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Embodied Activisms: The Case of the Mu Guiying Brigade*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2010

Kimberley Ens Manning
Kimberley Ens Manning
Affiliation:
Concordia University. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this article I re-think the complex legacies of the Maoist era and their relationship to the contemporary decline in rural women's leadership. By focusing on some of the gendered dimensions of rural development policy, it becomes evident that many “traditional” beliefs about the leadership abilities of rural women were given new life during the Maoist era. Prior to the Cultural Revolution rural women had two dominant paths of “liberation” or jiefang available to them: one that involved a liberation through the female body and household, the path of dangjia, and one that involved a liberation from the constraints of the female body and household, the path of fanshen. In this article I show how the simultaneous implementation of these two paths of liberation on a unique women-led Mu Guiying Brigade during the Great Leap Forward reproduced the problem of the political unacceptability of rural women.

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The China Quarterly , Volume 204 , December 2010 , pp. 850 - 869
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2010

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References

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10 Although some of the same dynamics that I discuss here were also present during the period of the Cultural Revolution, others were not. See e.g. Jian Zang's recent discussion of the Soviet influence on the Maoist period and Jin Yihong's discussion of the “iron girls.” Zang, Jian, “The Soviet impact on ‘gender equality’ in China in the 1950s,” in Bernstein, Thomas P. and Li, Hu-Yu (eds.), China Learns from the Soviet Union (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), pp. 259–72;Google ScholarYihong, Jin. “Rethinking the ‘iron girls’: gender and labour during the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Gender and History, Vol.18, No. 3 (2006), pp. 613–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 The historical Mu Guiying received wide attention during the Great Leap Forward. She was praised for her bravery in battle, disguised as a man.

12 While local officials approved the research, they did not “direct” my work, nor were they present during the interviews. Interview transcripts are in my possession. I include a brief discussion of the Mu Guiying Brigade in, “Making a Great Leap Forward? The politics of women's liberation in Maoist China,” Gender and History, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2006), pp. 574–93.

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26 The two most important documents in this regard are: “Zhongguo gongchandang zhongyang weiyuanhui guanyu ge kang Ri genjudi muqian funü gongzuo fangzhen de jueding” (“A decision by the CCP Central Committee regarding the current direction of woman-work in the Anti-Japanese Base Areas”), and “Huanying funü gongzuo de xin fanxiang” (“Welcome the new direction in woman-work”), in Wang Menglan (ed.), Zhongguo funü yundong lishi ziliao (1937–1945) (Beijing: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1991 [1943]), pp. 647–54. The second document was authored by Cai Chang.

27 Zhou Enlai, “Lun ‘xianqi liangmu’ yu muzhi” (“On good wives, wise mothers and the duties of motherhood”), in ibid. pp. 608–11.

28 See Susan Glosser's discussion of the 1950 Marriage Law and Harriet Evan's discussion of elite discourses on sexuality in China during the 1950s. Glosser, Susan L., Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Harriet, Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (New York: Continuum, 1997)Google Scholar, and “Past, perfect, or imperfect: changed images of the ideal wife,” in Brownell, Susan and Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. (eds.), Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 335–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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30 For an important recent discussion of the gendered shift in power within the home during this period see Yunxiang Yan, Private Life under Socialism.

31 In an important early report on disaster relief, Dong Biwu, head of the Central Relief Commission, stressed the importance of thrift as a strategy of preparing for and countering disasters, and this was adopted in some local areas. E.g. the Wenhe County Women's Federation in Henan urged local women not to rely upon their husbands for their family's livelihood but to participate in production and carefully manage household resources. See, Biwu, Dong, Dong Biwu xuanji (Collected Works of Dong Biwu) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1985), pp. 281–90.Google Scholar “X cheng funü shengchan jingyan jieshao” (“An introduction to the experience of women's production in X town”), 9-1-1, 3 May (no year is given, although the focus of the document is on land reform). The Gaoshan Women's Federation archives only date back to 1954.

