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Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233
Tina Mai Chen, ‘Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women’s Agency in 1950s China’
Gender & History, Vol.15 No.2 August 2003, pp. 268–295.
Female Icons, Feminist
Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric
and Women’s Agency in 1950s
China
Tina Mai Chen
With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) targetted patriarchy and gender inequality as antithetical to the new socio-political order it sought to create.
The Party associated redefinition of female subjectivity with a promised
socialist transformation. Through female model workers, the CCP pursued a proletarian-based socialist female subjectivity that reconstructed
gender and social relations. Despite the publicity accorded to these women
and their appearance in analyses of women in Maoist China, scholars
tend to discount CCP feminism thus expressed and the women chosen to
represent it. Scholars generally view official feminism as one-dimensional,
at the service of the Party and socialism, and not primarily concerned with
women’s place in society. This article, however, offers a different interpretation of CCP advocacy of, and authority over, women’s emancipation.
I highlight the situated agency of female model workers by focusing on
their multilayered lived experiences and on the multifaceted interactions
between these women and state representation of them. Specifically, I
reconsider female subjectivity in the 1950s by critically examining the
limitations and promises of female icons in Maoist China as well as the
structure and experience of state-sponsored feminism. Close readings of
emulation campaign materials reveal multiple subjectivities forged at the
nexus of state representation and women’s experience, and within local
and global struggles over gendered orders.
The female tractor driver was among the most widely circulating icons
of socialist modernity in the PRC. This typically young peasant woman
with glowing sunburned face was portrayed sitting confidently atop a tractor,
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amidst a field of plenty, gazing into the future.1 During the 1950s and 1960s
various audiences in diverse settings looked at this woman. Internationally,
China Reconstructs brought the female tractor driver to English language
readers in 1952 with photographs of a female tractor driver depicted in a
wheat field against expansive sky. A year later these same readers were
introduced to Zhang Xiurong, one of China’s best-known female tractor
drivers. Nationally, anthologies and school texts introduced China’s first
female tractor driver Liang Jun to young male and female readers. The
main Chinese film journal, Dazhong Dianying (Popular Cinema) further
published articles linking Liang’s success to Tractor Driver, a Soviet film
commonly shown in 1953 by projection units. Xin Zhongguo Funü (New
China’s Women), the official organ of the All China Women’s Federation,
also featured female tractor drivers: a 1954 photograph captured a young
woman resolutely plowing a cotton field; a 1963 folk art drawing depicted
a female tractor driver gracefully moving across a field; and a 1966 socialist realist poster showcased a tractor driver joyfully leading other model
women.2 These nationally and internationally circulating media images represented female tractor drivers as important members of the new Chinese nation.
Moreover, the images had personal impact as they inspired some Chinese
and non-Chinese youth to join their ranks.3 On a more general level, the
iconography displayed for all a state-sponsored vision of new China.
Figure 1: Young woman on tractor, China Reconstructs, back cover,
September–October 1952.
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In 1950s Chinese communist political culture, these and similar female
model workers functioned as everyday icons. I use the term everyday icon
because they appeared in mass-circulating media as the epitome of socialist China. They represented the values, politics and morality of the new
order and were used by the CCP explicitly to replace representations of
ideal women that had previously circulated in China. Women like Liang
Jun were everyday icons because they simultaneously represented the most
progressive elements of the new society while also being interchangeable
with the innumerable other model workers featured in the press on a daily
basis. The plethora of female and male model workers reflected the
notion that all Chinese had the potential to become an exemplar. In 1950s
liberated China, mobilisation of mass media coupled with Maoist egalitarian
politics to create a system of symbolic representation in which the combined
imagery, not the individual model, was of primary concern. Individual
models represented metonymically the new Chinese body politic while
the phenomena of emulation campaigns simultaneously worked to transcend the specificities of individual bodies.4 As a set of prevailing images
that represented morality and value within socialist China, model workers
constituted an iconography of the state, with the individual models assuming status as everyday icons within a highly politicised media system.
Within this system not all model workers assumed equal importance;
most were linked to specific campaigns, time periods and locations. The
female tractor driver and related female models working with heavy
machinery had particular saliency in the immediate post-liberation years
when they captured the imagination of CCP propagandists and policymakers. These women embodied success of programs championed by the
CCP since 1921: women’s emancipation, modernisation and leadership by
the worker and peasant. The iconography of the Chinese female tractor
driver also reinforced the power of socialist internationalism through
explicit linkages to Soviet iconography. Intertextual references to Soviet
tractor heroines and female models offered Chinese audiences embodied
symbols of the path to future plenty and abundance. Within the official
lexicon of Maoist China, the female tractor driver thus represented the
arrival of a socialist modernity contingent upon shattering the fetters of
Confucian, feudal and capitalist worldviews and their attendant patriarchal
forms.
Given the multiple axes along which these models were located, they
invite re-examination of women’s emancipation in the 1950s. Most scholarship concerning women’s emancipation in the first decade of the PRC
emphasises the truncated nature of liberation predicated upon male standards of evaluation, valorisation of heavy industry and subordination of
feminist issues to socialist ones. While I am indebted to seminal works
by feminist scholars, I depart from work that focuses on the incomplete
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liberation of women, masculinist frameworks shaping women’s participation in politics and the workplace, and gendered dynamics of
‘writing women’.5 My focus on mass-circulating iconography moves us to
consider the creative process through which female subjectivity emerged
as part of everyday politics on both the representational and experiential
levels. In order to demonstrate how seemingly simplistic and didactic
stories and images produced situated agency through representational
experience, I analyse one particular subset of CCP icons, ‘nüjie diyi’ model
workers.
‘Nüjie diyi’ literally translates as ‘female-kind–first’ and refers to those
women, or groups of women, recognised as the first female tractor driver,
train conductor, streetcar driver, welder and so on.6 Colloquially referred
to as ‘diyi’ (the first) women, they occupied a vanguard position in the
early and mid-1950s. Stories and visual representations rendered these
women embodiments of historical progress, a progress linked via their
bodies to the Party and socialism. As ‘the first’ women to be trained in
occupations associated with heavy machinery, ‘diyi’ women appeared at
the cutting edge of China’s new history. They played a historically specific
role that is, as I argue throughout this paper, precisely what makes them
compelling for reconsideration of the relationships between representation
and experience, rhetoric and agency in the 1950s. Moreover, if we consider
the full term applied to these women, ‘nüjie diyi,’ further issues arise.7
One, what did it mean in the 1950s to be raised above other women to
assume the position of ‘first among women’? Two, to what extent was this
position contingent on a reworking of female subjectivity that promised
new opportunities while demanding a reformed body that conventionally
has been understood in Western scholarship as a masculinised body?
Three, as the first among women to perform a job – but not necessarily
the first person to perform such a job – how important is the relationship
of ‘nüjie diyi’ to other women and men? In order to answer these questions, we must look at the multiple levels at which this group of female
model workers functioned as representatives of a new order. Before
turning to this analysis of ‘nüjie diyi’ model workers as icons of socialist
feminism, the conceptual relationship between representation and
experience deployed in this article needs to be outlined.
This article takes as a basic premise the inseparability of representation
and experience within the political culture of 1950s China. Representation and experience intersected in a dialogic fashion to constitute a
phenomenon of represented experience.8 By represented experience I refer
to a tripartite process linking representation of model women in CCP
propaganda, language of experience employed by and for these women,
and actions undertaken by women in response to such representation. In
this manner, this article addresses Lisa Rofel’s call for historically situated
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analyses of feminism that assess the appeal of Maoist discourse on the
‘national woman’ in the immediate post-liberation era.9
Analysis of the represented experiences of female tractor drivers and
other ‘diyi’ women who worked in traditionally male-dominated industrial
spheres proceeds at three levels. First, I consider potential for women’s
agency at the nexus of representation and experience, ideals and practice.
Second, I situate CCP constructions of female subjectivity along international axes. The critical role of the Soviet male expert in the training of
‘diyi’ women necessitates placing the CCP’s socialist ideology of gender
more firmly in dialogue with geopolitics as a gendered phenomenon.
