Event

Speaker:

Xiaofei Kang, Professor of Chinese Religions and History, The George Washington University

Title:

"The Gender of Superstition in the Chinese Communist Revolution"

Abstract:

Since its inception in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has viewed religion as a product of China’s “feudal” past and a major obstacle to its modernization programs. This talk explores the gender politics of the Party’s first mass campaign against “superstition,” conducted at its wartime headquarters in Yan’an (1937–1947), the “holy land” of the revolution. The campaign targeted male shaman-healers and the traditional ritual order they represented, denouncing them as “feudal superstitions” that impeded the spread of modern medicine and exposed young rural women to ritual violence. Through mass meetings, public confessions, and other mass-line methods, the CCP aimed to displace these ritual authorities and assert itself as the new moral and political authority in rural society. Paradoxically, in more efficiently executing the campaign, Party propaganda also drew on traditional forms of ritual exorcism and invoked familiar tropes of female sexuality. The gender dynamics of the Yan’an campaign reveal both the transformative aspirations and the inherent limitations of the Party’s wartime social reforms. More broadly, they offer insights into the enduring influence of the Party’s mass mobilization strategies and the revolution’s complex entanglement with China’s “feudal” legacies.