Toward a Chinese Feminism

...I will also confront the pro-cultural-revolution arguments— advanced even among those who were themselves gravely victimized, yet still engaged in the search for personal and social liberation...

...The essence of their relationship is, after all, not for me to judge...

...The validity of this search and the price paid for it were not fully revealed to me until the huge rehabilitation campaigns following the Mao era...

...I went to a village in northern Shanxi near the border mountains on which the "Smaller Great Wall" was built to obstruct nomadic tribes several centuries ago...

...It was indeed an age more than ever before in China of female participation in politics, management, and all kinds of social and cultural activities...

...Personal emotions and desires, including sexuality, appeared to be incompatible with the lofty, ruthless, and selfless revolution...

...This movement, known as the Tiananmen Incident, was the first massive protest in the People's Republic, involving also numerous party members, against the ruling order...

...Does tradition explain everything—as purely a matter of the "remnants of the old society," having nothing to do with a socialism that, almost by definition, would abolish these remnants in its irresistible forward march...

...On the other hand, acts of humiliation and violence against men and women on the "wrong" side were committed by people of both sexes at every level—a historical page still too heavy to be turned...

...Waving farewell to them on that golden autumn day has become for me a permanent reminder of naked inequality and minority privilege sustained by a proud socialist policy...

...The price for a bride was so high that many young men could not afford marriage unless they were prepared to sacrifice their sisters—if they were "lucky" enough to have a sister who had, in turn, no luck to marry out to a town dweller...

...Critical of that past experience as I am now, I nonetheless also miss what I see as some of the most worthy, beautiful, and heroic expressions of"human nature" that are lost in the present age of cynicism, money fetishism, and single-minded pragmatism...

...Our childhood was spent mostly in a (residential) nursery, a school, or in the care of an "auntie" (nurse...

...The whole question of women's liberation is all the more pressing because my daughter's generation is now being socialized in an environment in which the old socialist beliefs and policies concerning gender equality, however flawed themselves, are diminished by the overwhelming power of market forces...

...Have they, in fact, ever had a pondering moment or sufficient interest to look at their place in relation to men within and without the family during the revolutionary struggles...

...today's faddish phrase, that there existed a "gender hierarchy" in the Communist forces, did not bother us...

...indeed, they were very proud of each of us...

...478 • DISSENT Chinese Feminism My own parents had respected, cared for, and helped each other through thick and thin, though they never showed any intimacy in front of us...

...and consequently, so to speak, of empowerment of women within the family as well, especially in the sweepingly "modernized" rural areas...

...For the first time the "woman question" appeared to me as something of urgent contemporary relevance...

...I myself was much confined to a personal experience, above all a home environment (and similar environments extended from it), in which the issue of gender appeared not to exist...

...Was gender difference and equality really not an issue, or were we simply blind to it...

...It was immediately related to the situation of sheer poverty that overwhelmed men and women and erased even the most extensive and penetrating ideological influence...

...Only then did I meet someone who had lived in a world completely different from my own in its relationship with communism, a world of discrimination, oppression, and independent thinking, and through him I came to know many different life experiences...

...Our parents told us very little about their personal stories in relation to the revolution...

...My mother had to cross over a mountain on foot to attend a local school in a southern province where the mountains, she said, were covered with red bayberries throughout the year—this cheered her up from the exhausting daily treks...

...For the first time we learned how huge a gulf there was between material— including educational and medical—conditions in the cities and the countryside...

...rail tickets were not required anyway...

...I have two sisters and no brother...

...The students, in the absence of teachers who became the targets of attacks or stepped aside, would decide, say, in the morning and depart in the afternoon...

...My parents and their old comrades already knew, somehow, without accepting the traditional superstition that natural disaster is an omen of social-dynastic alterations, that significant changes would come soon...

...After two years of revolutionary activities in which classrooms were empty or only used for "struggle meetings," the three of us left home, quite willingly, for different places in the countryside during the campaign for "being reeducated by the peasants...

...More generally, is it true that family relations in China were so much penetrated by the social power relations of the party-state hierarchy that a distinguishable private sphere did not survive...

...A widespread practice in the rural north, this frequently involved huanqin or direct exchanges of (underage) girls between families in order to get a son a wife...

