"The Party-State and Society: The Dynamics of the Encounter Between the Party-State and the Family in Northeast China" by Isabelle Francoise Rey-Lescure

Isabelle Francoise Rey-Lescure

Deposited 1999

Abstract
When it took power in China in 1949, the Chinese communist party-state had high on its agenda a program of social and political reforms for a thorough transformation of society. The “feudal,” oppressive “old society” (jiushehui) had to be destroyed, and on its ruins a “new society” (xinshehui) was to be built under the party's leadership. This thesis seeks to understand the dynamics of the interplay between the state and society in China during the last four decades of communist rule, or how communist party-state social and political “revolutionary” engineering has articulated with traditional patterns of sociocultural reproduction. This is done by investigating how the state and the most basic unit of Chinese rural society, the family, have interacted at the local level and how this interaction was mediated and negotiated by local human actors and shaped by local socioeconomic and historical forces. As the thesis documents, the social and economic position of the family in rural society was powerfully modified by the various doings and undoings of the Maoist party-state and yet, despite these state-imposed changes, the family has retained many of its traditional dimensions. In view of the resilience of the familial institution along mostly “traditional” lines, including the many “traditional” strategies and values with which it continues to orient its members' lives, the thesis questions finally the ability of the Chinese party-state to challenge the reproduction and sustenance of most of the basic hegemonic assumptions on which rested the traditional sociocultural order, assumptions which the party-state has ceaselessly targeted to establish in their place its own hegemonic meanings and practices.