A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. xv, 380 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29229-1.
The goal of Wang Zheng’s latest book is to highlight the role played by feminists in official state organizations, and, more importantly, to bring their work into the conversation about cultural transformation in China. Through archival work, historical research, and interviews, Wang strives to question the dominance of patriarchy in the socialist state. She is also working against a “lingering Cold War paradigm” that implicitly emphasizes the totalitarian aspects of the Chinese Communist-led state, without recognizing the way in which diverse groups altered the status quo (7). Wang identifies several cohorts of “socialist state feminists,” the development of which begins with early Communist women from the May Fourth generation and ends with women who joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s (8). The work of a few feminist men is also part of this story.
Wang’s research illuminates the strategies used by state feminists to further their goals. The most important is the “politics of concealment,” which primarily means that feminist officials used Party language to formulate subversive action, but also includes self-effacement in the form of hard work, self-sacrifice, and a disavowal of power (18). This self-deprecating behaviour was necessary because the gender-related projects of state feminists were often overruled in favour of a focus on class struggle. The persistent risk of being labelled as bourgeois, and the official claim that China had already reached gender equality made it difficult to point out the continued existence of inequality. Therefore, even though Wang’s goal is to uncover cracks in the authoritarian structure, her work also illustrates the restrictions often imposed on the Women’s Federation by male officials, who were reluctant to address women’s concerns. The limitations experienced by state feminists could be read as evidence that the patriarchal state was indeed dominant, a possibility confirmed by some of Wang’s interviewees. For example, Hou Di, an influential editor of Women in China, commented on the extremely low status of women during the Mao era and the frequent attacks on their abilities (102). Wang argues that in modern China, the contradictory mix of Fredrich Engels’ theory of women’s liberation and the bourgeois feminism of the May Fourth period created a special situation that could only be addressed through the politics of concealment. However, the “hidden script” of feminist activity, lurking in adherence to Party language and self-effacement, is hardly unique to China (17). Superficially agreeing while working behind the scenes to change things is a ubiquitous strategy of those without power.
Wang unearths some fascinating interactions, such as Luo Qiong’s memory of the role played by Deng Xiaoping in assisting the Women’s Federation when it was under attack during the Great Leap Forward, and Dong Bian’s spectacular efforts to establish and sustain the journal Women of China. Part 2 continues this trajectory, investigating the way in which state feminist actors pushed their agendas through film. Chapter 5 revolves around the work of Chen Bo’er, an actress, director, playwright, and writer who became famous in 1934 for her role in The Fate of Graduates (Taoli jie). Chen also directed Daughters of China (Zhongguo nü’er, 1949), a film that drew attention to revolutionary heroines, an approach Chen expanded as director of the art department of the Central Film Bureau after 1949 (Chen died in 1951). Chapter 6 centres on Xia Yan’s work in socialist film screenwriting and adaptation. Wang reads Xia’s screen adaptation of The New Year’s Sacrifice—which endowed Xianglin’s Wife with more agency than did the story by Lu Xun on which it was based—as a feminist text. Chapter 7 traces the downfall of Xia Yan at the hands of Jiang Qing, and chapter 8 details the transformation of the Iron Girls from a positive icon of strong womanhood in 1964 to an example of all that went wrong with socialist gender ideology in the 1980s, when a newly developing capitalist China rejected this vision of socialist women as masculinized and demanded “natural femininity” (231).
Wang’s book is a spirited and useful study of a group of women (and some men) who embedded themselves in the state and fought for equality, often against great odds. Unfortunately, it is marred by her conviction that her methodology is the only way to study film, and that those who focus on “final products” (i.e., film interpretation and analysis) are woefully inadequate (170). Wang repeatedly names them and criticizes their lack of archival research, which, she argues, causes them to miss the important roles played by Chen Bo’er and Xia Yan. As with the supposedly powerful Cold War paradigm—which has long been under attack—film scholars who work interpretively become straw dogs, against whose work Wang contrasts the originality of her insights.
Although there is nothing wrong with a focus on plot and filmic history, as well as on the interactions of those working in film, this approach cannot provide a comprehensive perspective. Film can indeed be a historical source, but there are many ways in which film—like an archival document, perhaps—may be more richly understood. Wang ignores the way that creative work functions: how its structures knowledge, how it works subtly to influence ideology, when and how it becomes counterproductively didactic, and how the dialectic of aesthetics and subjectivity unfolds. She discounts the large body of film theory that has developed over the last one hundred years, with its provocative and revealing inquiry into aesthetics and ideology. Even so, I may not have objected to Wang’s approach to film had she not suggested that whereas others are neglectful, her work has exhausted every avenue. Wang seems unaware that her valourization of archival research above all other kinds of inquiry constructs a flattened form of history that is closed off from engagement with interdisciplinary interpretation, an approach that ultimately diminishes the considerable value of her study.
Wendy Larson
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
pp. 151-153