Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March (review)

Mao Zedong consolidated his leadership over the Chinese Communist Party during the so-called "Long March" from 1934-1936, when the Red Army fled certain defeat by Guomindang forces encircling their Soviet base areas in southeast China. The men who survived became the powerful generation of post-1949 leaders. But as Gerda Lerner would say, "what were the women doing?"

In the growing literature on women and revolution in modern China, Helen Praeger Young's book is a stunning contribution that taps a rapidly disappearing resource: women soldiers—not camp followers or wives of high-level Communist Party officials, although there were some of the latter—who made the Long March.Young's book represents her own "long march" to complete a project based on interviews of over two dozen women veterans of the Long March conducted between 1986 and 1997. Her path was sometimes obstructed by the political climate in China, especially during and after the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. As with her subjects, however, persistence paid off, and readers are rewarded with a textured history of the lives of ordinary women often doing ordinary things but under extraordinary circumstances.

Young masterfully avoids the all-too-common fate of retelling multiple narratives of the same event. The eight chapters are bracketed by an introduction that describes the origins and challenges of the project and a conclusion that reflects on women soldiers in the context of the whole revolutionary struggle. The first four of the eight content chapters focus on the dramatic experiences of four women during the Long March. Jian Xianren, who married a Red Army general soon after joining the march, gave birth in harsh conditions. Chen Zongying, already a committed revolutionary, married a noted Red Army general, Ren Bishi, as a child bride. She climbed the rugged mountains of western Yunnan just weeks before her seventh child was born. "Little Devil" tells the story of Ma Yixiang, an abused child who joined the Red Army at around age eleven, much younger than the usual seventeen years. He Maqiu's story could be a model of how the revolution improved the lives of women. Coming from a reform-minded family background, she studied for two years at an English Catholic high school in Chengdu before she was forced to drop out when fighting erupted between Guomindang and Red Army troops. With family consent, He joined the Long March. After working first in a propaganda unit, she began to study nursing, then medicine, and eventually became a career military doctor rising to the chief of women's and children's health in the People's Liberation Army's Health Department. But He's life is more the exception than the rule for the women whose stories are told here. Most of the women interviewed did not remain in the military or become political leaders. They did, however, remain engaged in their communities.

Young's next two chapters direct attention to the reasons why these women "chose revolution" and also look closer at the kinds of work that they did as soldiers. Although their stories are unique, the answers to why they joined reflect the mistreatment of Chinese girls, especially in conditions of war and poverty. Overall, joining the Red Army was a means to improve their lot in life. Some were escaping bad treatment as a child bride (tongyangxi), in servitude to future in-laws. Others, such as Li Guiying and Deng Liujin, had the support to join from the families they had been sold to when they became a burden to feed after the son (and prospective husband) had either died or left home. This "food factor" prompted those who hoped to eat more than the leftovers after feeding the pigs. The lure to start or continue their education motivated others. And, at least in hindsight, all were attracted by the propaganda of...