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The Party Family
Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China

Kimberley Ens Manning (Author)

9781501715518

Hardback, published 15 August 2023

402 pages, 7 b&w halftones, 1 map, 5 charts - 7 Halftones, black and white - 1 Maps - 5 Charts
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.2 cm, 0.907 kg

What distinguishes Manning's work in this area are her political science skills. Reading the book, I could see how historians might handle the material differently. Manning, however, provides overviews and shows that policymaking is a power struggle over revolutionizing social relations of production, which allows her to link "motherhood,"a key political category, to "the big family of socialism."

(The China Quarterly)

This rich and rigorous volume by Manning (political science and women's studies, Concordia Univ., Canada) addresses family ties as a subject and a means of political struggle. Highly recommended.

(Choice)

Kimberley Ens Manning's new book seeks to do justice to the role of gendered personal ties in the state-building processes of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

(The Journal of Development Studies)

In The Party Family, Kimberley Ens Manning offers a groundbreaking examination of the intricate relationship between state power and familial bonds in revolutionary China.

(China and the Inner Asia)

Co-winner of the Canadian Political Science Association Prize in Comparative Politics of the Canadian Political Science Association

The Party Family explores the formation and consolidation of the state in revolutionary China through the crucial role that social ties—specifically family ties—played in the state's capacity to respond to crisis before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. Central to these ties, Kimberley Ens Manning finds, were women as both the subjects and leaders of reform. Drawing on interviews with 163 participants in the provinces of Henan and Jiangsu, as well as government documents and elite memoirs, biographies, speeches, and reports, Manning offers a new theoretical lens—attachment politics—to underscore how family and ideology intertwined to create an important building block of state capacity and governance.

As The Party Family details, infant mortality in China dropped by more than half within a decade of the PRC's foundation, a policy achievement produced to a large extent through the personal and family ties of the maternalist policy coalition that led the reform movement. However, these achievements were undermined or reversed in the complex policy struggles over the family during Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958–60).

Introduction: Family Ties as Political Attachments
States of Activism
1. The May Fourth Movement
2. The Chongqing Coalition
3. The Long March to Yan'an
4. Land Reform
State Capacity adn Contention
5. Maternal Bodies
6. Filial Brides
7. Household Managers
8. Shock Troops
9. Leaders
Conclusion: The Attached Politics of State Capacityand Contention

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