this freedom; he didn’t give women agency/freedom to choose
- women were detached from traditional moorings → loss of identity
- though they were able to widen their options beyond domestic provider, gave them contributory power in the factories & economies as ‘equals’
- was ripped away through enforced social change that happened suddenly
- CCP continued to undermine the family
- “It is necessary to destroy the peasant family … women going to the factories and joining the army are a part of the big destruction of family.”
- a form of symbolic violence against women
- men and women had to live in separate quarters in communes except for conjugal visits
- “It is not the family, but Chairman Mao and the Communist Party, which has given us everything. Personal love is not important.” –official Party Statement, 1958
- “It is necessary to destroy the peasant family … women going to the factories and joining the army are a part of the big destruction of family.”
- controversial to say that Mao intentionally botched the reforms; better to say that he had good intentions, but vastly underestimated impact of policy on women
- empowered in some ways, disempowered in others
Impact of famine
On women
- women suffered most in the 1958-1962 Great Leap Forward
- inability to provide for women caused a chilling psychological shock (Source E, page 121)
- impossible to maintain anything close to a normal married life → 📈 divorce rates increased by 60% in Gansu province
- divorce was an alternative to wife-selling
- a teenage daughter might be sold off in marriage to the highest bidder in a distant place to obtain grain to keep the household alive, especially if the chief earner died
- the poorer the region, the more wife-selling there was
- they stopped feeding girls and gave them only water
- cannibalism had been accepted in this ‘hunger culture’ prevalent in China since the famines of the 1930s
- in spite of laws banning it
On children
- children were left motherless & suffered from being deserted
- abandoned children became targets for gang exploitation, sexual abuse
Population control
- Mao originally encouraged huge families to provide workers for industrialization
- mass effort required an ever-growing population
- the famine suggested that China had too many mouths to feed
- 1963: China introduced campaigns aiming at cutting the birth rate.
- the Birth Control Bureau was set up, sending teams of medical workers to the countryside to advocate:
- sexual abstinence and late marriage
- couples to stop at 2 children
- families who had many daughters and wanted sons weren’t offered any help
- husbands to be sterilized after the conception of the second child
- women to adopt effective contraceptive methods
Youth
- Mao chose the young as the main instrument of the Cultural Revolution
- consistent with policies towards the young adopted during the Jiangxi and Yanan Soviets
- youngsters were encouraged to become ‘young volunteers’, akin to Hitler Youth
- they were educated by the party in literacy, numeracy and given basic political training (aka indoctrination in socialist values)
- sent into villages to spread Maoist gospel
- 1949 onwards: same methods used
- youth = purity of spirit, enabling them to become ambassadors of the new China
- they set examples for their elders in their commitment to major projects, collectivization and the GLF
- propaganda > reality, but youths were definitely the greatest idealists of the PRC
- cooperation of young masses helped achieve liberation and regeneration of China
- accepted new Maoist vision
- instrumental in overcoming social & political conservatism in peasants
- worked in teams at factories, inspiring workers to greater efforts
- joined the PLA and helped sustain it as a the great protective force of revolution – Mao could rely on thier loyalty
- led party-organized marches, changing ‘Mao is our great leader, Mao is our father’
Education
- high hopes of raising the educational levels of the Chinese
- 1949: majority were illiterate or barely literate
- by 1950s: national system of primary education set up, success evident in statistics found in Mao’s China p.124, Table 5.3
- secondary schooling expanded
- reform of the Chinese language
- 📈 1955: a new form of Mandarin adopted and used by 80% of the population
- Chinese characters simplified
- 1964: pinyin introduced
- major advances made by mid-1960s
- 📈 1961: number of colleges & universities in China grew from 200 in 1949 to 1,289
- BUT the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution destroyed education, tragically, due to the large socio-economic-political upheaval
Religion
- religious belief and worship were considered superstitious and deliberately cultivated by classes in power to suppress the masses
- Mao declared religion as poison, comparing Christian missionaries in China to European Nazis
- attack on religion began once the CCP was in power
- official rational given was that since workers were now in power, there was no need for escapism through religion
- religion was an affront to the new Chinese Communist world
- religious worship was to be replaced by loyalty to the state and CCP
- suppression was organized
- Christian churches forcibly closed
- church property seized/destroyed
- clergy denounced and physically abused
- foreign priests and nuns were expelled from China
- the CCP feared religion would encourage breakaway tendencies in western provinces like Tibet and Xinjiang
- Tibet’s Lama faith had inspired Tibetan nationalism in its resistance to Chinese occupation
- the CCP worried that nationalism + religion would be particularly potent in Xinjiang, where the majority were Uighurs, Kazakhs, Hui and Kirghiz people (all Muslim in faith)