Third, I suggest a dialogic relationship between individual experience and
collective celebration. Study of this relationship must not be constrained
by a presumed erasure in communist rhetoric and iconography of the
individual by the collective.10 Rather, we need to look at mutually constitutive relations and the ways in which the individual, although embedded
within the collective, acquired subjectivities that may or may not have
reinforced a nationally based collective. Re-thinking the relationship
between socialist rhetoric and women’s agency in this manner highlights
the interpenetration within CCP propaganda of individual, national and
international frameworks. This interpenetration serves simultaneously to
delimit and enable alternative female subjectivities commensurate with
goals of socialist modernisation and women’s emancipation. Let us now
turn to the ways in which this is evident in the represented experience of
‘diyi’ women.
Xin Zhongguo Funü (New China’s Woman) introduced Guo Shulan to
its readers in 1955 by describing her as a tool-laden nineteen-year-old
woman in a white lab coat fearlessly standing more than thirty metres
above the ground. The author stated ‘this is female High temperaturehigh pressure welder Guo Shulan who was trained by a Soviet specialist’.11
In these statements age, gender, location, clothing, occupation and training combined to provide the rationale for promotion of Guo Shulan as a
model for new China. Her appearance differentiated her from peasant
women while her confident actions in the realm of heavy industry rendered
her a model that challenged the validity of the Confucian exemplary
woman. The conception of the Confucian ideal in circulation among
reformist and revolutionary discourse since the late-nineteenth century
emphasised woman’s limited mobility, lack of education and confinement
to the inner sphere of the household.12 Guo Shulan, by contrast, was bound
by none of these conventions. She represented a new ideal woman fit for
socialist China.
Guo Shulan’s story predictably outlined the specific conditions of her
early life and subsequent emergence as a ‘diyi’ model. Until 1953, the
story related, she was still a ‘girl’ who worked within the household. She
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then passed the entrance exams for technical school and under the guidance of the old masters and a Soviet male expert she mastered the skills
and technology necessary to become one of the most respected welders in
her unit and a model worker. The political discourse forged through reporting on Guo Shulan and other ‘diyi’ models highlighted four key themes:
physical form of the woman; gendered composition of the workforce;
constitution of the national body politic; and international solidarity of
socialist workers. As part of Maoist political ideology, with its stress on
voluntarism, each of these areas occasioned CCP representation of ‘diyi’
women as essential agents of social change. Using a narrative structure that
wrote women as actors, propaganda construed change at the personal,
local, national and international levels as the result of the individual actions
of these Soviet-trained, technologically competent, Chinese women. Reporting articulated a female subjectivity that conceptualised these women as
bearers of modernity, socialism, national autonomy and gender equality.
These CCP claims for women’s agency, as many feminist scholars have
noted, need to be read with a critical eye toward the complex ways in
which the CCP programme of women’s liberation was embedded within,
and responded to, existing Party, national and world orders. Reforming
the national body along socialist feminist lines took place within the masculinised arena of nation states in which male intellectuals and politicians
championed causes, including women’s liberation.13 I contend, however,
that we must consider seriously the importance of writing and representing female agency in national narrative. As Ding Juan, associate professor
at the Women’s Studies Institute of China, commented in 1997, women’s
presence in the workplace in the 1950s arose from the policy of equality
between men and women, the need for female labour and the desire of
women to work outside the home. Ding remarked that the first two were
male directed but the third included women as active subjects who produced the conditions for their liberation.14 Although beset with limitations,
state-sponsored female agency combined with women’s actions to render
women’s liberation a component of ratified political discourse and experience in Mao’s China.15 This ensured a role for women in socialist transformation. Moreover, this ratified political discourse insisted upon the
international context of socialist revolution that widened the terrain upon
which women acted out their agency in the early 1950s. As such, ‘nüjie
diyi’ workers participated in redefinition of self, local workplace, national
collectivity and international community. Through careful consideration
of the extent and conditions of their participation we can better understand
the ways in which this agency was embedded in a system of represented
experience that shaped women’s emancipation in 1950s China.
At the individual level, the represented experience of ‘nüjie diyi’
model workers regularly featured physical reconstitution of the body. The
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prevailing bodily aesthetic in the early 1950s promoted large arms and
legs tirelessly engaged in labour.16 The author of a 1952 Xin Zhongguo
Funü article about China’s first female train dispatcher, Sun Xiaoju, was
deeply moved by her exemplary deeds. Nonetheless, he began by
describing her body. He wrote: ‘from her stalwart body [and] robust arms,
I saw the form of new China’s women’.17 ‘Nüjie diyi’ models themselves,
like Liang Jun, also believed that their physical form represented
metonymically the power of new China. At sixty-seven years of age, Liang
Jun presented her hands to me as she related an encounter at a 1970s All
China Women’s meeting with an aging model worker whose eyesight was
failing. When Liang asked if she could identify her, the woman took
Liang’s hands and remarked upon their thickness and strength. These
were not the hands of an artist or scholar but those of a worker. Therefore, the woman concluded, they must belong to Liang Jun.18 Liang told
this story to illustrate the close relations between 1950s female model
workers. It also demonstrates the importance of physical form for CCP
representations of women’s entrance into the workplace as well as for
these women’s experiences of their identity and agency as model workers.
The physical experience of work comprised a substantial component of
‘nüjie diyi’ propaganda stories, both autobiographical and biographical.
The narrative structure of these stories followed a pattern that first
strengthened the body, then detailed the forging of a symbiotic relationship between body and machinery. The liberated female body, similar to
that of other heroic bodies of the Maoist period, was driven by a will that
refused to allow the body to succumb to physical discomfort.19 This perseverance reportedly enabled historical progress as the woman liberated
herself from historical, familial and economic oppression through physical
reconstitution and relocation of the body. Here, the account of the first
female portable steam engine operator, Fu Wenying, is telling.
Characteristically, the story of Fu Wenying referred to the difficulties
she faced in studying the filing axis.20 After the first day of work, Fu’s hands
were blistered and her classmates told her to rest. Her response: ‘I came
here to study, this small sore does not require me to rest’. As Fu developed
a body able to withstand the strain of production, her body underwent a
subsequent transformation. She became an instrument through which to
achieve socialist construction by establishing a symbiotic relationship
between her body and machinery. She moved from having blistered hands
to removing two hundred jin of water per day with her clothes soaked
in sweat to increasing the efficiency of water removal fourteen-fold by
properly operating the steam engine. Fu Wenying, not a male worker,
brought efficiency to human labour through correct use of the most advanced technology. ‘Woman’ thereby embodied strength, self-confidence,
initiative and familiarity with new technology. This new understanding
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of ‘woman’ juxtaposed with that of earlier periods in Chinese history.
Specifically, CCP materials about ‘nüjie diyi’ located the ‘new woman’
firmly in the working class and in close proximity to machinery. As a
result, the gendering of the proletariat as male shifted toward explicit inclusion of men and women into this crucial category of Maoist citizenship,
while also challenging the exclusive male gendering of technical expertise.
The body that accomplished this task was largely undifferentiated in
appearance from the idealised male body of the period. The similarity of
physical form between male and female bodies has led many scholars to
see these women as masculinised or androgenous ideals.21 Significantly,
however, the female-ness of ‘diyi’ women figured prominently. Rarely was
the adjective ‘female’ dropped from the descriptive category, thereby
reminding the reader that women could and should assume these physical
proportions. Transformation released women’s potential to rise to a vanguard position in Chinese history. To be first-among-women required
assuming a form substantially different than pre-1949 ideals and functioned
to differentiate them from other (less advanced) workers of the period.
But a reformed body was never a goal in itself. To be ‘first-among-women’
and ‘the first woman’ entailed much more than physical reconstitution of
the body. It required training and knowledge that separated these women
from their male and female counterparts who lacked the initiative, determination and training to stand at the forefront of socialist transformation.
As models of the new China, ‘diyi’ women represented a new state-authored
Figure 2: Two young women stoking the furnace of a train (1951).
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feminist iconography in which physical changes were intertwined with
other elements of socialist gender transformation in a complicated mobilisation of female models that entailed more than simple universalisation
of a masculine ideal.
