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Christina Kelley Gilmartin is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. She is the coeditor of Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (1994).

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Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s

University of California Press

Why do Communist revolutionary movements exhibit such a glaring discrepancy between their theoretical positions on gender equality and their political practice? This question has absorbed the attention of a considerable number of scholars, many of whom focus on the tensions between Marxism and feminism.1 These theorists contend that Marxism and feminism are basically incompatible, that their union, to paraphrase Heidi Hartmann, has been problematic from the start and like all unhappy marriages should be dissolved.2 Other scholars attribute the incongruity between word and deed to the subordination of gender issues to "larger" political goals on socialist revolutionary agendas.3

Both these interpretations, despite their differences, proceed from the premise that Communists have generally lacked sufficient commitment to the cause of gender equality to permit its realization in the postrevolutionary state. These interpretations reflect a profound skepticism of the capacity of socialist revolutions to establish gender equality. Both analyses also pay little attention to political culture as such, or to the ways in which gender issues are interpolated into a revolutionary movement.

Out of a desire to probe more deeply into the gender interactions of the Chinese Communist revolutionary movement in the 1920s, I have found the work of several scholars of the French Revolution to be useful. In particular, Lynn Hunt's treatment of political culture, which she defines as "the values, expectations, and implications that

expressed and shaped collective action," allows for a much more dynamic approach to revolutionary occasions and their possibilities, even when the outcome is already well established.4 Perhaps most important for my study, Hunt's methodology draws attention to the ways in which revolutionaries make meaning out of their own experience, and in so doing it provides insights into their fashioning of a compelling logic for their revolutionary actions.

Part 1 of this study examines the making of the Chinese Communist party from its inception in 1920 until the upsurge of the revolutionary mass mobilizations in 1925. It grapples with two simultaneous processes that shaped the formation of the Communist body politic. It examines the ways in which the explicit, radical break Communists made with tradition, including a rejection of paternalist and patriarchal models of society, created a fertile environment for the entry of feminist women into the party and for the construction of a women's program informed by feminism. At the same time, the study finds evidence of the persistence of traditional gender patterns of political attitudes and behavior in the party, which were not merely archaic remnants but became central organizing principles of the Chinese Communist polity. The new political culture of twentieth-century China incorporated this contradiction, and in time the gap between Communist rhetoric and practice on gender issues became starkly evident.

The geographical focus of the first part of this book is Shanghai. Although data exist for other localities that hosted a Communist organization by the convening of the first congress of the Chinese Communist party in 1921 (Beijing, Changsha, Guangzhou, Jinan, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Wuhan), it was Communist experiences in Shanghai that produced the richest historical material for this study.5 The industrial capital of China and a haven for Chinese radicals since the turn of the century, Shanghai quickly became the political, cultural, and social center of the Chinese Communist world. It was also in Shanghai that the greatest number of Communist feminists, both male and female, congregated. Moreover, Shanghai served as the home of the Chinese feminist press, a sizable assembly of women's groups, an active student movement, and the largest concentration of women workers in China.

To understand the interactions between feminist politics and traditional attitudes and behaviors, we must first probe into the origins and attributes of the feminist ideals that permeated the party at its incep-

tion. Chapter 1 examines how gender issues were constructed in the political and revolutionary Communist male discourse during the first years of the Communist movement, drawing attention to the ways in which May Fourth feminist categories shaped this discussion. This chapter explores some of the personal reasons motivating these male Communists to embrace feminist issues, as well as the political reasons compelling them to draw women into their organization.

Chapter 2 examines the tentative and paradoxical beginnings of the Chinese Communist women's action program. It focuses on the way Wang Huiwu and Gao Junman, the first women activists in the Shanghai Communist organization, worked to create a women's voice in the copious Communist literature on women's emancipation, establish a presence in the Shanghai women's circles, and develop a rudimentary infrastructure for involving women in Communist programs. Despite their accomplishments, these activists faced strong impediments to developing egalitarian political roles within the Communist polity and gaining the full support of male Communists for their undertakings. Only outside intervention by the Comintern effected a significant breakthrough, compelling the Chinese Communist party to grant legitimate status to this area of work by establishing a formal bureau with officially appointed leaders to oversee the party's women's program.

Chapter 3 explores Xiang Jingyu's search for a meaningful role in the Chinese Communist party. Her struggle to come to terms with the potentially painful contradictions between gender and class in theory and practice had a pronounced impact on the Communist women's program and on other Communist women leaders.

Chapter 4 looks at the experiences of women Communists in the creation of a gender hierarchy within the Communist body politic. It discusses their political background, their motivations for joining the Communist party, and their experiences in the political organization and the party's subculture. The chapter also addresses the question of why male and female Communists tolerated the development of a discrepancy between their ideological stance on women's emancipation and the unequal power hierarchy in the Shanghai Communist organization.

Excerpted from Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920sby Christina Kelley Gilmartin Copyright © 1995 by Christina Kelley Gilmartin. Excerpted by permission.
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