Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China’s Yangzi Delta Silk Industry by Robert Cliver (review)

Robert Cliver’s new study of the Yangzi delta silk industry during the mid-twentieth century focuses primarily on the silk workers and their experiences in the Revolution. As an effort to revise the Cold War narrative of the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that emphasizes the party and its policies, the book aims to “bring society back in” to the story and to study how ordinary people resisted, embraced, and adapted to changing political conditions during the 1950s. It is therefore an important addition to a growing body of academic studies on Chinese society and economy in the PRC’s early years. As Cliver points out in the introduction, these new, revisionist histories of the Chinese Revolution have been fueled largely by a more relaxed academic environment and the opening of Chinese archives to both foreign and Chinese scholars in recent years, although, as Cliver further adds, that window may be closing as the current leadership tightens restrictions on scholarship again. In the case of this book, Cliver has done extensive research in Chinese archives. Although his main sources are the Shanghai and Wuxi municipal archives, especially the archival documents produced by unions and industry associations during the 1950s, the archival material is supplemented by interviews with former workers and managers, a small number of company documents from the Meiya Factory in Shanghai, and contemporary news articles from popular newspapers such as Renmin ribao.

The book is organized very roughly in chronological order. At the same time, each chapter focuses on a specific topic, although there are often overlapping themes. In some cases, Cliver returns to the same events in more than one chapter in order to present multiple perspectives. The story starts with two chapters that offer the historical background. Chapter 1 traces the development of China’s silk industry from ancient times to the Japanese occupation and the postwar crisis of the 1940s. Chapter 2 examines the labor movements among the Yangzi delta silk workers during the first half of the twentieth century. The same chapter also suggests that the Yangzi delta silk workers can be divided into two groups: silk weavers, mostly male and located in Shanghai, and filature workers, largely young women and located outside Shanghai. Their experiences were very different prior to the Communist Revolution. As the following chapters further reveal, the division between these two groups continued through the 1950s, although the new Communist policies gradually but slowly brought the circumstances of silk weavers and filature workers closer together. This seems to be the key argument of the book.

The following four chapters, from chapter 3 through chapter 6, present a multilayered narrative of Yangzi delta silk workers during the tumultuous years of the early 1950s. Chapter 3 examines the first years of transition to Communist rule, dealing with issues [End Page E-9] such as Liberation and economic recovery, policies defining New Democracy in the new sociopolitical context, and the formation and early activities of industry-wide unions of Shanghai silk weavers and Wuxi filature workers. Chapter 4 focuses on the Shanghai silk-weaving industry’s labor-capital consultative conference, explaining how it was established and what role it played in promoting labor insurance and other welfare provisions in the factories. Chapter 5 moves on to the mass mobilization during the Korean War and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Three Antis campaign, and the Five Antis campaign. Since these three chapters focus mostly on Shanghai—though Cliver repeatedly brings Wuxi back to the story and makes comparisons between the two groups of workers and the conditions they were facing—the next chapter is exclusively about the female workers at filature factories in Wuxi. Both the poor working conditions and the limitations of the Democratic Reform campaign in the Wuxi filatures are highlighted to tell a very different story of the Revolution as compared to...