Underground In Plain Sight: The New Life Movement, Women's Publications, and Leftist Mobilization in Wartime China

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Women's Advisory Council of the New Life Movement, under the direction of Song Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek), created space for wartime collaboration among leading women associated with the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and neutral factions. This article examines Jiangxi Women, a New Life Movement-affiliated journal published from 1939 to 1942 that was part of a national constellation of provincial women's New Life Movement publications, as a case study of the presence of leftist voices in the movement and the infiltration of the women's New Life Movement by the CCP. The journal was overseen and edited by women who were leftists or underground Communists and, instead of promoting the bourgeois domesticity commonly associated with the New Life Movement, Jiangxi Women highlighted values often associated with the CCP, such as the importance of poor and rural women's labor, and encouraged its middle-class urban readership to view their lives and actions through lenses like labor, gender, and class. By the wartime years, the importance of mobilizing rural women was recognized as critical by activists across the movement, but the publication's prioritization of mass mobilization and attention to local conditions and organizations was at odds with the KMT's emphasis on top-down mobilization. As Jiangxi Women demonstrates, during the war, leftist and Communist women seized the opportunities provided by the New Life Movement to challenge conservative and centrist ideas and ideals, shifting the discussion of women's political and economic potential.