...Everything belonged to "the state," as we said in everyday Chinese...

...In April, in the form of mourning the late Premier Zhou Enlai, a popular revolt against the tyrannical regime—now in the hands of a handful of "ultra-left" careerists led by Mao's estranged wife—started in Beijing and spread to other urban centers...

...My younger sister could have stayed with my parents (as policy permitted one child of each family to stay in the cities), but acting on their self-disciplined commitment to allow no room for selfish interests, they sent her away as well to the far north...

...I did not realize that she, as the only child in her family, was exceptionally lucky among the girls in her home town (probably the poor boys too) to be able to go to school...

...She liked to dress in a silk sari, cook her favorite Nanyang (southern Asian) meals, and make us children luxury snacks such as fried bananas...

...I use the word "proletarian" literally to refer to something very characteristic about my own home and the homes of common Communists like us...

...Later, as targets of criticism, they too went to a "cadre school" in rural Hubei, taking with them both my grandmothers who, however, failed to survive the unexpected emotional and physical difficulties (which they saw as a "great disorder under heaven") and died one after another within a few years...

...Were they aware of any "male dominance" existing within the Communist power structure...

...She met my father, survived many more hardships including imprisonment and torture, and at long last found herself in the crowds in Tiananmen Square celebrating the birth of the new China in October 1949...

...Naturally I identify myself with the women's movements...

...It was hardly noticed that the first Communist group convened in Shanghai in 1921 formally to set up the party consisted of men only...

...Should the result of that month-long, bitter argument affect my view of the equality between my parents—which we all took for granted...

...But so what...

...I do not recall whether I ever felt miserable, missing my parents...

...This is a feminism aimed first and foremost at political democracy and full citizenship, and at self-realization and self-determination in harmony with social achievements...

...Yet she was also ordinary, along with millions of others—women peasants, workers, and intellectuals—who believed and participated in the revolution...

...She was barely fifteen...

...What prevented us from seeing things in a critical manner comparable to that of our Western feminist counterparts...

...I was born a few years after the founding of the People's Republic of China (1949) in Beijing and grew up an equal of everybody else—judged, at least, by one important criterion, gender equality...

...What has been a very positive development in China in the last decade, however, is the building-up of committed and autonomous movements for women's studies and women's interests...

...With a somewhat simplistic conviction of women's liberation through involvement in the labor force, we did promote some changes in local life...

...Also, my own pathway has been shared by many others, and I know that there are many more who would join us even though their personal trajectories might have been very different...

...A magnificent epoch, full of hopes and despair, glories and sorrows, was closed...

...Money and the notion of "owning" were deemed poisonous, and I was once punished by my father—seriously enough for me to learn the lesson forever—for using two cents to trade with my younger sister...

...Moreover, these movements have rapidly expanded to make an impact on the entire course of the country's political liberalization and economic reform, primarily through strengthening the moral dimension of public discourse and actual policy formation...

...Before then I did have some natural objections to the increasingly philistine Mao cult and was labeled a "reactionary student" for expressing them, but I never connected the cult to any systematic faults of existing socialism...

...As one of those students who quickly organized themselves to exercise their "right to rebel," I participated enthusiastically in the "mass criticism" of the "revisionist educational line" and of the authorities and teachers whom we deemed to have carried it out...

...The emFALL • 1995 • 483 Chinese Feminism phasis on physical labor and on combining theory with practice did not work in an era when "knowledge" as such was totally unappreciated...

...and indeed our university experience was not altogether bizarre if taken as part of the search for reinterpretations and innovations in an all-embracing project of cultural politics...

...Today it seems rather remote, and indeed I am puzzled, to think of my mother as a liberated woman in the revolution and of the gender-blind484 • DISSENT Chinese Feminism ness of my own generation growing up under communism...

...This, almost a deliberate betrayal, was justified by the claim of necessity and sustained by a rigid system of urban-rural segregation that undermined the moral promise of Chinese socialism...

...Did they see their specific "female subjectivities" being in any way sacrificed for the universal cause of liberation...

...What is, at bottom, the nature of the Communist family, in which the wife's rank (and hence grade on the wage scale) is usually lower than the husband's...

...she rented a private studio nearby for her mother whom she really wanted to live with after so many years of separation...

...how bad the rural famine of the time was...

