Wei Nanzhi | Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Tan Xingzang (Interview) | Cultural New Media Editorial Department

Teacher Wei Nanzhi analyzes Chinese women’s liberation from a century-old perspective historical process, and believes that current women's issues are facing double pressure: one is the dislocation of traditional family-style property rights relationships, which leads to the dislocation of the relationship between husband and wife, mother and child; the other is the alienation and suppression of people by the logic of capital. Relationship dislocation brings pressure to young women, while the logic of capital requires the general public, including women, to become pure workers and consumers, working hard and consuming without paying attention to other needs, including family. To give. But in essence, human beings have a natural need for social relationships and love. The atomization of society and the dominance of capital will eventually cause both material and spiritual harm to people. Gender issues are so controversial today, and the rift in attitudes is constantly amplified, which is a side reflection.

This article is a special article of the "Social Observation" of the new cultural media. The original title is "Clearing the Fog of Contemporary Women's Issues". It only represents the author's point of view and is for your reference.

Clearing the fog of contemporary women’s issues

Wei Nanzhi: I think looking at China’s women’s issues from the perspective of a hundred years of history will help us understand the complexity of today’s issues. Why do you say that?

Looking back at the revolutionary period, the issue of women's equality at that time was to break the oppression of women by traditional social structures. Women's liberation is not only an important part of the Chinese revolution, but also an important reason for the success of the Chinese revolution. From the revolution in rural areas to the liberation of minority areas and remote areas, we can see a large number of vivid examples in which women's self-understanding has improved with the liberation of women, thereby changing their personal destiny and the destiny of their children. Therefore, women are a force that cannot be ignored in the revolutionary cause. This is a valuable experience of our country’s revolution and also represents the Communist Party of China’s basic understanding of the status of Chinese women.

A peak in the social status of women in our country appeared in the era of Chairman Mao. Later, after continuous promotion, it was fully reflected at the social level from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. This is globally recognized, and our actions in women’s liberation during that era were beyond reproach. Through production teams in rural areas and units in cities, an economic mechanism has been formed for men and women to participate in social production and labor. However, during this period, women's liberation was mainly explosive and political, driven forward by the vanguard. Later, with the dissolution of the production team and the reform of the work unit system, the economic and social foundations for women's liberation also changed, making it difficult to continue.

Looking at gender issues from the perspective of social structure, what is truly liberating is changing the traditional relationship structure in which women must depend on men. The texture of this relationship is somewhat different from common imagination. Historically, from the Han and Tang Dynasties to the Song Dynasty, it was normal for women to divorce and remarry. According to historical data and artistic works, women controlled the means of production. In ancient middle-class and upper-class families, after the death of the husband, the wife took control of the family property, and the growth of property mainly came from the son. The son was mainly engaged in economic activities and had to hand over the income to the mother. So in fact, in traditional Chinese family relationships, the relationship between mother and child is more important than the relationship between husband and wife. This is an important reason why traditional women have a deep obsession with their sons and why mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law compete for sons or husbands. When people debate feminism issues today, they often overlook another important angle: women's liberation. In many cases, it is not the husband who opposes it, but the mother-in-law. The root cause is the misalignment of the relationship between husband and wife, mother and child in traditional family relationships, and behind the misalignment is the property rights relationship within the family.

Our women’s liberation work in the period after the founding of the People’s Republic of China has grasped the key points. At that time, there were nurseries in urban units, and children could be sent to nurseries 50 days after birth. There were also similar mutual aid organizations in rural production teams. These mechanisms allow women to receive help and support from society during childbirth, the most vulnerable stage of life. In traditional family relationships, there is a misaligned economic and moral relationship. When women need help most, they can only cooperate with their husbands in economic labor by asking their mother-in-law for help. Women receive help, and their husbands and children will also require women to treat their mother-in-law as filial as themselves out of affection, thus making women's care and obedience to their mother-in-law a moral obligation. Social support such as daycare can help women break out of traditional family relationships to a certain extent.

Moreover, during this period, women's liberation and literacy not only added a group of important labor force to the entire society, but also promoted the improvement of ideas, abilities and awareness of women's equal status and equal participation in productive labor. A big improvement. A number of outstanding female model workers emerged in that era. They are valuable subjects of study and truly the most liberated women.