At the level of local workplace and national collective the presence of
‘nüjie diyi’ models separated liberated space and time from those awaiting
liberation. Tian Guiying leaned out of the train engine car in Dongbei,
Lin Youhua drove the Changjiang boat, Liang Jun stood beside a tractor
in Harbin. The images and texts evoked an understanding of ‘woman’ in
striking contrast to that which was valued in pre-liberation years and in
capitalist bourgeois societies, while propaganda materials linked women’s
emancipation to specific spatio-temporal conceptualisations. Temporally,
‘diyi’ women occupied a strategically important position at the forefront
of history. Self and state representations of their lives spoke of living in a
new time, the springtime of socialism. New China’s first female peasant
scientist Zhang Qiuxiang experienced ‘rebirth’ in April 1949 when the
Red Army liberated her village: ‘the hard days could be put in the past.
[For] the first time, she looked at her own land and home, she felt very
warm’ as she acknowledged the Party and Mao for giving her ‘the springtime of life’.22 Similarly, coking-plant director Tang Sixiao viewed the new
age as one in which ‘the long night had passed ... bringing light and hope’.23
Spatially, the contours of modern China assumed a contingent relationship to public presence of women in liberated provinces and enlightened
workplaces. At the Number Two Coking Factory, Tang Sixiao moved to
the centre in metaphorical and literal terms. By the time she rose to the
position of assistant director, the reader was told, workers frequently
surrounded her asking for advice while visitors marvelled at the young
woman who stood next to the furnace for ‘many thousand days and nights’.24
This description encouraged the reader to envision a factory with Tang
and furnace in the middle encircled by eager workers desiring proximity
to both her and machine. Moreover, photographs depicted Tang, at one
instant, forging steel with body and machine working as one and, at
another instant, comfortably instructing a young man; together the photographs illustrated woman’s place in the factory, membership in the proletariat and leadership position.25
Women’s initiatives in changing their own situation and subsequently
altering gender relations in the home and workplace appeared as a common theme in propaganda about ‘nüjie diyi’ models. Refusal to submit to
male oppression resulted in Party support of these particular women,
enabling their success and subsequent acceptance by male comrades.26
When Liang Jun entered the tractor driver programme in Bei’an in 1948
as the only woman in a class of seventy students, she encountered resistance from classmates and teachers. They greeted her with phrases such as
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‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Go home, you can’t study this’, and ‘I’ve
worked twenty years and never seen a woman study this’.27 Placed in a
hostile environment, Liang accomplished more than self-empowerment
through unconventional work choices. As a woman present in a traditionally male-dominated sphere of activity she was an agent of social change.
The attendant representation of ‘nüjie diyi’ models as socialist leaders
who educated unenlightened male co-workers constituted an integral
component of individual tales of women’s liberation. As Liang proved
that her presence at the training school was not inappropriate, the newly
defined temporal borders that pushed liberated women to the forefront
allowed her to occupy the present and future while unenlightened men
were relegated to the past.
The spatio-temporal schemes invoked in CCP narratives of women’s
liberation as told through ‘nüjie diyi’ forced a reversal of traditional gender
hierarchies of present and past, leader and led. Women guided social
change in the workplace through their initiative, ideological stance and
technological knowledge. Propaganda materials disseminated about ‘nüjie
diyi’ went beyond simply arguing that woman workers were progressive
because they altered the composition and appearance of the proletariat.
The materials also suggested a more rapid transformation of female body
and mind than male. Although ‘nüjie diyi’ models typically were products
of a difficult childhood that entailed domestic work, they reportedly lacked
exposure in pre-1949 China to forms of labour that would proletarianise
their bodies and render them productive members of society. Yet, as
the stories enthusiastically related, within months these same women
emerged as the most advanced workers in their units. Official discourse
deemed anachronistic those who resisted their presence and knowledge.
The majority of ‘nüjie diyi’ stories contained an encounter mirroring
that of Sun Xiaoju, head train dispatcher.28 Reflecting Maoist dictums
regarding voluntarism and the mass line, Sun approached Zhu Shuixiang
about integrating advanced Soviet methods at the railroad. He responded
with silence. When she approached another dispatcher he dismissively
referred to her as ‘nü tongzhi’ (female comrade) and said ‘you have just
begun the work of a dispatcher and are certainly overrating your abilities
with talk of these advanced methods’. Sun Xiaoju continued to believe
in Soviet experience and the Maoist mass line, however, and talked with
drivers and workers while studying Soviet methods. Her less progressive
male colleagues ridiculed her. Only when she approached a colleague with
high political consciousness did she receive assistance in implementing
the new super-axle. Finally, Sun Xiaoju was recognised as one of the most
famous dispatchers of all China. In accounts of her story, this final
endorsement shed the signifier ‘nü’ (woman) and rendered Sun Xiaoju a
model for all Chinese.
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The transformation of the relative positioning of men and women with
respect to expertise, political consciousness and labour skills reflects two
different trajectories informing women’s liberation and Maoism: one, the
‘advantages of backwardness’ and, two, modernisation theory. The struggle
of the human body against nature and the attendant mastery of machinery
located the remolding of the female body within internationally circulating
modernisation discourse that viewed control of nature and proximity to
heavy machinery as stages of higher development. At the same time, the
represented experience of ‘diyi’ women articulated these tropes of
modernity to the reformed proletarian body and alternately gendered
workplace of socialist China. The Chinese embodiment of modernisation
processes found expression in an iconography that simultaneously reinforced specific socialist and feminist goals and processes: discipline through
struggle with nature, efficiency and knowledge through mastery of machinery,
and socialist modernity through the labouring bodies of ‘nüjie diyi’ models.
The presence of the female body thus proved a destabilising factor in
gendered thinking about work and categorisation of nature and machine
in modernisation discourse.
‘Nüjie diyi’ further destablilised these categories through their location in rural and industrial spaces. Internationally, modernisation and
urbanisation were understood as linked processes. In Mao’s China, however, representatives of advanced proletarian leadership located technology
in the countryside and offered an alternative vision of modernisation.
Furthermore, ‘diyi’ women signified the proletarianisation of women’s
emancipation and historical progress, thereby distinguishing socialist
feminism from earlier Chinese feminisms. This required co-optation and
redirection of late Qing and May Fourth feminisms. In the late Qing,
Liang Qichao stressed the need for women to be productive members of
society for national strength while He Zhen argued that women’s freedom must be based upon economic independence for all.29 Twenty years
later, May Fourth reformers and revolutionaries insisted on women’s
education and economic independence as essential for individual personhood (duli renge) and national strength.30 The 1950s privileging of ‘diyi’
women’s identity as worker as the basis of emancipation and the concern
with economic independence suggests a shared conceptualisation of female
agency and subjectivity. But, the proletarianisation of women’s emancipation formulated through ‘diyi’ women differed from earlier feminisms.
Through ‘diyi’ materials, CCP feminism incorporated poor women into
specifically Maoist categories of historical progress. The female subjectivity articulated to ‘diyi’ women required a synthesis between various
positions: beneficiaries of Party leadership, exemplars of the future and
agents of change. Significantly, the represented experience of female
subjectivity and agency in the 1950s entailed embedding subjectivity and
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agency within the space and time of the proletariat and its leader, the
CCP. For women such as Tang Sixiao, Liang Jun, and Sun Xiaoju, such a
redefinition of national time and space provided opportunities to promote
a differently conceived agency and independence.
Short accounts of ‘diyi’ female models conceptualised progress through
a female subjectivity that neatly layered physical reconstitution, spatiotemporal redefinition, political consciousness and economic independence.
Political consciousness appeared in the form of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
categorisations of women’s new position. Pictures of ‘diyi’ women illustrated successful liberation from illiteracy, foot-binding and beliefs about
the inferiority of women while written texts commended the women for a
new consciousness that encouraged them to demand change themselves.
Women’s agency thus became central to historical progress as readers were
taught to understand illiteracy and foot-binding as signifiers of women’s
subordination and characteristics of feudalism.