...how lucky we ourselves were compared with the often miserable life of rural women...

...Even the most noble and independent attempt at exercising citizenship did not consciously challenge communist degeneration at its root...

...Her friend eventually made her way to Yanan, the central base of the Communists, while my mother got involved in resistance activities in the South...

...Perhaps a feminism bearing universal demands sounds too broad, but I do not see how it can be otherwise...

...To my regret, I never asked...

...My parents, for example, both have strong personalities and remained so throughout the tortuFALL • 1995 • 481 Chinese Feminism ous years of the "continuing revolution," which gradually lost its massive constituency...

...9, February 1994...

...Having said this, I must add that it was not true that people in Communist China were merely obedient, their lives, therefore, lifeless...

...The enjoyment of public wealth and service by individuals and families to various degrees according to their stratified status in a state-controlled economy and redistributive system needs to be examined separately...

...The Foucaultian "knowledge/power" thesis, for example, echoed well the Maoist preoccupation with bourgeois domination in the realm of cultural production...

...While my sisters and I were each gone with our own schoolmates, our mother was 480 • DISSENT Chinese Feminism pleased to open our home to girls and boys from other provinces, as many Beijing residents did...

...There were confusions, doubts, and pains, but there was also at times a genuine feeling of freedom and self-determination...

...After the war against the Japanese invasion began (1937), my mother could not help wanting to join her compatriots in the national liberation movement...

...Or is that articulation itself flawed and hypocritical...

...Mao died in September, and in a few weeks, a coup succeeded in overthrowing the "Gang of Four," an action supported ardently by almost everyone...

...Foreign languages were not required...

...Science, Politics and Social Practice (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995...

...Ding, "Thoughts on March 8" (1942), in Tani E. Barlow, ed...

...My life in the countryside came to an end when things began to change everywhere, as the country slowly recovered from the disruptions of the revolutionary 1960s...

...With the female company commander, he helped to raise class consciousness and to win battles against the White army and the local despotic landlords (both were, so to speak, all male...

...One may certainly ponder here the potentials and limits of the now formative analytical framework of separate public and private spheres when it is applied to China, where for decades politics regulated not only social but also personal life...

...By the way, sex was strictly prohibited and dating discouraged...

...As small children, we hardly had a sense of possessing even personal belongings...

...When we were little, our parents were often absent from home, either away on a working trip or staying in the countryside as members of a work team sent by the central organs during the successive campaigns of economic or political mobilization...

...Unfortunately, these questions were beyond my range of concern until quite recently...

...Though they rarely talked about political ethics, my parents nonetheless taught us, simply by their deeds, what it was right to do...

...maybe I did...

...The feminist thesis that "the personal is political" was no novelty for the Chinese, yet it oriented psychological conflicts far away from what that slogan clearly implies in a different social context...

...Had she and her fellow female participants ever experienced any "systematic" discrimination in the revolutionary camp...

...It was not accidental that a Soviet autobiographical novel called How the Steel was Tempered (by Nikolay Ostrovsky, English and Chinese trans., Moscow, 1952) about a young Bolshevik and his comrades fighting in the civil war, had a tremendous influence on my entire generation...

...After all, this kind of family situation was not unusual in the 1950s and early 1960s, which were the heroic and difficult years of a new country striving for survival, dignity, FALL • 1995 • 479 Chinese Feminism and prosperity against long odds...

...I myself, always a favored student, without having sensed the slightest oppression, was nonetheless among a group of four to put up the first rebellious "big character poster" among the juniors in our school (which was all-female...

...Although I happened not to have physically attacked any person, what I was involved in was no doubt part of that massive and blind process of persecution...

...My father could no longer tolerate this and demanded that she move out of our place (which was in the housing compound of his work unit...

...Not surprisingly, then, the university students were composed of young (and not very young) people poorly prepared for any advanced study in any scholarly field...

...Perhaps they would simply brush them away...

...Under the government's strict residence control, few could ever escape the impoverished countryside...

...I could not ask what did not occur to me...

...Only recently I began my own attempt to approach the gulf between the fundamentals of the revolution and its actual theories and politics by thinking about the intrinsically contradictory character of a communist feminism...

...So it was...

...Was my father, for example, the center of attention and care because of his chronic illness or would he have been superior anyway...

