Women, Resistance and Revolution (32 page)

The cultural revolution brought a rejection of the emphasis upon motherhood which was common in the Soviet bloc. In a report on the Moscow World Congress of Women in 1963, Yang-Yun-Yu criticized a tendency to confine women’s role to motherhood. ‘On the surface, these views seemed to take no notice of politics, but they actually involved a very big political question. Their aim was to exclude women from political life. If these views were accepted women would never win complete emancipation.’
²⁶
From mid-1966 these views became more common. And
China’s Women
issued a
self-criticism of its editorial policy which had ‘intoxicated women with the small haven of motherhood’. This was a significant change from 1965 when embroidery and recipes were still included.

As part of the intense politicization of the cultural revolution women realized that to confine themselves simply to the home and family was to throw away equality. Yao Zi-sun, a factory worker, was happy staying at home; she didn’t like going to arguments, debates and meetings, and she wasn’t interested in criticizing other people. Then she became involved in the controversy which went on in her factory during the cultural revolution. This activity penetrated the other areas of her life. She made new connections. The world suddenly grew – beyond her factory, her family, her region. She understood that her actions were important: what you did in one place had its effect in another. Women couldn’t leave politics to men.

The daughters of Miss Chao Wu-chieh have learned many things in the last fifty years of struggle. Yao Zi-sun’s friend Wang Jui-jin says:

I was crushed before and so my mind had to be awakened and I learned many good things. In those old days, I thought a ‘good’ person was an obedient person, who obeyed orders without stopping to think whether they were right or wrong; and I passively accepted the fact that some people were rich and comfortable and idle, while others lived like we did and worked so hard. Now I know different. Now we have done away with that unjust and unequal way of living, and our present cultural revolution is reminding us that we must not permit that old system to creep up on us again and catch us unawares.
²⁷

Along with the distrust of the elevation of motherhood goes a suspicion of romantic sexuality. This very dismissive attitude to personal emotions tends to emphasize the ascetic element in the Chinese Revolution, but it helps to discourage passivity. According to a recent article in
Eastern Horizon
, ‘The Chinese girl of today disdains make-up, her clothes are loose and comfortable, her thoughts are not tied to pleasing men any more and she feels her equal responsibility with men in her work – the reconstruction of the country.’
²⁸

This is reflected in the changes made in popular stories like ‘White-Haired Girl’. ‘White-Haired Girl’ was originally one of the dramas performed in the liberated areas during the Long March. It was a story of the daughter of a poor peasant who is forced to become a
maidservant in the home of her father’s landlord. Because of his overwhelming debt to the landlord the father commits suicide. The girl is raped by the landlord and runs away to a mountain cave, to find her sweetheart. She gives birth to a still-born baby and she lives like an animal on roots and berries, stealing food sometimes from the temple. When the region is liberated by the communists she returns to her village to confront her old oppressor and find the peasant boy who loves her. Because of her suffering her hair turns completely white. In the 1970 version the girl flees from the landlord but the rape and the baby are cut out. The father dies fighting the landlord and the girl herself returns to fight him. There is much less emphasis on the suffering and more on the active resistance.

‘Red Detachment of Women’ is an example of a modern dance drama, which tells how Wu Ching-hua, the daughter of a poor peasant, escapes from slavery and joins the Red Army. At first she sees her commitment to the revolution as personal vengeance, but in the political classes she begins to connect her own oppression to a much wider movement. There is a hint of personal affection between her and the man who rescued her, but when he dies fighting Wu Ching-hua has to go on and organize.

The Chinese are far from complacent. The whole emphasis upon mobilization at the base, the conviction that socialism is a continuing process, which has to be consciously and actively directed by people and requires the creation of a new culture, inevitably affects women. No one has been ‘given’ emancipation by the revolution. They have continually to struggle for it. In the cultural revolution the question of women’s participation came quickly to the fore. The relationship between women’s liberation and self-government appears clearly in the street committees. In outer Shanghai for instance the street committee consists of twenty-two people representing various districts and political organizations. Women form a high proportion of its members – sixteen out of twenty-two. It organizes nurseries, kindergartens, non-profit-making dining halls, service centres and small factories in which women who can’t work at a distance or full time are employed. Conditions are often better in places of work organized in this way because suggestions and complaints can be immediately expressed and implemented.
²⁹

The cultural revolution has had an impact on the family. Typical is the experience of Ding Hai-yu, who is a barber in Lunghua
Province Production Brigade. He came home from a political study class full of enthusiasm, eager to discuss the new ideas in his own family. His wife, who works in the commune tailoring shop, was unimpressed. She couldn’t read or write very well, she was a mother, she felt politics was nothing to do with her. But the older daughters supported their father and managed to persuade her. Instead of simply reading Mao’s works, the girls started to make up songs and dances and plays to illustrate what they read. Soon Ding Hai-yu’s wife became involved and the whole family were acting out the new ideas for the neighbours.
³⁰

Members of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding who visited China in October 1970 found that the complete communalization of family life which appeared at the end of the fifties was not so evident. The dining-rooms and nurseries continue but not on such a scale. This is probably partly for economic reasons but the peasant women particularly seem to prefer their individual families to communal facilities. They visited a very simple crèche attached to a factory. There were colourful pictures round the walls. Women looked after the children, but fathers as well as mothers collected them. The children danced and sang together but the girls seemed to do this more naturally than boys.