For example, in politics class at workers’ night school, China’s first
female train conductor Tian Guiying learned the history of women’s
oppression from primitive communism to feudalism. This class emphasised past constraints on Chinese women, nation and historical development. Tian thus realised that historical progress and national independence
were inseparable from gender equality and technical knowledge. Moreover, she believed her efforts to promote both would be of historical
significance.31 The new consciousness forged through attendance at night
classes led Tian Guiying to understand personal and workplace reform
through Marxist-Leninist-Maoist categories of progress. She therefore
viewed her experience at engine driver training as part of a larger transformation from feudalism to socialism that could not be accomplished
without women’s participation.
Political consciousness functioned in ‘diyi’ materials to highlight the
process through which a model worker became aware of herself as a liberated member of formerly oppressed groups. Female agency depended
upon this awareness and self-positioning. Consciousness alone was not
enough to move a woman into the proletarian class, however. The framework through which female subjectivity in the 1950s acquired meaning
also highlighted economic independence as part of the process of realising subject status in socialist China. ‘Diyi’ women embodied the freedom
possible when consciousness and conditions enabled actualisation of the
phrase ‘whatever men can do, women can do too’.32 Women’s subjectivity
rested upon emancipation from oppressive situations of economic
poverty like that experienced by Zhang Xiurong, a female tractor driver
who spent her childhood gathering firewood and digging for wild roots to
eat. During this period of her life Zhang lacked decent clothes, a marked
difference from her bobbed hair and the simple jacket, slacks and
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blue cap worn at a 1953 All China Women’s Congress.33 Significantly,
the economic independence achieved was not formulated as individual
independence but liberation from systemic poverty and gender inequality.
Only through socialist transformation, of which CCP authored feminism
was one component, could such independence by achieved.
The positioning of ‘diyi’ women discussed above promised a restructuring of gender relations within society. Furthermore, it inferred through
metonymic deployment of the ‘new woman’ a place for China in the world
as a self-sufficient economic unit that promised an alternative mode of
modernisation. ‘Diyi’ women should not be reduced to metonym and metaphor, however. They were not mere representation but, as demonstrated
in the lives of ‘diyi’ women, they actively participated in the process of
socialist modernisation by reforming the female body, altering workspaces
and advancing technological knowledge. Furthermore, the intertwined
narratives of women’s liberation, historical progress, modernisation and
Chinese nationalism required that ‘nüjie diyi’ models did not simply change
their appearance and prove their strength but that these woman assume
subject status and effect social change beyond the individual level. Socialism, nationalism and women’s liberation combined to situate ‘diyi’ women
within a progressive dialectic that included, transformed and transcended
individual actions. The relationship between individual experience and
collective celebration therefore warrants close consideration in our discussion of agency and feminist potential of 1950s female icons.
In the represented experience of ‘diyi’ models the CCP did not simply
impose an overarching framework that erased individuality and gender
through insistence on the collective. Rather, individual and collective
identity worked dialectically to augment women’s agency in some instances
and delimit it in others. The new gender composition of the workforce
and the agency that was attributed to female workers and championed by
the CCP as indicative of a future order sat uneasily with the combined
effect of the CCP as vanguard of the new order and as authors of the
public persona of ‘diyi’ women. This unstable relationship between individual experience and collective celebration directs us to the difficult
relationship between empowerment and salvation discourses that
informed propaganda about ‘nüjie diyi’ models.
In response to CCP configurations of the relationship between
women’s liberation and socialism that viewed gender as potentially
divisive, most feminist scholars characterise the relationship between
individual experience and collective celebration as one in which real
women serve, rather than are served by, Maoism. The persecution of
Ding Ling, a prominent female writer who departed from the Party line
and advocated women’s rights in the first instance, has been seen as
indicative of CCP subordination of women to the ‘larger cause’.34 Unlike
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Ding Ling, however, ‘nüjie diyi’ lived a convergence of the goals of statesponsored feminism and socialism. Liang Jun again provides an apposite example when in 1997 she presented her role as female tractor driver
in terms of socialist and national community formation. She uncritically
explained that the changing social order encouraged by the CCP after
liberation permitted her to engage in non-traditional work.35 Without
hesitation, she stated that in the old society opportunities for women to
work outside the home did not exist.36 In the new society, however, under
the leadership of the CCP and socialism, men and women were made
equal. These were the conditions, she asserted, that enabled her to
become a tractor driver and advance agricultural technology and training.
Even as Liang recounted the impact of her story on other women she
carefully credited the Party for its leadership and downplayed any
initiative of her own. She tempered the feminist politics underpinning the
narrative of women’s liberation and her status as a model worker by
presenting her story as a microcosm of the history of socialism in modern
China. Even as a nationally-renown ‘nüjie diyi’ model and frequent
delegate at All China Women’s Federation meetings, Liang asserted that
she never championed women’s liberation qua women’s rights. She insisted
she worked for the development of a better country in which everyone
accepted the equality of men and women. She thereby submerged
individual into national collective.
The way in which Liang Jun positioned herself in 1997 with respect to
China’s modernisation upholds Mingyan Lai’s assessment of the writing
of women in the Anti-Confucius, Anti-Lin Biao campaign of 1973–1975.
In this campaign, ‘women [were] spoken as subjects, yet [did] not constitute
a subject position from which one [could] speak and self-represent’.37 But
the official rhetoric marking this campaign and Liang’s 1997 remarks
simplified the experience of Liang as it appeared in 1950s media representations. Accounts published in the 1950s about Liang’s success emphasised the ways in which she altered relations between men and women in
the workplace while simultaneously making available new machinery to
the masses. Liang lived the advice of her school principal: when she asked
whether or not China could have heroic women and men like those of the
Soviet Union he answered ‘you only need your own effort then all will
succeed’. Here we see how the represented experience of 1950s models
promoted a more complex conception of women’s subjectivity and agency
than that which emerged as dominant political discourse after 1956 when
Mao Zedong prematurely declared that ‘men and women are now equal’.
The shifting relationship between occupying a subject position within
CCP narratives of liberation and the abrogated agency of the subject
speaks to an unstable relationship between individual and collective. One
articulation of the relative positioning and duties of liberated women who
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participated in the reshaping of gender relations as part of nationbuilding appeared in Liang Jun’s 1950 story in the following manner:
Liang Jun was very familiar with production work [and] with the help of the school
principal and teachers, she began to understand what type of political party the
Chinese Communist Party was, the relationship between youth and the nation, why
she should continue to study hard, so that in the future she could contribute her
efforts to the nation and her thought would progress quickly.38
This passage reinforced the Party’s role in molding body and mind of
liberated women as these women took advantage of opportunities to enter
schools and productive spaces that were in the process of being redefined
through policies of socialist gender equality. Liang Jun situated herself
within a nationalist discourse that associated commitment to national
construction with progress of individual thought. In the process, the sex of
her body partially was elided through conflation with ‘youth’ generally
and the nation more broadly. Delineation of these salient relationships
silenced the gender dynamics of her story in favour of explicating relations
between a universalised new Chinese citizen and China, a new China and
the world.
Despite the partial elision of the female body of Liang and other ‘nüjie
diyi’ models, the selection of women as representative of a universalised
Chinese citizen retains importance. They may have been located within
existing gendered power structures but their presence demanded that the
universalised person not assume a de facto male gender. Moreover, it was
the femaleness of Liang that rendered her pertinent to the particular
historical juncture. Each telling of Liang’s story first situated her body in
particular locations that reinforced her oppression and marginality if the
standards of maleness, maturity, cosmopolitanism, wealth and education
were considered the abstract ideals to be approximated. Distance from
traditional markers of respectability associated with feudal, bourgeois and
imperialist relations accrued legitimacy to Liang in an era in which disavowal of past oppressions and their gendered significations constituted
much of nationalist discourse. Liang as new woman stood at the forefront
of new national, international, and world orders that rested upon a
rearticulation of power via a socialist ideology of gender.
