In January 1983 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued a document entitled “Certain questions concerning current rural economic policy.” The correctness of its basic objectives, principles and policies has been demonstrated by the notable results achieved in the course of a year's trial implementation. Accordingly, the Party Central Committee has decided to continue its implementation as an official document for the guidance of rural work into the foreseeable future.

During the last year thanks to the concerted efforts of the entire Party, cadres and masses on all fronts throughout China, agriculture has achieved a record harvest and heartening progress has been made in rural work. This has given us even greater confidence that if only we can maintain the stability and continuity of Party policy, taking stock of new experiences and solving problems through practice, we shall be able to unite with and lead the peasant masses in order to give further impetus to rural development already under way and so fulfil the magnificent goal set out at the 12th Party Congress.

The Chinese countryside is currently experiencing a return to the family farming system, with enormous implications for the lives and fortunes of some 80 per cent of the country's population. Little of this could have been foreseen in 1979, when the rural reform really got under way nationwide. Although each subsequent year has witnessed new initiatives, the major turning-point came with the issue of Central Document No. 1 of 1983, which fully blessed and promoted the “responsibility” system. Central Document No. 1 of 1984, by comparison, is less path-breaking. Indeed, in most respects the latter simply reaffirms the initiatives of the former, or reiterates support for policies announced in the press during the intervening year. The few significant additions made by the 1984 Document, however, highlight the most dramatic and consequential factors of the agricultural reform.

China's “democracy movement” seems, for the moment, to have passed into history. It began with wall-posters in Beijing in November 1978 and reached its high-tide the following February and March. By late March–April 1979, however, the first of a series of restrictions had been placed on participants, and the movement's most outspoken representatives, such as Wei Jingsheng, had been arrested. A year later there was a second crackdown, and even moderate members of the movement were ordered to desist. The final crackdown occurred in April 1981 and resulted in the arrest of more than 20 activists. Although the movement focused upon Beijing, where a wide variety of “unofficial” or “people's publications” (minjian kanwu) vied for domestic and international attention, many of China's provinces and cities produced their own “democracy activists” and publications.

Recently scholars have shown that Mao's accusations against the Russian Returned Students stemmed from his need to bolster his own legitimacy by discrediting their role in the 1931–34 period. According to the 1945 “Resolution on questions in the history of the Party,” the Returned Students were “doctrinaire sectarians” whose “‘offensive line’ for the Party” and “repeated failures in political work” caused “serious damage to the Party in the White areas.” But closer investigation indicates that in the bastion which they are accused of weakening and decimating, the Returned Students devoted considerable attention to strengthening Party organization, educating cadres and mobilizing mass support. Although factional struggles and aggressive tactics characterized the policies of the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks in the 1931–34 period, their contributions to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) eifort to maintain a viable organization in the cities cannot be ignored. That the urban Party, hurt severely by the Kuomintang (KMT), survived at all can be attributed to efforts that Mao later denigrated.

Biology is not supposed to be destiny in socialist China. In contrast to class societies where supposedly “men occupy the position of the ruling class… and women become the household slaves of men and the instruments for producing more men,” in China men and women together are said to hold up the sky (biantian). Women are no longer enslaved by reproduction; if they are oppressed, it is merely because remnants of feudal thinking, superstition and backwardness still exist in China. Or so it is argued by representatives of the Chinese leadership. Here I will posit a different view. Rather than blaming feudalism or China's lack of development, I suggest that contemporary political and economic decisions have reinforced sex inequality in China. In this article, I argue that social and economic policies since the Third Plenum of the llth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party have created conditions which impose on women (and men) sex-differentiated roles in production and reproduction. These new public policies sustain the traditional definition of women as household labourers and reproducers of men.

In mid May 1983 the Wuhan Public Security Bureau posted a notice along the walls of Hankow on “temporary residence certificates” for non-native personnel coming into the city to work. Since a check of the State Council Bulletin and the People's Daily for the months surrounding this time (from 1 January through 31 July 1983) turned up no similar central-level document, one must conclude that the source for this circular was local. Also, in the period since (through the time of final preparation of the present manuscript, late March 1984), those sources have still not published any authoritative rulings on this matter, insofar as I have been able to verify. Moreover, recent press accounts pertaining to city household registration describe decisions about this work as if they were taken by the municipalities themselves. Thus, the regulations translated and analysed below may only represent the situation and its handling in one particular region. Nonetheless, their intrinsic interest, their broader implications and their import reach far beyond this one case.