Recomendaciones para la dirección de la escuela

Compared to later years, relationships between men and women in the Jiangxi Soviet

were known by the public to be “rather loose”.113 Positive achievements such as gaining

women’s economic independence and the promulgation of pro-female marriage regulations were followed by a more widespread, ‘bottom-up’ sexual liberation wave. During this wave, unmarried cohabitation, triangle love affairs, adultery, easy breakups, frequent divorce and sexual indulgence were common scenes in daily life.

In his memoirs, Cai Xiaoqian蔡孝乾(1908-1982), a Taiwanese communist and one-time

minister of the Internal Affair Ministry of the Chinese Soviet Republic, remarked on several love triangles among the high-ranking communist members in order to

demonstrate how intriguing and disordered sexual relations in Jiangxi Soviet were.114 The

affair of Li Bozhao李伯钊(1911-1985), Yang Shangkun杨尚昆(1907-1998) and Wang

Guanlan王观澜(1906-1982) was recounted by Cai as a typical example of this disorder.

Li was first married to Yang when she studied in Moscow. Soon after she arrived in Jiangxi, she began living with Wang as a couple. However, she left Wang and returned to Yang as soon as he came to the Soviet region. 115 According to Cai, this kind of love disturbance was a sign of the discrepancy that existed between marriage legislation and daily practice:

.… Here (in the Jiangxi Soviet) is no such thing as “jiehun”[marriage ceremony],

neither the official marriage registration (although people were required by the Marriage Regulations to register their marriage or divorce in the xiang or shi

Soviet government). The Communist Party stressed the “fact”. In the Soviet area, a man and a woman will be naturally recognized as “husband and wife” as long as they live together. It does not matter if they registered or not. 116

113

Zhu Hongzhao 朱鸿召, Yan’an richang shenghuo zhong de Lishi:1937-1947延安日常生活中的历史(1937-1947) [History in the Daily Life of Yan’an, 1937-1947] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2007), 242.

114

Cai Xiaoqian蔡孝乾, Taiwan ren de changzhengj jilu: Jiangxi Suqu-Hongjun xicuan huiyi 台湾人的长征记录: 江 西苏区-红军西窜回忆[A Taiwanese record of the Long March: Jiangxi Soviet] (Taibei: Haixia xueshu chubanshe, 2002),120-126.

115 _{In theJiangxi Soviet government, Li Bozhao was the leader of the Art Bureau, Yang was the vice president of the}

central party school and Wang was the vice minister of the land ministry.

116

Such unregulated love and marriage behavior, Cai believed, was caused by a distorted tendency towards sexual liberation among the young Chinese communists. It was a trend

that came to be called beishui zhuyi杯水主义[the glass of water theory], which followed

a theory of sexual ethics that had been created by Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952). A Bolshevik feminist from Soviet Russia, Kollontai proposed that “in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water.”117 As the first official female Ambassador in the world, and as the

secretary of the Women’s Department of the Comintern, Kollontai became an idol that

many Chinese female communists endeavored to follow.118 Liu Ying 刘英(1905-2002),

a leader of the Youth League trained in the USSR, was cited by Cai as a pious follower of

Kollontai’s theory: after she lost her husband in 1927, Liu married Wu Xiuquan 伍修权

(1908-1997) via a third party introduction in Jiangxi, but then declared a divorce two

days later. In 1935, she and Zhang Wentian 张闻天(1900-1976) became lovers and were

finally married in 1936.119

Whatever Cai’s beliefs on the subject, the major disturbances concerning issues of love that occurred during the CCP’s early years were more products of the chaotic wartime conditions than a result of the Party’s failed marriage legislation or a general moral decline. Before the CCP acquired the official recognition of the central government and established a stable base in 1937, the consummation and dissolution of marital unions between male CCP leaders and local female partisans were usually subjected to frequent and unexpected upheaval, caused by military migration and wartime casualties. Liu

Ying’s first marriage serves as a good example of this fact: she married Lin Wei林蔚, a

top Party leader in Hunan in 1927. One week after they were married, Liu was sent alone

117

Originally seen in Clara Zetkin’s “My Recollections of Lenin, an Interview on the Woman Question”, which she held with Lenin in Moscow in the autumn of 1920. Collected in The Emancipation of Women;From the Writings of V. I. Lenin.(New York, International Publishers, 1969).

http://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm

118

In 1919, Alexandra Kollontai was appointed the first female government minister in Soviet Russia. Later, she worked as the sectary of the Women’s Department of the Comintern from 1921 to 1923. In 1923, she was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, and later to Sweden. For more information see Clements, Barbara Evans. Bolshevik Feminist: the Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1979.