32 Marina Thorborg, “Chinese employment policy in 1949–1978 with special emphasis on women in rural production,” in Chinese Economy Post-Mao. A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee Congress of the United States, vol. 1 Policy and Performance (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office), p. 592.

33 In Gaoshan in late 1956 and early 1957 local women's heads were encouraged to realize a plan that included women's agricultural work, sideline production and housework. Gaoshan County Archives, Women's Federation, B21-1-1956-6.

34 See also Tani Barlow for her discussion of the conflation of “production” and “reproduction” in state policy, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, p. 61.

35 I deliberately translate nannü pingdeng as sex rather than gender equality in order to highlight the centrality of physiology to this conceptualization. On a similar note, my use of “maternalism” is also intentional. In other work, I elaborate upon the proliferation of different maternalisms in China during the early 20th century and how it was that several specific strands of maternalist thought came to inform CCP social welfare policy. Kimberley Ens Manning, “The Sino-Japanese War and the second maternalist front,” paper presented at the Historical Society for Twentieth Century China, June 2008.

36 Feng, Jin, Deng Yingchao zhuan (Biography of Deng Yingchao) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1993), pp. 506–07.Google Scholar

37 Indeed, Deng Yingchao made this point clear in her discussion of the Marriage Law when she criticized some women cadres for putting their careers before their families, agitating for independence, and not wanting to care for their husbands and have children. Deng Yingchao, “A report regarding the marriage law,” p. 175.

38 See King, Richard, Heroes of China's Great Leap Forward: Two Stories (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 2010).Google Scholar

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41 See, for example, Xiaoxian Gao's discussion of labour models in Shaanxi. Gao, Xiaoxian, “‘The silver flower contest: rural women in 1950s China and the gendered division of labour,” Gender and History, Vol.18, No. 3 (2006), pp. 594–612.Google Scholar

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43 Chen, Tina Mai, “Female icons, feminist iconography? Social rhetoric and women's agency in 1950's China,” Gender and History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2003), p. 274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Manning, Kimberley Ens, “The gendered politics of woman-work: rethinking radicalism in the Great Leap Forward,” in Manning, Kimberley Ens and Wemheuer, Felix (eds.), Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China's Great Leap Forward and Famine (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), pp. 72–106.Google Scholar

45 Manning, “Making a Great Leap Forward?”

46 Zheng, Wang, “Gender and Maoist urban reorganization,” in Larson, Wendy and Goodman, Bryna (eds.), Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 189–209.Google Scholar

47 There was extensive interaction between “rural” Gaoshan and the nearby cities. Many of my Gaoshan interviewees, including Lin, had friends or relatives working in Shanghai and Nanjing.

48 Gaoshan xianzhi (Gaoshan County Annal) (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1994) p. 634.

49 Gaoshan County Archives, Women's Federation, B21-1-1954-3.

50 For a study of the elite politics surrounding this movement, see Zheng, Wang, “Dilemmas of inside agitators: Chinese state feminists in 1957,” The China Quarterly, No. 188 (2006), pp. 913–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Robert Ash shows that in 1957 the state was increasing grain procurement at the same time that average per capita output of grain was declining among the rural population. One Gaoshan document on the “Two Diligences” admonishes: “If everyone relies upon the collective and upon the state, no one will think to save, what do you think will happen? Will it be possible to establish socialism under these circumstances?” Ash, Robert. “Squeezing the peasants: grain extraction, food consumption and rural living standards in Mao's China,” The China Quarterly, No. 188 (2006), p. 973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gaoshan County Archives, Women's Federation B 21-2-1957-4.

52 Gaoshan County Archives, Women's Federation B 21-2-1957-3.

53 For example, the lead editorial in Funü gongzuo in June 1959 urged women's federations to re-commence the “Two Diligences” policy. “Zai funü qunzhong zhong da li kaizhan qinjian chijia chuxu ai guo de jiaoyu” (“Go all out in launching the patriotic education of the women masses in diligently, thriftily managing the family”), Funü gongzuo, Vol. 64 (22 June 1959). Although the language of thrift disappeared for several months in the wake of the second Anti-Rightist Movement, by late autumn urban women's organizations were urging frugality at home. In January 1960 qinjian chijia was once again being used in reference to the home and the dining hall in the countryside. See Funü gongzuo for the period November 1959–January 1960.

