“Under Communism, Women Will Once Again Be in Charge”: The Specter of Revolutionary Matriarchy in the Thought of Jiang Qing

The coup against Jiang Qing and her fellow members of the “Gang of Four” at the end of the Cultural Revolution was followed by a wide-ranging campaign of critique, in which statements and interventions ascribed to Jiang and others were popularized for the purpose of exposing the ultra-leftism of the “Gang”. Amongst those statements associated with Jiang were several comments she was said to have invoked during her visits to Xiaojinzhuang, including: “In tribal society, women were in charge, and with the development of the productive forces, so too will it be female comrades who manage the state,” “In matriarchal society there were mothers but no fathers, women were in charge!” “Under communism there will also be female emperors, women will once again be in charge.” This paper takes up these statements as the basis for tracing how the campaign against Jiang had the unintended effect of producing a theoretical archive, however fragmentary, in her name, and so engendering her as a theorist. With particular reference to the statements on matriarchy that were ascribed to Jiang, this paper reads these statements in tandem with the contested theoretical trope of “matriarchy” (muxi shehui) as a recurrent term in Chinese Marxism from the 1930s and 40s as well as in the post-socialist 1980s. The misogynistic campaign against Jiang, I argue, was crucial for establishing the ideological hegemony of post-Maoist developmentalism, grounded in a de-gendered but ultimately masculine figure of the human.