Party Family

Ens Manning Kimberley

Description

The Party Family explores the formation and consolidation of the state in revolutionary China through the crucial role that social ties-specifically family ties-played in the state's capacity to respond to crisis before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. Central to these ties, Kimberley Ens Manning finds, were women as both the subjects and leaders of reform. Drawing on interviews with 163 participants in the provinces of Henan and Jiangsu, as well as government documents and elite memoirs, biographies, speeches, and reports, Manning offers a new theoretical lens-attachment politics-to underscore how family and ideology intertwined to create an important building block of state capacity and governance.As The Party Family details, infant mortality in China dropped by more than half within a decade of the PRC's foundation, a policy achievement produced to a large extent through the personal and family ties of the maternalist policy coalition that led the reform movement. However, these achievements were undermined or reversed in the complex policy struggles over the family during Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-60).

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Ethnic studies
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 août 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501715532
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 25 Mo

Extrait

THE PARTY FAMILY

THE PARTY FAMILY Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China

Kimberley Ens Manning

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Photographs in chapter 8 by John Manning, June 1958, China.

Copyright © 2023 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2023 by Cornell University Press.

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Manning, Kimberley Ens, 1970– author. Title: The party family : revolutionary attachments and the gendered  origins of state power in China / Kimberley Ens Manning. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2023. | Includes  bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022051753 (print) | LCCN 2022051754 (ebook) | ISBN  9781501715518 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501771415 (paperback) | ISBN  9781501715525 (epub) | ISBN 9781501715532 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Families—Political aspects—China—History—20th century. |  Interpersonal relations—Political aspects—China. | Women—Political  activity—China. | China—Politics and government—20th century—Social  aspects. Classification: LCC DS775.7 .M34 2023 (print) | LCC DS775.7 (ebook) | DDC  951.05—dc23/eng/20221115 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051753 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051754

Cover art: Photo by John Manning, June 1958, China.

In loving memory of Scott Manning, 1971–2020

Contents

Preface List of Abbreviations Editorial Notes Major Historical Events Map of China

Introduction: Family Ties as Political Attachments

Par t I.STATES OF ACTIVISM 1. The May Fourth Movement 2. The Chongqing Coalition 3. The Long March to Yan’an 4. Land Reform

Par t II.STATE CAPACITY AND CONTENTION 5. Maternal Bodies 6. Filial Brides 7. Household Managers 8. Shock Troops 9. Leaders

Conclusion: The Attached Politics of State Capacity and Contention

Appendix 1. Glossary Appendix 2. Individuals Interviewed Appendix 3. Research Methods and Sources Notes Works Cited Index

ix xvii xix xxi xxiii

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281 293 299 305 333 369

Preface

In June 1958, my father disembarked from a German cargo ship onto a pier in Tianjin. Just twentyone years old, Dad was backpacking his way across the South Pacific, Asia, and Europe, filing stories with Canadian newspapers about his experiences along the way. Of the more than two dozen countries through which Dad would pass, including Afghanistan and the Philippines, it was China that left the biggest impression. The sheer enormity of the country, its history, and the still new political project that was the People’s Republic of China (PRC) captivated his imagination and upset many of his preconceptions about the world order and the place of women in it. One of my father’s most enduring memories of his twoweek visit was hearing a train whistle while standing on a railway platform. When he looked up, a young woman engineer waved and grinned down at him. As Dad would share with me much later, it had never occurred to his younger self that a woman could drive a train. Several of my father’s photos from that brief trip appear on the book’s cover and in chapter 8. A little more than thirty years later, in August 1988, I arrived in Beijing to study Mandarin, knowing little of my dad’s early travels or the impact that it had on his own studies. And yet my own postsecondary studies tracked a very similar route to his: intensive Mandarin training (Dad in Taipei, me in Beijing) while pursuing an undergraduate degree in Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. It was only on completion of our undergraduate degrees that our paths parted ways. After my father graduated, he did not speak Mandarin again until he spoke with me on the phone in Beijing. I, however, have spent nearly twentyfive years trying to understand that moment he landed in Tianjin. In spring of 1958, Chairman Mao’s call to make a Great Leap Forward (GLF) was being enthusiastically embraced by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) activ ists and leaders across the country. A movement designed to surpass the United Kingdom and the United States in steel production, the GLF mobilized the entire population, including women, to participate in collective agricultural and indus trial projects, while socializing many forms of household labor. And yet by June, serious points of contention marked the project. This gendered conflict, and the familial politics which bound and shaped it, would have serious implications for China’s rural populace. By 1960, the last year of the GLF, hundreds of millions would be suffering from malnutrition, and tens of million were dead or dying. The GLF famine would prove the deadliest famine the world has ever known.

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