Female Workers, Political Mobilization, and the Meaning of Revolutionary Citizenship in Beijing, 1948–1950

Abstract

After entering Beijing in January 1949, the Communist Party immediately sent cadres to local factories in order to mobilize female industrial workers into a women’s movement and to establish the idea of “revolutionary citizenship.” The Party wished to nurture this idea in both the local political arena and in women’s lives inside and outside the factories. This article demonstrates that a host of factors defined revolutionary citizenship, including party directives, choices in revolutionary strategy, cadres’ interpretations of directives and their own initiatives, and workers’ reactions to mobilization. It was in this complex mix of mobilization, women’s strategies to protect and advance their own interests, and the politics of group representation in the revolution, that female workers came to understand the meaning and impact of revolutionary citizenship and the shape of labor-state relations in the emerging socialist China.