Making a Great Leap Forward? The Politics of Women's Liberation in Maoist China

This article employs a discursive institutional approach to examine the emergence of funu, or national woman, under a Maoist-Communist state inscription, and how this subjectivity was both constructed and contested differently by women leaders within the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF). The article explores a significant set of organisational crises within the ACWF during the Great Leap Forward (195860) and how those crises are remembered today. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with former Women's Federation activists and officials, it reveals the extent to which different forms of agency were active in making and reshaping the ACWF past and present.