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Socialism and the Chinese Peasant Family*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

William L. Parish Jr.
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Though there have been in China since 1949 occasional deviations in the policy regarding family life, some ideals enunciated at the start of the revolutionary regime have remained constant. The dominant policy has been that the family should be retained and its strengths used. However, family commitments should not interfere with commitments to the state or the collective, and within the family feudal customs should be eliminated. The parents' stranglehold over the lives of their children should be broken. Children should be able to marry without parental interfence. There should be no buying and selling of brides, and big, ostentatious and wasteful wedding feasts should be stopped. In an effort to limit births, marriages should be delayed to age twenty-three for girls and age twenty-five for boys in rural areas. As part of the program for more equal treatment of women, parents should show no favoritism towards boys. Women like men should work in the fields, and nurseries should be established so as to help women join in productive work. At more sporadic intervals, young children have been urged to teach their parents about the thought of Mao Tse-tung in order to rid them of old feudal ideas.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , May 1975 , pp. 613 - 630
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1975

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References

1 For example, “Sunlight of Mao Tse-tung's thought shines on thousands of homes,” Kuang-ming jih-pao (Peking), 31 March 1970,Google Scholar in Survey of China Mainland Press (SCMP), no. 4634.Google Scholar“Unless the clan relationship is destroyed, the seal of power will not be grasped,” People's Daily (Peking), 30 January 1969,Google Scholar in SCMP, no. 4358. “Bring into fuller play the role of women as a labor force,” Hung ch'i (Red Flag), no. 3, March 1973,Google Scholar in Survey of China Mainland Magazines, no. 750. These articles tend to follow a standard form which is that a problem once existed but it has now been solved—at least in one place. Chou En-lai may give a clue as to how to read this kind of article. Commenting on a model play, Chou says, “It is not possible that everyone behaves like the advanced commune members depicted in the play. Otherwise, there would have been, no need to stage the play. Those with penetrating eyes know that what a play calls for [in social attitudes] are precisely those things which some people still find hard to do. The play is staging something exem-plary to help the less advanced catch up … Those who come to China for fact-finding don't have to hunt for any inside information. They can discover our problems from the stage or from our publications … When we encourage the good and criticize the bad, it means that bad things surely still exist and good ones arc not yet perfect.” From Edgar Snow, “Talks with Chou En-lai, 1964,” in Snow's The Long Revolution (New York: Random House, 1972), paperback edition, pp. 228–29. Brackets added by Snow.Google Scholar

2 For example, see Snow's talk with Mao Tse-Tung in The Long Revolution, p. 44,Google Scholar and Topping's, Audrey talk with Chou En-lai, “Return to changing China,” National Geographic, December 1971, p. 833.Google Scholar Note the frequency with which visitors report grandparents in the homes they visit and grandparents tending kids on the street—for example, Salisbury, Harrison E., To Peking and Beyond (New York: Quadrangle, 1973),Google ScholarTuchman, Barbara W., Notes from China (New York: Mac-jnillan, 1972).Google ScholarAlso note the detailed study of one family by Peggy Printz, “The Chen family still has class,” New Yorlk Times Magazine, 14 November 1973.Google Scholar

3 Malloy, Ruth Lor, “The ‘new’ China has an old face,” The National Observer, 19 May 1973, p. 1.Google ScholarAlso see the excellent book by Chen, Jack, a Peking bureaucrat who went to live in a village from 1969 to 1970, A Year in Upper Felicity (New York: Macmillan, 1973).Google Scholar

4 Twenty-five former residents who had spent some time in villages were interviewed in Hong Kong during 1973. They included officials who had made many visits to villages in the course of their administrative work, administrators who had been sent to May 7 cadre schools in or near villages for two years, peasants who had spent all their work life in a village, and students who had been sent from the city to work in the countryside. Most were from Kwangtung province just north of Hong Kong, but three had their primary experience in north and central China. Two others, though Cantonese, had spent some time in the North.

