At the risk of agreeing with the journalistic scaremongers who excel in telling tales about 'the Chinese nightmare', we must accept that the family may have been destroyed in China. If by family we understand a wife's submission to her husband, a wife's isolation in the home, the absolute authority of parents over children; if by family we designate that secluded 'haven of peace' which is the ideal of all men and without which life has no meaning, that little island over which the husband rules and for which he struggles, by means of wit and cunning, alone against the problems of daily life - yes, that family has all but disappeared! In the preceding chapters we have seen a China in which familial roles and structure, both actual and supposed, have not just been shaken, but have actually been eradicated or replaced by other forms of organization.
At the same time the whole truth might disillusion others. And the whole truth is that a kind of family does exist in China - if by family we understand a monogamous and stable couple whose children live with them; children who, apparently, will have no sexual experiences outside the family they in turn will set up later. This family is a saddening sight to a section of the revolutionary movement. But the question isn't quite so simple and deserves closer examination. If we can show that the family has been destroyed and yet still survives, then surely what we refer to by the term 'family' is more confused than we might at first think?
No one would think of purely and simply identifying feudal polygamy with what convention describes as the nuclear family of our society. But these two family types do have one striking feature in common: the woman's inferiority in her relationship with her husband. It's as impossible to imagine a feudal society based on small-scale agricultural production with a structure of cell-like families consisting of couples and their children, as it would be to find a capitalist society composed of broadly, based families in which the father and his wives and his wives' children and his wives' nubile sisters and his parents and their parents would all live together. Because, as we know, the different forms of family are products of different societies and are suited to the ends of those societies (not always exactly, but we'll come back to that later).
The Chinese family has one historical peculiarity, and it's one of the most important for increasing our understanding of the different functions of different types of families. In the space of barely twenty-five years China changed from a society of feudal families to one with a type of family that isn't known in any capitalist country. This rapid and recent development is important, because it's the only thing that can help us to understand a number of special aspects of the Chinese women's movement. As a result we can better discover which elements in the contemporary Chinese family might be of universal applicability.
We heard many stories in China. One told us of the life of a peasant woman from the Sin Kiang Mountains whose feet had been bound and mutilated to make them small. Another was told to us by a woman working on the Ret Flag Canal, who, almost smiling and in measured tones, related how, at the age of eight, she used to be whipped daily by her stepfather. Another was told by a young Tibetan woman sitting in a deep armchair with a long and brightly coloured dress hiding her legs, who couldn't stop crying when she recalled the landowner whose serf she was, and the day he caught her trying to escape, tied her feet to his horse's tail and dragged her back at a gallop, her head and back bouncing on the stone road. All these stories merge into one tale of horrendous misery - the life of one woman indistinguishable from the lives of all the rest. The daughters of the poor were not by any means gifts from heaven to their families. The lucky parents were those who could arrange an early betrothal, since the girl would then be the responsibility of her future in-laws. In exchange for food and lodging - and beatings - she would serve her fiancée's parents from dawn to dusk - a most practical arrangement! Later on she would give her husband sons, and with a little luck she could inflict on her daughter- law the same treatment as she had received herself.
What could be worse than the condition of women in a feudal family?
Everything thing can be done to them - they can be bought, sold, beaten, raped and sacrificed to the gods; have their feet bound and mutilated and their children stolen from them. The reality of' these women's lives is unimaginable.
Their whole life would echo with the rule of the three obediences: obedience to their father when young; obedience to their husband when married; obedience to their eldest son when widowed.
And yet things didn't always go smoothly, and arranged marriages could often be organized only by the use of force:
'It wasn't a question of being willing or not. Of course anyone would have protested. But they just tied her up with a rope, stuffed her into the bridal chair, carried her to the man's house, forced her to put on the bridal head-dress, performed the ceremony in the hall and locked them into their room; and that was that. But Hsiang Lin's wife is quite a character. I heard she really put up a great struggle, and everybody said it must be because she had worked in a scholar's family that she was different from other people. Madam, I've seen a great deal. When widows remarry, some cry and shout, some threaten to commit suicide, some when they have been carried to the man's house won't go through the ceremony, and some even smash the wedding candlesticks. But Hsiang Lin's wife was different from the rest. They said she shouted and cursed all the way, so that by the time they had carried her to Ho village she was completely hoarse. When they dragged her out to the chair, although two men and her younger brother-in-law used all their strength, they couldn't force her to go through the ceremony. The moment they were careless enough to loosen their grip - Gracious Buddha! She threw herself against a corner of the table and knocked a big hole in her head. The blood poured out and although they used two handfuls of incense ashes and bandaged her with two pieces of red cloth, they still couldn't stop the bleeding. Finally it took all of them together to get her shut up with her husband in the bridal chamber, where she went on cursing. Oh it was really . . .' She shook her head and said no more. [1]
It's obvious that there were some husbands-to-be who never actually became husbands - even when they relied on force. Some fiancées would kill themselves rather than marry. And this wasn't a rare occurrence. In 1919, during the mass rising of Chinese revolutionary youth, the suicide of a young woman named Chao stirred women's anger against forced marriage.
. . . A suicide is determined entirely by the environment. Was Miss Chao's original intention to die? No, it was not. On the contrary, it was to live. Yet her final decision to die was forced by her environment. Miss Chao's environment consisted in the following: one, Chinese society; two, the Chao family of Nanyang street, Changsha; and three, the Wu family of Kantzuynan, Changsha, the family of the man she did not want to marry. These three factors formed three iron cables which one can imagine as a sort of three-cornered cage. Once confined by these three iron cables, no matter how she tried, there was no way in which she could stay alive. The opposite of life is death, and so Miss Chao died . . . If one of these factors had not been an iron cable, or if she had been set free from the cables, then Miss Chao surely would not have died.
First, if Miss Chao's parents had not forced her and had allowed Miss Chao the freedom of her own will, then Miss Chao surely would not have died. Second, if Miss Chao's parents had not used force in this matter, and if they had allowed her to make known her views to her future in-laws, and to explain the reasons for her refusal, and if, in the end, her future in-laws had complied with her wishes and respected her individual freedom, then surely Miss Chao would not have died. And third, even if neither her parents nor her future in-laws had granted her free will, had there been in society a powerful source of public opinion to support her, and had there been some new world where the fact of having run away to seek refuge elsewhere was considered honourable and not dishonourable, then surely Miss Chao would not have died. For today Miss Chao had died because she was rigidly confined by the three iron cables (society, her parents and her future in-laws). Having sought in vain for life, in the end she sought death . . .
