1. See Chine nouvelle, LXI (March 1968), p. 8, 'Chinese women reject the revisionist line in the women's movement'.
1. The Peking local government was a stronghold of Liu Shao-chi's partisans. It would frequently intervene in the management of factories to enforce a policy of 'rationalization' of work, as here. It was trying to reduce workers' control.
2. Tachai, a famous Chinese people's commune, was cited by Mao Tse-tung as an example of the way to build socialism in the Chinese countryside.
3. Red Flag (Hongqi) is the official organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
4. Cited in La Nouvelle Chine, VIII (1972).
5. The distribution of revenue is done annually after the autumn harvest, taking the production team (unit of farm production) as the basis for calculation. Every month each team member gives himself or herself the points he (or she) thinks he has earned for his own work, this is done in collective discussion, during which comrades intervene if they disagree with his self-evaluation, whether they consider it too low or too high. The allocation of work points for women was the immediate cause of the controversy.
1. Brigades are the agricultural production units. Several brigades make up a people's commune. Most brigades were formed by the reorganization of an already existing village community.
2. May 7 cadre schools were set up during the Cultural Revolution. Their purpose is to re-educate cadres in industry, commerce and administration.
1. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works
(London, Lawrence & Wishar, 1968), pp. 509-10.
2. Christiane Collange, Madame et le management.
p. 72.
1. A. Kollontai, Communism and the family (London, Pluto Press, 1972), pp. 12--13.
2. Cited in H. K. Gieiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard
University Press, 1968), p. 79.
3. Peking Review (24 September 1971), pp. 11-14 emphasis emphasis added.
4. Weekday schedule to be followed by adult-workers
as seen by Kuzmin.
| 1 lights out | 22:00 | |
| 2 eight hours' of sleep Reveille | 6.00 | |
| 3 calisthenics | 5 minutes | 6.05 |
| 4 toilet | 10 minutes | 6.15 |
| 5 shower (optional) | 5 minutes | 6.20 |
| 6 dress | 5 minutes | 6.25 |
| 7 to the dining-room | 3 minutes | 6.28 |
| 8 breakfast | 15 minutes | 6.43 |
| 9 to the cloakroom | 2 minutes | 6.45 |
| 10 put on outdoor clothing | 5 minutes | 6.50 |
| 11 to the mine | 10 minutes | 7.00 |
| 12 work in the mine | 8 hours | 15.00 |
| 13 to the commune | 10 minutes | 15.10 |
| 14 take off outdoor clothing | 7 minutes | 15.17 |
| 15 wash | 8 minutes | 15.25 |
| 16 dinner | 30 minutes | 15.55 |
| 17 to rest-room for free hour | 3 minutes | 15.58 |
| 18 free hour. Those who wish may nap | 1 hour | 16.58 |
| 19 toilet and change clothes | 10 minutes | 17.08 |
| 20 to the dining-room | 2 minutes | 17.10 |
| 21 tea | 15 minutes | 17.25 |
(Cited in A. Kopp, Town and Revolution [London, Thames & Hudson, 1970], p. 153).
5. The translators have been unable to find the source of this quotation. However, the position is expressed in this extract from a Sabsovich pamphlet:
The individual household must be replaced by communal establishments catering for the primary needs of the workers. Vast factory-like kitchens, in numbers sufficient to serve the entire population, must completely supersede home cooking. This will considerably improve the nation's feeding while greatly cheapening it. A corresponding apparatus, sufficiently complex and mechanized, must be created not only for preparing food, but to provide a more convenient way of feeding the population: an organization of large communal dining-halls at centres of work and in rest centres, in the creches, in social and educational institutions, etc.; a large-scale extension and perfection of the canning industries, etc.; in many cases the most convenient and expedient way of ob taining ready-made food at home will be this mechanised method. The U.S.S.R. after another 15 years, cited in R. Schlesinger, The Family in the U.S.S.R. (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 170].
6. Kopp, op. cit. p. 155.
7. Yvon, 'L'U.R.S.S. telle qu'elle est. ed. lPes d'or
8. William Hinton, Fanshen - A Documentary of Revolution
in a Chinese Village (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972).
1. See Anna Louise Strong, Letter from China, XLIV-XLV (15 December 1967).
2. Ibid.
1. 'Les Communistes et la condition de la femme' (1970), a study carried out among women by the Central Committee of Labour of the Communist Party; emphasis added.
2. Clara Zetkin, My Recollections of Lenin (Moscow, 1956).
3. 'Les Communistes et la condition de la femme', p. 44.
