Organizer: Neil J. Diamant, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Elizabeth J. Perry, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: William Kirby, Harvard University
The papers in this panel aim to present new research covering a wide swathe of new social and political developments in the PRC and Taiwan. Neil Diamant's paper reexamines the impact of the 1950 Marriage Law in Beijing, Shanghai, two suburbs and a rural prefecture. The law's impact, he suggests, was contingent upon where the law was implemented. Divorce rates varied dramatically between urban and rural settings, but not in the directions suggested in the secondary literature. Glen Peterson's paper complements the analysis of the Marriage by examining the implementation of literacy programs in rural areas, particularly South China. In contrast to the dramatic changes in family structure in the rural areas examined in Diamant's paper (especially in Yunnan), Peterson argues that until the mid-1950s the CCP adopted a rather conservative stance in this plank of their reform program. Taken together, these papers cover two key social reform policies in five settings-urban, suburban and rural areas in both North, South and Southwest China. Chia-yin Shih's paper shifts the focus on the 1950s to the impact of the Communist Revolution on changes in elite politics in Taiwan. Shih argues that, unlike the dramatic changes in state-society relations occurring on the mainland, the KMT, even after decimating its political opposition, was unable to penetrate society during the 1950s. As a result, in contrast to the internally-generated changes in the PRC during this period, political changes occurred largely as a consequence of external pressures and support.
Revolutionizing Love: Politics and Lust in Urban and Rural China, 1950-1959
Neil J. Diamant, University of California, Berkeley
As part of the PRC's effort to reconstruct Chinese society on a new basis, party ideologues attempted to promote a new vision of intimate relations between the sexes. The new socialist idea of love and marriage would ideally be based upon careful evaluation of political class. People from "good" classes should not fall in love and marry people with bad class background. In this paper I ask: to what extent were these efforts successful in the years preceding the Cultural Revolution? Were love and marriage politicized in the way the regime had hoped?
Based upon recently opened archival sources in Beijing, Shanghai, their suburban areas, and an ethnic minority prefecture in Yunnan, I argue that lust, the pursuit of leisure and enjoyment, and economic considerations usually overrode considerations of political class. Lust, I suggest, was very difficult to politicize. Even as late as 1964, party officials in Yunnan complained that peasants were still sleeping with members of the enemy classes, and that sexual liaisons were frequent among cadres and assorted "counter-revolutionaries." When relationships were politicized, it was often with results opposite of those originally intended. This paper concludes by assessing how pre-Cultural Revolution sexual politics shaped patterns of violence during the Cultural Revolution.
The Party Reform of the Kuomintang Regime, 1950-52
Chia-yin Shih, University of Washington
Having been defeated in mainland China, Chiang Kai-shek moved the remnants of his Kuomingtang regime to Taiwan at the end of 1949. In June 1950, he started a "party reform" so as to rejuvenate his decrepit regime. The goal was to rebuild the Kuomintang party machine to serve as the kernel of a Leninist regime, and the project was officially completed in October 1952. According to the KMT sources, this reform was a success which laid the foundation of Taiwan's development of later years. In recent years, some Western scholars also share this view. However, the story based on the then classified documents and publications of the Kuomintang is different. Although the morale of its members was indeed recovered from their bitter memory of debacle in the mainland, the goal of that reform was not achieved, even in 1952. The party reform did not create a Leninist regime capable of penetrating and mobilizing the whole story as intended. The result was still a dictatorial regime without any solid social base, which was not as different from its predecessor before 1949 as the Kuomintang proclaimed. Nevertheless, due to its failure, the Kuomintang regime became highly dependent upon support from outside, and had to adjust to legitimacy crises caused by diplomatic setbacks. And because, after the February 28 Incident of 1947, the alienated native Taiwanese tends to see the Kuomintang regime as just another colonial government, the political change that ensues from these legitimacy crises is then very much like decolonization, and not authentic democratization. The case of the party reform of the Kuomintang is hence a good example of how institutional change shapes the way state and society evolve through time.
The Social and Political Construction of "Peasant Education," 1949-1959
Glen Peterson, University of British Columbia
This paper examines the social and political construction of "peasant education" (nongmin jiaoyu) during the first decade of the People's Republic of China. It traces the Chinese Communist Party's changing conception of the political and economic importance of literacy in rural society, and attempts to show how state literacy ideologies helped to shape and entrench the caste-like divisions that separated rural and urban citizens beginning in the late 1950s. Contrary to what is often assumed, the CCP initially did not regard universal literacy as an urgent priority in the countryside. Early 1950s approaches to the problem of peasant education were heavily influenced by the Party's wartime experience in popular education, in which written texts featured as but one component in a multi-media-based strategy for mass mobilization. Universal literacy did not become an urgent goal until the mid-1950s, in conjunction with the effort to collectivize Chinese rural society. The great national literacy campaigns of 1955-56 and 1958-59 can only be understood in the context of the political economy of collectivization, and in particular with the state's effort to eliminate the physical, economic and social mobility of peasants beyond the confines of their rural collectives.