...Judging from what we gained from living with the peasants, Mao was right to hold the concept of education well beyond the reach of formal schooling...

...My personal path leading to a feminist understanding is further related to the long, collective search for a synthesis of socialism and liberation, and hence at the present historical moment, to reform socialism...

...The results of the exam were, however, cancelled later on after an applicant handed in a blank paper and stated in the People's Daily that such a bourgeois barrier to (academically unqualified but) politically qualified worker, peasant, and soldier candidates must be "smashed...

...I came to realize (as many others like myself did) that I had grown up physically and mentally not in Beijing where we were spoiled and deceived but in that northern corner of the great loess plateau, even though five years were not very long and we scarcely ever found a moment (or indeed a book—almost all we had were a copy of Anti-Diihring, And Quiet Flows the Don, and War and Peace—apart from 200 Foreign Folk Songs) to read in those days...

...And the female part of that generation was also trapped in the gender-laden conflicts between the required "class standing" and their natural human compassion, simultaneously viewed as "feminine" and politically unacceptable...

...Half of my three university years was spent on "social practice" in villages and factories, and at least another quarter on political activities...

...Moreover, the purpose of attending university was not conceived as learning but simply as "occupying the educational arena" previously controlled by the "bourgeoisie" (a central category never coherently defined in the Chinese political language...

...This latter doubt did bother me (as a dim 482 • DISSENT Chinese Feminism passing thought) when I wondered why the official Women's Federation was powerless to confront those illegal acts of human trade4 and, moreover, why the male-headed household should continue to be the norm, legitimated in a new society that thus rendered the exchange of women naturally acceptable...

...It was not until much later that I would come to see the lack in our consciousness of two key notions tied to the very idea of liberation: freedom and happiness...

...The picture of a pathway stretched through bayberries was so sweet in my imagination that I completely neglected the bitterness of the conditions of rural education...

...It is interesting to note that later in the 1980s the Chinese, after decades of isolation and ignorance, finally encountered some "new" intellectual trends in the West only to find them familiar...

...When the time came years later to think over these events, I simply wanted to know why, and why teenage girls...

...Beyond the lack both of private property and the sense of privacy, personal and family life itself was "socialized" or "depersonalized" in many "proletarian" families...

...Was it possible for them to think of "gender identity" not in the normative context of women's liberation but in terms of the defects of the revolution itself?' Moreover, how would my father and his male comrades view the matter...

...There was no natural science taught to humanities majors...

...FALL • 1995 • 485...

...So individuals, especially those of my urban generation, were highly politicized in the sense that their self-repressive mechanism worked effectively against "bourgeois" humanism and individualism in general and in support of communist puritanism in particular...

...Apparently the often arbitrary boundaries dividing perceptions of good and evil, given systematic manipulation by the authorities and a lack of a legal system, misled the post-revolution generation...

...They were no doubt among the most loving and responsible parents...

...3 On the other hand, since the peasants were hardly integrated into the state welfare establishment, it can be said that they also constituted the most independent (and the largest) portion of the population...

...My grandmother, as a privileged "returned overseas Chinese," had some extra supplies of foodstuffs as well as money to spend (probably in the black market), and appeared to be unconcerned with the gap between her life and that of others...

...Yet how could we, Chinese living and thinking and striving for the decent ideals of equality, have missed the kind of questions that since the late 1970s have stimulated notable contributions by EuroAmerican feminist critics to China scholarship...

...Their tenacity, wit and unique perspective helped us to develop an outlook on life that was heavily influenced by egalitarian sentiments—against privilege, urban arrogance, and every form of elitist social bias...

...Has the celebrated principle of equality— "whatever the division of labor may be, all are servants of the people," ever been a reality...

...In fact, the first wave of severe violence in which more than one principal was beaten to death by students or driven to suicide occurred in the best all-girls schools in Beijing...

...I did not and still cannot imagine the immense difficulties the two young women must have encountered on that journey, by sea and land, with little money and nothing else but courage and determination, in the turmoil and chaos of war...

...What was most fundamental about the revolution seemed so obvious: it was made by and for the exploited and oppressed, including the special underclass of women...

...In our eyes she was no doubt an independent and liberated woman...

