William Hurst
Theoretically sophisticated and incredibly rich empirically, The Party Family is among the best studies of gender and family politics in rural China. Spanning the tumultuous timeframe from roughly 1920-1965, and combining extensive interview research and individual oral histories with painstaking work in multiple archives to unpack the dynamics of how politics at all levels shaped gender and family relations on the ground across each period, The Party Family maintains both an impressively wide lens and a rigorously tight focus. Rooted in many years of research, the book effortlessly weaves together individual memories and life histories with macro-level narratives and conceptual analysis. Manning has produced a masterpiece that will remain required reading for many years.
Yiching Wu
Offering a groundbreaking understanding of the gendered and familial dynamics behind the mobilization and state formation during China's crisis-laden twentieth century, The Party Family challenges conventional notions of state power and provides a refreshing perspective on the role of gender in revolutionary politics in both China and beyond.
Jessica C. Teets
Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Manning finds that networks of women enabled state building in the early PRC by making the household legible to the state to improve health and rural marital practices. Significantly, this study contributes to the growing literature recognizing the importance of social ties to mobilization, as well as making an important contribution to the study of state building in Chinese politics and history.
Xiaohong Xu
Manning's groundbreaking book demonstrates compellingly the fundamental role that family ties and gender relations—as simultaneously resources for mobilization and objects of revolutionary transformation—played in both the extraordinary successes of state building in the early People's Republic and the catastrophic failure of the Great Leap Forward. It is a must read for the understanding of affective politics and modern Chinese history.
Elizabeth J. Remick
Manning's pathbreaking analysis shows how affective family ties—fictive, biological, marital, parental, sororal—and the political commitments they engendered shaped the formation of the Chinese Communist Party and the process of state building in the early PRC. The Party Family illustrates the complex interplay between high-ranking women leaders who advocated for policy that would liberate women and the women at the grassroots who carried out crucial parts of the new state's political and economic agenda. The book's reinterpretation of the first decades of the PRC transforms the study of gender, family, and politics in Chinese studies.