Yesterday's event was a major one, and its circumstances were the rotten marriage system, the benighted social system and thought which could not be independent, and love which could not be free. . . The family of the parents and the family of the future in-laws both belong to society. They both constitute a proportion of society. We must realise that while both the family of the parents and the family of prospective in-laws have perpetrated a crime, the sources of the crime exist in society. While these two families could have committed the crime themselves, the larger part of their guilt was transmitted to them by society. Moreover, if society were good, and they themselves had wanted to perpetrate this crime, they would not have been able to do so. . .
If we launch a campaign for the reform of the marriage system, we must first destroy all superstitions regarding marriage, of which the most important is destruction of belief in 'predestined marriage'. Once this belief has been abolished, all support for the policy of parental arrangement will be undermined and the notion of the 'incompatibility between husband and wife' will immediately appear in society. Once a man and wife demonstrate incompatibility, the army of the family revolution will arise en masse and a great wave of freedom of marriage and freedom of love will break over China'.[2]
This is an excerpt from an article written by Mao Tse-tung in 1919. Mao draws a close parallel between the struggle against the 'man-eating' society and the struggle against arranged marriages. The principle of forced marriage was even opposed by some men - those who had been married at the age of seven or eight didn't value the custom at all. Sometimes they too would attempt to escape their fate and flee from their villages. Most of these men went to swell the ranks of the People's Liberation Army.
There could be no solution for women in feudal China. Their oppression wasn't just maintained by ancient customs, or by the weight of age-old traditions. The oppression of married women was wholly the product of an economic system. Otherwise how are we to understand the survival of such a situation for a period of only a few years, let alone for centuries. Throughout her long history China has known many peasant revolts, but peasants have never triumphed and women have never been able to glimpse another way of living. It wasn't until the proletariat appeared on the scene that a new road emerged with a light at the end of it for hundreds of millions of peasants, and for women. That is why the Chinese Women's Liberation Movement is so closely linked with the revolution. For the first time ever women could envisage a new role for themselves on earth and the possibility of doing something other than serving their husbands, serving their mothers-in-law, serving the landowners and serving the gods. For the first time ever they could envisage the possibility of leaving their place by the fireside, on the k'ang [3] or at the well. 'The freedom of love will spread all over China!' was a sentiment that had little to do with reality for hundreds of millions of women. A popular Chinese song sums up their feelings:
There was a girl of seventeen
Four years hence at twenty-one
She wed a boy of ten
By eleven years the younger one!Her husband clung to her skirts
As she fetched water from the well
(One side was low, the other high)
She said 'Away!' in case he feared he fell.'If my in-laws weren't so kind
I would throw you in the water
If my in-laws wouldn't mind
I would throw you in, my husband,' says this daughter.
A woman wanting to leave might well have heard her husband say, 'What would you do without me? Who would feed you? Who would till the fields for you? You're acting like a scatterbrained woman, dreaming up idle fantasies. You've got no alternative, though. You're destined to serve me here, just as I'm destined to serve the landowners who are graced with manna from heaven.'
Women's liberation could never have been the concern of women alone. Too much was involved in their oppression and they depended on so many 'props'. It could have happened only within the revolution, in the same way as the revolution couldn't have taken place without people doing away with superstitions, respect for the clan, ancestor worship and the matrimonial power structure, all of which upheld the landowners' autocracy. That's why the women's movement spread so rapidly in the areas liberated by the Red Army of workers and peasants. Women in all these areas took over the 'great upheaval' and by the time the Eighth Route Army arrived they were well on the way to persuading themselves that equality between men and women could be achieved. And so they organized teams to discover typical cases of families in which the women were treated particularly badly. They would go and see such a woman, talk to her and try to persuade her that if women were united, she would be able to shake off her yoke. Then they would arrange meetings for all the women in the village and summon the husband or the father-in-law to defend himself publicly against the accusations made by the woman or the daughter-in-law. If he refused to answer they would often give him a beating to show him that things would be different from now on and that he had better not abuse the woman once he was alone with her. The women's committee would be present, ever-watchful and ready to intervene again if necessary. Hinton writes:
Among those who were beaten was poor peasant Man-ts'ang's wife. When she came home from a Women's Association meeting, her husband beat her as a matter of course, shouting, 'I'll teach you to stay home. I'll mend your rascal ways.' But Man-ts'ang's wife surprised her lord and master. Instead of staying home thereafter as a dutiful chattel, she went the very next day to the secretary of the Women's Association, militiamen Ta-hung's wife, and registered a complaint against her husband. After, in a discussion with the members of the executive committee, the secretary called a meeting of the women of the whole village. At least a third, perhaps even half of them, showed up. In front of this unprecedented gathering of determined women a demand was made that Man-ts'ang explain his actions. Man-ts'ang, arrogant and unbowed, readily complied: He said that he beat his wife because she went to meetings and 'the only reason women go to meetings is to gain a free hand for flirtation and seduction'.This remark aroused a furious protest from the women assembled before him. Words soon led to deeds. They rushed at him from all sides, knocked him down, kicked him, tore his clothes, scratched his face, pulled his hair aud pummelled him until he could no longer breathe.
'Beat her, will you? Beat her, and slander us all, will you? Well, rape your mother. Maybe this will teach you.'
'Stop, I'll never beat her again,' gasped the panic-stricken husband who was on the verge of fainting under their blows.
They stopped, let him up, and sent him home with a warning - let him so much us lay a finger on his wife again and he would receive more of the same 'cure'.
From that day onward Man-ts'ang never dared beat his wife and from that day onwards his wife became known to the whole village by her maiden name, Ch'eng Ai-lien, instead of simply by the title of Man ts'ang's wife, as had been the custom since time began. [4]
This is how the 'great upheaval' (as the women call it) was brought about, and even if husbands weren't always quick to approve of their wives' social involvement, they soon learned caution. It was generally true that the Women's Association went through this first stage in order to ensure the minimum security necessary for those women who wanted to join in the struggle.
While forced marriage, and in particular the buying and selling of child-brides was common to the whole of Chinese society and pointed to the generally inferior position of women, there were noticeable differences between noble and poor families.
Among the Han nation, who constitute 90 per cent of the Chinese people, polygamy had been illegal for a long time. But concubinage was quite legitimate. A man could marry and still have the right to as many concubines as he wished, and he could take them into his conjugal home. Concubines had the same duties as a legal wife. In particular, they owed respect and obedience to the head of the household. But they didn't have the same rights. They also had to obey the legal wife. While the legal wife belonged to the same social class as her husband - and wasn't chosen by him, but through a family agreement, without his or her consent - concubines almost always came from the poorer classes, and were chosen by their 'user' himself. In most cases they would be thrown out when they got too old or fell ill or when, for whatever reason, they were no longer 'up to the job'. There was little they could then do -except to swell the ranks ot the army of beggars and vagabonds or try to hire themselves out as servants in a rich family. Although any children they might have had were legally entitled to the same rights as legitimate children, in reality they were often exploited by the master as simple farmhands. Daughters would suffer just about the same fate as their mothers, becoming concubines in their turn to other lords. They could occasionally hope to become legitimate wives, but generally of a poor husband. Their lives would be left in the hands of the master, to shape them as he pleased. Of course there were exceptions. Sometimes the child of a concubine would become the master's legal heir, if, for example, the wife had been unable to continue the line - in particular if she had failed to provide a male heir. But recognition of a concubine's child was a positive disadvantage to her, since from that moment on the child was lost to her and became the child of the legal couple.
