Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2019, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (3): 210-240.

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The Fission of Revolutionary Purpose and the Transformation of the Mass Line: Moderation of Women's Policies of the CCP in the 1940s

CHENG Wenxia1, LI Hui2   

  1. 1 Department of History, Fudan University;
    2 Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance
  • Online:2019-05-20 Published:2019-05-20

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Abstract:

As a Marxist revolutionary party,the CCP advocated gender equality,however,in the 1940s,its radical gender policies came under moderation. During the Soviet period,female emanciption was a powerful means of mobilizing women to participate in the land reform. The Anti-Communist "Encirclement and Suppression" had caused a significent number of male casualty and had drained male laborers from the land. This reality forced the CCP to focus on mobilizing females to step in males' role in production. At the same time,the intensified class conflict took the primacy over the gender equality issues arisen from the radical policies. As soon as the Sino-Japanese War started the CCP suspended the land reform,thus the radical gender policies had lost its practical foundation and the relationship between the Party and the masses had altered structurally.Because of the pressure to seize the resources for the War,the principle goal of the CCP shifted from liberation to draft of army recruits. The relationship between the Party and the peasants changed from coorperative to tense. Although the gender equality policies were shelved,the path dependence persisted. Only by the middle period of the War when the CCP modified its mass line as non-class struggle and production output focused to counter the KMT's "xiangong" (Restricting the CCP),the path dependency of gender equality was broken and moderated as the period had brought back the traditional gender difference and gender division of labor. The softening of the policies on women rebalanced the central goalsand principle objectives of the revolution,and compensated the preference of males and the physiological characteristics of female.

Key words: mass line, production, division of labor based on gender, resources extracting