Masculinity: A Useful Category of Analysis for Revolutionary China?

Men have long been at the center of academic analysis of China’s revolution, from historical narratives about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders to discussions of peasant revolutionaries. Despite scholars’ longstanding tendency to foreground male experiences in investigations of revolutionary China, gender did not figure as a major category of analysis for a protracted time. In recent years, historians have highlighted how much past scholarship missed by overlooking gender in Chinese revolutionary politics. While these studies have greatly enriched our understanding of gender’s constitutive role in China’s revolution, they have mainly focused on female voices. This overwhelming concentration on women raises the question of whether gender is a useful category of analysis for men. This paper argues in the affirmative and urges historians of revolutionary China to take masculinity seriously.

This paper seeks to contribute to this broader research endeavor by tracing how a particular form of expressing masculinity emerged in CCP revolutionary base areas and became hegemonic in Mao’s China. This form of masculinity valorized men who vocally embraced the life of a revolutionary soldier. The militarized man prioritized fighting for the revolution above realizing familial and individual pursuits, and repeatedly declared, in party-curated speech acts, the devotion of all his mental and physical energy to constructing and protecting a new socialist China. This paper shows how this militarized ideal of masculinity shaped the discursive and material conditions of men in revolutionary China. Many men publicly voiced finding meaning in China’s revolutionary project and acted as a militarized male in everyday life. However, there was also a muffled undercurrent of counter-masculine discontent with the CCP’s policy of spartan living conditions and sidelining familial and individual concerns, since these dominant norms undermined men’s ability to pursue their personal interests, marry, and fulfill their paternalistic obligations to their parents and nuclear family.