The contest for family and nation in Republican China

This dissertation analyzes the evolution of family reform discourse in Republican China (1911-1949). Many May Fourth intellectuals advocated the adoption of the Western, nuclear family as a remedy to strengthen the Chinese nation. In causally linking family and state order, they drew on traditional political ideology. Their insistence that familial and political hierarchies be replaced by egalitarian democracies, and their claim for the primacy of the individual, however, represented a radical break with the past. The attempt to fit new elements into an old formula created tensions between individual and state, work and home, and production and consumption. Reformers defused these tensions by reconfiguring women's roles as wife, mother, and citizen. Three conceptual chapters focus on three participants in this discourse--intellectuals of the New Culture Movement, the Nationalist Government during the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937), and entrepreneurs in the mid-1930s. Three additional empirical chapters assess whether the new ideals influenced daily life.; The indissoluble link between family and national reform meant that the contest to define the family was also, at a deeper level, a struggle for the right to define the Chinese nation. Thus, in addition to tracing the transformation of family ideals and expectations of women, the dissertation connects these changes with Republican political culture and economic development. The conclusion draws the six chapters together to offer an overview of the Republican landscape. It discusses how the reconfiguration of women's roles as rational consumers diffused the tensions which existed between nationalism, individualism, and economic imperatives. Finally, it compares the family ideals and state-society relations of the Republican era with those of the early Communist regime, arguing that the Nationalists and Communists shared common assumptions about the nature of marriage and family and a desire to manipulate the nuclear family ideal for state-building purposes. This suggests that while 1949 marked a change in regimes, strong continuities in political culture and social organization persisted into the early 1950s.