Couples Activism and Socialist State Formation: A Practice Account of Informal Institutional Change, 1938-1978

• In Event: Republican and Revolutionary State Building: Continuities, Contradictions, and Transformations

Abstract

This paper considers the role that elite and mid-level Chinese Communist Party (CCP) couples played in the state formation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Based on interviews as well as published biographies and memoirs, the paper argues that CCP couples effectively bridged the often otherwise gender-segregated operation of party power and state building through the close interactions of their members, even as accepted practices about how the bridging should be carried out shifted across time. Between 1938 and 1959, a form of companionate couples activism prevailed in which spouses held separate official portfolios and, at times, coordinated their offices to achieve diplomatic and social policy goals. This “different but equal” approach to state building stood as a moral rebuke to Guomindang practices in which wives primarily served as helpmeets to their husbands. As party norms and practices shifted, however, a form of patron-client couples activism began to prevail. Between 1959 and 1978, patron-client couples activism largely undermined state institutions and ultimately diminished the standing of women leaders and associated projects of women’s liberation within the party and state. In contrast with the widely held assumption that informal institutions only change very slowly my study of gendered practices reveals that party families played a complex and dynamic role vis-à-vis the development of state projects as they were pursued over this forty-year period.

Author

• Kimberley Manning, Concordia University