After the reform and opening up, we learned from some specific foreign systems and practices. Along with the high degree of marketization, there is a high degree of atomization of society. The nurseries and so on that had been established before disappeared. Women lacked social help during the childbearing stage and had no choice but to return to their families. Some became stay-at-home mothers, and some asked their mothers-in-law for help. This returns to a relationship structure similar to that of a traditional family. If we look at it solely from the perspective of women’s liberation, a set of practices with capital as its core logic is itself a system of gender inequality. The requirement of capital is that a person should be a laborer who can provide value. Women cannot give birth and cannot pay the time and cost for giving birth. For example, there is no such thing as maternity leave in American society to this day. From this perspective, women’s liberation in our country has encountered setbacks to a certain extent.

"Culture Perspective": In the current public opinion field, discussions on women's issues have become labeled, emotional, and polarized. Concepts imported from the West like "feminism" were originally very popular, but now they seem to have become a negative topic. Why is this happening? What kind of social psychological mechanism do you think is behind this change? Furthermore, what kind of sociopolitical factors do you think are behind this change?

Wei Nanzhi: As mentioned earlier, capitalism is essentially an unequal system. Some analysts believe that in the information field generated around the topic of feminism, the participating subjects are very complex. Not only stakeholders and the general public participate, but also capitals such as the CIA (Editor's note: the United States Central Intelligence Agency) have emerged. The figure of the special institutions of the communist country. It can be found from history and reality that capitalism is best at consolidating capitalism by promoting issues against capital. Because once ordinary people form positions on an issue and then oppose each other, it is impossible to unite to fight capitalism itself.

Specifically speaking about today’s feminist discussion, it is easy to fall into two misunderstandings:

The first misunderstanding is that you have to compare with men in all aspects, and you want to trample men under your feet. Only in this way can we show our firm pursuit of feminism. But this is an extreme desire for control, and it is based on recognition of male chauvinism: first put men in the strong position, and then if women defeat this strong man, they will become stronger. But many people don’t realize that this defeat implies a background, that is, the setting standards of social value are still in the hands of men. The true liberation of mentality should be to not care at all or what men think, right?

The second misunderstanding is to completely regard men as ferocious beasts, engage in complete opposition, refuse to get married, and refuse to have children. But this actually falls into the trap of capitalism. If you don't get married or have children for the rest of your life, just consume, be a worker who can provide value, and then continue to be a good consumer, but what will you leave for yourself in the end?

Human beings all need certain social relationships. When I was doing research related to social security, I once went to a nursing home to experience it. What I felt deeply there is that in the final stage of life, money, identity and other things are no longer important. What people need most is just one word - love. But love can only be obtained if you really give it. Family is where true relationships are built.

For women, the pregnancy and childbirth stage is fragile, and the subsequent process of raising children requires even more effort. But in this process, a true love relationship can be established between mother and child. The mother's protection of her child and the closer and deeper relationship the child has with her mother are the feedback given to women by nature. So what I understand as "the way of heaven" is not that people should obey the order of which gender dominates, but that people should accept and make good use of a certain balance that exists in nature.

However, all the hype that uses identity labels to create opposition will deprive everyone of their ability and consciousness to love. The result is that people return to the animal state - they feel as if they are omnipotent and more and more powerful. But in fact, all kinds of social relations are stripped away, separated from the original family, and they do not form a new family. They are unwilling to have children, and they are even unwilling to connect with others. In the end, they can only rely on work, and even be tied to work. Sure, but in fact, work is the most unreliable. As the links around a person become more and more disintegrated, they will become more and more fragile.

Studies at home and abroad have pointed out that behind some of the discourse topics or "culture wars" in today's public opinion field are the invisible manipulations of the top elites of capitalism. From the perspective of these elites, with the development of science and technology, society no longer needs so many people. The extra population cannot be well organized for production, nor can they become good consumer subjects. In the end, they become scrapped garbage population. In this case, then design a cultural label and create a popular trend of thought to make people consciously not have children and reduce the population. These rhetorical labels that deny reproduction may seem modern, but their essence is that capitalism no longer needs so much labor.

In their view, if there are more people, there will be greater management costs, and giving these people the right to vote is no longer in the interests of capital. So it is better to let what they consider the "junk population" self-destruct, for example, through infertility, Let go of drug abuse, gun ownership, etc., and let these people disappear automatically.

