• For more than five years, we have established anti-Japanese base areas behind enemy lines, persevered in the War of Resistance, waged arduous struggles against the enemy and the puppet forces, surmounted countless difficulties, and achieved brilliant successes—achievements that were made possible primarily by the Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and the broad masses of the people. Women, who constitute half of the population, have played a major role, and our work among women has yielded results. However, owing to a lack of a realistic, fact-based approach in this work, an insufficiently mass-oriented perspective, and a failure to go deep into the grassroots, to engage in down-to-earth, hard labor, and to integrate closely with the masses, we have not fully grasped the vital importance of economic development for sustaining the resistance and building up the base areas. We have not regarded economic work as particularly well-suited to women; we have not recognized that mobilizing women to participate in production is the central link in safeguarding their immediate interests; nor have we conducted thorough investigations into the specific conditions of women, deeply understood their sentiments, or taken due account of the burdens of household chores, physiological constraints, and material hardships they face. Instead, acting on subjective notions, we have formulated slogans for the women’s movement, drawn up plans, set up organizations, and regularly summoned women to meetings, conducting unnecessary mobilizations that have wasted both their labor and resources. As a result, our work has become generalized and formalistic, lacking a genuine mass foundation. This tendency toward subjectivism and formalism, divorced from the women themselves, is the fundamental reason why women’s work has stagnated and failed to advance further.

In the various anti-Japanese base areas, as victory draws nearer yet the struggle grows ever more arduous, combat, production, and education are the three paramount tasks of the day. Among these, it is above all production in which the vast majority of rural women can and should make a special effort. Their diligent participation in production is, like the enlistment of able-bodied men at the front, a glorious form of combat. Moreover, raising women’s political status and cultural level, improving their living standards, and thus advancing toward liberation, must begin with economic prosperity and independence. The more women produce and save, the better off they and their families will be. This not only plays a crucial role in the economic construction of the base areas but also provides the material basis for them gradually to break free from feudal oppression. This constitutes the core of the particular interests of rural women within the broader mass movement and points to a new direction for women’s work in all anti-Japanese base areas.

To implement this policy, there must be a thorough transformation in the style, methods, and approaches of women’s work at all levels. We need to carry out in-depth investigations and studies to understand the lives, needs, and feelings of rural women, taking into account both their individual capabilities and the local conditions. Priority should be given to launching pilot projects in key areas, gradually extending their impact to neighboring regions, and ultimately driving progress across the board. Accordingly:

(1) Local Women’s Federations and Women’s Salvation Associations should make organizing rural women—both individually and collectively—in productive activities their primary task. They should go deep into the villages to educate, assist, and help resolve the difficulties women encounter as they join the production front. The success or failure of rural women’s production efforts will serve as the benchmark for evaluating women’s work. Rural women are capable of spinning, rearing silkworms, cultivating fields, cooking, feeding pigs, and managing households. Plans should be formulated according to local conditions, but women’s production plans must be integrated with those of their families; isolated, stand-alone initiatives by women are simply not feasible. We must avoid repeating the past mistakes of certain areas, where mere formalities and numerical targets—such as claiming that women had reclaimed so many acres of wasteland or planted women’s forests—lacked any real substance. Instead, we should mobilize women to genuinely participate in the mass production drive.

(2) Organizations should be structured in response to the actual needs of women, correcting the previous practice of establishing purely nominal bodies. Production cooperatives and other forms of collective production, such as spinning groups, should be used to organize them. These organizations should become the basic units of the Women’s Salvation Associations or Women’s Federations, rather than being mere empty shells or hollow institutions.

(3) Unnecessary mobilizations of rural women should be minimized, meeting attendance reduced, and their labor and resources carefully conserved, so that they may devote greater energy to production.

(4) Practices harmful to health and detrimental to production, such as foot-binding and poor hygiene, should be encouraged to be abandoned. Political and cultural education for women should be imparted through practical means related to production—for example, by improving production techniques, learning to read texts pertaining to production, or composing songs and folk tunes for use during work. Female cadres must dispel the erroneous view that economic and production work are of secondary importance. They need to recognize that production is not only one of the most important political tasks in the base areas but also that women’s workers must maintain close and solid ties with the rural masses. Only by going deep into the countryside to organize women’s production, address their production-related difficulties, and enhance their economic benefits can true progress be made. To achieve this, women’s workers themselves must acquire knowledge of the rural economy and a clear understanding of what women’s production entails, so that they can truly serve as organizers and leaders of rural women’s productive activities. Many capable female comrades should take up positions in cooperative enterprises. Similarly, numerous female Party members and cadres should work in state-owned economic institutions to promote their development. Views that regard remaining aloof at the top, idle and unoccupied, as something to be proud of rather than shameful, are entirely wrong.

This year, the guiding principle for commemorating International Women’s Day on March 8 is to mobilize women actively to participate in production work. Local authorities should formulate detailed measures tailored to their respective circumstances.