The lord would select and purchase his concubines from poor families. They had no say in the matter of course, and very often their daughters' only chance of survival was to be sold to the lord. Sometimes the sale of a daughter would raise some money to support her brothers and sisters for a little longer. Sometimes a family up to its ears in debt to the lord would give their daughter away as a 'deposit'- no transaction would take place, but in his ineffable goodness the lord and master would consent to defer the payment of debts until the next harvest.
Quite clearly this de facto polygamy was restricted to wealthy men, who had the power to get what they wanted when they wanted it. It was very different for poor men. Far from being polygamous, they were often forced to remain single because they couldn't afford a wife. Among some of the national minorities the law clearly sanctioned different family structures for different social classes. For example serf-owners in Tibet were legally polygamous - and this didn't exclude concubinage. However, serfs were required to practice monogamy, which was a sign of poverty. Serf marriages were decided exclusively by the landowner, who wished his serfs to have descendants, since he would have proprietary rights over them, too. Polyandry was practiced in distant corners of Tibet and among even poorer sections of the serf class. In the Peking Institute for National Minorities we were told that this kind of polyandry should not be understood as a straight female equivalent to polygamy. The women didn't choose several husbands, but rather several men were obliged to share one wife because they were too poor to aspire to one each.
These different family structures, whether written into the law - as in Tibet or contingent on material circumstances - as with the Han nation - indicate where each family type is placed within the social structure. But to see how family types are organized as a whole according to the social structure in which they function is only a starting-point. We have yet to learn to recognize how a given family type (or structure) functions within its social class in one society. For the mass of the poor peasantry, dependent on small-scale private production with no resources other than their land and labour power, a family was the only chance of survival. A wife to share the work-load was an absolute imperative for the peasant - he would farm the land while she went about small-scale domestic production. As long as China had a tiny industrial output, the peasant's wife and daughters bore the responsibility for making clothes, preserving food and providing all short-term family needs, while the sons provided vital long-term security for the peasant's old age. With no children the peasant would inevitably die of hunger and cold.
For the landowner, enriched by the fruits of the work of others, a family meant something altogether different. First and foremost it was the medium of inheritance - the thing that enabled property to be handed down from generation to generation, maintaining wealth and power in the hands ot the same restricted group of people and the same despotic class. Concubinage was part of the same scheme: the larger the number of his descendants the broader the landowner's power base. Second, a large family, wife, concubines, children - and a retinue of servants (over whom he had the droit de seigneur, as he did over all the daughters of the local poor) was, simultaneously, the symbol and instrument of his control over the local people. Taking concubines from among the lower peasantry also meant that 'sacred' familial bonds were created between the landowner and the peasants. Of course these bonds put the landowner under no kind of obligation to the girl's parents, but they did ensure that peasant superstitions and religious beliefs against harming kinfolk or their property were reinforced. Thus family types differed according to the different needs and functions of the individual family in each social class.
The step-by-step destruction of the ancient economic and political functions of the family.
The Marriage Law of 1950, passed on the morrow of the liberation, is evidence of the changes in male-female relations that came in with the new democratic revolution. Bigamy and concubinage were forbidden. Marriage for boys or girls under eighteen was also prohibited. Mutual consent became the only basis for marriage. The grounds for divorce were no longer restricted and divorce itself could be obtained free of charge.
But this was only the law, sanctioning the end of feudal mores and indicating a new political direction. The ancient family functions still had to be eliminated in practice. Agrarian reform, in destroying the great estates, dealt a fatal blow to the old family structures. The redistribution of land among the peasant families, and also among all women living on their own or wanting to leave their husbands, considerably undermined the power of the institution of marriage. An enormous wave of divorces swept China in the ensuing period and many arranged marriages were dissolved.
Conjugal love, which was never even alleged to be a basis for marriage, now became a sufficient justification for it. And the aspirations of Chinese youth which Mao Tse-tung had supported thirty years earlier (see the text on Miss Chao's suicide above), were fulfilled in part. In his analysis of the role of love in marriages in different societies, Engels had this to say about societies where forced marriages were customary: 'Throughout antiquity marriages were arranged by the parents; the parties quietly acquiesced. The little conjugal love that was known to antiquity was not in any way a subjective inclination, but an objective duty; not a reason for but a correlate of marriage.' [5] which sums up rather well the Chinese situation before the revolution. With freedom of marriage, '. . . a new moral standard arises for judging sexual intercourse. The question asked is not only whether such intercourse was legitimate or illicit, but also whether it arose from mutual love or not.' [6]
And that is also the significance of the Chinese laws which followed the liberation. Commenting in 1950 on the Marriage law, Teng Ying-chao (Chou Enlai's wife) specifically argued that the struggle for fair implementation of the law must rest on the following points:
First, the cadres should study the Marriage Law and remould their ideology in order to eliminate the remnant feudal ideology that man is superior to woman and that women are playthings . . . Second, organisations at all levels of the Party, of the Government, and of the people should earnestly conduct widespread and penetrating educational and propaganda campaigns among the people, so as to transform the opposition to the feudal marriage system into a broad movement of the masses. The Central Committee of the Party has made the statement that the whole Party should 'make the publicity and organisational work guaranteeing the correct carrying out of the Marriage Law one of its important and regular tasks at the present time . . . Third, the social freedom between men and women and the freedom to fall in love between unmarried men and women should be permitted. There's no denying that an unhealthy point of view in this respect still exists in the minds of some of our cadres. More often than not gossiping runs riot when a man comrade becomes friendly with a woman comrade. We should oppose such an attitude. We must provide the proper social environment for the carrying out of the Marriage Law. It must be pointed out here that love and marriage are the private affairs of individuals and should not be interfered with by others, and, if viewed more positively, they are part of the make up of social life. The smooth course of love and marriage of an individual is essential to a satisfactory social life. [7]
It's clear that Teng's first step served only to destroy feudal attitudes and further steps were necessary [8] before the situation so familiar to us - that of the family as unit of production - could be ended. In that situation, the transformation that must take place is no longer predominantly concerned with smashing feudalism (feudal structures have long since disappeared in the West), but with destroying bourgeois forms of the family. Of course China retains some individual characteristics. In the first place, the struggle against the bourgeois family structure is taking place under the aegis of a proletarian leadership. In the second place, the recent feudal past influenced the type of family structure set up during the progress of the New Democratic Revolution. Given all that, we enter an area clearly more familiar to us, the struggle against the bourgeois forms of the family. Just as agrarian reform had dealt a fatal blow to the family structures of feudalism, so collectivization was to be a powerful factor in the disintegration of bourgeois structures of the family under the new democracy. The bourgeoisie understood this very well, and in suggesting a return to family-based production it tried to aim a precise blow against collectivization. To talk about 'a revolution in social relations' or about 'the necessary equality between the sexes' or about 'love as the foundation of free marriage' is easy; but as long as production is based on private property it is no more than empty phrase-mongering. The fact of inheritance of land or capital is, of itself and without any corresponding legal status, enough to make an economic necessity out of the family and a simple contract of work out of marriage. Women understood this particularly well, as we saw in the discussion of the struggle against Liu Shao-chi's policy of the Zhen Zui YiBao.