Our women’s problems are similar. Since the 1990s, our country has gradually accepted this modern discourse system, and women have begun the process of being commodified and self-commercialized, which is reflected in the decline in the degree of women's liberation. On the surface, concepts about women are becoming increasingly fashionable and seem to be in line with international standards, but we often fail to see that behind these changes are a series of huge capitalist chains of control. In other words, when we accept and immerse ourselves in this set of words, we have fallen into a trap, which in turn hinders our understanding of the nature of the problem.

Back to the current reality, why are women now increasingly reluctant to have children?

We have analyzed the pitfalls of modern ideas of capitalism and the dislocation of traditional family and property relations that continue to this day. In the traditional relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, the younger generation of women is suppressed. However, with the modern concepts and discourse of capitalism, refusing to have children has become a way to resist traditional oppression. Not only that, capitalism’s evaluation of human value is often based on a set of standards centered on success in the workplace. Therefore, once the variable of childbearing appears, it will cause a serious blow to this value evaluation. It is worth noting that there are more and more cases of postpartum depression among modern women, which is also related to the logic of this value evaluation.

Our women’s liberation work in the early days of the founding of the People’s Republic of China truly grasped the main contradictions and main aspects. When women need support the most, it provides a social support function to help women get through the vulnerable stage and live a better life. But this mechanism only lasted for a short period of time, and it was impossible to change the traditional family model that had gone through so many generations at once; later its economic foundation was gone, and it was impossible to fight against the unequal model of capitalism.

So when we look back, we can find that there was a period in history when the status of Chinese women was recognized by the whole world. It is also due to that period that many women in contemporary China have been lucky enough to grow up and enter the elite ranks, especially in academia and business, and have made outstanding achievements. In this sense, any liberation movement must have a certain economic foundation. Whether we are thinking about women's liberation or social changes, it is necessary to consider the combination of nature and society. Once we look at a problem away from nature or society, it will be difficult to see the essence clearly, and our thinking will be easily influenced. In fact, if we discuss women’s issues without clarifying the underlying mechanisms and only amplify gender antagonisms, we may not be able to solve the real problems.

"Culture Perspective": Speaking of elite women, there is indeed a problem of social stratification. The society we live in now is a society with a complex structure. Some comments pointed out that some women's issues are essentially expressions of the ideas, anxieties, demands or moral principles of a specific class. Another situation is that the success and glory of elite women are often in sharp contrast with the situation of ordinary women, and the problems they face are also different. In such a complex reality, women's issues are often multifaceted and sometimes even contradictory. What do you think about this issue?

Wei Nanzhi: When we use women’s issues to respond to social phenomena, there are indeed differences in perspectives. Because each of us will have a projection of our own consciousness when looking at other people's affairs. There is a phenomenon in women's topics, especially elite women who have experienced their own pain on gender issues. They will unconsciously project their own hearts and pains onto some issues. Their sympathy and expressions for public *** incidents are understandable. But sometimes what they put forward is actually their own imagination and requirements for life. People have the strongest emotions when they express their inner feelings, so this empathy often includes personal projection.

This is also a consequence of the polarization of women’s issues. After polarization, some elite women will feel a strong sense of pain. These women have to shoulder many responsibilities in the workplace and at home at the same time. Many women even have to make great efforts to break the social reality that favors sons over daughters in order to gain a better status. The pain they reveal in discussing public issues deserves sympathy, and the targets of their projections also deserve sympathy, but the problem that cannot be ignored is that the pain they express is not necessarily equal to the pain of the targets, or even the real pain of the targets. was obscured.

In fact, historically women have never been equal within the group. Even when women had the highest status, urban women were equal and rural women were equal, but there was definitely inequality between urban women and rural women. We can see from TV series, movies, and novels that rural women of that era often had to pay a lot of price in order to go to the city and change their destiny. Therefore, there will be cases of young rural women marrying into urban families and being bullied by women in the family.

This kind of inequality, from the perspective of society as a whole, is the inequality between urban and rural areas. Within the family, it is combined with the distortion of traditional family relationships.

Another problem is that in many women's issues nowadays, the dispute is not between men and women, but between women. An unfortunate situation now is that family relations have returned to the mode of competition between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law to a certain extent. The pressure on young women comes from older women, and the targets of resistance are also women. Sometimes women are fighting within themselves and engaged in discourse opposition, but men are not so involved. To change this situation, women need to develop more sexual awareness and more mutual understanding and support.

