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From Red Guard To Blue Hair: Why Leftists Destroy Womanhood
Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in the five-part series “American Maoists: Warnings From The Cultural Revolution.”
In Part II, Xi Van Fleet and Sasha Gong — both activists, scholars, and survivors of Mao’s communist uprising — broke down the endless cycle of victimization that fuels perpetual revolution, and has been embraced by the American Left.
Today, the authors take up the question of women. The American Left, it turns out, is not the first revolutionary movement to encourage androgyny and shame women for being traditionally feminine. Indeed, as our authors, show, destroying womanhood is essential to the revolutionary project.
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The story of women under radical Marxist ideology is the story of beauty turned to beast.
Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing — known in the West as Madame Mao — was once celebrated as a symbol of feminine beauty. In 1930s Shanghai, the so-called “Hollywood of the East,” she gained fame as a rising movie star, embodying the glamour and grace traditionally associated with Chinese womanhood.
But Shanghai was also a hub for progressives, Communist sympathizers, and fellow travelers — and Jiang Qing was soon drawn into their orbit.
In 1937, at the age of 23, Jiang Qing — like tens of thousands of other progressive youths — traveled to Yan’an, the Communist stronghold in the loess hills of northwestern China, to join the revolution. There she quickly caught Mao Zedong’s attention, leading him to set aside his guerrilla fighter wife and marry the former movie star.
As Jiang Qing bound herself to Mao and the Communist revolution, she began to shed her feminine image: cutting her long hair short, trading dresses for shapeless military uniforms, and abandoning the aura of a glamorous actress.
This transformation was not simply personal; it reflected a broader ideological demand. In Yan’an, and later in Beijing, the revolution required individuals to dissolve their identity into the collective. As Mao’s political power grew, Jiang’s own image moved ever further from the ideals of Chinese traditional femininity.
By 1966, when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, Jiang’s metamorphosis was complete. Elevated to unprecedented authority as “Chairman Mao’s greatest standard-bearer,” she emerged as a hardened, gender-neutral revolutionary warrior, wearing a distinctly masculine haircut and clad only in a Mao suit or military uniform.
Jiang Qing became the model for all Chinese women to emulate. Feminine qualities were denounced as toxic, bourgeois, and reactionary, and women were expected to abandon not only the ornaments of beauty but the very essence of femininity itself — as lovers, wives, and mothers. Mao himself praised this new ideal in verse: “China’s daughters hold uncommon resolve; they love not splendid ornaments, but the arms of revolution.”
Nowhere was this more stark than in the Red Guard movement: thousands of teenage girls, who might once have sung, studied, or courted love, instead shouted slogans, wielded clubs, and became torturers and killers.
The Red Guard was responsible for the first murder of the Cultural Revolution — the brutal beating to death of their principal at a Beijing girls’ high school — an act that unleashed the nationwide violence which would claim tens of millions of lives.
It was in that era that both of us passed through girlhood, adolescence, and the bloom of youth, devoid of all femininity.
We were told, and we believed, that women could hold up half the sky, and that whatever men could do, we could do even better. We strove to become Iron Girls — the Chinese version of the superwoman — taking on the hardest tasks while training ourselves to look, speak, and act like men. Family, children, and motherhood were pushed from our minds; all that mattered was proving ourselves as revolutionaries.
Sadly, defeminization left deep scars on the women of our generation, eroding many of the traditional Chinese virtues of womanhood: tenderness, modesty, nurturing, grace, and devotion to family. Our generation, unlike our Western counterparts, grew up without dreams of a fairytale love story or a perfect wedding.
When some of us later came to the West, we shattered the stereotype of what an Asian woman was expected to be in the eyes of Westerners.
As survivors of Mao’s defeminization, we are horrified to see history repeating itself here in America. Although the process began decades ago with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s, its pace has accelerated dramatically in recent years.
Radicalized young women — especially white female youth in search of identity — have taken defeminization to new extremes. The body itself becomes a canvas of protest against convention and traditional feminine beauty: blue hair, tattoos, piercings, and harsh attire announce open rebellion. One needs to look no further than the Antifa girls on the streets for living proof.
As in Mao’s China, defeminization is more than an outward transformation; in today’s woke culture it is a proud declaration of being the opposite of what family, culture, or faith once revered as good, beautiful, or sacred. In this sense, it is a total reordering of values, inscribed visibly on the body.
What is even worse is that the defeminization of women is accompanied by the feminization of men — a topic for another time. Both trends aim to shake the very foundation of a functioning society.
READ MORE:
American Maoists, Part I: License To Kill: What Turns Normal People To Political Violence?
American Maoists, Part II: The Wheel Of Misfortune: Victims, Victimhood, And Victimization
Xi Van Fleet is a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, activist, and author of “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning.”
Sasha Gong is a writer, scholar, journalist, and filmmaker. A dissident in Mao’s China, she holds a PhD from Harvard University and was previously Director of the China Branch at Voice of America.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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