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Socialist Revolution and Women's Liberation in China—A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Emily Honig
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Abstracts

It was once popular for Western scholars to view the liberation of women as one of the most dramatic accomplishments of the Chinese revolution. This article reviews three recently published studies that present a more sanguine view of the impact of the policies adopted by the Chinese Communist party on women's lives. Throughout its history (with the possible exception of the 1920s) the CCP has failed to commit itself to the achievement of gender equality. To have done so, the new scholarship suggests, would have alienated male peasants, the most important constituency of the CCP Patriarchy, rather than being dismantled, has thus been perpetuated and reinforced in China. This argument is substantiated in the three volumes under review by an analysis of Party policy and political campaigns. The extent to which these policies and campaigns reflect social reality is a task that future scholars will have to confront.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , February 1985 , pp. 329 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1985

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References

1 Johnson, too, treats the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius too literally. Her main criticism of the campaign is that it was not implemented with enough vigor.