For all that, the family as an economic edifice was only shaken, not levelled to the ground. The family remained for some time the chief repository of too many of its former functions, like child care, housework and the care of the retired. Before marriage could be freed from its traditional material constraints, further steps had to be taken. The collectivization of housework on a grand scale had to be got under way, while certain duties that were previously familial (such as health or responsibility for retired workers) were being socialized.
We were often told during our visit that Chinese men and women are today economically, politically and legally equal. This was obviously meant to suggest that women are not discriminated against in any way and that the contrary, as we shall see later, may even be true. Now complete equality between men and women should lead to an equal distribution of both sexes in all sectors of society. Yet there are still many areas with a majority of men, and some areas almost exclusively reserved for women. If you look, for example, at the structure of the leadership you will find that the ratio of women to men in positions of power is markedly low, and that the higher you look in the power structure, the lower it will be (see appendix). This is a real sign that equality doesn't exist in practice, and indeed it couldn't yet be otherwise.
Recognizing that sexual inequality still persists, even though the subject may be passed over in silence, is nevertheless an important first step. Sometimes the inequality of women was presented to us as a simple 'retardation' due to the remnants of inherited ideas: 'We must struggle against the reactionary ideas about women's inferiority that are left over from the past.' But to say only that much is to keep silent about the contemporary material foundations on which relative inferiority still rests. The least difficult thing is to be absolutely convinced of the falsity of the ideas that have supported the inferior status of women. But to achieve real equality it is essential to destroy the material obstacles in its path. Unless these obstacles are exposed - and this is a prerequisite for their destruction - such equality will never be attained. To point to the material base underlying the inferiority of Chinese women is an indispensable political task - not only for Chinese women and for the Chinese revolution, but for all women and for the world revolution.
We have already seen how housework is still undergoing a continuing process of socialization. With this socialization as yet incomplete, the family unit has to bear some of the responsibility for providing for its members. This domestic work is, of course, part of the material base which reproduces the family as an economic unit - even if the family's responsibility in this area is constantly diminishing. And privatized domestic work is a material and not an ideological obstacle to the full emancipation of women.
Replacing capitalist ownership of the means of production by collective ownership under socialism is not a simple legislative measure. The proletariat cannot, on seizing power, simply decree the end of the capitalist base. This notion of socialism by decree, which is still widely held, is simply a variation on the revisionist theme, in which all the material foundations of capitalism appear as worthy of preservation, with the sole exception of the legal structure of ownership. In this account of' socialism, nationalized enterprises and joint-stock companies which aren't the private property of a single flesh-and-blood boss appear as models of the new order. What a great communist Napoleon must have been, to decree the nationalization of the tobacco trade! [1] As we shall see, these judicial illusions have implications for the women's movement.
'Wherever' "capitalism as such" has been destroyed, the oppression of women is attributed to purely ideological causes, implying a non-Marxist and idealist definition of ideology as a factor that can subsist in the absence of the material oppression which it helps rationalize.' [2] But what does the destruction of 'capitalism as such', mean if it doesn't mean that the socialist phase has been completed and communism has been achieved? Socialism doesn't entail the disappearance of capitalism and the removal of every material condition on which relationships of oppression and inequality depend. To believe that it does is neither more nor less than to imagine that 'old ideas' surviving without a material base bear the sole responsibility for all oppression and inequality still existing under socialism. It comes back to the claim that communism and socialism have the same material base, and differ only in that communist ideology is appropriate to that base, while socialism is saddled with the ideology of the past.
Throughout the socialist phase, capitalism and communism, each represented by its social class, are locked in a ruthless struggle. Wherever capitalism is defeated embryonic communist relations are created, but as long as capitalism is dominant in whole sectors of society, communism will not be established.
Suppose there was a revolution in France today. This very evening, the proletariat decrees the abolition of capitalist ownership of the means of production. Will it then have destroyed 'capitalism as such'? Certainly not. The division between manual and intellectual work will still remain, the wage system won't have been abolished. It takes more to build communism than a single stroke of the pen, just as it takes more than a single round of machine-gun fire to destroy capitalism. The proletariat cannot escape the legacy of the capitalist division between manual and intellectual work - a division that is essential to capitalism and has been taken by it to incredible extremes. And as long as one capitalist relation exists, capitalism itself still exists.
The destruction of the division between manual and intellectual work necessitates a profound revolution in education and a continuous upheaval in the social relations of production. Inside the factories manual workers will no longer work with their hands alone and intellectuals will no longer be pure minds. Under the political leadership of manual workers both will strive to create the new man who is both manual worker and intellectual. That is the task that China has specifically undertaken, by every means possible, not least by means of the Cultural Revolution. Good intentions alone will never achieve the goal. Only a continued struggle will destroy 'capitalism as such'.
The same applies to the oppression of women. Where it persists under socialism, even it it has been weakened, this isn't because socialism 'as such' provides a material base for this oppression, or because the oppression of women is beyond social oppression, but solely because 'capitalism as such' hasn't been completely eradicated.
The fact that wage earning still exists in China, although it is very different from the wage system in the capitalist countries, means that labour-power is still a commodity that can be bought and sold - a situation that is alien to communism. The family will no longer be an economic unit in any way, and thus will no longer be a base of women's oppression, on the day, and only on that day, when the quantity or quality of labour expended by an individual will no longer have any bearing on his remuneration; 'to each according to his needs!'