54 Or at least that is my supposition insofar as the report identified a total of 36,794 children in the county as in need of care. Gaoshan County Archives, Women's Federation B21-1-1956-6.

55 Gaoshan County Archives Women's Federation B21-2-1957-3. According to county statistics, 80.3% of children were being cared for collectively by 1960. At the same time, 94.3% of county inhabitants were eating in collective dining halls. Gaoshan County Archives, Women's Federation B 21-2-1960-5.

56 Both Wang Yanni and Frank Dikotter offer compelling accounts of the destruction of homes and graves during this period. Yanni Wang, “An introduction to the ABCs of communization: a case study of Macheng county,” in Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness, pp. 148–82, and Dikotter, Frank, Mao's Great Famine: the History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe 1955–1962 (New York: Walker & Co., 2010)Google Scholar.

57 Gaoshan county's natural growth rate declined by -4 per/mille in 1961, Gaoshan County Annal, p. 177. See p. 915 in the same volume for a discussion of county response to uterine prolapse. The “elimination of the family,” while never an explicit policy of the Party Centre was practised by lower-level cadres either eager to participate in the socialist transformation of the countryside, such as Yang, or terrified into submission. See Wemheuer's discussion of the utopic origins of the dining halls: Felix Wemheuer, “Dining in utopia: hunger and food politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union,” unpublished book manuscript, 2010. The ensuing Great Famine (1959–61), caused largely by the over-procurement of local grain stocks, put the cohesion of families under even greater stress. For a recent review of the literature on the Great Leap Forward and famine, see Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer, “Introduction” in Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness, pp. 1–27.

58 This quotation also appears in Manning, “Making a Great Leap Forward?” p. 583.

59 Hershatter, Gail, “The gender of memory: rural Chinese women and the 1950s,” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2002), pp. 43–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 Unlike Yang, Lin attributes a “lifetime of health problems” to the harmful effects of planting seedlings in water while menstruating during the time of the higher-level agricultural producer co-operatives.

61 Several Party secretaries I interviewed in Henan painted very similar pictures of their brigades.

62 See Jacka, Women's Work in Rural China, pp. 34–36.

63 In 1957, 83% of Gaoshan county's illiterate and semi-literate population were women. Gaoshan County Archives, Women's Federation, B21-2-1957-3.

64 Tong “The gender gap in political culture and participation in China.”

65 Interviewee 121.

66 Interviewee 120. Nüquan zhuyi was not a term frequently used in post-1949 China. I specifically raised this question with former women's heads in Henan and Jiangsu as I was interested in exploring whether or not the concept of “feminism” had entered local vocabularies, before, during, or after 1949.

67 For a discussion of the impact of the famine and over-work on women's health see Fu, Dong, Maimiao qing, caihua huang (Wheat Sprouts Green, Rape Flowers Yellow) (Hong Kong: Tianyuan shuwu, 2008), pp. 270–76Google Scholar, Thaxton, Ralph, Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 139–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Weifang, Liu, “Zhongguo funü yundong ‘Da Yue Jin’ shimo” (“On the process of the Chinese women's movement in the Great Leap Forward”), Zhonghua nuzi xueyuan xuebao (Journal of China Women's University), Vol. 20, No. 5 (2008), pp. 104–05.Google Scholar

68 See Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women, and Manning, Kimberley Ens, “Communes, canteens, and crèches: the gendered politics of remembering the Great Leap Forward,” in Lee, Ching Kwan and Yang, Guobin (eds.), Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution (Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson and Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 93–118.Google Scholar

69 Chen, “Female icons, feminist iconography?” p. 291.

70 Interviewees 120 and 121.

71 Yunxiang Yan, Private Life under Socialism, p. 219.

72 On this point, see also Xiaoxian Gao, “‘The silver flower context’,” p. 610.

73 Felix Wemheuer, “The grain problem is an ideological problem,” in Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness, pp. 107–29.