ABSTRACT
After China’s Communist Party came to power in 1949, one of the first pieces of legislation it put in place did not address land reform or class struggle; instead, on May 1, 1950 the government promulgated a national Marriage Law that aimed to revolutionize the ways Chinese married and the roles women and men played within families and communities. The centrality of the 1950 Marriage Law and its subsequent revisions in 1980 and 2001 underscore the extent to which marriage, family, and gender roles have constituted key elements of China’s revolutionary and reformist nation-building projects. In this chapter I detail how changes in these domains have unfolded since China’s socialist revolution, with a particular focus on the unintended and unexpected twists and turns in Chinese women’s own marital experiences and desires. By comparing the case of Fujian Province’s eastern Hui’an County with the experiences of rural migrant women and those engaged in cross-Strait marriages, I show how contexts that might appear to deviate from national norms reflect and reinforce the ways that normative goals acquire purchase on a broader scale. Over the past sixty years, different combinations of political and economic forces have influenced how and whether the Chinese state has been able to mold its citizens’ intimate lives so that they conform to an image of a liberated socialist citizenry. These linkages attest to a close relationship between intimate ties and state power. Hence, this chapter asks why certain kinds of intimate relationships and practices were of such concern to China’s early post-1949 regime, how state reformers worked to transform citizens’ intimate desires, and what this history of state intervention has meant for Chinese in the contemporary period as they forge new kinds of intimacy under market reforms.
