Socialist Industrialization and Gender Norm Diffusion: A Subnational Approach

• In Event: Gender, Ethnicity and Identity Politics in Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

The notion of gender equality constitutes a critical component in the communist ideology. Whether it was implemented, and actually promoted equality under the communist rule, however, remains as a debatable topic among scholars across various disciplines. We join this debate by introducing newly discovered historical data in a cross-national setting. Stemming from state security concerns, two massive operations of industrial evacuations were conducted – in the 1940s in the Soviet Union and in the 1960s in Communist China respectively. As the destination regions of these two movements, the Soviet Kazakhstan and western provinces in China received a massive inflow of industrial population from the historically developed regions in the country, with the majority of whom presumably being more adherent to the official communism ideology which includes gender equality norms. We argue that the rearrangement of industrial allocation represents an exogenous shock which essentially exposed the local population in the hinterland to social norms of gender equality brought about by the new pro-socialism settlers. The cultural transmission has solidified and persisted through generations despite the waning or even demise of the communist ideology. By merging the historical data on enterprise relocation in the 20th century into contemporary geo-coded subnational survey data, we show that in both Kazakhstan and China, localities which received more evacuated enterprises and had more access to interact with relocated workers in the past demonstrate a higher level of gender equality norms. Our study is expected to contribute to three main strands of literature. First, we join this debate and conclude that communist industrial planning could activate the social diffusion of gender equality. Second, our study hopes to bring post-communist comparative research back into comparative politics given the fact that the communist influence did not die out with the end of the Cold War. Rather, it exerts a persistent impact on contemporary social norms and political practice. Methodologically, our study is one of the first to adopt a comparative setting while delving into subnational variations in both countries. By exploring how uneven historical shocks produced rugged distribution of social norms till today, we show the surpassingly "sticky" legacies imposed by communist regimes.

Authors

• Zhihao WANG, Nanjing University

• Liu Peng, University of Minnesota