“Peasant Women Need the Revolution, and the Revolution Needs Peasant Women”: Women-Focused Social Investigations in the Taihang Base Area (1938–1949)

Social investigation was a principal instrument by which the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) linked policy with praxis, and studies of women formed a vital part of this endeavor. During the nationwide War of Resistance against Japan, the CCP persistently advanced women’s investigations in the Taihang Base Area to mobilize rural women for the revolution, but encountered a severe reversal in the 1943 Liguadao 离卦道 uprising in Licheng County, when every member of the Taihang Regional Party Committee’s Investigation and Research Office was killed. The resulting shortage of investigators hamstrung the work and demanded an urgent remedy. As a stopgap, after the Taihang Forum on Literature and Art, intellectuals active in cultural production emerged as a new investigative force. Focusing on female emancipation, they ventured into the countryside to conduct surveys, thereby transforming the earlier model that had relied solely on party-state organs. Through a substantial corpus of literary and artistic works rooted in women’s everyday lives yet suffused with revolutionary ideals, the CCP disseminated policy to women and successfully mobilized them to participate in the revolutionary cause. As the revolution deepened, women-focused social investigations became a fresh instrument of social transformation for the CCP , continually providing powerful support for its work among women.