of all time was Mao. It’s not even close.
When a book was bought, he and I would always read it together, mending the text, repairing the manuscript, and writing the captions. And when a painting or a bronze was delivered, we would together open it, play with it, study its merits, and criticize its defects. Every evening we studied together till our candle was burned up, and, after supper, we sat together in the Kuei-lai Hall and made our own tea. We wagered against each other that such and such a quotation was to be found on a particular page in a certain chapter of a specific book. We would give the exact line, page, chapter, and volume and then check them from the bookshelf. The winner was rewarded with the first cup of tea, but when one of us did win, the first cup was rarely drunk: we were so happy that our hands trembled with laughter, and the tea spilled all over the floor. We swore to grow old and die in that little world of ours. –Li Qingzhao, Poetess, Song Dynasty, 1000 AD.
Tales of Song women made a deep impression on young Mao who, aged twenty-six, published The Death of Miss Chao, his account of a local girl who had committed suicide rather than marry a man she despised:
Miss Chao found herself in the following circumstances: One, Chinese society. Two, the Chao family of Nanyang Street in Changsha. Three, the Wu family of Kantzuyuan Street in Changsha, the family of the husband she did not want. These three factors constituted three iron nets, a kind of triangular cage and–once caught in these three nets–she sought life in every way possible, but in vain. There was no way for her to go on living. It happened because of the shameful system of arranged marriages, the darkness of our social system, the negation of the individual will and the absence of freedom to choose one’s own mate”.
Mao campaigned for women’s rights for the rest of his life, constantly reminding colleagues that Chinese women comprised the greatest mass of disinherited human beings the world had seen. He attributed their success in the Great War of Liberation as much to them as anyone and made colleagues swear that, if they won, they would ‘grant freedom of marriage and equality between men and women’.
To make sure everyone understood its importance, Mao’s first official act as Head of State was signing his Marriage Law, which resembles the preamble to America’s failed Equal Rights Amendment: “Women in the People’s Republic of China enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of life, in political, economic, cultural, social, and family life. The State protects the rights and interests of women, applies the principle of equal pay for equal work to men and women alike, and trains and selects cadres from among women”.
To conservatives, Mao insisted, “Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized through egalitarian transformation of our entire society. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work”. In 1955, he made his point by promoting Li Zhen, the sixth daughter of a peasant family, to the rank of Major General–the first female combat commander in history to reach that rank.
The largely self-educated Mao had long observed the importance of counting school children to monitor gender balance and, in 2016, the Education Ministry pledged to reach the goal of 50-50 balance by the 2021 centennial.
Along the way they also discovered thirty-million missing girls. But that was not Mao’s fault, as we shall see in a later essay.