On one level, Liang Jun’s position at the apex of a linear history of
women’s liberation that traversed time and space promised empowerment
for women and China within an evolving world order. The story, however,
located the impetus for an altered consciousness external to the wouldbe-subjects. The agency of the newly liberated bodies – be they ‘diyi’
women or China – arose from a causal relationship in which the CCP,
Soviet advisors and Western nations had access to power and knowledge
that then structured the terms under which empowerment occurred.39 The
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structure of the agency of women and the CCP, therefore, was fraught
with a tension characteristic of global modernity between the suppliers of
self-consciousness and the always present potential for counterhegemonies enunciated by the newly produced agents of social change.
In CCP national narrative, as expressed through the represented experience of ‘diyi’ women, one strain posited the traditionally oppressed as full
subjects in the present/future, able to overcome all barriers she encountered.
Another proffered knowledge and freedom to those less fortunate with
no concern for the gendered dynamics of the process of salvation. Reporting of the opening banquet of the 1949 Asian Women’s Representatives
Meeting proved characteristic: Liang Jun ‘saw the government leaders
[and] she thought “those really are the people who saved China, saved
women, saved me”’.40 By attributing these words to Liang, the author
erased Liang’s active involvement in changing gender relations. He credited
government leaders and reinstituted a gendered hierarchy. Women’s new
position, in this formulation, depended upon the benevolence of a masculinised Party and the male leaders of nation states. Moreover, the woman
as individual could not participate in construction of the nation because
the dialectic relationship between individual and collective was overdetermined by salvationist constructs.
Tonglin Lu remarks on the prevalence of salvation thinking in twentiethcentury China and its less-than-emancipatory effects on women. She states:
One may say that the very notion of salvation is precisely what engenders inequality
in a revolution since its hierarchical structure always justifies women’s oppression in
a new form. To a large extent, the misogynistic discourse prevailing in contemporary
Chinese literature can be traced to the salvation theory of the socialist revolution of
which socialist realist literature is one of the best expressions. This discourse
reinforces the underlying gender hierarchy existing in the socialist salvation theory.
The Communist Party, as a collective savior in socialist realism, usually proves its
ideological and political superiority by the salvation of silenced and oppressed women.41
Female icons as socialist realist protagonists fit within this framework to
the extent that salvationist modes of thinking in CCP narratives ensured
that the Party guided the development of the national body. Official
discourse scripted the subject positions of ‘nüjie diyi’ models and embedded these women within explicitly stated relations of power. The CCP
wrote itself and Mao Zedong as supreme leader and enabler of a new
future in which relations of inequality ceased to exist. But the ever-present
voices of ‘diyi’ women differentiated them from the generic ‘silenced and
oppressed woman’ of Lu’s socialist salvation theory. Even in mediated
form, the voices and experiences of ‘diyi’ women actualised feminist
and socialist policy so as to produce a situated agency for these women.
Deployment of salvation and empowerment discourse for female icons
in the 1950s meant that women’s experiences unfolded at the crossroads
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of the two contending frameworks. If we consider the articulation and
enactment of subjectivities as a process located at this nexus, the gendered
determinism Tonglin Lu attributes to socialist realism is less convincing.
For ‘diyi’ women, the Communist Party as sole ‘collective saviour’ failed
to cohere because both Soviet and Chinese communist parties contributed
to emerging subjectivities. Moreover, in conversations with Soviet representatives ‘diyi’ women reportedly spoke openly. In this relationship
between Soviet expertise and Chinese female icons individual experience
coexisted with celebration of the collective in such a way that individual
empowerment was not subsumed by the collective in a salvationist moment.
Consideration of the relationship between individual experience and collective identity thus moves us to consider the CCP’s socialist ideology of
gender in terms of gendered geopolitics and proletarian internationalism.
Close Sino-Soviet relations marked the 1950s and created a political
culture in which intertextual references to Soviet and Chinese visions of
socialist modernity peppered propaganda materials. Revolutionary
rhetoric referred to the Soviet Union as China’s tomorrow and to Soviet
experts as older brothers to their younger (in historical time) Chinese
comrades. Soviet knowledge also circulated freely as Soviet experts entered
China and Chinese delegates and students travelled to Moscow. Women
too appeared in this international exchange as political discourse concerning Sino-Soviet relations stressed newly-defined gender relations
in the workplace and society at large. Within this framework ‘nüjie diyi’
models established particularly close relations with representatives of the
Soviet Union. Tang Sixiao and Liang Jun, for instance, recalled the impact
of photographs of Soviet women and Soviet films on their career decisions,
while male Soviet advisors and female Soviet models occupied an important role in the training of most ‘nüjie diyi’ models. These relationships
challenged the CCP’s position as sole saviour to Chinese women and
nation while they also offered alternative collective identities that mediated
the tie between ‘diyi’ women’s individual experiences and Chinese national
collective.
The story of Tang Sixiao, the first female director of a steel coking
plant, concluded by indicating that if anyone asked Tang how a woman
could persevere next to the furnaces day and night, she would respond
‘when I am faced with difficulties, I look to the Party to guide me’.42 The
position of leadership attributed to the CCP, however, did not conform
to Tang’s experiences as related in propaganda materials. Rather, when
faced with poor quality steel and low production caused by a faulty
furnace, a Soviet expert indicated to Tang the cause of the problem. Later,
when she restored the furnace to its full capacity, the Soviet expert noted
the quality of her work. His words, rather than those of a CCP cadre,
conferred legitimacy on Tang’s abilities. Similarly, Soviet experts occupied
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a prominent position in the training and education of Guo Shulan, China’s
first female high-pressure welder, and Tian Guiying, China’s first female
train dispatcher.
The relationship between Soviet male experts and ‘nüjie diyi’ models in
China suggests the coexistence of multiple gender configurations and
subject positions as a condition of the unevenness of global modernity.
References to Soviet influence mobilised alternative spatial and gendered
geographies of modernisation and development that shifted the focus
from national community to female and technical international communities. Materials linked women together across borders through shared
experiences and presented these female-female bonds as constitutive
of the future. Visual and print media provided examples of Soviet model
women to Chinese women: photograph exhibits appeared in Chinese
cities, while the women of Tractor Driver inspired numerous Chinese
women in urban and rural areas. Meanwhile, Soviet male experts forged
technical relations by sharing expertise with Chinese women. Notably,
the embodiment of progressive knowledge by the male Soviet expert
embedded ‘nüjie diyi’ models within gendered international hierarchies
even as the relationship between male Soviet expert and uneducated poor
Chinese female peasant provided an opportunity for these women to shift
gendered categories associated with progress, production and modernisation. The conditions of Sino-Soviet exchange under which ‘diyi’ women
were trained reinforced an internationalist positioning of women as the
most backward/most progressive and thereby suggested, to some extent,
alternative subject positions for women that circumvented the narrow
boundaries of Chinese national history.
Tian Guiying, new China’s first female train driver, exemplified the
shifting location of ‘nüjie diyi’ models along international lines. Tian went
to work at the Dairen City Railway depot following the liberation of
Dalian by the People’s Liberation Army in 1947. Two events pushed her
to apply to the new training programme for women train drivers. First,
she attended a lecture with the theme that ‘to become really free, women
must take part in social labour. Only when women are economically free
can they find true political and social freedom’. Second, she visited an
exhibition illustrating the role of women train drivers in Russia.43 After
overcoming similar sexist biases and harsh physical conditions encountered
by other ‘nüjie diyi’ models, she and her female classmates completed their
training in time for 1950 International Women’s Day.44
When Tian Guiying initially approached the Soviet expert, comrade
Lisuofu (Chinese transliteration), about advanced training as a driver he
responded by showing her photographs of drivers and pilots – all of whom
were female heroes in the Soviet Union. When she confronted opposition
from male comrades she said to herself ‘if men can [drive a train] so can
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women, the Chinese Communist Youth League guides us, and we also
have the assistance of our Soviet big brothers for success’. In Tian’s story,
Soviet representatives offered different subject positions for the body
of ‘new China’s woman’. They promoted ties between Soviet women
who had already broken gender barriers in their own country and their
Chinese counterparts who were embarking on a similar challenge. Such
efforts to forge bonds of female internationalist identity between the new
women of the Soviet Union and China occurred throughout the 1950s in
print and visual propaganda. For example, the cover of the October 1954
edition of Xin Zhongguo Funü depicted a young Chinese student with her
Soviet classmate gazing at a map of China. The relative positioning of Li
Wenxuan and Yiyueta (Chinese transliteration) invoked a sisterly tie, as
the description of the photograph mentioned the close friendship of these
women and detailed the number of female students acquiring higher
education in various Soviet cities.45
Figure 3: Xin Zhongguo Funü 10 (1954).