There will no longer be any connection between work done and the satisfaction of needs; no standard by which to measure the one against the other. Work will cease to be a means of earning your daily bread and will become, in and of itself, the foremost of life's necessities, the richest and freest activity ever known to man. This state of affairs won't happen tomorrow, and as long as it is still to come, labour-power will remain a commodity in private hands - the one resource every individual owns. This commodity is therefore fashioned to suit the prevailing mode of production in society. It is not reproduced according to the wishes of the worker, but according to the requirements of production. As long as labour-power remains a commodity, the family necessarily remains a small factory for producing this commodity.
While the recent debates about wages in China may have tackled many issues other than the question of equal pay for women (see pp. 22-24), women themselves are still central to the arguments. After all, what is really in question is the continuation of the wage system.
The Cultural Revolution saw an important development in the march towards communism. The people joined in massive criticism of all the material incentives, production bonuses and wage differentials that seemed designed to divide them. But from then on a new divisive notion was established. Differentiation on the grounds of quality became the main element in the wage system. And qualitative judgements were made not just on the technical level, but on a political level, too - how committed a worker's attitude was and how collective his work was were the new criteria for remuneration. That's all very well, but is rewarding a progressive political attitude with higher pay any improvement on the old capitalist system of material incentives? Shouldn't we question the monetary valuation of revolutionary political attitudes which specifically attack the capitalist idea of work? 'Working for money, to earn a living' will be replaced in the revolutionary canon by 'Working for the people, without gain and without financial return'. The principle of rewarding political attitudes must surely transform the evolution of vanguard ideas among the mass into the evolution of the vanguard into an élite? The principle of rewarding political attitudes must surely run the risk of producing political careerists who will always toe the party line and benefit from doing so. It must surely also run the risk of gradually replacing collectivist consciousness by individualistic display, since a political attitude has to be noticed if it is to be appreciated and rewarded. All this involves the obvious danger of an inflation of external signs of revolutionary spirit. And this is quite the reverse of what is wanted.
While the above shows that destroying the old system of rewards does present problems, similar problems arise with the progressive introduction of a new system for providing for people's needs. To deny that there are unequal situations, and hence unequal needs (in health, housing or the size of a family, for example), and to consider only the labour a worker expends, also maintains a form of capitalist wage earning. These inequalities must be taken into account, and attempts must be made to eliminate them step by step. The problem seems to have been solved in some places by giving an income supplement to those in greater need. But does that constitute any kind of step towards the progressive elimination of wage earning? No, it clearly reinforces the wage system. It is not a question of choosing between 'denying the existence of different needs resulting from inequalities' on the one hand, and 'providing income supplements' on the other. The real choice is between 'denying different needs as a fact of capitalism' and 'creating collective forms that reduce these inequalities, not by increasing salaries, but by ensuring that society takes over direct responsibility for fulfilling needs.'
Whenever a worker's wife with children falls ill, taking the family's needs into account doesn't mean increasing the worker's wages. Rather it means a crèche to look after the smallest child night and day for as long as necessary; a service team bringing cooked meals to the house; the district health team taking care of the sick woman; free medical treatment; and, if necessary, the provision by the neighbourhood committee of financial aid for the family from the local solidarity fund. It means keeping the husband's morale up and making the sick woman feel that she's not forgotten. It means surrounding the children with affection. It means the spirit of comradely help and warmth from the neighbours, from the old people's committee, the women's committee, the school, the crèche, the factory and the hospital. And there isn't a going rate for that!
Western society is organized in such a way that each individual can rely on no one but himself and his family to survive, no matter what difficulties arise. In the West, the morality of the market-place and the principle of bourgeois equality amount to this: 'You work for so many hours and you get paid accordingly. It makes no difference whether you have five children or none at all, whether you are in good health or on your death bed, whether you have a home or live in a shanty town.' In China the socialist principle of 'he who doesn't work doesn't eat' is applied only to point out in clear terms that no one has the right to live off another's labour. But nothing material or ideological is denied the sick worker or the worker with special problems.
Finally, and most importantly, since work is no longer purely the expenditure of labour-power, labour-power itself is no longer merely the sum total of greater or lesser physical or psychological capacities. The production of new labour-power thus tends to be less and less a matter of its daily reproduction, of the simple business of eating and sleeping to be on form tomorrow. It tends more and more to take shape in the workers' increasing knowledge of diverse techniques, of new technologies and of society itself.
The worker is not pushed to fulfil quotas; he or she is expected to participate in working out new projects and techniques; to take factory study courses or go to university; to become a barefoot doctor; to run educational establishments; to learn about military matters; to participate in the industrialization of rural areas; to be an artist, a poet, a philosopher; and, above all, actively and consciously to further the revolution. What do the 'capacities' of this worker and those of the proletarian figure of capitalism, mutilated and enslaved in the service of machines, have in common?
A comparison between the situation of workers in the West and that of their Chinese counterparts, whose work is so much broader in scope, highlights another function of the family under capitalism: to crystallize the worker's free time and force him or her to 'put up with' the time he or she spends in work. The unnatural separation between leisure time and work time is typical of an exploitative society which sees the sole significance of work as enabling you to earn enough to survive.
The proletarian, dispossessed of everything, can only carry out an endless ritual of fragmented and senseless operations, bored to death and expending great physical effort, for as long as it takes to make a living. We work to earn a living, but what kind of life are we working for? [3] Take away the time spent earning and we are left with free time - the time in which all our hopes, all our aspirations are placed. The days of rest seem like the only possible moments of real existence; home the only possible place where we can live the good life; and holidays the only possible goal of the whole year. At least, these are the daydreams of our working life. In these conditions it is no surprise to find that 'private life' is so important to us. A car, a telly, a little 'home of our own', all spick and span, foster the illusion of a flight away from this hated society. And to escape means to have leisure. And leisure is filled with the family. Without a family and without the need to support it, nothing in the world could force a worker to labour in the conditions he now works in. The capitalist employer would have to resort to the violence of the slave owner if it weren't for the family. '
Craftsmen and poor peasants were also compelled to work in order to survive - that isn't an invention of capitalism. Yet the craftsman had control over the manner of his production. He was simultaneously an intellectual conceiving a project and a worker making it with his own hands. His labour therefore had a significance which enriched a working life whose physical boundaries were the four walls of his workshop. And even that was immeasurably more fulfilling labour than his children would experience when vast industries came to ruin the craftsman, to deprive him of his tools and to replace his hard-won skills by assembly-line techniques of slavery, tightening up bolts or patching up the paintwork on a car body. [4] Of course the solution isn't to return to the hallowed days of the artisan. Indeed capitalism was a progressive force when it shattered the partitions dividing one craft from another and transcended the limited horizon of the journeyman - they were specialists in their own fields, but totally ignorant in all other fields. The creation of a proletariat with the capacity to think in universal terms and to sketch out an egalitarian society of integral human beings also represented progress. But this same proletariat will remain incapacitated as long as the means by which this vision will be realized are hidden, and as long as the vision itself is obscured. Momentarily deprived of revolutionary goals, life has no other meaning than the search for the illusory ideal of leisure. The oppressed place all their hope in the family. Their disappointment and bitterness are all the greater because they have invested their greatest dreams in the family.