"Culture Versus": Today, China is entering an era of national rejuvenation and building a modern country. A modern country must first have a modern society. In the new historical context, how to position different gender roles and what gender concepts are established? Considering the current situation, what are the good trends and what shortcomings need to be improved? How to further promote the development of Chinese women's careers and promote social progress?

Wei Nanzhi: First of all, we must realize that we live in a country with extremely complex and diverse social forms, and there are obvious regional imbalances. The rural areas in the east are very different from the rural areas in the central part and the rural areas in the west. If you use the social imagination of Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen to imagine these areas, it is easy to be divorced from reality. Therefore, for a country like ours with multiple ethnic groups, multiple cultures, multiple economic forms, and multiple social forms, it is quite difficult to answer what modernization is, and it is easy to make mistakes if you are not careful. As a form of civilization, China has always been known for its diversity. It is difficult for us to use a simple modern standard to measure it, and we should not use our own imagined good to demand the good of others. Mr. Fei Xiaotong said that the beauty of beauty lies in beauty and beauty. This is a basic conscience.

The most critical thing is to empower women. On the one hand, we must try to rebuild organizations that provide support for women, including public service and social mutual assistance. On the other hand, we must further activate and unleash women's own energy so that they can deal with life. Various problems at work. There are nearly 700 million women in China. Imagine how much energy this contains?

At the same time, we must be wary of things that sound like special consideration, but may actually make women more vulnerable. Just like the problem of ethnic minorities in the United States, the real solution is community building and improving education standards, not lowering admission scores, let alone lenient treatment after committing crimes, because that will only make them further and further incompetent and trapped in Vicious cycle. Wouldn't it be better if we could discover some cases of women who stood up, gain strength from them, and inspire more women to stand up as well?

The issue of polarization among women needs attention. How can we give voiceless women a chance to express themselves? I suggest that when doing research, you should start a dialogue with the real subjects and truly understand their difficulties and requirements, instead of falling into the misunderstandings of intellectuals and substituting your own imagination. I have also made suggestions to the media. You can go to rural areas to find the most ordinary families, 100 households in each province, and ask them what their biggest difficulties are. It makes sense to ask about difficulties without asking about happiness.

Women should also empower each other. Rather than arguing online, it is more valuable to build a mutual aid organization among women where everyone helps each other. This mutual help should not be limited to contemporaries, but is open to everyone. For example, when faced with the most troublesome relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, what we want to pursue is that the mother-in-law does not bully the daughter-in-law, and the daughter-in-law does not cheat on the mother-in-law. If they fall into mutual strife and become divided, the power to solve problems will be dispersed.

In fact, the most important thing for people is love. People need to connect with the world around them and move in a positive direction through constant interaction and communication. People will get sick physically and mentally, and they need to be healed through social interaction and communication. Why have the proportion of homicides been higher in Northern Europe over the years? When people are separated, they will be lonely, angry, face many psychological difficulties, and even do some extreme things. Therefore, our families cannot be dominated by the logic of capital. Home is originally the warmest place, but why do many people dislike home less and less? Because the family has become an economic organization, full of calculations and without emotions. In the Internet age, each of us is enclosed in an information cocoon, forming "political tribes" that are easily affected by polarization and malicious manipulation, causing conflicts and disputes among each other and consuming energy. It can be said that in a society distorted by the logic of capital, everyone is vulnerable regardless of gender.

Frankly speaking, my perspective is Marxist. At the same time, as a mother of two children, I hope that my children will live a good life in the future, not just for themselves, but for all children in our society to have a better future and to live in a more equal society. Grow up and become talents in a , inclusive and progressive society instead of being torn apart by the logic of capital. This definitely requires a process.

Over the years, I have also participated in the work of relevant departments, hoping to promote the construction of infrastructure for women's child care security, and hope that our public services can effectively reduce the burden on women. Now some places have launched community activities of Happy Dad and Happy Mom to explore new ways for couples to raise children together. These are small details, but social construction needs to be promoted step by step. In this process, we can still have full discussions, but it is not appropriate to fall into confrontation or even division. Everyone can talk less and build more. This is my point of view.

This article is a special article of the "Social Observation" of the new cultural media, originally titled "Clearing the Fog of Contemporary Women's Issues". Personal sharing is welcome. For media reprints, please contact this official account.