There were a number of means to check on these people's veracity: Two were not refugees but rather people who had left through legal application procedures. Though one of these people was rather critical of bureaucrats, both tended to be positive about China, villages, and villagers. One looked forward to occasional visits back to his friends in China. Both served as useful checks on other informants. Even among those who had left illegally there was a wide spectrum of opinion. Some of the students who had been sent to a village were very positive about China, very negative about capitalism and Hong Kong, and only regretful that they had not been able to earn enough to eat in the village or had not been reassigned to an urban job. Others were more negative, but even among the most negative, by asking for very specific features and events it was still possible at times to get very useful information. By comparing the responses of those of varying opinions, it was possible to draw conclusions about the general accuracy of different respondents.

The most problematic biases, however, were not those involved with a general negativcness or posi-tiveness towards China—these biases were rather easy to detect. Rather, the most problematic biases were those involved with idiosyncratic personal histories. One youth who had a personal conflict with his team leader was a very poor informant on local leadership though an excellent informant on other aspects of the village. Another person who had been attacked by students in the Cultural Revolution was, by his own admission, not a very good informant about students and youth but excellent on the intricacies of the bureaucracy. The most important guard against these idiosyncratic biases was extended contact. It was very important to get detailed personal histories and to keep asking informants whether they had actually seen such and such an event or whether they were just reporting an opinion about it. Contact with the informants ranged from a low of two or three hours up to forty or fifty hours over twenty separate interview sessions. Contact with those informants relied on most heavily in this paper exceeded fifteen hours and six or more interview sessions. Except for a few villagers who could not speak Mandarin, the interview was one-for-onc with no outsider present. For most interviews, notes were taken by hand during the interview and then typed within twenty-four hours.

Another check on the veracity of informants was that some who reported one village as very backward would also report another village as very advanced. Two informants who had lived in northern and southern villages reported great admiration for the political activism of the northern and exasperation with the backwardness of southern villages they had lived in. A similar phenomenon was found when informants were asked to give a household census of their production team. This was the most exhilarating part of the research and the major basis for this paper. Revealed in the village was a wide range of personalities and households. Some households were harmonious, well run and prosperous. Others were filled with bickering, others were deeply in debt. Some individuals were committed, hard workers. Others were lazy. Some individuals hardly said anything in public; others were super-critical and running off at the mouth all the time. Some thought only of saving for their family; others were incurable playboys or dedicated drinkers, using up all their family's resources. It does not seem that such a wide range of types, often reported by the same informant, could come out of some mysterious bias.

5 Soong, Ching Ling, “Women's liberation in China,” Peking Review, Vol. 15, No. 6 (11 February 1972), p. 7,Google Scholarcited in Sidel, Ruth, Women and Child Care in China (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), paperback edition, p. 184.Google Scholar

6 Based on household censuses from interviews TCT, PAPI, HYH, KCK. Also see Salaff, Janet, “Youth, Family, and Political Control in Communist China,” unpublished PhD. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1972,Google Scholar and the comments by Tse-tung, Mao in Snow, The Long Revolution, p. 44.Google Scholar

7 Keith Buchanan, The Transformation of the Chinese Earth (London: Bell and Jones, 1970), pp. 136–137. Also see the excellent discussion of income inequality in Schran, Peter, The Development of Chinese Agriculture 1950–1959 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), Ch. 6. Though Schran's discussion is for the 1950s, the wage system that exists in most places today is virtually the same as that which existed in 1957. Some places adopted the Tachai modification of this system between 1968 and 1971, but since 1971 most places have returned to the earlier system.Google Scholar

8 Overdrawing is not an infallible index of poverty. Some families overdraw because their main laborer works in a salaried job outside the production team. (Sec Myrdal, Report … p. 154; interviews TCT:19, HYH:21, 23. The numeral following the colon indicates the page number in the interview transcript.) Others overdraw because they skimp on collective work while devoting more energies to their own private plot or other private sidelines (PAP1:42). Though a well-run team will squelch ihc second type, both types tend to prosper and at the end of the year they simply repay the team for their overdrawn grain. Even allowing these anomalies, most southern Kwangtung teams appear to have one or more poor, and overdrawn, households (censuses in interviews TCT, PAP1, HYH plus estimates by KCK, TKM:15.

