Thread by @LetaHong

🧵On the the 100th anniversary of China’s Communist Party, don’t forget that feminism played a key role in China’s revolutionary history.

The first woman to emerge as a leader within the Chinese Communist network was 23-year-old Wang Huiwu, a May Fourth activist who used her community of Shanghai women’s activists to organize locations for secret Communist meetings in 1921. (From my book, Betraying Big Brother 116)

Wang had written essays condemning China’s arranged marriage system as a form of lifelong imprisonment for women. Her most prominent essay, “The Chinese Woman Question: Liberation from a Trap,” was published in 1919 in Young China, whose advisors included Mao Zedong.

Wang & other 1st-generation Communist women wanted to break free of patriarchal constraints and “were attracted to the Party because it provided a supportive environment in a largely hostile society,” according to historian Christina Gilmartin.

After the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, the first decision of its new Central Committee was to put Wang Huiwu and another radical woman, Gao Junman, in charge of launching a Communist women’s program. Wang sponsored a new journal, 妇女声 (Women’s Voices”

‘Women’s Voices’ published its 1st issue in Dec 1921 with two women editors, Wang Huiwu and Wang Jianhong. It’s authors were primarily women and it was aimed at women readers from the May Fourth period who had “gained political consciousness,” writes Gilmartin.

“Because most women were without property, they could in many ways be considered members of the ‘property less class’, (无产阶级）a term that served for the word proletariat.

The Shanghai Pingmin Girls’ School opened in early 1922, with the high-ranking Communist Li Da (Wang Huiwu’s husband) as its principal, although Wang Huiwu did all the work of designing the curriculum and recruiting students who could become women cadres in the CCP.

Yet even during the earliest revolutionary years, when male Communist Party founders LI Da and Chen Duxiu embraced feminist rhetoric, Wang Huiwu was never admitted as a member. When LI Da fell out of favor with other Communists and failed to be re-elected to the Central Committee

In 1922, other male Party members could not accept the idea of a woman holding a more important position than her husband. ‘Women’s Voices’ abruptly ceased publication and the Pingmin Girls’ School permanently closed at the end of 1922.

On May 30, 1925, British police fired on a large crowd of demonstrators in Shanghai protesting the murder of a Chinese worker at a Japanese-owned textile mill. They killed around a dozen students and workers, including a female student. The killings galvanized Chinese workers

and students into a revolutionary fervor, which Communist organizers like Xiang Jingyu used to recruit female activists and labor leaders. By September 1925, the Communists had a thousand women recruits , ten times the number before the May 30.

International Women’s Day celebrations became increasingly radical. In 1926, in Guangzhou alone, over 10,000 people gathered to call for an end to arranged marriage, freedom to divorce, gender equality in wages,the elimination of concubines, child brides and girl bond servants.

But when the Communists and Guomindang split and began a covil war in 1927, feminist programs lost their political backing. Meanwhilethe Sixth Congress of the Chinese in 1928, held on Moscow, passed a “resolution a on the womans’s movement” which explicitly denounced the…

“Bourgeois feminist” program of the previous eight years & said it had been “a mistake” to allow the establishment of independent women’s associations,” (Gilmartin). “It thus facilitated a clear departure from the feminist program and the subsequent adoption of an orthodox..

Communist position on the primacy of economic class oppression over gender exploitation.” Once Communist Party leaders decided to shift from the standard Marxist model of mobilizing the urban working class to a peasant-based revolution in the countryside,..

They were even less inclined to embrace feminist policies, in order to avoid antagonizing the heavily patriarchal male peasants.

The consequences of the Party’s deliberate denunciations of feminism have reverberated through many decades, all the way to the present day. Although the CCP continued to endorse gender equality, Party officials shunned the term “feminism,” (女权主义), and shifted their focus..

to the elimination of private ownership and the class system. “Feminists who refuse to identify with the Party’s goal but focused on gender equality we’re called “bourgeois narrow feminists,” a strategy copied from European socialists (Ko and Wang).

I’m getting very sleepy. Read much more in my book Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China - now out in paperback: amazon.com/Betraying-Big-…

Apologies for all the typos - I wrote this thread late at night while very sleepy, but wanted to tweet something about #CCP100!

Related piece I wrote for @LARBchina on Chinese revolutionary feminist Qiu Jin and the connection with Chinese feminist activists today:

https://twitter.com/letahong/status/1081767039780425728?s=21

https://t.co/WqjDNYsZqy