Slaves of the Family or Fighters for Revolution?

What does the future hold for Chinese women? As U.S. imperialism ramps up its pressure on the Chinese deformed workers state, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has doubled down on strengthening the family—and all the reactionary social controls this entails for women. Just look at the introduction of the so-called divorce “cooling off” law, mandating a 30-day waiting period before the separation process can start. The bureaucracy is exhorting women to have three children, and yet the marketization of the economy has destroyed social services which free up women’s time. As a result, women cannot afford to have more children while they already balance working and caretaking. Worse is out in the countryside, where there have been massive scandals of “chained women,” abducted domestic slaves bought as brides since the introduction of Reform and Opening Up.

In reinforcing the family and continuing its alliance with the capitalist class, the CPC deepens the internal contradictions of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and undermines the capacity of China to defend itself against a belligerent United States. There are two paths for women in the coming period: they will either return to domestic slavery under the diktats of the CPC or they can emerge as revolutionary fighters at the head of an internationalist working-class movement to combat U.S. imperialism.

How Did We Get Here?

The condition of women in China has always reflected the level of social development throughout the country. The destruction of the semicolonial economy by the Chinese Revolution created the foundation for real improvements in the condition of women just as it opened the way for national development. For the first time, women could receive a share of land equal to that of men and were free to initiate divorce. Despite China’s material poverty, serious attempts were made to socialize domestic labor with collective kitchens and housework—allowing upwards of 70 percent of women to participate in the labor force by the late ’70s. Communist women were among the radical vanguard of land reform. Yet Maoist China’s enormous bureaucratic distortions, which made it impossible to raise productivity with anything but force, eventually brought the materially poor and isolated economy to a paralyzing halt—creating a crisis which eventually saw Deng Xiaoping’s right-wing market reforms come to the fore.

There have been immense contradictions in this development. After more than three decades of China’s integration into the world economy, women have become integrated at the heart of the socialized production process. At the same time, exploitation and the bondage of the family degrade the new freedoms of working women. Chinese women have experienced real advances in their social status relative to other women in the Third World and are often politically conscious of this. Centrally, this is because the capitalist class does not have state power, and the commanding heights of the economy remain collectivized, which has allowed the regime to redirect massive foreign investment into productive internal development. While millions of Chinese workers have been lifted out of poverty, the CPC’s total accommodation of international capitalism has come at an immense cost. The dismantling of collective care systems, rural childcare, healthcare, and care for the elderly have been a social catastrophe. This has come with the return of all the “old muck,” as Marx put it. Take the return and skyrocketing of the bride price or the social preference for boys to inherit property within the family, which has produced a gigantic gender imbalance of 35 million more men. As a result, ancient social relations have been amalgamated with the heights of modern industry.

China’s social progress has exacerbated the contradictions at the core of the CPC’s growth model: economic development has hinged on integration into the U.S.-dominated world order and growing capitalism internally. The poverty in the countryside has hindered national development, but China’s access to the globalized economy has allowed it to partially overcome this poverty by producing for export. Today, the most powerful threat to China comes from the U.S., which is tearing up the international economy and hiking up national barriers such as tariffs to shut China out of global markets. The CPC’s national-bureaucratic interests mean that its response to Trump exacerbates national divisions between U.S. and Chinese working classes rather than seeking to mobilize U.S. workers against the American Empire.

Facing growing external pressure, Xi Jinping and the bureaucracy demand women follow a “new culture of marriage and childbearing.” Rather than further alienate or even expropriate the capitalists, the CPC has sought to shore up their old model of providing mass labor to fuel cheap manufacturing by promoting mass pregnancy. This is what is behind the “Three Child Policy,” which accompanies an ideological push for traditional values of filial piety. Ultimately, the CPC’s approach will mean tearing women out of the workforce, taking along with them a large potential source of political, economic, and even military power. Unable to maintain its collaboration with the U.S. and constrained by its national-bureaucratic interests, a flailing CPC is attempting to maintain social stability at the expense of women and the working class rather than at the expense of U.S. imperialism. Rather than expropriating the capitalists and providing quality healthcare, schools and full employment, the CPC leaves rural children incapacitated by tapeworm infections and students to waste their youth preparing for the gaokao (extremely competitive college entrance exam), while college graduates from elite schools still can’t get jobs. Yet young people are supposed to have more kids. Dividing the population into separate households undermines the productivity of the economy, as millions of individual households daily expend resources on the constant menial chores of cooking, cleaning and childcare. In short, the CPC is propping itself up using the very social relics which the revolution laid the basis to destroy.

