Page 119 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

106 LOUISE EDWARDS
and their gender was a product of heterosexual marriage customs rather than evidence of
an improvement in women’s status. Thus, the questions about the connection between
feminist intent and women’s work in politics are legion and entirely specific to a historical
moment.
In China during the twentieth century women aspirants to political work and women
politicians have faced a unique set of challenges. Initially, some of China’s feminists
embraced the women’s suffrage campaign that united women around the globe in their
fight for formal recognition as equal political citizens to men. In the years between 1911
and 1913 several groups vied to persuade an intensely conservative all-male political class
of the value of women’s political participation. This goal was achieved in piecemeal
fashion during the early 1920s at the provincial level in Guangdong (1921), Hunan
(1921), Zhejiang (1921) and Sichuan (1923) and at the national level in 1936 (Edwards
2000a). However, these gains were largely theoretical, because the country was
embroiled in a war of national defense against the Japanese and a civil war between the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party. Women’s political
participation at a formal level involved engagement with various wartime governments, a
political leadership in crisis, and calls for demonstrations of their loyalty to national
salvation or party salvation.
With the defeat of the Nationalist Party in 1949 and the rise of the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ within the People’s Republic of China (PRC), political work in China changed
irrevocably for both men and women. In the PRC women aspiring to employment in
politics function within a political system dominated by one party—the Chinese Communist
Party In 2001 the Vice President of China’s Mayors’ Association, Wang Yinpeng,
described the unitary Chinese political state as follows: ‘China’s system of political parties
is a system of cooperation between multiple political parties under the leadership of the
Communist Party’ (Wang Yinpeng 2001:4).
The leadership of the CCP is unquestionable within this ‘system of political parties’.
Thus, formal ‘political work’ and ‘party work’ have become almost synonymous over the
course of the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast, the early twentieth century
women aspirants to political office saw themselves as members of numerous contesting
parties whose role was independent and critical. They did not perceive of women’s work
in politics as being the subordination of women activists to party discipline. The extent of
the shift in perceptions of women’s involvement in politics is clear when we examine the
different meanings attributed to the term ‘funü canzheng’ (women’s participation in
politics) over the period in question. For the first half of the twentieth century this was
understood to mean ‘women’s suffrage’, whereas for the second half of the century it
connoted ‘women’s participation in politics’. Moreover, when commentators from the
PRC talk about the problems of falling rates of ‘women’s participation in politics’, they
are referring to low rates of women’s engagement with CCP politics.
Over the course of the past 100 years another important change occurred in
perceptions of women’s connection to formal politics. From the early 1920s on, women’s
political engagement became conceptualized increasingly around the notion of ‘women’s
work’ (funü gongzuo). That is, women’s political aspirations were legitimized and
institutionalized within a concept of ‘women’s work’ within the party structures of both