When the gap between alienating work and escapist leisure begins to be bridged, inevitable changes in the family will follow. From being a pseudo-refuge, it becomes one fundamental collective among others, open to society and in a symbiotic relationship with it.
This is what the Chinese experience reveals. Nothing can be understood about
the new Chinese family if it is seen outside the social transformation in
which it is situated; if the place that each of its members is beginning
to take in society is overlooked. Instead of thinking about Chinese men,
women or children in the abstract, you must imagine a woman like Ma Yu-yin
in from the Chao Yan factory - a woman who is fully aware, who is participating
in the collective creation of a new life and helping to change the world
so that she can transform herself. A woman like this, who leaves for her
factory every morning to 'make the revolution', has little left in common
with the housewives of our world, who, as Lenin said, '. . . continue to
be "household slaves", for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the
most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the family
household'. [5] You must imagine
a real child, little Li in the Nanking school, for example. A child aware
of social reality and of what is at stake in the struggles to change the
school; a child integrated into the world which is therefore, no longer the
world of adults alone; a child who organizes with his friends the most varied
activities imaginable - scientific experiments, medicine, debates on
international politics, military training, the formation of children's platoons
and street sweeping. A child like that no longer has much in common with
our children, those submissive and oppressed minors whom psychoanalysis has
placed at the apex of the family triangle. You must imagine a real man, one
of the millions of peasants, like a man who lives in Shawan, for example.
This man is a farmworker and son of a farmhand. He organized the first mutual-aid
team in Shawan and is now chairman of the revolutionary committee; he is
still working in the fields with the others, still struggling against nature
and class enemies to create a new world. This man to whom mending socks comes
naturally, who sees looking after the children when his wife goes to study
Marxism as a duty he owes her, is no longer an oppressed worker, or the male
oppressor of our world. Such new women, children and men are no longer rare
exceptions. They are prototype communists for all the people, representatives
of the direction of the revolution. We must bear them in mind when
we talk about the Chinese family - their new kind of labour and the new
significance they've given it cuts across the family, modifying and liberating
it.
No picture of the new Chinese family would be complete without some account of the place old people have in it. The Marriage Law stipulates that adults in good health must support their retired parents. [1] It must be understood, in this context, that retired workers receive a pension equivalent to about 80 per cent of their earnings. On the other hand, at the time of writing, peasants get no pension, and retirement age depends exclusively on their state of health. Generally they work less as they get older, tending to concentrate on less tiring jobs such as pig-breeding or rabbit-breeding and so on. As they work shorter hours they also earn less than adults in their prime. Clearly, the clause in the Marriage Law has an economic significance and guarantees that the family maintains one obvious economic function. If elderly peasants cannot support themselves, either totally or in part, the next generation of the family shoulders the w hole responsibility for supporting them. This is true throughout the rural areas and is one of the aspects of the dichotomy that still exists between town and country. The Party's policy of lessening the differences has improved the lot of peasant families to a considerable extent. No doubt it's the development of the health service in rural areas that has resulted in the provision of all kinds of treatment for the old free of charge, for a nominal annual subscription of 2 yuans. Moreover, the setting up of numerous small clinics throughout China has prevented the old and the sick being isolated from their families in vast central hospitals. This is very different from the lamentable picture in our society - with old people virtually cut off from all emotional relationships, abandoned both by their relatives and by society, in the gloomy surroundings of a geriatric ward.
Collective restaurants and clothing workshops shoulder a good deal of the burden of the work that usually falls on the family caring for its old people. The constant improvement of the various collective services and the growth of productive forces should allow the society of the future to take full responsibility for meeting all the material needs of the older generation.
It would be a mistake to think that the young people look after the old just to fulfil a need arising from the present state of economic development. Even when old people receive a pension enabling them to be self-sufficient, they still live with their children and grandchildren. This constant mixing of all ages in China, from infants to the elderly, has an obvious political significance.
Unlike his or her counterpart in the West, the elderly Chinese worker is not considered useless or a burden. The fusion of qualities from the old and young - political experience, born of years of practice in the class struggle, combined with enthusiasm and daring- results in an explosive mixture of great potency for the revolution.
Since the Cultural Revolution the social involvement of old people has further increased and widened in scope. The Old People's Committee of the city of Shanghai invited us to discuss this point with them. While on our way to their meeting-house in the middle of a block of flats, Noelle reminded us of the atmosphere of an old people's home like the one she had worked in. The home is like a hospital, the hospital is like a barracks; the barracks is like a prison. She spoke of the unbearable isolation of the spirit; the endless days spent in waiting, with nothing to wait for - except the letter that doesn't come, the meal that merely helps to pass the time, the Sunday visiting hour that brings no one, the hope that is never fulfilled, the ease of death.
The leader of the committee, elected by her comrades, was a short, wrinkled, white-haired woman. She wore a carefully ironed cotton jacket and trousers. Her name was Ho Yao-chen and she told us:
'Old age used to be at the same time a privilege and a great misfortune. A privilege, because the wretchedness of the people was such that life expectancy was very short and most of the poor died before reaching old age. A great misfortune because those who did survive were thrown out into the street as soon as they stopped being of use to the landowners and the capitalists . . . Most people were often much too poor to be able to offer a home to their parents. Old people were either forced to sell their feeble strength, doing exhausting work for a derisory wage until they died or else they were reduced to begging from day to day, an existence beneath that of the animals. The victory of the revolution brought change, not least for us old people. Our society surrounds us with good-will; our health, welfare and happiness are paid unfailing attention. Our days are filled with sunshine under the dictatorship of the proletariat.'
The Cultural Revolution shook the attitudes of old people considerably. They quickly understood that only the continuation of the revolution could prevent the old society being resurrected. They joined in, writing and sticking up the city wall newspapers in which bourgeois pronouncements about the uselessness of the old were attacked. They took part in revolutionary meetings to work out revolutionary critiques; they conducted surveys in and around the city, so that they could become more aware of the people's needs in order to run their activities for the success of the revolution. They organized teams of old people to do housework for the less able among them.