119

Cai Xiaoqian,123. Also see Liu Ying, Liu Ying zishu刘英自述 [Memoir of Liu Ying]. Beijing: People’s Press, 2005.

to Shanghai for a Party mission. As Liu Ying told in her memoir: “Both of us thought we could be together soon…who knew that this brief time apart would become a permanent

separation.” 120 She was informed of Lin’s arrest and execution by the GMD not long

after he had left her.

The marriages consummated during the Jiangxi Soviet period were particularly unstable and short-lived. Except for the case of Lin Biao, all ten future marshals of the PRC were married at least once during the Jiangxi Soviet period. However, only two of these couples had marriages that survived to the end: Zhu De and Kang Keqing as well as Nie

Rongzhen 聂荣臻 (1899-1992) and Zhang Ruihua张瑞华(1909-1995).121 When the

Red Army retreated from the Jiangxi base, only thirty women were allowed to take part in the Long March. Most of them were the wives of high-ranking Party leaders, like He Zizhen and Kang Keqing. This figure shrank to just nineteen women by the time they had reached Shaanxi. All the others were left in Jiangxi, captured, executed by the Nationalist troops or forced to remarry because of poverty.122 In the midst of a violent and

unpredictable revolution, therefore, these couples saw little point in maintaining fidelity after becoming physically separated.

4.5 Conclusion

In the marriage revolution launched by the May Fourth elites, the Chinese cities had heard a rising voice that was calling for unconditional marriage freedoms, the rejection of traditional matrimony, and even the abolishment of the marriage system altogether. The newly formed Chinese Communist Party was viewed by the common people at that time as the most distinguished representative of these radical ideas, as exemplified in its promise for women’s liberation and its members’ open embrace of Engels’ anarchic marriage theories.

While the Chinese communists promoted the achievement of women’s economic independence as an elixir for all their social problems, this elixir turned out not to have

120 _{Liu Ying, 30.} 121

Appendix A.

122

been as effective as promised. Chinese women, rural or urban, traditional or modern, illiterate or educated were still largely restricted in the domestic sphere by the traditional gender conceptions that upheld man’s social superiority even after women had gained access to economic independence. The conflict between the socialist marriage ideal and traditional Chinese marriage customs was made more intense when the CCP’s marriage reform law was introduced to the Jiangxi Soviet by urban-born policy-makers. In the two pro-women marriage codes that were promulgated in 1931 and 1934, marriage freedom was extended in order to embrace conceptions of free love, ex parte divorce and de facto

marriage. However, because these new laws violated the deeply-rooted traditional gender relations of China’s rural society, where a husband’s domination over his wife was ingrained, the implementation of these laws provoked strong opposition among the peasant masses. When this opposition eventually caused an interruption of the recruiting schedule of the Red Army, which was universally recognized by the Party as vital to the revolution itself, the marriage problem raised serious concern from the temporal and later CCP leaders.

While the common Party members and Red Army soldiers were repeatedly warned not get involved in romantic love affairs that might harm revolutionary morale, the marriage practices within the Party leadership during this period were a tangled mixture of both radical and conservative approaches. On the one hand, with a declared preference for consensual union- a marriage ideal recommended by Engels, some CCP members turned to relationships of convenience that served to challenge the traditional and ‘feudal’ marriage and family systems, cover their secret missions or simply satisfy their natural desires; on the other hand, within the Party circles where the traditional patriarchal hierarchy was still accepted as the norm, women were constantly assigned as trophies to the male political leaders and generals, according to their rank. Also, from this period forward the Party began to interfere with its members’ personal lives by applying strict censorship to their relationships under the auspices of serving the considerations of military safety and the Party’s impression on the local peasants, which then became a lasting policy of the Party.

The quick collapse of the Jiangxi Soviet regime in 1934 annulled all the cosmopolitan marriage reforms and removed the urban-born leadership from the Party’s policy-making inner circle. With the rise of a more pragmatic and rural-born Party leadership, the schedule of marriage reform was minimized from the CCP’ s pre-1949 agenda of total women’s liberation in order to avoid gender conflict and to meet the wartime expediency for military recruitment. This change will be discussed in the next chapter.

Chapter 5