9 For example, Yen, Li, “The grain free supply system is as good as can be,” Li-tun Hsüeh-hsi (Theoretical Study Monthly), Liaoning, Vol. 18, no. 12 (1 December 1959), p. 27.Google Scholar

10 “Document of the CCP Central Committee, chung-fa (1971), no. 82,” reproduced and translated in Chung-kung yen-chin (Studies on Chinese Communism), no. 6 (September 1972).Google Scholar“Document No. 22 of the CCP Ssumao District Committee,” translated in Issues and Studies 9 (No. 6, March 1973).Google Scholar

11 On rural school expenses, see Myrdal, China: The Revolution …, p. 139; Alley, Travels in China, p. 369; interviews TCT:10, 54; PAP1:51; TKM. Myrdal shows that girls are pulled out of school more often than boys (p. 139). Because senior middle school fees are higher and because senior middle schools usually remove the child from the village, it is even more unlikely that a less wealthy peasant could have his children continue on in school (see Myrdal, Report …, Ch. 21; interview TKM:12).

12 Interview TCT:46.

13 The material on TB and other diseases did not come from direct questioning on the topic. Rather, it arose incidentally as informants were asked to enumerate and discuss the households in their production team. Examples are found in TCT:16, PAP1:63, HYH:18, TKM:16

14 On women's work and workpoints, see Mehnert's, Klaus visit to Tachai in China Returns (New York: Dutton, 1972),Google Scholar Ch. 6. Also, Myrdal, China: The Revolution …, pp. 45, 109, 135; Chen, A Year …, pp. 136, 160, 194, 197.

15 Buchanan, Transformation of the Chinese Earth, pp. 142, 157. Burki, Shahid Javed, A Study of Chinese Communes, 7965 (Cambridge: Harvard Easr Asian Monograph no. 29, 1970), p. 40.Google ScholarWalker, Kenneth R., Planning in Chinese Agriculture (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), p. 34.Google Scholar

16 On the time and care involved in feeding the pig as well as a discussion of subsidiary work for women and children, see Chen, A Year …, passim; Myrdal, China: The Revolution …, p. 48, Also interviews LY, TCT:50, HYH:20, TKM:1, 6.

17 See the family described in Salisbury, Chalotte Y., China Diary (New York: Walker, 1973).p.Google Scholar 21. This is a commune which has a large number of nurseries and kindergartens (Sidel, Women and Child Care in China, p. 29). Also interviews PAP1:41; HYM:20, TKM:1.

18 Nurseries were apparently absent in Upper Felicity (Chen, A Year …, pp, 189, 233, 234), Willow Grove in 1969 (Myrdal, China: The Revolution Continued, p. 45), and in one Kwangtung village (Malloy, “The new China …” p. 18). The women's cadre in the west-central Kwangtung commune visited by Peggy Printz and Paul Stcinle (Westinghouse Broadcasting, May 1973, personal communication) reported that nursery and kinder-gartcn work was as yet poorly developed. Though former residents give a mixed picture, they generally report that in Kwangtung province nurseries and kindergartens are uncommon. On ponds and other dangers for kids, see Alley, Rewi, Travels in China, 1966–1071 (Peking: New World Press, 1973). p. 340; Chen, A Year …, p. 199; and interviews TCT:53 and TKM:1.Google Scholar

19 Myrdal, Report …, p. 258; interviews TKM:2, CSK:3.

20 Sidel, Ruth, on her visit, was told that even in communes with many regular nurseries and kindergartens half or more of the children stay with grandparents (Women and Child Care in China, pp. 84–85, 124–25).Google Scholar

21 It is the 1962 revised draft of the Sixty Articles which is used here. Recent government documents still cite the Sixty Articles as the touchstone for rural policy. (See the documents in footnote 10.)

22 On the inheritance laws, see Meijer, M. J., Marriage Law and Policy in the Chinese People's Republic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1970. Ch. 14.Google Scholar

23 Sixty Articles, article 45. Interviews PAP1, HYH. Some villages are reluctant to allocate crop land to housing, with the result that new houses can be built only where an old one has been lorn down (interview TKM:9).

