Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953

1. Saving Self and Nation: The New Culture Movement’s Family-Reform Discourse

chapter 1 Saving Self and Nation The New Culture Movement’s Family-Reform Discourse Historians of the New Culture Movement have typically focused on either the movement’s nationalism or its romantic individualism and portrayed participants’ interest in family reform as an outgrowth of one of these two elements. Chow Tse-tsung remarks that young radicals believed that “to have all individuals liberated from the old passive thinking and from the self-sufficing and paternalistic family and clan system based on an agricultural society would strengthen the nation.”1 Roxane Witke argues that New Culture radicals attacked the traditional family because “while individualism might be possible to some degree within a loosened form of the old system, it was thought that adoption of the western model of the monogamous family would surely facilitate it.”2 Vera Schwarcz believes that young New Culture radicals “demanded a new ethical code that would make self-fulfillment a natural and widespread prerogative.”3 In fact, the impulses that drove family reform were more complex than these representations suggest. Although much of family-reform rhetoric prominently featured the language of nationalism and individualism, New Culture family-reform literature reveals that the primary impetus of the family revolution was the search of young, urban males for a new identity in a modernizing, industrializing society. Ultimately, socioeconomic issues, not nationalism or individualism, drove young men to challenge traditional family structure and authority. We cannot understand the significance of the family-reform movement or even account for its emergence unless we examine its socioeconomic components. A good place 27 to start is with Jiating yanjiu (Family research), a popular family-reform journal that exposes the confluence of political, ideological, and socioeconomic factors that shaped the family-reform debate. It also reveals a New Culture radical quite different from the one we thought we knew: no romantic dreamer, this young, educated, urban man was deeply concerned about his own economic future and passionately involved in redefining himself as a member of an industrializing economy and a modernizing state. founding family research As the epicenter of the New Culture Movement, the Beijing University campus saw a lively succession of student organizations. China’s first Marxism study society began there in 1920, and the New Culture Movement ’s founding journal, New Youth, claimed the university as its headquarters . The campus seethed with an emerging youth culture. Mary Ryan has shown how the appearance of peer associations in early-nineteenthcentury Utica, New York, created new social spaces that facilitated a reworking of family roles.4 With the advent of the New Culture Movement, a similar phenomenon occurred in many of China’s cities. Only by organizing and orienting themselves to their peers were the movement’s young participants able to formulate their radical proposals for a new society . In fact, the creation of peer associations was one of the most important innovations of the New Culture Movement. Traditional social order in China, and to a lesser degree in the United States, organized itself through the web of connections within and among families. Blood and marriage ties defined group membership; individuals usually found themselves embedded in vertical relationships governed by the hierarchies of gender, age, and generation. In contrast, membership in peer associations was voluntary. People of similar ages formed single-sex organizations around a common interest. Ties within these groups tended to be horizontal and egalitarian. In China as in the United States, peer organizations implicitly contradicted the logic of traditional social organization. In January 1920, one of these peer groups coalesced to offer an explicit challenge to traditional family organization. Two Beijing students, Luo Dunwei (1898–1964) and Yi Jiayue (Yi Junzuo, 1899–1972), called together several “comrades” to discuss the “cruel circumstances” and “barbaric aggravation” that young people suffered in their families.5 Later that month, the group, which had grown by fifteen, established the Family Research Society (Jiating yanjiu she), with the intention of pro28 Saving Self and Nation viding a forum for discussing family reform and publishing a journal. The group decided to welcome additional members regardless of age or gender. (In fact, most members were men in their twenties.) Interest in the society spread quickly. On the first of February, the society held a large meeting at the New Knowledge Translation and Compilation Society (Xinzhi bianyi she). Three people from Shanghai and nine from Changsha promised to establish branch...