ABSTRACT
In the processes of general commercialization of social life in the post-Mao era, domestic service, purchased as wage labor, has indeed become a routine phenomenon in Chinese urban society. During the Mao era, a small number of married rural women worked as domestic helpers in the city, where their stay varied from several years to decades. Contract-based wage labor existed in this context of contested and struggling socialism, was introduced without the existence of private capital, was not always taken for granted, and was sometimes a contentious political issue, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Bondservants were subjected to specific legal classification, familial and clan rules, and patriarchal authority. The long-standing social tradition of the bondservant system, already eroded by commodification of servant labor in the mid-nineteenth century, was resolutely swept away by the Communist Party-led social revolution in the first half of the twentieth century.
