評Wang Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964

Wang Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964

Wang Zheng’s book Finding Women in the State: A Socialist FeministRevolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964 examines a history ofsocialist feminist revolution by focusing on the educated Chinese revolutionarywomen and men who shaped the complicated dynamics and multifacetedstruggles in the process of socialist state-building. By observing the two spacesof feminist engagement ─ the All-China Women’s Federation and the filmindustry─Wang masterfully uses gender as a category of analysis to investigatethe internal workings of the Chinese Communist Party in the contentiousprocesses of socialist state formation and cultural transformations in the 1950’sand 1960s. In doing so, this book not only illuminates a persistent“genderline” in the struggles within the high politics of the Chinese Communist Party, but also asks for a reexamination of the ideas about the total dominance of asocialist state patriarchy, and aspires to challenge the conceptions of masculinestate power which rules out possibilities for women’s subversive agency andactions within the state processes.