Revisiting White-Haired Girl: Women, Gender and Religion in Communist Revolutionary Propaganda

Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies hosts Xiaofei Kang as part of the Chinese Religions Seminar.

Speaker:
Xiaofei Kang, George Washington University

Professor Kang aims to bring the seemingly missing “religion” into the study of women, gender, and the Communist revolution. Through reexamining White Haired Girl (Baimaonü白毛女), a 1945 Communist propaganda opera whose immense popularity lasts into the present day, Professor Kang argues that the Communist attacks on Chinese religious traditions are only partially based on their proclaimed stand of science, atheism, and a secular nation-state. Popular propaganda works such as White-Haired Girl in fact treated religion as the CCP’s vile competitor for popular piety, and their success relied largely on deploying the same gendered languages and imageries as traditional religion. Religion, therefore, remained at the very center of the Communist revolution and greatly contributed to the formation of the Cult of Mao.

Xiaofei Kang is associate professor with the Department of Religion at the George Washington University. She has a PhD in Chinese history from Columbia University. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (2006). She is finishing a forthcoming collaborative book manuscript on religion, tourism, ethnicity in contemporary China’s religious revival. Her current research examines gendered representations of women and religion in twentieth-century and contemporary China.