The role of women in the revolutionary struggle in China. The Chinese Communist revolutionary period lasted from the mid-1920s until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 during which time the successes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) depended in part on the political participation of women. The party embraced gender equality as a theoretical maxim and devoted considerable resources to cultivating women’s allegiance in the civil war against the Nationalist Chinese.
The CCP was founded in 1920, when post-World War I upheavals presaged a radical break with China’s tradition-bound past. With its large foreign communities and vibrant industrial economy, the city of Shanghai became an early focus of Communist activism in China. Shanghai’s small female working class and foreign-influenced feminist elite both gravitated toward the newly introduced Communist ideology. Despite Communism’s apparently egalitarian stance, male Communists dominated the party, and a handful of female activists struggled for inclusion. These included Wang Huiwu, who argued against China’s paternalistic tradition of arranged marriages and who, in 1921, organized the earliest women’s program endorsed by the CCP. In the northern Chinese city of Tianjin, another feminist leader, Deng Yingchao, became a prominent pamphleteer, leader of the city’s Women’s Rights League, and editor of the Women’s Daily newspaper. In late 1923, Deng married Zhou Enlai, a rising Communist leader and future premier of the People’s Republic of China. By 1925, Deng emerged as a party leader in her own right, and she remained an influential force on women’s issues through the 1960s.
Efforts to develop a broader base of support among women workers in urban centers such as Shanghai and Tianjin faced formidable obstacles, including resistance within the party’s overwhelmingly male leadership. The party’s 1925 Resolution on the Labor Movement, for example, downplayed the revolutionary potential of women factory workers, and party discipline required even fervent feminist activists to minimize their recruitment of female laborers. In February 1925, however, when female mill workers in Shanghai went on strike because experienced workers were fired in favor of lower paid trainees, party policy changed. Sympathy strikes spread throughout China’s coastal cities, and the party quickly endorsed and tried to guide the strike movement. A new Women’s Bureau was organized, but its female leader, Xiang Jiangyu, was ostracized by male party officials, and the bureau became a vehicle for Nationalist, rather than Communist, activities.
During the First United Front Period (1925-1927) of cooperation between the fledgling CCP and the growing Nationalist Party (Guomindang or Kuomingtang [KMT]) led by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek), an unprecedented political mobilization of both urban and rural women took place. As the CCP-KMT alliance fought against China’s many warlord armies, women provided such services as cooking, nursing, and intelligence gathering. A special all-women propaganda team of more than 100 members was organized by the KMT Women’s Bureau in Guangxi province, and scores of women’s associations were organized as the joint CCP-KMT Northern Expedition moved northward through central China. The Communists renewed their independent organizing work, targeting female peasants and urban workers. Soong Quingling, the U.S.-educated widow of revered nationalist leader Sun Yatsen, promoted women’s emancipation, organized feminist women’s groups, and helped change local laws in the regional capital of Wuhan city, where marriage, property, and civil rights were extended to women. The CCP’s radical actions soon provoked a violent break with the stronger Nationalists, who decimated urban Communist networks in eastern and southern China. As the CCP slowly rebuilt its popular support during the 1930s under Mao Zedong, its focus shifted from urban to rural recruitment, including the women of China’s huge peasant class.
While the Nationalist government dominated China’s major coastal cities and fought the warlords of northern China, it also tried to eliminate the Communist movement. In 1934, to escape encirclement by Nationalist troops, some 100,000 Communists, including at least 1,000 women, began a perilous, yearlong trek through central China. Pursued by Nationalist armies, the Communists suffered heavy losses during the Long March. Settling in remote Shensi province, the survivors revitalized the outlawed party by gaining support from the agricultural peasants. New programs attracted their support, including a land-to-the-tiller campaign that redistributed agricultural lands from landlords to poor farmers. This movement helped rebuild CCP political power and popular appeal. Paternalistic land-holding patterns meant that women benefited little from the program, but in the accompanying propaganda campaigns, the Communists enlisted thousands of young women, many of whom were former employees of local landlords who could reveal the landlords’ political "crimes." These women increasingly found permanent roles as party propagandists, helping to launch the land reform movement and staffing the growing Communist Party bureaucracy. Later, these propaganda specialists helped to organize troupes of female speakers, actresses, singers, and musicians who gave politically oriented performances to peasant audiences.
The Nationalists bore the primary burden of the war against Japan’s invading forces during the late 1930s and early 1940s, but the Communists, concentrated in remote provincial border regions, consolidated their own bases of support. Priority was assigned to creating large-scale party, military, and economic organizations with manpower drawn from the local peasantry. Women’s organizations were vital to the Communists’ successes in this period. Women farmed on a larger scale, while female administrators directed production programs in the agricultural, textile, and other industries, allowing male managers and employees to take up military duties. Meanwhile, at the leadership level, three women joined the policy-setting Party Central Committee in 1945, and the China Liberated Areas Women’s Federation was organized to enlist more women in the Communist movement.
In the long-running civil war between the Communists and Nationalists that flared again in 1947, women played a key role in the Communists’ mobilization programs. Huge manpower drafts by both armies caused industrial and food production to drop, but only the Communists actively encouraged women to make up the shortfall. Communist women’s groups focused on maintaining morale and enhancing women’s status within the family and the Communist movement, even as party cadres escalated their demands for more output. The Communist leadership was forced to recognize the central importance of women’s support in maintaining production. Land redistribution campaigns, which were seldom directly beneficial to women, were scaled back, and women’s issues, including expanded property rights, received greater attention at party meetings.
During 1949, the Communists achieved a final victory over the Nationalists, and party interest shifted toward integrating all classes of Chinese women into the new Communist-led state. General policies for this process were outlined at the First Congress of Women in March-April 1949, and several senior female revolutionists were given prominent, if not always powerful, positions in the new government. Furthermore, the international significance of women’s participation in the Chinese revolution was highlighted at the December 1949 Asian Women’s Conference held in Beijing. At this meeting, 165 female delegates from fourteen Asian countries heard how they might follow the Chinese revolutionary model by enlisting women in Communist-led political and guerrilla movements.
