Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China

Xiaoping Cong examines the social and cultural significance of Chinese revolutionary legal practice in the construction of marriage and gender relations. Her book is an empirically rich investigation of the ways in which a 1943 legal dispute over an arranged marriage in a Chinese village became a legal, political and cultural exemplar on the national stage. This conceptually groundbreaking study revisits the Chinese Revolution and its impact on women and society by presenting a Chinese experience that cannot and should not be theorized in the framework of Western discourse. Taking a cultural-historical perspective, Cong shows how the Chinese Revolution and its legal practices produced new discourses, neologisms and cultural symbols that contained China's experience in twentieth-century social movements, and how revolutionary practice was sublimated into the concept of 'self-determination', an idea that bridged local experiences with the tendency of the twentieth-century world, and that is a revolutionary legacy for China today.

Author: Xiaoping Cong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 11/01/2018
Pages: 346
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.72d
ISBN: 9781316602614

About the Author
Cong, Xiaoping: - Xiaoping Cong is a scholar of late imperial and twentieth-century China. Her previous book, Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897-1937 (2007), was awarded a prize from the Chinese Historians in the United States society (CHUS) in 2008. Professor Cong has published a number of refereed journal articles and book chapters in both English and Chinese in the United States, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia and the Netherlands. She has also received several prestigious research grants, from Fulbright (2008-9), ACLS (2008-9) and AHA (2006). She was the President of the CHUS from 2011 to 2013, and is currently the secretary-treasurer (2014-16) of the Historical Society of Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC).