Leaping Housewives: Women’s Grassroots Organization and Neighborhood Politics During China’s Great Leap Forward

In the spring of 1961, an internal report from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denounced Zhou Dezhen for corruption as the chairwoman of a residents’ committee in Beijing. As an urban neighborhood-based association that was not part of the government, the residents’ committees during the Great Leap Forward campaign (1958-1962) were responsible for distributing rationing coupons for household necessities, such as grain, clothes, and, in this case, iron woks. Zhou reportedly abused her power in the committee by pocketing the wok coupons to trade in favors: a housewife who already had a wok but had always drowned Zhou in flattery recently received another coupon, while one family without the prized piece of paper had to resort to using a washing bowl to cook dinner.

Contrary to the conventional narrative which portrays the Great Leap Forward as a top-down movement, this vignette reveals how non-elite women in grassroots organizations wielded substantial power to influence people’s everyday lives. Drawing on internal government documents and newspapers from Beijing, I argue that the residents’ committees – an organization primarily made of and led by housewives – transformed from a volunteer association to an indispensable body of governance during the Great Leap Forward. To leap into communism, the CCP in 1958 sought to mobilize every laboring body to contribute to industrial production. While the literature has mostly credited the work-unit system for the total mobilization, this paper shifts the focus from workplace to urban neighborhoods and highlights the women-led residents’ committees. As the smallest organizing unit, the committees led residents to open dining halls, childcare centers, literacy classes, and small workshops. By emphasizing these grassroots organizing efforts, this paper foregrounds ordinary housewives as vital actors in neighborhood politics during the disastrous campaign of the Great Leap Forward.