Politicizing Aunties: The Gendered Origin of the Residents' Committee and Urban State Building in China, 1949–57

This paper excavates the gendered origin of the residents’ committee (jumin weiyuanhui) and the vital role older women played in the urban state-building of the PRC from 1949 to 1957. To better govern the urban area, in 1949 the municipal governments in major cities, such as Tianjin, Shanghai, and Beijing, began experimenting with a new form of urban organizing by establishing the residents’ committees to take charge of neighborhood affairs. Since its inception, the organization had become a venue for ordinary women – who were mostly illiterate housewives – to participate in the politics of the new nation. These women’s avid involvement engendered a cultural icon: aunties at the residents’ committees (juweihui dama). Previous scholars, such as Franz Schurmann and Benjamin Read, have either understated the committee’s importance in urban grassroots organizing, or downplayed the role of gender in the working of the organization. Centering gender and the figure of aunties, I argue that the young Communist state relied on the unpaid care work and social authority of aunties at the residents’ committees to help strengthen its rule in urban centers.

Drawing on newspaper articles, street gazetteers, and internal reports from municipal archives and reading them against the grain, this paper engages with the newly emerged critical aunty studies and illuminates the Chinese aunties’ approach to political work at the grassroots level. As the matriarchs of the neighborhood, aunties at the residents’ committees mediated family conflicts, paid visits to service member’s families, and conveyed the government’s latest policy in casual conversations with neighbors on their evening stroll. Embodying the state’s promise of caring for the masses, aunties and their politicized care work invite us to look beyond the violent, eventful, and fast-moving campaigns in the early 1950s and rethink how gender mediated state-society relations in an era of intense state-building.