In the coming period, it will be essential for revolutionaries to link the struggle for women’s emancipation to the defense of China, not least because the CPC’s reactionary answer to the breakup of the liberal order expresses itself most clearly on the terrain of the woman question. Whereas in the home all sorts of reactionary ideologies fester—a reflection of the degradation of women and their isolation from society—freeing up women for political and economic work would make China a powerful beacon for women in Asia and around the world. While the family is used to plug the holes of decaying social services destroyed by marketization, whose devastating effects were on full display with “Zero Covid,” easing the burden on the home through quality childcare and pensions could serve as a rallying point for working men and women. However, every step toward socializing the functions of the family and freeing women from the home requires breaking the domination of the international economy by U.S. imperialism.

The State of the Feminist Movement

The feminist movement demonstrates the problem of fighting for women’s rights absent an anti-imperialist perspective. The bureaucracy has fueled a feminist movement which is hostile to the workers state and has become the darling of Western media bent on using activists justifiably outraged at the condition of women as a battering ram against the regime. Now that the CPC is herding women back into the home, the feminist movement has been subjected to severe and escalating repression, a turn away from its former regulated legitimacy in Chinese society. It is essential that revolutionaries defend feminist protesters against state repression! The brutal repression feminists face will only drive them further into the arms of the imperialists.

But the inability of the feminist movement to really change the situation of women is due to its liberal perspective and strategy. The problems of the feminist approach are encapsulated in the cultural flash point of feminist comedian Yang Li. Her jokes about men’s incompetence have ignited controversy. In response, many men have opted to defend the status quo and the bureaucracy by arguing that bourgeois gender politics from the West will destroy China and the unity of the working class. Such a reaction reflects the fact that the feminist strategy cannot, nor does it intend to, unite Chinese working people against social inequality. Rather, it ignites Chinese nationalism, which posits that the strength of the nation to resist foreign incursion starts with a defense of the family. It would make the women’s movement all the stronger to link the fight to free women to the defense of China by demonstrating how the CPC’s reactionary policies for women undermine the conditions of the working masses as a whole.

Feminists are rightly enraged that the CPC is placing heavy pressure on women to bear three children, and many have turned to such separatist methods as birth and marriage strikes. While “lying flat” and individually rejecting familial obligations may be possible for urban petty-bourgeois women, this is not the case for working-class and peasant women, who rely on their families to pool together the resources to survive. Fighting against the bureaucracy’s reactionary policies by solely focusing on women’s right to refuse motherhood means feminists are led into the open arms of the capitalist class who prefer women remain exploitable while championing the “freedoms” of bourgeois women. An alliance of feminists with the Chinese capitalist class means preparing the way for the destruction of socialized property in China, which would throw back women’s conditions even further.

After the return of capitalism in the former Soviet Union and workers states of East Europe, women were not liberated but bore the brunt of the ensuing social decay. Massive deindustrialization threw women out of the workforce and drove them back to “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church). Religion festered once again with support from the newly installed capitalist states. Gone were quick divorces, accessible abortions, heavily subsidized rents and free childcare and healthcare—all liquidated along with the workers states. Despite the Stalinist bureaucracy’s enforcement of the family as the “fighting unit for socialism” and the material poverty of the workers states relative to the West, the collectivized economy made it possible for women to achieve social and economic independence beyond what women experienced in the wealthiest capitalist countries. Feminists, in allying with the imperialists for counterrevolution, mobilized for one of the single most regressive social transformations for women.

Without a perspective to link women’s emancipation with the defense of the Chinese Revolution, feminists are left with the blunt instrument of moralism to confront nationalism, thereby deepening the divide between petty-bourgeois women who look to the West and working-class people who see the CPC as essential to combat hostile U.S. imperialism. Against the feminist approach, which relies on forming alliances based on who has more progressive ideas about women, revolutionaries must rebuild the women’s movement on the basis of an anti-imperialist program. It will only be possible to break through Chinese nationalism by uniting with the working masses who have a material interest in fighting to confront the CPC, rebuilding public services, and socializing the functions of the family.

