Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 20:58:14 -0800
Subject: M-G: Re: Women's Legal Status and Employment in Socialist China




On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) wrote:

>A marked feature of the "Chinese road to socialism" has been a constant
>fluctuation of the party's view of the role of women -- from a position of
>official equality during the decade of the Cultural Revolution (summed up in
>the facile epigram "women are the same as men") to a greater ambivalence
>concerning "women's problems" which,  during the course of the past decade,
>are increasingly discussed as a matter of biology,  rather than as social or
>political phenomena.

Jay Miles:
I am very glad to see this rare post dealing with the Chinese experience.
Day after day discussions on this list go on about socialism and revolution
and it sometimes seems that the Chinese revolution and the struggles of 
HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of people living in a dictatorship of the proletariat
and building socialism, had never existed.  The accumulated practice and ideas 
of these many multitudes of folk that engaged in CLASS STRUGGLE are very
important.  The mass campaigns lead by the Communists in China have left us 
with invaluable lessons and insights which we could be examining and learning
from.  But Louis Proyect and comrade Godena are the only ones ever to mention
the excellent phenomena of the Chinese revolution on this list.  I would like
this situation to change. I think I'm gonna start right away and begin to 
interject into the discussions some of the richness and vastness of what went
on in China.

Lou mentions how the continuing influence of Confucian tradition 
has affected public policy in regards to women in China.  That this
is happening without a mass campaign to defeat these old ideas is 
one more evidence that there is no more socialism being attempted
there, it is a bourgeois government.   During the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution there was a mass campaign to "CRITICIZE LIN PIAO
AND CONFUCIUS" that began in 1973, part of which was a serious attempt
to further the emancipation of women in Chinese society.  At the 
commune level, for instance, the principle "Anything a man can do,
a woman can do," was deepened through struggle to mean, "Anything
a woman can do, a man can do," which meant that men were expected to
wash clothes and cook.  These changes did not come without struggle.
Today there are no mass campaigns in China to raise the consciousness
of the people.  But the advances made by the class struggle of 
these millions people don't have to vanish, become invisible.
There remains a huge body of literature with the voices of the 
Chinese workers and peasants and foreign visitors accounting what
they saw and did and learned from the class struggle in revolutionary
China.

Lou's post provoked me to pick up once again a book; "Women's 
Liberation in China" by Claudie Broyelle (1977).  The introduction
makes mention of how Liu Shao-chi (former president of China) tried 
to reverse the gains that working women had made in Chinese society.
It's very good, I think you have a copy, Lou.  (It would be a zerox
copy, spiral bound, given to you by Gina last April I think.)
I am going to post the intro here:


Introduction (Women's Liberation in China)

Immediately after its liberation in 1949, China was faced with the
problem of how to involve in social production the many millions of
women confined until then in narrow domesticity.  China was in a 
good position to bring about this upheaval.  In particular, the
victory of the revolution, crowning twenty years of national and
civil wars, had profoundly transformed the old society and had
destroyed many of the old ideas about women's inferiority.  Millions
of women had played an active part in the war against the Japanese;
they had exercised power directly, often playing a leading part in
the liberated areas.  In many districts they had frequently taken
charge of agricultural production.  This wealth of experience was
the context in which the question of achieving emancipation was
seen.  It was a very important established fact which the women's
movement could look to for support when tackling the next stage.

WORK ISN'T ALWAYS LIBERATING

While China is almost the only country in the world today (note; this
was written in 1971) where the vast majority of women participate
in social production, this didn't come about smoothly.  Some figures
are worth thinking about.  For example in Shanghai in 1966, on the 
eve of the Cultural Revolution, more than half the women had given
up their jobs and had returned to their domestic lives.  This can
be explained partly by the policy of the Chinese Communist Party,
under the influence of Liu Shao-chi, ex-president of the People's
Republic of China, which involved waging an intensive propaganda
campaign for a return to the home.  This took many and varied forms.
Here a mother's 'unique' ability to raise children was praised;
there it was stated outright that women were good for nothing, too
limited intellectually to learn a trade.  The scarcity of day-care
centres and canteens was often used as an argument against women
working.  As for those who already had a job, their work was 
interpreted in a particular way: a second wage for that little bit
extra ('work to feed and clothe your family better')!  This 
reactionary chorus was no doubt loud enough to discourage many whose
intentions were good.  but by itself it cannot explain the fairly
widespread return to the home.  We must look for the underlying 
reasons in the work itself, in its organization.  Otherwise it's
hard to understand how women holding down a job as part of their
effort to liberate themselves could have allowed themselves to be
convinced by such backward-looking theories.  It's really because
not all the working women were actually gaining any freedom.  Wherever
there were genuinely liberating jobs women didn't leave the factories
in such great numbers.  In the Chao Yan factory, which we visited,
only about ten women 'went back behind their front doors', as the
Chinese say.

Nobody can still think that the Soviet way of explaining things is
satisfactory: 'Here is a state-owned factory, and since the State
is the Party and the Party is the masses, the factory belongs to the 
workers, QED.'  That's no longer acceptable.  If I'm told, 'This 
factory belongs to you and the people' while I blindly obey my bosses'
orders, understanding nothing about my machine and even less about
the rest of the factory; if I don't know what happens to my product
when it's finished, or why it was produced in the first place; if I
have to work faster to get a bonus; if I'm bored to death in the 
factory waiting all week for Sunday, all day for clocking-off time;
if I'm even more ignorant after years of working than when I began --
then it's because the factory is neither mine nor the people's!

When production is still organized on capitalistic lines, that is
maintaining and deepening the separation between intellectual and 
manual work and sticking to the rule of profitability; when production
relies on a bourgeois rule-book, blind discipline and material 
incentives and maintains a division between those who think on one
side and those who do on the other -- then the least educated, 
especially the women, are also the most oppressed.

A significant number of women were convinced of the advantages of
returning to domesticity, because in the first place the class 
struggle had not yet been defeated the bourgeoisie in the factories.
Because of this, work remained subject to bourgeois criteria.  And
capitalist production can no more 'liberate' women than it has ever
actually liberated men.  We, who had all worked in factories,
remembered the endless conversations with other women on the subject;
'If my husband earned enough, I'd stay at home', 'When I get married,
I won't work anymore.'  Such talk came up again and again, even
though, the very next day, these same women would swear: 'I wouldn't
stay at home for anything in the world, I'd get too bored.'  Such
wavering opinions only reveal the particularly ambiguous position of
women workers in a capitalist country: they have enough experience 
of social labour to appreciate the triviality of housework, but this
social labour itself is so devoid of meaning as to make the prospect
of staying at home seem like a temporarily inaccessible luxury.  A
solderer in a television factory once told me:  'On Monday morning,
the prospect of the whole week ahead of me makes me envy those who 
can stay at home; on Sunday evening, after a day of cleaning-up,
I pity them.'

Yet while the participation of women in social labour has not
liberated them, it has nevertheless been a decisive factor in 
arousing an awareness of their oppression and in the socialization
of their rebellion.  It has led to an enormous increase in their
consciousness of oppression: 'woman's condition' or the misfortune
of being a woman.

================================================================= 
Jay Miles / Detroit


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