Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (12 page)

This does not mean that the Confucian past simply disappeared with the arrival of modern politics. For instance, assumptions that came from a modernized Confucianism did remain, such as ideas of hierarchy and mutual obligation. But these ideas have become adapted through contact with the assumptions of modernity about mass participation and legitimacy derived 72

from the people, as well as the importance of the individuated self.

There is a fi nal irony that has been implied, but not stated, in the way in which this chapter has portrayed politics since 1928 as a changing of the baton in a wider, consistent, politics of modernity.

For the political form of China today – a one-party state that does still allow a signifi cant amount of individual autonomy, a powerful state with a cooperative role in the international order, and a highly successful semi-capitalist economy in which the state and party still play a signifi cant, embedded role – means that the Communist Party of today has essentially created the state sought by the progressive wing of the Nationalists in the 1930s rather than the dominant, radical Communists of the 1960s. One can imagine Chiang Kaishek’s ghost wandering round China
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today nodding in approval, while Mao’s ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision. The intellectual
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assumptions behind both the Nationalists and the Communists in the last century were similar in many important ways, making this seeming paradox perfectly comprehensible if examined in a somewhat
longue durée
that extends back before 1978 or 1949.

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Is Chinese society modern?

Zou Taofen, one of the best-known journalists in China in the 1920s, wrote an essay under the title of ‘Equality’ in 1927: Not every person’s natural intelligence or strength is equal. But if each person develops his mind towards service and morality … so as to contribute to the mass of humanity, then he can be regarded as equal. That is
real
equality.

Modern societies, both dictatorships and democracies, betray the ideal of equality all the time. Yet they are still committed, in their most basic rhetoric, towards a society that breaks down hierarchies and aims, even if imperfectly, towards equality as a goal. Chinese society has changed in a myriad of ways in the past century and more, whether it is the nature of landholding, relations between men and women, or between countryside and city, or in the duties and obligations owed by state and people to one another. This chapter examines some of these areas to ask how far Chinese society has become modern, and whether this is at odds with, or complementary to, maintaining its identity as distinctly Chinese.

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Men and women

One of the most important areas where that search for equality has been fi ercest is the changing roles of men and women.

Mao Zedong famously said that ‘Women hold up half the sky’, a rebuke to the generations of Chinese men who had regarded women as their inferiors. However, it would be wrong to take the assessment of Mao and other 20th-century revolutionaries at face value, and simply to regard the women of late imperial China as an undifferentiated, oppressed mass, or to assume that the modern era has brought Chinese women today an uncomplicated

‘liberation’.

How far has the role of women changed in Chinese society since the imperial era? ‘Unbound feet’ has been the enduring metaphor
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of the change in the status of women in China between the
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premodern and modern eras. From the 10th century onwards, for reasons that are still unclear, the fashion developed for
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Chinese women to have their feet tightly bound from an early
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age, distorting the shape of the foot and leaving it shrunken unnaturally small for an entire lifetime. In some ways, this was surprising, as Confucian norms frowned upon the mutilation of the body. Yet the trend spread, and by the 17th century, the writer Li Yu wrote of the women of Lanzhou, in western China: ‘The feet … measure at most three inches, some even smaller … Lying in bed with them, it is hard to stop fondling their golden lotus.

No other pleasures of dallying with courtesans can surpass this experience.’ Not all women bound their feet; it was not the custom among peasant women of the Hakka sub-ethnicity, nor among Manchu women during the Qing dynasty. But for the vast majority of women who aspired to respectable life, it was essential. A mother who did not bind her daughter’s feet was doing her a disservice, for ugly, huge feet would mean little prospect of a good marriage.

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14. For centuries, Chinese women had their feet bound from an early
age so that they never grew to full size. The custom was abolished
following the action of reformers in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries

Opportunities for women were restricted overall in imperial China. They could not join the bureaucracy, nor were there many opportunities for them to become traders. Confucian culture did regard women as intellectually less capable than men. However, in the late imperial era, it was quite normal for well-off families to insist that women were literate. In particular, elite women during the early Qing (the 17th and 18th centuries) developed a public voice of their own in one particular area: publishing. This period coincided with a growth in mass woodblock publishing (see Chapter 6), and women writers of the era took advantage of the existence of a new readership to make their views and interests known. The Ming dynasty had seen a culture of literate 76

courtesans become part of elite culture, whereas by the Qing, new norms of sexual control meant that chaste womanhood (widows in particular) was praised. Yet the latter change did not end the phenomenon of women writing about their own lives.

The great Qing administrators Chen Hongmou and Yuan Mei were strongly in favour of literary education for women, even while affi rming their belief in women’s inherent lesser capabilities.

However, there was still a genuine shift in the late 19th century which saw a signifi cant breakdown in the hierarchical relationships between women and men, in particular, poor women who would not have shared in the elite written culture of their richer contemporaries. There developed a considerable intellectual movement in favour of women’s rights. Kang
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Youwei, one of the most prominent reformers of the late 19th
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century, and a Confucian in his assumptions, proposed a new society in which men and women would be equal, and
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marriages would operate on one-year renewable contracts.