24 China: The Revolution Continued, pp. 47–48.Google Scholar Also, Chen, A Year …, pp. 195, 373.

25 Interviews PAP1, HYH, TKM:5. Also Printz, “The Chens …,” Printz, personal communication, 1973. and Malloy, “The new China …,”

26 Chen, A Year…, p. 108, interviews PAP1: 40, HYH:19, KCK.

27 “Revolutionary youth should properly treat their own landlord and rich peasant families,” Chung-kuo ch'ing-nien (China's Youth), 1954, no. 17, pp. 31–32.Google ScholarSheng-hui, Ch'ao, “How to deal with landlord and counter-revolutionary parents and their kin?” Chung-kuo ch'ing-nien, 1956, no. 22, pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

28 ibid.

29 9 February 1957.

30 1957, No. 2, p. 26.

31 1957 No. 2, p. 26.

32 See jui, Ma Wen-, “Explanation of the revised temporary regulations on retirement …,” People's Daily, 6 February 1958;Google Scholar“Vagrants at the An-chi State Farm enjoying a new life,” Fukien Daily, 24 January 1959;Google Scholar“Provincial welfare production blossoms everywhere,” Anhui Daily, 3 November 1959, p. 3;Google Scholar“Great achievements in disaster relief, economic relief, and social welfare work,” Fufyen Daily, 8 November 1959, p 3.Google Scholar

33 Hun-yin-fa wen ta (Questions and Answers on the Marriage Law), Hofci: Anhui People's High Court and the Legal Administrative Bureau, 1964. Myrdal, China: The Revolution…, p. 52. Galbraith, John K., A China Passage (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), 1973,Google Scholar paperback edition, p. 98. Though direct welfare payments from the state are infrequent, there are a number of other mechanisms to care for the poor and sick in the village. The production team has a welfare fund, which is one, two or three per cent of its budget. Families with too many children can overdraw grain, so that they will not starve. Teams tend to assign poor families extra work, such as tending an extra buffalo, so as to give more income. And, finally, even when people are not related by kinship, there is one to one, individual assistance such as the lending of a vacant room to an old person.

34 Interview TCT:46.

35 People's Daily editorial, 9 February 1957.Google Scholar“Complete the good work in taking care of those in difficulty,” Southern Daily, 22 December 1961, p. 2.Google Scholar

36 Some of these people lose their gamble and live so long that the proceeds of their house sale are used up, thereby causing quite a problem for their production team.

37 Myrdal, China: The Revolution…, p. 52. Meijer also finds frequent articles in the press on support of parents with only daughters, Marriage Law and Policy…, p. 261.

38 Interview HYH:36. Also see examples in Meijer, op. cit., p. 261.

39 Chen, A Year…, p. 76.

40 Regulations Governing Household Registration (Standing Committee, National People's Congress, 9 January 1958),Google Scholar translated in Tien, H. Yuan, China's Population Struggle (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1973), appendix L.Google Scholar

41 wa, Chang Ching-, “Why must we reduce urban population,” Daily Worker (Peking), 4 January 1958.Google Scholar

42 On the basis of household censuses of four production teams and estimates from other teams.

43 Parish, William L, Jr., “Kinship and Modern-ization in Taiwan,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1970.Google Scholar

44 Dunn, Stephen P., “Structure and functions of the Soviet rural family,” in Miller, James R. (ed.). The Soviet Rural Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 332.Google ScholarChirot, Daniel, “Sociology in Romania: A review of recent works,” Social Forces 51 (1972), p. 100.Google Scholar

45 Teiwes, Frederick C., “Provincial politics in China: Themes and Variations,” in Lindbeek, John M. H. (ed.), China: Management of a Revolu-tionary Society (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), pp. 165–166.Google Scholar

46 Interview TCT. Also see Buchanan, Transformation …, p. 137. These figures are for average team incomes. As noted earlier, there are additional differences in family income learn.

47 Myrdal, China: The Revolution …, p. 78

48 For the changes in policy, see Meijer, Marriage Law and Policy … as well as the journals China…s Youth (Chung-kuo ch'ing-nien) and China's Women (Chung-kuo fu-nü).

49 Interview TCT:38. Personal communication from a Hong Kong resident who went to visit his kin in Canton for extended periods during the Cultural Revolution. Also see the forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation by Raddock, David, Dallas State University.Google Scholar

50 See People's Daily, 6 February 1969, p. 4; 30 March 1969, p. 4; 21 January 1970, p. 4; 6 October 1970, p. 1; Kiangsi Provincial Radio, 19 March 1970, 9 PM.Google Scholar