Visual and textual rhetoric of the CCP promoted the development of
close friendships as indicative of progress toward worldwide socialist
transformation guided by the Soviet Union and China. For most Chinese
women, however, ties to their Soviet sisters were indirect. Opportunities
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for women to establish international friendships arose for students and
delegates chosen to attend international meetings. For others, including
the majority of ‘nüjie diyi’ models, the Soviet ‘big brothers’ referred to
by Tian Guiying mediated access to international sisterhood. Women –
while they may have been moving into a differently constituted public
arena through performance of certain jobs – largely occupied domestic
terrain while men ventured beyond national borders. The international
public sphere remained, in most respects, a masculinised topography in
which Soviet brothers consolidated an international sisterhood.
Moreover, the familial language used to describe the relationship
between Tian Guiying and Soviet expert Lisuofu relied upon gender and
sibling age hierarchies that rendered Tian the object of Soviet expertise.
While the relationship of Soviet male expert to Chinese female student
established alternative subject positions for ‘nüjie diyi’ models, it attributed
female knowledge to a male source. In this framework, the degree and
modality of gender signification of ‘nüjie diyi’ models differed greatly
from that of international sisterhood. It is tempting to reduce this tension
to the experience of ‘diyi’ women that saw them in daily contact with
male experts versus a rhetoric of international sisterhood. This dynamic
constituted an important component of the gendered experience of internationalism but I caution against dismissing the importance of Soviet
female models to ‘diyi’ women’s experiences and CCP representations of
these experiences. Not only did Soviet products feature prominently in the
Chinese cultural landscape, most stories referred to contact with materials
promoting Soviet heroines as a transformative moment. Women’s agency,
individual experience and collective identity thus were produced not
simply out of the intersection between national and feminist policies but
out of the intersection of nationalist, internationalist and feminist policies.
By locating expertise outside of China, the story of Tian Guiying complicated the manner in which the individual experiences of ‘diyi’ women
were linked to the Chinese national community. In some instances the
CCP mediated this relationship, but elsewhere the Soviet expert conjoined individual to collective. The prominent position of the Soviet
expert in the training of ‘diyi’ women therefore reinforced the position in
which China found itself vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and China’s need for
extensive industrialisation in the early 1950s. The celebrated presence of
Soviet experts in ‘diyi’ stories reminded the reader of the extent to which
China’s historical progress, modernisation and women’s liberation relied
upon international aid in addition to CCP leadership. This then gendered
Sino-Soviet relations by feminising China via metaphoric deployment of
the body of the emancipated woman as representative of liberated China
while also undercutting the primacy of the CCP in the training of liberated
women.
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If we understand Tian Guiying, Guo Shulan and other ‘nüjie diyi’
model workers to represent liberated women and, metaphorically, a new
Chinese nation, then we must ask what type of subject positions could the
Chinese woman – or more generally, China – occupy if the knowledge and
status upon which these positions rested continuously needed to be
provided by a masculinised outsider who conferred this status? On the
national level, participation in the emancipatory project of international
proletarian struggle potentially lessened one dimension of the inequalities present in the international arena. At least in rhetorical utterances,
the CCP did not need to consider the dynamics of class, ideology and
gender as detrimental to the relationship between a new Chinese nation
and Soviet advisors. The common interest in socialist construction
temporarily flattened the uneven international terrain. The revolutionary
gaze projected the future onto the present, facilitating rhetorical reconciliation between socialist nations that glossed over geopolitical struggles.46
This formulation of Sino-Soviet relations appealed to national liberation
but not that of women’s liberation; it invoked a masculinist framework
that erased individual (female) experience to celebrate national and
international socialist collectivities.
Propaganda materials did not consistently erase female experience,
however. The category of liberated woman, represented by ‘nüjie diyi’
models, functioned as subject through salvationist approaches to revolutionary change. This entailed mapping temporal strategies for change
onto the bodies of the women and rendering them signifiers of a new
future. This future, as opposed to a strictly national one, occupied international terrain even as it ordered nations, Parties and people through the
language of temporality. The Soviet Union’s present was China’s future.
Tian Guiying’s thoughts about Soviet learning were ‘I only want this
type of training and education, [so] in the future Chinese women will be
like Soviet women, and be able to participate in the work of industrial
production’.47 Ironically, this strand of the narrative structure provided
only one bridge to the future: the male Soviet expert. Locating knowledge
at a distance from the female body and China in terms of gender and
country of origin thus promoted a proletarian international brotherhood
as mediator of a socialist future. Even as Chinese and Soviet iconography
insisted on the image of the ‘new woman’ as central to the new world
order, these women remained on the national front while men brought
together women’s represented experiences to construct Chinese and
international socialist modernity. Sino-Soviet knowledge/power differentials structured women’s agency in a similar manner to the way in which
the CCP wrote women’s subjectivity. Both were fraught with a tension
between the external providers of self-consciousness and the restructured social orders that privileged human agency as the basis of newly
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self-conscious national bodies acting on the national and international
level.
Maoist subjectivities rested upon a (self) positioning of the Chinese
nation and its citizens as most oppressed within a world context. Like
salvationist modes of thinking that targeted the most exploited (usually
women), Maoism insisted that those individuals and nations furthest
distanced from capitalism were most deserving of being saved. This
formulation, linked to the ‘advantages of backwardness’ theory, privileged
male saviour over emerging female subject as author of social change.
In this vein, the relationship between male Soviet experts and China’s
‘nüjie diyi’ models conspired with CCP salvationist discourse to elide the
feminist potential expressed through association of these women with
modernisation, expertise and historical progress. This was only one level,
however. If we approach the relationship via individual experience rather
than a priori celebration of the power of the masculinist collective, the
bypassing of the CCP/China as source of knowledge also offered an alternative path to socialist construction, a path that held promise for more
open narratives of liberation of women and nation.
Given the proclivity of Chinese reformers and revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century to symbolise oppressed social groups through
the female body, the oppression of women under feudalism, Confucianism
and imperialism marked women as ideal beneficiaries of the new order.
In 1950s national narrative, emancipated women embodied the ‘advantages of backwardness’. I have argued above that as representation this
promoted salvationist theory and delimited the feminist potential of
female labour models. But in the experiences of ‘nüjie diyi’ models they
were uniquely positioned to benefit from the most-advanced Soviet
techniques and acquired learning that placed them ahead of their male
comrades. Knowledge, technology and machinery were not necessarily
the domain of men; nor perhaps, propaganda implied, should they be
masculine-coded categories. Although the CCP propaganda trafficked in
common imagery that linked male bodies to machines and industrialised
progress, and female bodies to the land and natural abundance, mass
media simultaneously problematised simplistic gendered divisions by
avidly reporting on female directors, tractor drivers and similar labour
models.
The active integration in the early 1950s of women into traditionally
male-dominated spheres of employment as well as into newly emerging
fields of technology and machinery was particularly disruptive in terms of
gendered categories of expertise, productivity and modernisation. Since
the Party considered knowledge, technology and machinery to be
crucial to the socialist construction of China and they explicitly linked them
to the female bodies of ‘nüjie diyi’ models, the potential existed within
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official discourse for the future to have a female and feminist face. Within
CCP propaganda about ‘nüjie diyi’ models, an implicit challenge existed
to conventional gender-coding of modernisation discourse that shored up
hegemonic worldviews. But women and the CCP were not free to re-write
the categories entirely. The gender-coding of knowledge, technology,
machinery and notions of progress, in addition to being categories with a
gendered history in China, constituted a world order within which the
CCP sought membership. Although the theory of revolutionary ruptures
and great-leap-forward heroics promised reversal of hierarchies, geopolitical
reality ordered hierarchically the available subject positions written for
women and the CCP. Women’s ties to international knowledge systems
gave them value beyond Chinese borders but at the same time the ways in
which they attained knowledge on behalf of China through a Soviet male
advisor indicated the constraints on a socialist ideology of gender embedded
within international geopolitical structures and discourses.