...2 Lin Chun, "Love and hate: learning 'human nature' under Communism," in K. Gavroglu et al., eds...

...We made every effort in other community activities as well to attract female participation, as part of our propaganda job...

...Having quite successfully brought women out of the home, however, we overlooked the typical problem of their "double burden...

...3 There were of course richer areas and more successful communes, but the majority of the rural population evidently lived under poverty and compulsion in the two decades prior to the reform...

...There were truly creative, emancipatory, and joyful moments in the lives of Chinese women and men, despite big and small tragedies...

...I was hurt, as a devoted women's team leader, not so much by the actual tears as by the passivity and even mindless contentment (over the gifts received, for example, which were made possible by the family's going into debt) on the part of the victims of those strange mercenary marriages...

...Gaining its primary strength from the countryside, communism, as we began to see it then, ultimately failed the peasantry after seizing state power by subjecting the organization of agriculture to an "internal accumulation" for the sake of industrialization...

...The goal was once again to find and devote oneself to a genuinely just cause "above" any individual interest...

...I rushed to Beijing to be with my parents in their temporary shelter, which was in a sea of sheds while buildings were evacuated...

...if one of its goals was precisely women's liberation, if its moral principles were unity and equal relationships between men and women (and between officers and soldiers, the army and the people, and so on), what else should matter...

...We bear heavy duties as soldiers...

...They finally lost each other at some point in China proper (I remember seeing their joyful meetings after their reunion sometime in the 1950s...

...Having followed debates in the West since the 1980s about the overburdened and disrupted motherhood of working women and about related problems such as the financing of day care facilities, I still think of my own experience with appreciation...

...Concerning generational relations, one of the exciting scenes of the cultural revolution involved millions of young people traveling the length and breadth of the country to "propagate and establish revolutionary ties...

...In the history department of the finest provincial university where I went, for example, the world history course (which, believe it or not, covered a timespace span from antiquity to the end of the Second World War over five continents) lasted a total of sixteen class hours in four weeks...

...I am not concerned here with the qualities of their various analyses, but only with the contrast in our perspectives...

...we fight deep injustice as women...

...For it was not my father, but his principles, which were actually shared by my mother, that won out...

...Practically it was even simpler— the university became the single transitional place for anyone able to "get out" of the countryside and get on the state payroll, hence once and for all to lift one's status from the agricultural...

...Nothing there was private property, for example, including the apartment and the furniture...

...What impressed me the most from those rare occasions when they talked about themselves turned out to be almost irrelevant...

...In that year (1973) for the first time since the resumption of higher education, a rudimentary entry examination was required...

...4 The Marriage Law, adopted in 1950, outlawed child brides and mercenary and forced marriages, among other practices typical to prerevolutionary Chinese society...

...In the end, the anti-humanist spirit of Maoism (and struggles over its interpretation in the wake of the paralysis of the "ideological state apparatus") turned out to be profoundly damaging to the very foundation of Chinese socialism, as ideology and social experiment...

...Their voluntary and total identification with what they believed to be a good cause had its historical origin in past experience, from which the revolution gathered its momentum and popular support...

...I say "luxury" because this was during the "three difficult years" following the failed Great Leap Forward (19581959), when people were hungry, everything was rationed even in Beijing, even for senior cadres and high intellectuals...

...That must be the reason, I admit, for our having sustained a naive idealism throughout the period, regarding personal feelings and affairs as ultimately unimportant in the great collective struggle...

...In two hectic trips, I covered two-thirds of the country, from the north to the south, then from the east to the midwest...

...Female self-repression was even stronger: strangely featured in a socialist culture, it existed side by side with an ideology of gender equality...

...how greatly the morale of real laborers, from time to time in hunger and despair, differed from the joyful folks singing of the harvest in familiar picture posters...

...We heard high praise for our mother from those who had known and admired her since her early years...

...The single non-public piece conspicuously standing in our living room was my father's old grand gramophone, with lots of records (which were all smashed at the beginning of the cultural revolution...

...Moreover, how should we evaluate the relationship between the Communist "masters" and their female domestic helpers, notwithstanding varieties of individual cases...

...No wonder Grandma was out of tune with it...

...What preoccupied me above all was the peculiar experience of young women in those years...

