Materializing nation and gender: Peasant mobilization in northeast China from 1911 to 1945

This study rethinks the intersection of class, nation, and gender. Instead of assuming pluralism, I specify the independent effects which nation and gender exercised on the political mobilization of twentieth-century peasants in northeast China.; Intersection of class and nation engendered regional differences, buried in the current historiography: peasant nationalism in Zhiendao and bourgeois nationalism elsewhere (beyond-Zhiendao). In beyond-Zhiendao in the 1920s, the triangular relationships among the Japanese, the Chinese military government, and the Chinese bourgeoisie were expressed not through direct conflicts, but around ethnic nationalism. To counteract Japan's use of Koreans as surrogates for its economic penetration, the government revoked Koreans' economic and civil rights. The Chinese bourgeoisie, meanwhile, mobilized Chinese peasants to confront Korean peasants, inhibiting peasant class unity even into the 1930s.; In Zhiendao, national struggle became class struggle. Due to Japanese-Chinese territorial rivalry, Koreans gained civil and economic rights which secured their political position for the tenancy uprisings of 1931 and 1932. These became the struggle for land distribution, conjoined with the Communist struggle. Despite the fact that half of the landlords were Chinese, class struggle by Korean peasants did not entail national antagonism against the Chinese, but only anti-Japanese nationalism which originated prior to 1930s.; In Zhiendao peasant women organized themselves as a political force. Communist pro-family policy and Korean mothers' family-bound class mobilization merged, and elevated the family and motherhood as the center of nationhood during the revolution. Because the family was the unit of both production and patriarchy, patriarchal orders guided work relations and produced differences in women's mobilization. Mothers, active in agricultural production, were drawn to the revolution for land distribution, which they hoped would relieve family poverty. Unmarried daughters, whose work and social relations remained outside of production relations, were the ones attracted to Communist groups and their initial promise to eliminate family and marriage oppression.; These analyses lead to the core thesis: when nationality and gender are structured into material conditions and actually part of class experience, the wider discourses on nationality and gender become forces on their own, having mobilizing power.