A complex set of relations existed between ‘nüjie diyi’ model workers
and the metaphoric functions their bodies served in CCP national narratives. ‘Nüjie diyi’ simultaneously occupied multiple subject positions,
each of which recalled particular gendered relations of power within
China and internationally. Some of these held promise for feminist
politics because the presence of ‘nüjie diyi’ models forced changes in
social relations by integrating new actors into the process of social change.
The visibility of the ‘diyi’ female body in 1950s as signifiers of modernity,
progress and knowledge reinforced female presence as central to the
legitimacy of CCP national narratives. Yet, some strands of the national
narratives merely created the conditions under which women could be
spoken as subjects but were not constituted as active subjects on their own
behalf. In still other instances, women’s bodies were disciplined against an
increasingly masculine socialist standard while the Chinese national body
also was subjected to international norms of appearance.
CCP narratives wrote ‘nüjie diyi’ as claiming subject positions denied
them by feudal and imperialist social orders. These new subject positions,
on the telling of the CCP, denoted realisation of the Maoist dictum that
women held up half the sky. The project of constructing a new socialist
ideology of gender based on equality of men and women was part of the
self-conscious movement to provide China with new national images.
These women and their new subject positions signified radical discontinuity with a Confucian past and separation from imperialist powers. They
represented future self-dependency and full mobilisation of resources.
The icon of the ‘new woman’ addressed the critique put forward by
Chinese reformers and revolutionaries as well as Western critics of traditional China that by binding the feet of women and denying her a place
in the nation, China held back men, women and nation.
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Creating the conditions for women to share in the movement of history
proved difficult however. CCP efforts to promote women as agents of
social change entailed creating a socialist ideology of gender that privileged an agency articulated through representation and experience, ideals
and practice, national and international demands, individual and collective
celebration. The resultant tensions inherent in the Chinese national narrative, its attendant ideology of gender, and the symbolic power of the female
body in the 1950s indicate that no clear direction existed concerning the
gendered appearance of a modern Chinese socialist body. Rather, CCP
discourse was rife with slippage from one body to another, one subject
position to another; alternately extolling the promise of a female/feminist
national body and stripping this body of a sexed identity in order to universalise its appeal. But it is precisely this messy coexistence in propaganda about ‘diyi’ women of empowerment and salvation as well as feminist
and masculinist potentialities that makes these women an important but
overlooked component of women’s emancipation.
Through consideration of the intertwined representations and experiences of ‘diyi’ women, I have interrogated officially produced subjectivity
at the nexus of the mutual articulation of individual, nation state and
international feminism in 1950s China. The purpose of this interrogation
was not to demonstrate that national narratives relied upon representations
at odds with the lives of ‘real’ citizens but to investigate how a three-fold
articulation produced female subjectivities and informed the lives of ‘diyi’
models. The productive female body occupied a symbolic place in the
narrative of liberation because of the historical context out of which the
CCP emerged; a context that cemented feminism to modernity to nationalism. As a category of model workers that could continue to grow and
retain relevance to society, however, ‘diyi’ women were constrained by the
very historical setting that vaulted them to the forefront of socialist modernity. Once the first woman performed the job of tractor driver, train
dispatcher or high-pressure welder, the next woman entering the profession need not receive similar recognition. Within the constructs of a linear
narrative of historical progress, the first woman initiated a change in
gender relations in the workplace and adoption of new technology. She
therefore stood at the cutting edge of China’s new history. Once she
asserted through her presence the strength and equality of women and
China then others could follow suit. These subsequent women were participants in the formation of the new national community and historical
progress, although no longer, like ‘diyi’ women, the embodiment of them.
As the CCP celebrated the entrance of women into various nontraditional careers and extolled these women as leaders in both gender
and technological revolutions, a concomitant institutionalisation of
women’s emancipation occurred. Characteristic of the political culture of
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Maoist China, the Party championed the accomplishments of vanguard
persons like Liang Jun, Tang Sixiao, Fu Wenying, Tian Guiying and Sun
Xiaoju as symbolic of the realisation of new social relations of gender,
class and international socialist cooperation. Such declarations of completed transformations belied the attention in early 1950s official
propaganda to the processes that produced subjectivities for ‘diyi’ women.
These subjectivities took shape through the represented experience of
struggle over gendered orders at the local and global level.
Practically and metaphorically, the female body, much in the way official
discourse represented the Chinese nation vis-à-vis the international community, existed on the periphery of a masculinised public sphere; a position
simultaneously disparaged and valued in Maoist political discourse.
China and these women existed in a world where rupture and revolution
gained predominance as the solution to oppression and inequality; that
which was considered least tainted by complicitous participation in
undesirable spheres held the greatest promise to ‘leap forward’. Chinese
poor peasant women such as those represented in the stories of ‘nüjie diyi’
model workers, therefore, simultaneously were the subjects and objects of
liberation politics that took inspiration from the theory of advantages
of backwardness. In this capacity, these female icons of socialist China
promoted state-sponsored feminism as informed by Chinese Communist
Party views of past, present and future world orders and China’s place in
them. ‘Nüjie diyi’ models sat at the nexus of various related, but often
competing, notions of the role of gender in an oppressive past and a liberated future. Explicit recognition by the CCP of the intimate relations
between gendered structures of power and the role of women in society
enabled the rise of female icons. The subjectivity enacted by, for, and
through these women promoted individual actions as essential to historical
transformation. But agency never exists outside larger socio-political and
ideological structures. For these women, their agency was located within
a state-authored feminism. The represented experiences of ‘nüjie diyi’ models
therefore remind us that women participated in individual, national and
international liberation but not, as Marx foretold, under conditions of
their own making.
Notes
I would like to thank David Churchill, Prasenjit Duara, Zang Jian, anonymous reviewers and
members of the Gender and International Relations research circle for their assistance on this
paper. Funding for this research was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
1. On the gaze see Elisabeth Croll, ‘Imaging heaven, collective and gendered dreams in
China,’ Anthropology Today 7:4 (August 1991), pp. 7–12; Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public
Secrets, Public Spaces, Cinema and Civility in China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 62.
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2. China Reconstructs, September–October (1952), back cover; Staff reporter, ‘Five Women’,
China Reconstructs, July–August (1953), pp. 43–4; ‘Nü shi jianshe zuguo de chenda liliang’
[The great strength of women in construction of the motherland], Xin Zhongguo Funü, 3
(1954), p. 1; Xin Zhongguo Funü, 4 (1963), back cover; Zhongguo Funü, 3 (1966), front
cover; ‘Nü toulajishou Liang Jun’, Funü Nongye Laodong Mofan (Quanguo Gongnongbing
Laodong Mofan Daibiaohui, 1950), ‘Nü Tuolajishou’, Mofan Nügong (Wuhan gongren
chubanshe, 1950); Xie Zhongde, ‘Nongmin kan Tuolajishou’ [The Peasants watched Tractor
Driver], Dazhong Dianying, 1953.
3. Liang Jun recalled the response to a 1949 article in Dongbei Ribao that resulted in two
women from Beijing, two from Shanghai, two from Korea and two peasant women who
came to Dongbei to follow in her footsteps. In 1950 Liang Jun established a woman’s
tractor unit with seventeen women. Interview with Liang Jun, May 28th 1997 in Harbin.
4. Tina Mai Chen, ‘Re-forming the Chinese National Body: Emulation Campaigns, National
Narrative, and Gendered Representation in the Early Maoist Period’, PhD dissertation.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999.
5. Phyllis Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women, 1949–1980 (Indiana
University Press, 1983); Elisabeth Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1978); Christina Kelley Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution, Radical
Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (University of California
Press, 1994); Tonglin Lu, Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century Chinese Literature and
Society (State University of New York Press, 1993); Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese
Modernity, The Politics of Reading between West and East (University of Minnesota Press,
1990).