'Just because we now have enough money from our pensions to live without working is no reason to withdraw from the building of socialism,' a retired worker told US, to explain their own view of their activities. Many of those who are strong enough work a few hours a day in the service workshops, in the crèches or in the schools. They often spend their free time taking children round factories or hospitals, helping them with their investigations and, generally, helping them to acquire a class perspective. They arrange public exhibitions and meetings on the class struggle, to which they bring material or reminiscences about the old society. (We have already mentioned the active part played by old people in the schools, noting in particular their lessons on recent history as they experienced it.) Such activities in every sphere have the immediate result of integrating old people into the political life of the whole society. Comparatively recently the study of Marxism-Leninism has begun to play a substantial part in these activities. The committee told us that if old people didn't study revolutionary theory they wouldn't be able to learn the lessons of their long experience and transmit that invaluable understanding to the younger generations. Without doubt the extent of the politicization of the old can be gauged by the interest they take in the international situation.
It is a commonplace in the West to say that the horizons of the elderly are limited and that their lives consist of trivia. But this can be said only because society thrusts them aside and leaves them poverty-stricken like vegetables. Their fate has nothing natural about it; it is caused by the way society is organized.
One of the elderly Chinese said to us, 'How could we be preoccupied with trivial and ephemeral problems when three-quarters of mankind are still being exploited? When we take over some of the jobs in the neighbourhood we free forces for increasing production, not only for the Chinese people but also to help other nations in their struggle against imperialism. That's why we say that working in service workshops is a clear expression of the internationalism of old people.' This conquering state of mind is also reflected in the importance attached to physical fitness. We often saw old people doing gymnastics and we were told that most of them regularly take part in a variety of sports, and that there are frequent sports meetings between teams of old people.
After our discussion with the committee we listened to their choir. It was extremely moving to hear the 'Internationale' sung with such spirit and warmth, and by voices occasionally revealing the fragile and tremulous tones of old age. The role of old people and the esteem in which they are held have nothing in common with the lip-service we pay the old as a means of politely dismissing them and all their aspirations and activities without openly displaying contempt.
I had read an article in a Chinese periodical called 'An eighty-seven year-old Tibetan woman is learning to read' with some curiosity. I confess to a feeling of scepticism about the interest that this effort could arouse. Knowing that it takes several years to learn enough Chinese characters to be able to read the newspapers, I thought: 'She's sure to die before she achieves her goal.' The article told the story of this woman's life. She was a former slave who had known only servitude, beatings and humiliation. She had worked all her life, literally chained to the kitchen, so oppressed by her owners that she had never even known an hour of relaxation sitting on the doorstep at midday, with the sun hovering high in the sky, sipping a cup of hot jasmin tea. - When asked, the old woman had said, 'Women today can learn and understand things. I want to be able to read.' How difficult we find it to shake off our market-place mentality, to stop calculating the return on everything we do! We are indeed heavily oppressed.
At this moment I can easily picture the white room where this old peasant woman tries to remember some large characters, drawn on a slate by a little girl. No one shows any surprise. This is not wasting time. Who is being educated? The former slave or the little girl?
This story is a perfect illustration of the point that what is at stake is not personal achievement through study, but the possibility that the underprivileged, oppressed and scorned masses may become the masters of the world. What difference does it make, in the last analysis, whether we talk of a woman on the eve of her death or of a child early in her life? In a society in which value is no longer calculated in terms of profit or as a return on investment, but is measured according to the sole criterion that what is right is what corresponds to the needs of the people, the sine qua non of our liberation, as individuals, as women, is the social principle.
If society was strictly divided into age groups, so that the old kept with the old and the young with the young, old people could never play the important part they do. This is one of the reasons why grass-roots collectives such as the family, where all the generations are united in communal practice, are so significant. And as long as old people are an integral part of all social activities and participate to the limit of their capacity, the family will be considerably enriched by their presence.
There are really only two possibilities for old people: either they are thought to have a vital role to play, and all material, ideological and political steps are taken to integrate them into all social activities; or they are thought to have outlived their social usefulness, and, depending on the wealth of the society and the extent of its 'barbarism', are either 'nationalized' in homes or abandoned to their own fate. The he idea that society should take over from individual families in caring for those who can't look after themselves is often confused with the idea that the care of the old or the sick or the young is the State's responsibility. Old people's homes are put forward as indisputable evidence of social progress - especially by those who militate for the destruction of the family and venerate state control as the panacea for all ills. It's nothing of the sort! When a society is no longer driven by profit, when it no longer measures productivity as a function of profitability, its relation to its formerly 'unproductive' members is radically altered. It doesn't give charity because its need for them is as great as their need for it. Putting their care totally into the hands of bureaucracy is to deny the irreplaceable usefulness of every member of society.
Those who believe in the idea of putting the old away and try to pass it off as a progressive theory lean heavily on the dichotomy between leisure time and work time that we mentioned earlier. 'They really do have the right to enjoy a rest after a lifetime of work.' 'They're entitled to have a bit of leisure now that they can no longer earn their living.' Retirement is then seen as the privileged period in a person's life - a period consisting of nothing but leisure. The reality, as Chinese society demonstrates, is otherwise. When social activities are experienced as free and enriching, you're not doing someone a favour by excluding him or her from them.
Of course this criticism of state care of the elderly is not meant to suggest that it would be fair to force each family to cope as best they can with their old people. It is right and proper that those who can no longer work should receive a pension ensuring their economic independence, and China is indisputably moving towards a situation of material autonomy for all her people. And I don't mean to suggest either that old people's homes should go. China, too, has a few homes for old people with no close relatives. But these homes aren't the only alternative open to such people. We were told that they would sometimes go and live with distant relatives, or even with families of friends who have no grandparents. Such arrangements would be subject to mutual consent - a kind of reverse, or rather reciprocal, adoption. Old people's homes are built inside housing estates and are open to everybody. Like anyone else, those who live there participate alone or with other old people in the estate's social life. But these homes are not put forward as prototypes of a new social institution.
There are no orphanages in China - a fact which stresses the political significance the Chinese give to the question of institutional care. They believe that a revolutionary society must solve and surmount individual misfortune by means of class solidarity and the power of revolutionary commitment, not by administrative machinery.
'But what happens to children who have no parents?' we inquired, and we were told that this doesn't raise any particular problems. Such children are always adopted by grandparents, uncles, friends, or even neighbors. It's all very simple. If the children are still babies they will usually be adopted by relatives, even if they live far away. If they are already at school and have friends and emotional ties in the area, neighbours will usually adopt them. The wishes of the children are always taken into account in making this decision. The State pays a maintenance allowance for each orphan, and thus doesn't offload its financial responsibility onto the adoptive family. For it is thought preferable for orphans to live like other Chinese children rather than being institutionalized.