The tendency of the cultural revolution seems to have been to include the specific oppression of women within the general attempt to encourage all the underprivileged to throw off the old authorities. Consequently it is argued that there are no longer men’s or women’s jobs. It is true that women are doing jobs they have never done before but some of the old distinctions still exist in traditional trades. The S.A.C.U. members visited an embroidery factory which used nearly all women workers, with only a few men. But these men were mainly doing the very skilled design work, and most of the women were either doing hand embroidery or working on the machines, though among the apprentices in design there were many young women. The man who showed them round said that rather than making particular efforts to alter the sexual division of labour they were breaking down the distinction between skilled and unskilled by interchanging all the workers and teaching all the women to design, and the men to embroider and work the machines. When he was asked about the composition of the revolutionary committee he replied with a twinkle in his eye that he was the only man on it. The committee had the job
not only of running the factory but of judging the designs and deciding which ones could be sent out Although the women spoke he was obviously more confident and articulate than they were.

In the attempt to eradicate the legacy of the past there is the constant emphasis on the need to encourage all the people who normally would be silent to speak up. Joshua Horn in
Away With All Pests
describes the way in which the cultural revolution shatters the hierarchical structure of the medical profession. As women have traditionally been at the bottom of all authority hierarchies they are radically affected. Nurses criticize the doctors. Equally, in the schools, by encouraging students to challenge their teachers, young girls have been hurtled out of passivity. They often leave their parents for a long time to work in the country. The difficulty has been in containing the resentment of the young rebelling in a society which retains a deep-rooted respect for authority, and veneration for the old. A fifteen-year-old girl who struck her teacher for reactionary ideas after much discussion with Red Guards in Peking returned home convinced that ‘when you use force it only makes people resist, but if you use reason you might convince them.’
³¹

Politically, all this has had a great effect at a local level but at the centre of power women are still under-represented, although a few women like Mao’s wife have emerged through the cultural revolution into positions of great significance. This is part of the more general problem of revolutionary democracy. Moreover, it is apparent that the old ideas of women’s place still persist. Some young girl graduates from a junior middle school who went off into the country in the summer of 1969 found they were still regarded with scepticism by the comrades there when they announced they were going to be a herding team. ‘In all my years here,’ one peasant said, ‘I’ve never seen a herdswoman. These girls don’t even come up to the stirrups. How can they herd horses?’ Another comrade was of the opinion that ‘If they can herd horses then the sand-grouse can fly up to heaven.’ The girls retorted, ‘Women have flown planes.… Why can’t we herd horses?’ They kept falling off and were laughed at a great deal but they persisted.
³²

A report from an old poor peasant in Chungsan County, Kwantung, indicates that support for the ‘buying-and-selling type of matrimony’ continues:

In our commune, an unreformed landlord has spread openly such reactionary nonsense as ‘parental care is like the grace of heaven’, and ‘giving away your daughter without asking for money is valuing a human being as cheap as mud.’ He instigated those who gave away their daughters by marriage to ask for so-called ‘gift-money’ and ‘silver for her person’. This is the new trend of the class struggle. We must heighten our vigilance.
³³

Chinese vigilance has found dramatic expression but many problems remain unresolved. It is not clear whether it will be necessary for women again to emphasize their specific oppression before a completely different sense of value can emerge, nor whether self-activity at the base can be reconciled with the magnified figure of Chairman Mao directing from the top. It is difficult to estimate now how far it is possible to achieve human liberation when the margins between socialist reconstruction and starvation are still all too close. How far the emphasis on women’s general involvement in revolutionary politics can be separated from an interchange in male/female roles, changes in the family and a conscious attempt to relate sexual liberation to the new society stays an open question, but the contrast between the old world before liberation and China now is undeniable.

Han Suyin is not uncritical of some aspects of the cultural revolution. She shrinks from its self-righteousness, which resembles Confucian moralizing; its extremes are alien to her. But she understands the depths of subjection suffered previously by the Chinese people, and particularly the oppression of women, which demand the profoundest cultural re-creation. Female subordination is inscribed in the letters of the language:

The very ideogram for ‘woman’ denoted subjection, the bar across, horizontal burden of her heavy breasts, the protuberant hips and the crossed bow legs, not quite quadrupedal, but almost. Since then I have often thought that in today’s China, with the cultural revolution which compels all to weigh in the light of reason our secret clingings to primeval devices of subjection, the first thing that should be done is to eradicate totally, to change totally, some of those odious ideograms which are exact pictures of two millennia of feudal oligarchy, four millennia of woman’s inferiority.
³⁴

In considering this extremely fundamental relationship of women with our own past, and ultimately of all human beings with all history as part of the scope of continuing revolution, the Chinese ask a
question we can’t afford to ignore – why do we cling to subjection?

To say there are still definite limits to the liberation of women after the Chinese Revolution is not to dismiss what has been achieved. Indeed, the attempt to understand historically the point from which women emerged helps us not only to appreciate what has happened in real terms, but also prevents us from lifting their experience mechanically onto ours. We come from different pasts, and the kind of socialism and liberation that we can conceive and create differs greatly. The emphasis on the work situation, the puritanism in sexual matters which appears in the emancipation of Chinese women, is not some formula for western capitalism, or the other socialist countries for that matter, but should be understood as part of a particular process of development. But while we make our own liberation the experience of other revolutions shows how from the most wretched of beginnings the impossible can happen. The sand-grouse is on its way to heaven.

CHAPTER 8

Colony Within the Colony