6. ‘Zhongguo “Nüjie diyi” mingdan’, Huaxian Funü Mingren Sidian (Huaxian Chubanshe,
1988), pp. 56–60; ‘Zhongguo de Nüjie diyi’, Zhongguo Funü Baikequanshu (Anhui Renmin
Chubanshe), pp. 292–3.
7. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing to my attention the implications
of different readings of the phrase.
8. Given the hegemonic work of political discourse in Maoist China and the ways in which the
narration of personal stories and national stories acquire similar form and vocabulary,
representations inform the ways which people experience their everyday lives. Elisabeth
Croll, Changing Identities of Chinese Women, Rhetoric, Experience, and Self-perception in
Twentieth-Century China (Hong Kong University Press/Zed Books, 1995); Emily Honig and
Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices, Chinese Women in the 1980s (Stanford University Press,
1988); Emily Honig, ‘Striking Lives: Oral History and the Politics of Memory’, Journal of
Women’s History, 1 (1997), pp. 139–57.
9. Lisa Rofel, ‘Liberation Nostalgia and a Yearning for Modernity’, in Christina Gilmartin,
Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White (eds), Engendering China, Woman, Culture,
and the State (Harvard University Press, 1994). For a genealogy of funü and the Maoist state
discourse of ‘national woman’ see Tani Barlow, ‘Politics and Protocol of Funü’, in Gilmartin
et al., Engendering China.
10. Elisabeth Croll argues that ‘it was the very appropriation and near monopoly of the language of collective celebration which disguised the relevance of the language of individual
experience’ in Maoist China. Elisabeth J. Croll, ‘Imaging heaven, collective and gendered
dreams in China’, Anthropology Today 7(4) (August 1991), p. 7.
11. Yang Huaiqi, ‘Gaowen gaoya nühuohangong Guo Shulan’ [High temperature-high pressure female welder Guo Shulan], Xin Zhongguo Funü 10 (1955), p. 27.
12. Confucian exemplary women were more diverse than representations of these women in
20th century discourse. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender, Fabrics of Power in Late
Imperial China (University of California Press, 1997), p. 215; Susan Mann, Precious Records,
women in China’s long eighteenth century (Stanford University Press, 1997); Janet Theiss,
‘Femininity in Flux: Gendered Virtue and Social Conflict in the Mid-Qing Courtroom’, in
Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (eds), Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities:
An Introductory Reader (University of California Press, 2002).
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Gender and History
13. Christina Kelley Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution, Radical Women, Communist
Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (University of California Press, 1995).
14. Conversation with Ding Juan, Fulian offices (All China Women’s Federation), Beijing, 13
March 1997.
15. On ratified political discourse and mass mobilization Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State, Soviet Mehods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
16. Tina Mai Chen, ‘Proletarian White and Working Bodies in Mao’s China’, positions: east asia
cultures critique 11:2 (2003).
17. ‘Dianche Nüsiji zai peiyangzhong’ [Training Female Streetcar Drivers], Xin Zhongguo Funü,
October 1(1949).
18. Interview with Liang Jun, 28 May 1997.
19. Mark Elvin, ‘Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-person and Heart-mind in China during the last
150 years’, in Thomas P. Kasulis, Roger T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Self as Body
in Asian Theory and Practice (State University of New York Press, 1993).
20. ‘Nü Guotuojishou Fu Wenying’, Zhongguo Funü 3 (1956), p. 18.
21. On masculinisation, Emily Honig, ‘Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red
Guards’, in Brownell and Wasserstrom (eds), Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities,
pp. 255–68; Mayfair Mei-hua Yang, ‘From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State
Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China’, in Mayfair Mei-hua
Yang (ed.), Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China (University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 35–67.
22. ‘Xin Zhongguo diyi ge nü nongmin kexuejia’, Gongren ribao, 22 September 1959, p. 6.
Zhang Qiuxiang is presented as the first female peasant scientist in this 1959 article but the
category of female peasant scientist appeared in earlier propaganda.
23. Xu Fang, ‘Lianjiao chejian nü zhuren’ [Female director of the coking plant], Zhongguo funü
3 (1956), p. 14.
24. Xu Fang, pp. 14–15.
25. Tina Mai Chen, ‘De/Humanizing Production: Model Workers, Machines, and Modernization in Mao’s China’ (paper presented at the New York Conference on Asian Studies,
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 13–15 October 1999).
26. Tian Guiying, ‘Wo yiran qingnian’, Zhoumo, March 1997; ‘Xin Zhongguo de nü huoche’,
Xin Zhongguo Funü, 8 (1951), pp. 1–2; Tian Guiying Kai Huoche (Shanghai: April 1951).
27. ‘Nü Tuolajishou Liang Jun’, Funü Nongye Laodong Mofan (Quanguo Gonggongbing
Laodong Mofan Daibiaohui, 1950), p. 2; ‘Nü Tuolajishou’, Mofan Nügong (Wuhan Gongren
chubanshe, 1950), p. 17.
28. Chen Ji, ‘Xin Zhongguo nü diaodu yuan’ [New China’s first female dispatcher/controller],
Xin Zhongguo Funü 6 (1952).
29. Ono Kazuko, Chinese women in a century of revolution, 1850–1950 (Stanford University
Press, 1989); Peter Zarrow, ‘He Zhen and Anarcho-feminism in China’, Journal of Asian
Studies 4 (1988), pp. 796–813; Mary Backus Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries, Radical
Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911 (Harvard University Press, 1971).
30. Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, Oral and Textual Histories (University of
California Press, 1999).
31. Ba Mu, Tian Guiying kai huoche [Tian Guiying drives a train] (Fangjiao chubanshe, 1951),
p. 2; Gu Dengfeng, ‘Xin Zhongguo de nü huochesiji Tian Guiying’ [New China’s female
train driver Tian Guiying], Xin Zhongguo Funü 8 (1956), pp. 1–2.
32. This phrase peppered almost all stories and articles about ‘nüjie diyi’ models. For example,
see Tian Guiying Kai Huoche (Shanghai: April 1951).
33. Staff Reporter, ‘Five Women’, China Reconstructs, July–August 1953, pp. 43–4.
34. Tani Barlow (ed.), I myself am a woman: selected writings of Ding Ling (Beacon Press,
1989).
35. Interview with Liang Jun, 28 May 1997, Harbin, Heilongjiang, People’s Republic of China.
36. As noted above, women worked outside the home, particularly in textiles, in other periods
of Chinese history. Bray, Technology and Gender. What is of importance here is that Liang
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37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
295
Jun reiterated this formulation of historical disjuncture and women’s opportunities scripted
by the CCP.
Mingyan Lai, ‘Female but not Woman: Genders in Chinese Socialist Texts’, Genders 21
(1995), p. 296.
‘Nü Tuolajishou, Liang Jun’, p. 1.
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, A Derivative Discourse
(University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
‘Nü Tuolajishou, Liang Jun’, p. 5.
Tonglin Lu, ‘Introdution’, in Tonglin Lu (ed.), Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century, p. 3.
‘Lianjiao chejian nü zhuren’, Zhongguo Funü (1956) 4, pp. 14–15.
Nan Ting, ‘Tien Kui-ying Earns a Licence’, People’s China, 1 April 1950.
Wang Yaping, ‘Huoche Siji Tian Guiying’, Mofan Nügong (Wuhan Chubanshe, 1950); also
Tian Guiying Kai Huoche (Shanghai, 1951).
Of the over 2,400 Chinese students studying in the Soviet Union in 1954, 602 were women.
Xin Zhongguo Funü, 10 (1954), p. 1.
On the geopolitical and ideological level tensions existed between Mao Zedong and Soviet
leaders since 1949, Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners, Stalin,
Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford University Press, 1993); Michael M. Sheng, Battling
Western Imperialism, Mao, Stalin, and the United States (Princeton University Press, 1997).
‘Xin Zhongguo de Nü Huoche’, Xin Zhongguo Funü, 8 February 1951, p. 2.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003.