We can fruitfully compare Chinese and western attitudes to child care by looking at a minor French scandal. A semi-skilled worker in a French car plant had lived for several years in an abandoned railway coach on a piece of waste ground with his wife and five children. In spite of numerous applications, he was never given a decent home. The wife fell seriously ill and was hospitalized for an indefinite time. The husband, w ho was on shift work, organized himself and his elder children to take over the mother's work in the home. The family, including a baby of a few months, looked after themselves like this for a few weeks. But then a social worker discovered their crisis situation while on a visit. The efficient and humane local administration, moved by this drama, took 'the necessary steps'.
What do you think happened? Was a suitable home immediately provided for the family? Was an allowance given to the father so that he could pay for a full-time home help? Oh no! These are the dreams of incorrigible idealists. Administrative genius, in its infinite wisdom, dreamed up the proper solution. The father was left in his railway carriage. His five children were taken away from him - the younger ones were put into foster homes, the older ones were sent to boarding-schools run by the local authority. But if this seems too good to be true, you have yet to learn the full extent of administrative magnanimity. Great care was taken to send the baby to a wet nurse in Nevers; the two-year-old was specially selected for a foster-mother in Angers; the third child was sent north; the two eldest were placed in different schools in towns far apart! Ah, yes! The State had clearly fulfilled its obligations. The ladies of the idle rich no longer perform good works by caring for our social unfortunates. Nowadays the State will do it all with intelligence and sensitivity. And if the unfortunate worker is dissatisfied with the results if his eldest son runs away to rejoin the family, it can only be because the poor these days know only ingratitude, or sinister leftist ideas.
Chinese policy on adoption offers a clear contrast to the Soviet approach in the twenties. A law forbidding childless couples to adopt orphans or deserted children was introduced at the time, with the justification that such children were the State's responsibility. It was a logical measure, given the political goal of the destruction of the family that was then current. As we have seen, the Chinese hold a diametrically opposite view: abandoning children is forbidden by law and all orphans are adopted.
Weh Cheng and Chang Kua are brothers, aged eight and ten. Their parents, workers in Shanghai, died within a few months of one another. The children weren't on their own for long. Since they didn't want to leave their school, or their friends, the neighbours adopted them collectively. The State paid the necessary allowance to support them and they grew up as orphans among children with parents, but were carefully looked after by the other families. When winter came round, everyone would make sure that they were properly dressed to go out. In the evenings they could eat in the district restaurant with other children or with a family. The collective responsibility didn't stop at making sure they were in good health. The old people's committee, in particular, often invited them to hear about life long ago in stories such as all grandfathers tell in China. Somebody had to make sure that they would get a class perspective on the past. The two brothers were never short of affection. There was never a family celebration to which they weren't invited. Everyone worried about their school work, everyone was interested in their pastimes. They were criticized, of course, but not with indulgent pity. Their relationships had all the warmth characteristic of a revolutionary society.
The law goes further than ensuring the adoption of orphans. Article 13 of the Marriage Law, dealing with the relationships between parents and children, forbids the desertion of children. 'Parents have the duty to rear and to educate their children; the children have the duty to support and to assist their parents. Neither the parents nor the children shall maltreat or desert one another. The foregoing provision also applies to foster parents and foster children .'[2]
The duties of parents towards their children are strictly equivalent to those of children towards the parents, which shows that the relationship between parent and child isn't a one-sided property relationship. Parental authority is not codified in law. This legal absence of parental rights, backed up by the ever-increasing material independence of children, is no accident, nor is it a mere public show of democracy. It underlies and reinforces all ongoing struggles to ensure that political unity and consciousness become the only criteria of discipline throughout social life, as they already are in the family.
Children are no longer the only raison d'être of the new Chinese woman, nor is motherhood her sole destiny. We can evaluate the extent of women's emancipation by examining the crucial and very practical issue of contraception
We were introduced to Li Chang, a young woman in charge of family planning in the Shawan commune. She started by explaining how the family planning centre had been set up a few years earlier at the request of a few women. At that time a doctor from the nearest hospital, accompanied by two medical workers, came to help them. Within a few days they had learnt the necessary physiology and all the basic techniques, and had begun to visit families. They encountered a variety of responses. Some women would refuse to limit their families to two or three children, especially if they had only daughters. Some husbands wouldn't accept that contraception could concern them, and only long discussion could convince them otherwise. On the other hand, sometimes a woman would immediately join the group and their work would advance by rapid strides.
'We've educated the village people about different contraceptive methods,' Li Chang continued, 'and today I think that sterilization, along with the coil and the diaphragm, are the most popular methods.' We were rather surprised and even a little shocked by this revelation, but the young woman added, 'You know, here in the village, out of a total of eighty-five sterilizations, seventy have been performed on men, because we always try very hard to make the villagers appreciate that contraception is intimately connected with the emancipation of women. A large family is still an obstacle to the woman who wants to get out of her home.'
'Don't you use the pill at all?' asked Danielle. 'We do,' replied Li Chang, 'but we're cautious about distributing it because it's still at the experimental stage. We in China try our utmost to control the long-term effects of all drugs.'
She said that abortions are performed on demand, and are almost free of charge (they cost about three yuans). The women are entitled to a fortnight's rest with full pay, as for any other medical treatment. She pointed out that childless or one-child couples were told about the risk of sterility attendant on abortion. Discussions are held with them to see if there might be a solution other than abortion for their difficulties (better housing or improved work schedules, for example). The final decision, however, rests with the couple. She also made it clear that in those rare cases where the husband opposes the abortion, it's the woman's decision alone that counts.
Li Chang explained that although the Ministry of Health has over all responsibility for family planning, every team, in the village, factory or neighbourhood, organizes its work round the specific needs of its area, thus giving the people themselves immediate control over births and the size of their families.
A visit to the maternity ward and nursery of the gynaecological hospital in Peking complemented our discussion with Li Chang. Every woman normally records the date of her periods, and these records are kept by a medical worker attached to the women's particular production unit. The records themselves provide invaluable material for medical research and the early detection of feminine ailments. Moreover pregnancy tests can be made as soon as a woman's period is overdue. Not only does this enable an early abortion to be performed under the most favourable conditions (if she wants one), it also enables the pregnancy to be medically supervised from the earliest stages. Throughout pregnancy the woman's state of health is closely watched. She may be moved right away to a less tiring job, and systematic testing may be initiated, so as to detect any potential illnesses or other dangers to the pregnancy. Such a procedure, which could well be more conscientiously carried out in the West, considerably reduces the risk of any kind of congenital malformation or handicap. Regular ante-natal consultations take place monthly until the sixth month, then twice a month until the eighth, then weekly during the eighth and ninth months.
Much the same things were felt about contraception in the Peking hospital as we had been told in Shawan: 'Contraception must not be confused with a simple technique. It requires thorough ideological education. It as a far-reaching political act which aims to give women a method for controlling nature, so that they can participate fully in all social activities. It is a means of promoting their emancipation.'