...But without thinking much—that was an age for social change without philosophy or rational understanding of the world—we never fully understood the reality that struck our conscience and challenged our received education...

...The cultural revolution, however, somewhat like "1968" in the West, in many aspects remains a historical mystery that still needs to be reexamined and understood...

...This becomes all the more interesting in light of the later revival of family solidarity, which served as a refuge for many people when political tyranny reached its height in 1975-1976...

...It was gradually undermined only when the wrongs and sorrows within the revolution became so severe and so evident that they realized the necessity of clearing its name through conscious struggles—from inner-party actions to popular uprisings (such as the massive street demonstrations in Beijing and Nanjing in 1976...

...This was the prelude to the now notoriously destructive cultural revolution...

...Socialism, often as an abstract ideal, was defended for the sake of socialism...

...and it might be approached very differently...

...Yet the question, which seemed merely rural, was in fact a pervasive one...

...I will attempt elsewhere an analysis of the rationality and irrationality of that enormous mass movement, and of the different motives behind it, which reflected the accumulated social conflicts of the previous period...

...Or maybe socialist policies and institutions are themselves severely limited by a certain cultural backwardness, hence unable to uproot deep forces of human indignity and misfortune...

...Quite unusually, a group of friends and I still read as much as we could, including "big books" from the Chinese classics to the three volumes of Capital, with, of course, great gaps and difficulties in our understanding of them...

...My parents (who are largely self-educated intellectuals among the Communist rank and file) were evidently not unhappy that they did not meet the traditional Chinese ideal of having a son...

...My sisters and many friends shared with me their sense of seldom experiencing discrimination for being female in those years, however partial or even, sometimes, false that sense might be...

...Later, for some reason, she was taken to Indonesia where my grandmother (who was educated, also FALL • 1995 • 477 Chinese Feminism unusual then) worked, and they settled down to live a relatively comfortable life...

...This identification survived the accusations against them during periodic "rectification" campaigns...

...In one of the most popular movies of the time (later made into a ballet and modern opera as well), based on a true story called "The Red Detachment of Women," the party representative among women soldiers in Hainan in the 1930s was a man, a hero...

...There was not much time to sit down to read anyway...

...The article was publicly criticized in Yanan...

...He, however anti-bourgeois, was a Western/Russian classical music lover...

...But what was self-defeating with the Maoist educational revolution also became obvious as the new experiments failed to teach young people to appreciate, as critically as one should, the cultural heritage of human civilization...

...As privileged urban students "sent down" to learn from the peasants, we did not actually share some of their most fundamental experiences— such as hunger (we had grain subsidies from government reserves), early and undesired marriages, the closed world of a locally bound existence...

...For me, feminism would inevitably link women's rights with citizens' rights, women's consciousness with democratic consciousness, women's liberation with social emancipation...

...Examinations and the graduation thesis were altogether eliminated...

...I left my village with mixed feelings of nostalgia and longing, also a sense of guilt for going to the university alone (only with a couple of my fellow city dwellers), leaving friends doomed to stay behind and to remain quasi-illiterate, some of whom were the smartest people I ever knew...

...but they also, though maybe sometimes reluctantly, trusted public institutions to ensure our well-being...

...In July, in an unprecedented earthquake in Tangshan, an industrial city 80 miles from Beijing, 240,000 people perished overnight...

...On the whole, my childhood (and that of my sisters and many friends) was very happy, enriched by what we call "collective life" outside the home...

...By working daily and competing in the fields with young male members of our production teams, and by playing a leadership role in organizing female hands, we set ourselves— inspired by the spirit of the day—to be role models for the young village women...

...Even William Hinton, the most formidable defender of Maoist agricultural socialism, accepted that two-thirds of the communes failed or stagnated by the late 1970s ("Mao, Rural Development, and TwoLine Struggle," Monthly Review, No...

...My mother argued, cried, and in the end gave up...

...It is extraordinary, looking back, that parents so easily let their children (self-organized in peer groups) make distant journeys, often without a plan, even without a minimum of packing or defmite destinations...

...We also failed with another task: to alter the old custom of selling daughters in return for betrothal gifts...

...1 Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling (Beacon Press, 1989...

...Probably not...

...q Notes I Ding Ling was among a very few female Communist intellectuals who did express some criticisms of the sexual politics of Party life in the red bases...