4. Ibid., p. 47.
5. PCF (Party Programme). Changer de cap (Paris,
Editions Sociales, 1971), p. 66; emphasis added.
1. Cited in H. Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 72.
2. Cited in Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 54.
3. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London, Sphere
1972), pp. 126 - 7; emphasis added.
1. La morale au cours élémentaire, Classiques Hachette (Paris, Hachette, 1966).
2. C. Baudelot and R. Establet, L'Ecole capitaliste en France (Paris, Maspéro 1971).
3. The members of such groups are chosen according to the following political criteria: they must have had shop-floor experience; they must be involved in the class struggle, especially in the struggle against revisionism, they must practice socialist principles at work; they must be able to lead the ideological struggle to unite the masses around revolutionary positions, and especially to fight against sectarianism and divisive splitting; they must apply themselves lo the study of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Tse-tung's thought. The teams are directed by the Communist Party, but not all workers are party members.
4. Cited in Volpicelli, L'éducation en URSS p. 209; emphasis added.
5. Cited in Schlesinger, op. cit.; pp. 363-4emphasis added.
6. Cited in Volpicelli, op. cit., p. 209; emphasis added.
7. It's not only in secondary schools that boys and girls
learn to sew. We saw little boys of three or four in a Shanghai kindergarten
sewing buttons on jackets.
1. Cited in Geiger, op. cit., pp. 47-8.
1. Lu Hsun Chinese Literature, IX (1971).
2. Cited in Roxane Witke, 'Mao Tse tung, Women and Suicide', in Women in China ed. Marilyn B. Young, Michigan Papers in Chinese Stu dies (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1973), pp. 16-17.
3. 'A k'ang is a raised platform of mud bricks that usually lakes up one whole side of a room in a Chinese house. It is so constructed that the flue from the cooking tire runs under it and warms it. In the winter the women live and work on the k'ang during the day' (Hinton, op. cit., pp. 42- 3n).
4. Hinton, op. cit., pp. 185-6.
5. F. Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and State, in Marx and Engels, op. Cit., p. 512.
6. Ibid.
7. Teng Ying chao. The Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China (Peking, Foreign Language Press 1950), pp. 38-40.
8. So as to remove any possible confusion, Teng Ying-chao stresses this point in the same article: 'The only way to eliminate the various chaotic phenomena in marriage in the transitional period is to carry out the Marriage Law in its entirety, to completely abolish the feudal marriage system and to establish the New Democratic marriage system. It is also necessary to educate the people on a long-term basis and to promote new social morale' (p. 34)
1. See F. Engels, Anti-Duhring (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1954), p. 385, for this example and a discussion of this point.
2. Christine Dupont, 'Libération des femmes, année zero', in Partisans, LIV-V (1970)
3. See K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York, International Publishers, 1964), pp. 72-3:
. . . In his work therefore, he [the worker] does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and m his work feels outside himself He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. As a result therefore, man [the worker] only feels himself freely active in his animal functions -eattng, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.
4. On this topic see J.-M. Konczyk, Gaston, I'aventure d'un ouvier, bit le Coeur ed.
5. V. I. Lenin, 'International Women's day, March 8,
1921', in Collected Works (London Lawrence & Wishart, 1961),
XXXII.
1. '. . . the children have the duty to support and to assist their parents', Teng Ying-chao op. cit., ch. 14, article 13.
2. Ibid.
1. K. Marx, Critique of Political Economy (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 197.
2. Lenin Collected Works, XXXV, p. 183.
3. The degradation of sexuality is rooted mainly in the
fact that sexual life is divorced from all other areas of social life and
is relegated to the rank of activities devoid of awareness. Marx noted:
'Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human
functions. But abstractly taken, separated from the sphere of all other human
activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions'
(Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p.
III).
1. Geiger, op. cit., chs III and IV.
2. La Nouvelle Chine, II, p. 31.
3. 'Sortir de l'ombre', a discussion paper by the Dimitriev group of the French Women's Liberation Movement, published as a supplement to Le Torchon Brûle (a French femininist newspaper )
4. La Nouvelle Chine, I, p. 39.
1. Teng Ying-chao, op. cit., p. 40.
1. This is the complete text of an article written by the author in 1973 and published in the French periodical Chine 74 (April, 1974).
2. The People's Daily (Renmin Ribao) is the official newspaper of the Chinese government.
3. Pi Lin Pi Kong' - an abbreviation used in China to denote the campaign of criticism `waged against Confucius and Lin Piao.
