Madame Mao and the Depoliticization of the Domestic Sphere

During China’s Cultural Revolution period, Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, exercised an unprecedented amount of power as the deputy director of the Central Cultural Revolution Group and one of the highest ranked members of the Politburo. With the combined bureaucratic powers of the military and cultural realms, Jiang modernized traditional operatic culture on a national scale and made strong, powerful female protagonists the most central figures of the model works. Despite her position as the most powerful woman in the history of modern China, gender scholars have depicted Jiang as someone who willfully ignored gender issues in order to advance her individualist agendas and have criticized the model work heroines for failing to address the double burden of women. This paper re-assesses Chinese feminist arguments about the Cultural Revolution period by examining the model works as Jiang’s attempt to create a new event of woman in which the domestic realm (where the concerns of May Fourth and socialist state feminists were sited) was depoliticized. It asks how Jiang’s creation of heroines without husbands and children in the model works illuminate the obstacles that impeded the advancement of gender reforms and public motherhood campaigns led by China’s Federation of Women during the socialist era. It explores the public and private tensions between leaders of the Federation of Women and Jiang Qing to shed light on a larger gender problematic in China’s socialist era. This study via the cultural formation of Jiang Qing makes visible a cross-section of Chinese womanhood across Republican, Socialist and post-Mao periods.