As part of its effort to achieve a political and organizational "normalization,
" the new Chinese ruling group convened the Fourth Congress of the National Women's Federation on September 8-17.
The first three congresses were held at regular and fairly close intervals-in 1949, 1953, and 1957. Then, thanks to a bureaucratic tradition that was also responsible for the fact that no party congresses were held from 1956 to 1969, no other national women's gatherings were organized. This did not keep Kang Ke-ching, widow of Chu Teh, from giving a report on behalf of an Executive Committee elected twenty-one years ago!
Some 2,000 delegates (belonging to fifty different nationalities, according to the official summary) attended the congress and unanimously approved the report, a new set of statutes, and the slate of 300 candidates for the new executive committee.
In her report, Kang restated the main points of the current leadership's line (referring in particular to the decisions of the Eleventh Congress and the Fifth National Assembly). She then went on to explain that "in the course of striving for the four modernizations [of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology], material and technical conditions will be continuously provided for bringing about the socialization and modernization of household chores; this will in turn progressively free women for production work and continuously provide reinforcements for realizing the four modernizations.'
In addition, Kang joined in the ritual denunciation of the "gang of four," thanking the Central Committee of the Chinese CP, and Chairman Hua, for having cured the youth-who had come under the harmful influence of the notorious "gang" as well as of the "traitor Lin Piao"-of their illusions. She urged that academic and social education be closely intertwined with family upbringing.
The most interesting feature of the report was the picture it gave of the problems still facing a considerable number of Chinese women:
"For some years, because of interference from Lin Piao and the 'gang of four,' the practice of buying brides and arranging marriages reappeared in some places, while bourgeois and feudal ideas began to spread and cases of oppression of women have been reported. ... We should publicize the idea of marriage based on the free will of both parties, and encourage reasonable late marriage. Couples are encouraged to observe frugality in arranging wedding celebrations and all venal marriages or arbitrary arrangements by others should be opposed."
In other words, certain elementary, demnorms that should prevail in male-female relations and in family life. "Young men and women should not base their love on the pursuit of money and material things but on working for common revolutionary objectives."3 As for the family, it should belong to the "new type": "The household should be managed industriously and thriftily. Men and women should be equal and should share the housework. Elderly people should be respected and well taken care of, and the children educated by their parents. A family should discuss things together and contradictions should be democratically settled through discussions. The feudal patriarchal style of behaviour and selfish bourgeois ideas must be thoroughly done away with."*
Worthwhile though this advice may be, we should not overlook the fact that no mention is made of the family's future as an institution. The perspective seems to be to perpetuate the nuclear family in a "reformed" version. Meanwhile, a number of other issues raised by the women's liberation movement around the world seem to have been ignored as well.
In China, "one-half of heaven" still has a long road to travel.
Notes
1. Peking Review, September 29, 1978, pp. 9-10.
2. Ibid., pp. 10-11.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.