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This article is part of a large project on feminism in the People's Republic of China. Focusing on the flagship publication of the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), Women of China, during the first 17 years of the PRC, I intend to recapture a past that had barely any chance to become known to the English-speaking world before it was "forgotten" in China.1 The article does not claim to be a comprehensive study of the magazine, which published 238 issues by the end of 1966.2 Rather it highlights a few of its features to illustrate socialist state feminists' cultural practices in the socialist revolution. The term "socialist state feminists" refers to women Communist Party members in powerful positions who consciously promoted women's empowerment and equality between men and women. Although many of these women may never have defined themselves as "feminist," I use the term to distinguish them from Communists who had little commitment to gender equality, to establish a feminist genealogy in 20th-century China and to locate their activism in the context of global feminist movements.
Going further than previous scholarship on literary and visual representation of gender and class in popular arts and media of the Mao era,3 this study extends a gender lens to the historical process of producing symbols, icons and discourses in the production of "CCP propaganda" or "Maoist gender discourse." Aiming to address the concealment and erasure of a socialist feminist history, it treats Women of China as a dynamic site of feminist contention through revealing the behind-the-scenes stories that were crucial to understand feminist struggles in socialist China. It uses interviews with eight retired senior officials of the ACWF and three generations of editors of Women of China conducted in Beijing from 2006 to 2010, in addition to memoirs and biographies of women in the CCP published in the past two decades in China. Internal documents compiled by the ACWF since the late 1980s also provide indispensible contextualized information on the internal workings of the ACWF and the relationship between this gender-based mass organization and the Party.
Socialist state feminist practices express both identification with and divergence from the male-dominated power centre. Close attention to the ways in which...