Mao Zedong, in the early days of the new republic, published a succession of essays in Changsha analysing the fate of Miss Zhao, a young woman who had committed suicide rather than enter a forced marriage, and describing her dilemma in the most uncompromising way:

Chinese parents all indirectly rape their sons and daughters. This is the conclusion which inevitably arises under the Chinese family system of ‘parental authority’ and the marriage system in which there is a ‘policy of parental arrangement.’

Periodicals such as
The Ladies’ Journal
and
The New Woman
, and essays on the ‘woman problem’ in the journal
New Youth
, were published in China’s major cities. The idea of the ‘new woman’, autonomous, professional, and urban, was a global one during the interwar years, visible in places as far apart as the US and India. However, it was notable that in China, many 77

of the feminist texts relating to the ‘new woman’ and her role were written by men. This refl ected a tendency that would recur throughout the century: the role of China’s women was frequently controlled by men, however sympathetic the latter may have been. In less sympathetic cases, feminism was considered a moral failing: in 1927, Nationalist activists on the look-out for leftist activists considered women with bobbed hair to be dangerously subversive and deserving of arrest or execution.

Nonetheless, the late 19th and early 20th centuries did bring about a variety of changes in Chinese society that did ultimately change the status of women. The most signifi cant social change, and one that affected society at all levels, and in both city and countryside, was the ending of the long-standing practice of foot-binding (which was no longer practised by the 1920s).

Beyond the ending of foot-binding, however, the majority of social
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changes for women in pre-1949 China were concentrated in the city. As the concept of the ‘New Woman’ became well known
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among urban elites, the character of Nora, from Ibsen’s play
A Doll’s House
, became a powerful role model: Nora leaves home at the end of the play, abandoning her husband and children to fi nd an independent role for herself. Yet society as a whole changed less quickly than the aspirant Noras would have wished.

The writer Lu Xun asked the pointed question ‘What happens after Nora leaves home?’ Even so, there were opportunities that had simply not been there a few decades before. Women became journalists, lawyers, and students: education, particularly at university level, was the preserve of a very small number of people of either sex, but university radicals were at the heart of feminist thought of the era.

Even mainstream politics found a role for women. The Communist movement made great play of its commitments to gender equality from its earliest days. The reality was not always so clear: Xiang Jingyu, the most prominent woman in 78

the CCP in the 1920s, found that her feminist concerns were repeatedly sidelined so that the party could accommodate the prejudices of rural men, who were its primary target at that time. Although the Nationalist Party, in government from 1928, did little fundamentally to challenge gender roles, it did give women citizenship rights and (theoretically) equal rights to status in marriage and inheritance. Poorer urban women found opportunities in the massive social change of the era. As capitalist modernity brought factories to China’s cities, in particular Shanghai, rural women were recruited from the countryside to work in the factories that made the silk and cotton cloth that underpinned the textile industry. These jobs were backbreaking and dangerous, and paid little: but they marked a move for ordinary women from the confi nes of the village cottage industry, linked to their families, to a more autonomous, urban way of life.

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For women still in the countryside, however, change would be
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much longer in coming.

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The single most devastating event of China’s 20th century, the Sino-Japanese War (or War of Resistance to Japan), changed society from top to bottom. This included the devastation of the settled village society that still dominated rural China. In the areas controlled by the Communists, the conditions of wartime were used to create radical social movements that would eventually reshape China in the postwar era, and in which traditional gender roles would be further undermined.

In 1949, the CCP’s victory ‘overturned heaven and earth’. The following decades would be an ambivalent time for Chinese women. The Great Leap Forward ended up causing China’s most devastating famine of the 20th century, and it is this disaster by which its effects must ultimately be judged. However, it also marks the period when women’s roles were most notably equal. The Cultural Revolution, in contrast, offered a much more ambivalent view of womanhood. Although it stressed social equality and took delight in breaking down boundaries, the Cultural Revolution’s 79

stress on violence and radical change swiftly made it clear that it took masculine values as its default. Women were shown in the vivid Socialist Realist posters of the era wielding rifl es; men were not shown feeding babies. In addition, the unbearably close attention that was paid to people’s private lives during the Cultural Revolution led to prurient accusations, often against women, every bit as censorious as those of the premodern era which Mao had condemned. Yet there were more women party offi cials and individually paid workers in the economy than at any other point in Chinese history.

The era of reform after 1978 saw a loosening of society in all areas. For women and men alike, some of the claustrophobic restrictions of the Cultural Revolution were removed. Romance was no longer a sign of bourgeois backsliding; nor was wearing stylish clothing or make-up. Yet the social egalitarianism of the earlier era gave way in part to a type of paternalism familiar from
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the past. Within the party, the number of women party offi cials, both at local and elite level, dropped dramatically. In the labour
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market, women often found it harder to gain jobs because their prospective employers assumed they would swiftly leave to have children (and did not wish to make provision for this eventuality).

The CCP did a signifi cant amount to enforce the rights of widows and daughters to an equal share of inheritance, but even today, especially in rural China, premodern assumptions that males have priority in inheritance remain powerful (even though women could inherit property in some circumstances in late imperial China).