Maoist Opposition

In reaction to the embrace of feminism by the imperialists and some Chinese capitalists, a significant Maoist current has sought to criticize feminism from a class standpoint. While many Maoists recognize the petty-bourgeois character of the feminist movement and the cynical way capitalists use feminism to attract a female consumer base, they draw the wrong political conclusions that women’s rights are a distraction from the class struggle and will be achieved merely by further social development. If Marxists pursue radical anti-capitalist measures but have no program to fight for women’s liberation through means which unite the working class and oppressed as a whole, the antagonism between men and women will remain. This is why the women’s movement has come to be dominated by pro-Western liberal feminists. What the Maoists dismiss is the need to combine the struggles for women’s liberation and for broader national development by opposing the CPC’s accommodation of world imperialism.

For many Maoists, the Cultural Revolution offers an example of how the women’s movement should go forward in connection with the class struggle. However, the Cultural Revolution demonstrates that the key obstacle to national development and women’s liberation is the isolation of the Chinese workers state and the CPC’s strangulation of any possibility for international revolution. Pushed out of the ruling circle of the CPC following the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Mao sought to reassert his power by appealing to the anti-bureaucratic left-wing sentiments of the youth who were disaffected by the stiff social hierarchy of New China. Rather than extend the conquests of the revolution internationally, Mao sought to mobilize the Chinese masses in an ideological purge of elements within the party that opposed him, who he claimed were an emerging capitalist class. While Mao and the “rightists” in the party pursued different strategies, both sought to defend China in a way that upheld the privileges of the bureaucracy. Constrained by their alliance with Mao, Red Guards could only combat capitalist ideas through moralist purges of “capitalist roaders” rather than create the material conditions to tackle the roots of the bureaucracy by overcoming the isolation of the workers state. The limitations of their allegiance to Mao led the Red Guards down a more and more hysterical path, turning against working people and dividing the country between wings of the party rather than uniting workers and students in political struggle against the bureaucracy. The idealist strategy of the Cultural Revolution was not unlike that of the feminists, attempting to purge those whom they claim have reactionary ideas rather than putting forward a program to unite the working class around their common needs. As a result, both could only deepen the divisions within the working class.

Nevertheless, Mao had unleashed a powerful mass movement which had been ignited by the limitations of “socialism in one country” and when he felt his power was secured, he mobilized the People’s Liberation Army to bloodily repress it. This was because Mao’s autarkic model and the CPC opposition to him both proceeded from the need to maintain peaceful coexistence with imperialism, a fact which was graphically shown a few years later when Mao sought the friendship of Richard Nixon and U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union—during U.S. imperialism’s war in Vietnam no less.

For many women, the Cultural Revolution was a massively politicizing event. They attacked the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits) together with male Red Guards and vowed to destroy everything that survived from backward, prerevolutionary China. The Red Guards and mass media emphasized that women should devote themselves to political and military work. However, the Stalinist program of Mao and the CPC relies on the family as an essential tool for promoting social cohesion and obedience. Even as collectivized property provides the basis to socially integrate women, the bureaucracy can only remain in power by suppressing the political development of the working masses and especially working women.

A Perspective to Go Forward

Women’s liberation is not possible without confronting the imperialist system which oppresses China and isolates it on the global stage, exacerbating all the contradictions which the CPC has maintained in society. Nor can the working class wrest political power from the CPC without taking up the cause of women’s liberation.

The women’s movement must link up with the working class in fighting for free healthcare, free childcare, and full retirement benefits for the elderly. This would not only take the burden of care off the shoulders of women, but also provide a higher standard of living for the whole working class and peasantry. While women drown under the weight of the family, high unemployment is destroying the futures of millions of youth. In fighting to build up social services, the women’s movement can mobilize the unemployed to fight for jobs in socialized care, education for new workers, and the construction of new facilities.

A strong Chinese women’s movement would also rally women internationally, particularly in Asia and the Third World, to fight for a revolutionary working-class answer to their oppression. Rather than the CPC’s strategy of building alliances with the national elites in the Global South at the expense of the workers, revolutionaries should fight to extend China’s productive capacity to the Third World in a way that strengthens the working class. For example, by building factories under fully unionized conditions and bringing women into the organized workforce. This can provide a concrete alternative to the pro-Western strategy of the feminists, which divides the working class and cannot link the struggles for women’s and national liberation.

The CPC’s nationalist strategy means strangling the working class and reinforcing the family in favor of illusory “peace” with world imperialism. Only by counterposing itself to the CPC can the Chinese women’s movement find steadfast allies in the working class. Onward to an international anti-imperialist women’s movement!