4. Red Flag, XII ( I December, 1973).
5. 'The women workers in the Chao Yan factory in Peking that I had visited in 1971 and returned to in 1973 told me that during the Cultural Revolution four out of the six qualified young women in the kindergarten left their jobs because they thought the work 'too inglorious', and not noble enough. It was, at that time, impossible to convince them that the people could be served in places other than the factories. It's easy to imagine the repercussions their attitude could have had on the functioning of the creches, and therefore on the liberation of women.
6. It's worth mentioning in this connection an important article in the March 1974 issue of China Reconstructs, 'How we women won equality', in which the author, Tsui Yu-lan, smashes this 'theory'.
7. I have noticed a net growth in the proportion of women in positions of leadership and in other areas such as higher education, since the visit to China which led to the writing of this book. In 1971 we were told that the Party's aim was to have 30 per cent women in the various positions of leadership. Today many people say that this is only one phase and that 30 per cent represents a figure that must be quickly exceeded. The revolutionary committee of Tsinghua University gave us the following figures for the proportion of women in the student population: 27 per cent in 1971, 30 per cent in 1972 and 34 per cent in 1973. The chairman of the committee added, 'This progress is encouraging but we can't be pleased with these figures. We must quickly reach 50 per cent, really half of heaven'
This example is particularly interesting when you realize that Tsinghua is a scientific and technical university specializing in areas which have been traditionally masculine.
8. The press is full of reports and tables - not to mention critical articles like the one in Red Flag - describing people's communes, districts and factories where these reforms have been implemented and telling of the progress women there have made towards actually becoming 'halt of heaven'.
9. Domestic-service workshops (laundries, clothes manufacture and repair workshops, cleaners and so on), canteens, health centres, creches and kindergartens attached to various productive or housing units are all described by the term 'social public welfare facilities'.
10. The author of this article could be making a veiled reference to difficulties which have actually hindered the efficient provision of pre-school care. The Peking teacher-training school for kindergarten teachers has been closed since 1966 and, to the best of my knowledge, is still closed. It has produced no newly qualified teachers for at least eight years "I his is one way in which right-wing policies have shown themselves,' we were told in Peking's No. 5 Kindergarten. Such interference from the right has posed, and no doubt still poses, serious problems. I he network of creches and kindergartens needs to be extended at a time when the source of newly qualified teachers has dried up. Moreover, there are regulations specifying a certain ratio of qualified staff in creches. Observing the regulation is often equivalent to refusing a new intake of children. This was especially true three or four, ears after the Cultural Revolution, which saw an increase in the birthrate. Faced with this situation, some creches (especially those run directly by factory or district committees) ignore the regulations and recruit their staff directly from among women factory workers or housewives of the district - the creche in the No. 3 textile factory in Peking has two qualified women out of a staff of forty; at Chao Yan, two out of twenty are qualified. However, seems that creches run by various administrative bodies, further education establishments or even the State, suffer from this state of affairs.
11. 'Report from a production brigade in Kiangsu', Red Flag (March 1973).
12. On our visit to the Sino-Cuban people's commune, near Peking, the leader of the commune recounted its experiences in this area - difficulties as well as successes. He concluded: 'The main tasks of the women's committee are 1) to carry out ideological work among women, 2) to speak for all women and lo defend them in their family or elsewhere; and 3) to be responsible for women's work. For instance, women can't do exactly the same work as men during their periods. Yet because feudal ideas still persist women don't want to talk about their periods. The women's committee, which knows the women well and knows the dates of their periods, can speak for them. The women's committee also intervenes if the equal pay principle isn't correctly applied - which does happen. Without a women's committee, there is no guarantee of women's equal rights.
13. Yang Po-lan and Chen Pei-chen, Hsinhua News Agency (22 February 1974).
14. I shall just mention here the example of the problem of housework, which I have already discussed at length.
15. In reading these five points the reader must, of course, bear in mind that they refer lo a continuous process of radical change, started at the very inception of the Chinese revolution.
16. The May 7 workshops, created after Chairman Mao's directive of the same name, have a different function from that of the small street factories. Their main task seems to be to organize collective productive labour for people who are either too old or too weak to cope with factory schedules and work. The internal division of labour in these workshops is loosely defined, so that one person's absence, for example, doesn't upset the work of others. They are usually subcontracted by small street factories or state factories to produce parts. Not only does such a system of production meet the real needs of society but, and this is perhaps most important, the collective set-up immediately allows women working there to lake charge of the workshop and to organize political and cultural study groups so that they, too, can participate in the socialist reconstruction (see also the article on women tackling this question in Peking Information, XII [1973]).
17. I mean of course mainland China. Under Nationalist rule the non-liberated part of China still sees Confucian doctrine as the infallible and rigid governing code for the people.
18. Red Flag (December 1973).