Social Harmony, Family and Women in Chinese Novels, 1948–58

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s intellectuals and writers led the attacks on the tyranny of the Chinese family and the power of patrilineal authority. Their essays and fictional works, particularly such novels as Ba Jin’s Family (Jia), were avidly read by a younger, radicalized and iconoclastic generation. By the late 1940s and after Liberation in 1949, however, mainland leftist and communist writers had retreated from attacks on the family, emphasizing instead its centrality in social life. Two major reasons may account for this. The Chinese Communist Party, needing the peasantry’s support in its climb to and final assumption of power, chose the road of reforming obvious abuses rather than assaulting family and patriarchal institutions. The second reason served to reinforce the Party’s concern. After decades of turmoil, conquest and war, writers envisaged peace as order and as a return to familiar ways of life. In their short stories and novels, socialist transformation, therefore, consisted not of the disruption of family life and patrilineal authority, but of the reconstitution of the family, now stripped of its abusive features.