In reading Susan Glosser’s “Chinese Visions of Family and State”, we are able to register the heavy importance of the personal in spawning the New Culture Movement. The call for industrialisation by mid 20thcentury young urban males in China simultaneously aimed to dismantle and reconfigure the family unit. Spearheading the project to disentangle themselves from their overbearing fathers, fiscal co-dependency and minimise the inventory of filial obligations, Yi Jiayue and Lou Dunwei cite superficially Marxist theory to figure themselves in the wider national context to achieve those ends. When we read Glosser against Ko, Liu and Karl’s The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, we can further see that the New Youth’s purported understanding of women’s liberation, industrialisation and the patriarchy is very limited by the male experience it largely drew on. Having intellectual tunnel-vision and clutching at theoretical straws, the proponents’ hang-ups about the family system only made visible young male and elite female urban struggles.
Yi Jiayue’s criticism of patriarchal authority was that it stood in the way of personal freedoms of men such as himself, obstructed progress for the wider Chinese world[1] and that the family institution which it that world was hinged on also inserted itself into “every aspect of [young men’s’ lives”.[2] Since Confucian ideology pervaded all matter of state – making the personal and political synonymous – the New Youth perceived the family unit as symptomatic of national failures and illnesses. Taking remedial action, the New Youth’s advocacy for industrialisation was because of their belief that it was a process capable of destroying the family system that was causing them so much distress.[3]
Interestingly, however, the New Cultural Movement’s belief that it was servicing progress and helping women realise their personhood was largely erroneous or at least exclusive.[4] The main form of progress it was affecting was not just that of young urban males’ everyday-life experiences, but the achievement of placing young Chinese men in some sort of historical moment. The New Culture radicals’ eagerness to participate in history and locate the movement in an international intellectual conversation. Although modernization and industrial mobilization may have distanced men from their family, prevented the creation of “extended families”, their antiquated ideals and led them to deferring the start-up of a new generation because of their renewed focus on factory work or intellectual engagement, as Glosser notes, the New Youth’s understanding of the past was a cursory one which was to the end of reenacting “revolution in the present”.[5] Importantly, the movement neglected the experiences of women in rural society who were adversely affected by the very industrialisation the men urged for. As Ko et al note, “laboring women and [their] rural economic hardship remained largely invisible” and male dominated discussions about the oppressed female position were largely glossed over.[6] Thus, although one may look positively on the Movement’s prohibition of “taking concubines, collecting slaves etc…”, the reality of the situation was that China’s insertion into the capitalist system was detrimental, primarily to women, in numerous ways. The Youth’s desperation for the destruction of the family unit through industrialisation and espousing Marxist ideology to justify that particular route, would thus go on to destroying some families economically. “Women, whose family livelihoods were being ruined” at the hands of “competition in silk and cotton from Japan, British-colonised India, and the revival of the American South” were not considered when rethinking the family and the nation. [7]
Ultimately, we are able to see that the superficial applications of Marxist ideology, a theory which itself focussed on class-based struggle at the expense of treating the women’s plight, in its attempt to ease the burden young urban males were subjected to by their families as well as well as in marking itself as a moment on the Chinese historical timeline. As a result of such exclusivity, the New Culture Movement failed to address the working class struggles of China, the problem of women’s rights and intersection at which those issues compound.
[1] Glosser, Susan L. Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953. University of California Press, 2003, p.9
[2] Ibid, p.7
[3] Ibid, p.6
[4] Ibid, p.17
[5] Ibid, p.5G
[6] Liu, Lydia He, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. Columbia University Press, 2013 p.32
[7] Ibid, p.31-32