...Working from a preliminary analysis elsewhere,2 I want now to stress the hidden crisis of ideology and politics, which would not have revealed itself had there not been such large-scale chaos and casualties...

...My group also went on foot for two hundred miles, on an imitative "long march" to honor the glorious undertaking of the Red Army (1934-1935), from the heart of the Jinggang mountains, where the Communist guerillas created their first base in the late 1920s to Ruij in, the capital of the Chinese Soviet Republic (1931-1934...

...We could indeed for a long while feel free and happy as so-called "successors to the cause of proletarian revolution," but not without profound blindness and prejudice, not without an immense feeling of alienation within ourselves...

...Even though in accordance with the principle of equality a great many more of them than ever before were from rural areas and female, they could not be provided with what they actually needed from a good primary and middle school education, despite great efforts by devoted teachers...

...I still vividly remember every detail of the book, especially how a beloved revolutionary martyr was seen by his widow: falling in battle, dying in her arms on the vast Russian grasslands, his eyes forever gray, the color of steel, not blue, the color of love...

...Igraduated in 1976, an eventful year, a second turning point, after 1949, in modern Chinese history...

...That feverish period brought a further loosening and devaluation of family ties because of the intense "class struggle" that ruthlessly divided kin and, for that matter, other identities or communities...

...There were his many precious books, of course, the sole material that could possibly make up "property" of one's own (most of which were also lost during the cultural revolution...

...While we were Young Pioneers, whenever we sat at the dining table with them, we used to call our father, the sole man in the family, the "party representative...

...The question of individuality and personal fulfillment, not to mention "separatist" identity, was, paradoxically, indistinguishable (if not excluded in standard theoretical formulations) from this pursuit of universal interests...

...and how unfair a fate was already prepared for our village friends...

...The theme song of the movie remains today a favorite of mine: "Advance, advance...

...Here the personal turned out to be not really political, except when private desires got in the way of ideological correctness and therefore were seen as politically offensive...

...Reading was thus something odd, unfashionable, and even regarded as somehow politically incorrect...

...But how did it come to be so...

...Although not under pressure of exams or deadlines, we faced suspicion and even hostility from fellow students...

...It was a neglect all the more regretable because the underdeveloped socialization of house work and the "feudal" attitude toward such work as gender specific were both especially severe in backward regions...

...The fact that the women revolutionaries would have needed a male leader or, to use This article is a revised version of the first part of an introductory piece originally written for the author's book manuscript on the transformation of Chinese socialism...

...Have they ever thought of or been bothered by it...

...But I do remember great times with them at dinners, in a park, on a holiday, whenever they were available...

...The worst argument they ever had, as far as I can remember, was over my grandmother, who returned from Indonesia to join us around 1960 (I do not know how and when my mother resumed contact with her...

...I never met either of my grandfathers...

...She never said much about that extraordinary adventure...

...I do not know how my parents and friends of the older generation would respond to questions like these...

...The general organizational pattern of the Chinese Revolution has ever since been men-a-step-before-women in becoming politically conscious and mobilized, hence promoted...

...Nor was the system a monolithic bloc without any gaps, inner breakthroughs, and diversities...

...He must have been ashamed, as I understood later, of having such an openly "bourgeois" lady in a "proletarian" family, especially if he knew (did he...

...Only by living with the peasants on that poor plateau during our formative years (in my own case, ages sixteen to twenty-one), did the group of us "city youth" develop a critical attitude toward reality...

...And I still cannot ask without explaining why these are, now for me, valid and necessary questions...

...What is utterly wrong with Western mainstream liberal criticism of communist totalitarianism is its ignorance of the real complexity of communism (aside from the social achievements of the Communist regimes), which differs from country to country, party to party, period to period, situation to situation, believers to believers, even within the totalitarian territory...

...My grandmother on my father's side had previously lived with my uncle's family in Beijing, and because they now had to move to another "cadre school" in a much more remote province, my parents took over the job of looking after her...

...So, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, she managed to leave her beloved mother and, with a friend two years older, to return to China...

...Then there came the nationwide "socialist education movement" which mainly aimed at the rural cadres, while in the urban centers junior high school students like myself and my elder sister studied Mao's work and engaged in selfcriticism...