Social and Cultural Changes 1949-76 Flashcards
What was Clause six of the Communist common programme in 1949?
- Promised equal treatment of women and men and allowed people to marry anyone they liked
This was for two reasons
- Family relations taught respect of elders which was Confucian
- Family encouraged bourgeois mindsets due to people wanting to keep material possessions
What was foot binding?
- Breaking toes of young girls and placing them under the foot restricting foot growth to 3 inches which was a sign of beauty in young girls
- Outlawed in 1911 but still in rural areas
What was the marriage law of 1950?
- Red army treated women with respect in the Yanan and Jiangxi soviets
- Marriage law of 1950 made marriage an equal contract
- Mao had refused marriage to a 20 year old when he was 14 and a bride killing herself because she didn’t want to go to a wedding
- Arranged marriages outlawed
- Forced marriages had right to divorce
- Marriages and divorce had to be registered with local government
- Man could not divorce woman if she was pregnant or within a year of her giving birth
- Bastards given equal rights
- Women kept property in marriage
- Concubinage and polygamy outlawed
How was the 1950 marriage law enforced and how effective was it?
- Party cadres enforced laws
- Propaganda campaign through posters, radio and drama plays
- Muslim regions in the west rejected these changes
- Cadres had traditional attitudes and undermined the second propaganda campaign in 1953
What impact did the communes and collectivisation have on women?
- Private ownership of land outlawed meaning equal ownership of property undermined
- Communes promised freedom from domestic chores and childcare but didn’t deliver giving women the double burden
- Men was aimed towards men meaning women earned fewer work points
- The cadres enforcing the communes had traditional attitudes and refused pregnant women breaks
- Lack of work points meant less food for women during the famine and forcing them into prostitution also driving up the divorce rate to 60%
- Wife selling also increased to make resources go further
How was women’s role in the family affected?
- Men and women made to live in separate quarters of communes breaking families
- Famine increased divorce rates and wife selling further breaking up families affecting age-dependants
- After the famine women liked their new husbands better and stayed
- Family unit in the four olds in the cultural revolution and children made to snitch on traditional family members
- Rustification programme uprooted 12 million teens between 1968-72
- 1962, contraceptives made popular and female cadres of the women’s federation encouraged mothers to have less children
- One child policy introduced in 1979
How much did women’s role improve over all?
Positives
- Arranged marriages less common and over 1 million women used the divorce law to escape forced marriages
- Paid the same as men
- 1949-76 women’s employment went from 8-32%
Negatives
- Women no longer controlled by parents but by head of work units
- High employment positions male dominated
- Higher education not required or free and women pressured to fill domestic roles stopped them from attending
- No opportunities for women to gain equality through fulfilling feminist roles
- Class issues seen as more important than gender issues during the cultural revolution
Where was female emancipation hardest to enforce?
- In rural areas and western Muslim provinces where it was part of religious culture to arrange marriages
- Women’s role in agriculture fulfilled when shortages were filled by them during urban mass mobilisation but they were not payed equally due to piecework being favourable to men
How did literacy grow?
Statistical growth
- Mid 1950’s primary education set up and 20% could read as a result
- 64% could read by 1964
- Growth slowed by 1976 due to cultural revolution at 70%
Strategies
- Only 6.4% of total budget spent on culture and education in 1952
- 1956, half of kids in full time education
- Old system replaced with key schools with the best teachers and strict entrance exams
What was Pinyin?
- 1956, Modernised version of Mandarin
- Each word had to be learned separately because Mandarin had no alphabet
- Allowed communication across all regions and internationally
How did education collapse after 1966?
- Closure of schools between 1966 and 1970 meant education of 130 million stopped and in 1968 12 million children sent away due to rustification programme
- Hard to put support back in the education system because teachers had been attacked and education undermined by cultural revolution.
- After the cultural revolution focus was on vocational education
What were the barefoot doctors?
- 1 million doctors trained for 6 months sent to the countryside to teach basic hygiene, treating common diseases and taught family planning.
- Exposure to lives of peasants would prevent the young generation from developing bourgeoisie mindsets by participating in peasant work
- They were cheap only being paid half of urban doctor wage which was paid by the local village government
- 90% of villages had basic healthcare by 1976 and improved foreign relations
How successful were the barefoot doctors?
Successes
- Success of mass mobilisation
- Dug deeper wells to prevent waterborne diseases and human waste disposed of further away in villages and using it as fertiliser discouraged
- Snails spreading abdominal diseases controlled
- Life expectancy rose by 11 years by 1970 to 62
Failures
- Focus on prevention rather than cure
- 10% of villages still didn’t adopt the scheme by 1976
- Shortage of hospital facilities and trained doctors and nurses
- Eradication of bugs led to ecological imbalance
- Urban workers had access to better healthcare
How was traditional culture attacked in towns and countrysides?
- Confucian values blamed for lack of
development by experts since 1919 - Land reform of 1950 with landowners being eradicated and focusing on peasnats working together
- Collectives and communes gave the party control over culture watching propaganda meetings and attending political meetings to enforce new ideas
- June 1966, Chen Boda ordered the destruction of the four olds destroying symbols of old culture such as books and musical instruments
- Jiang Qing put in charge of cultural destruction to enforce a new proletarian one
What role did Jiang Qing have in imposing proletarian culture in ballet?
- Actress prior so had insight into performing arts culture and had power of radicals in the CCRG
- Criteria of cultural purity put into place and art not allowed to be published unless it fit this criteria but allowed some bourgeois culture due to personal preference
- Artists that refused to modernise traditional tales sent to reeducation camps
- Pursued enemies such as actors who gained roles instead of her
- Commissioned 8 ballet shows with modernised traditional tales
- Taking of tiger mountain viewed 7.3 billion times
