Socialist Industrialization and Gender Norm Diffusion: A Subnational Approach in China and Kazakhstan

With Zhihao Wang

The social norms of gender equality constitutes a critical component in the communist ideology. Whether it was implemented, and actually promoted equality under the communist rule, however, remains as a debatable topic among scholars across various disciplines. We join this debate by introducing newly discovered historical data in a cross-national setting. Stemming from state security concerns, two massive operations of industrial evacuations were conducted – in the 1940s in the Soviet Union and in the 1960s in Communist China respectively. As the destination regions of these two movements, the Soviet Kazakhstan and western provinces in China received a massive inflow of industrial population from the historically developed regions in the country. We argue that the rearrangement of industrial allocation represents an exogenous shock which essentially exposed the local population in the hinterland to social norms of double burden in gender politics brought about by the new pro-socialism settlers. The cultural transmission has solidified and persisted through generations despite the waning or even demise of the communist ideology. By merging the historical data on enterprise relocation in the 20th century into contemporary geo-coded subnational survey data, we show that in both Kazakhstan and China, localities which received more evacuated enterprises and had more access to interact with relocated workers in the past demonstrate a higher level of double burden, which means more gender equality perceptions with more support of traditional labor division. By exploring how uneven historical shocks produced rugged distribution of social norms until today, we show the surpassingly “sticky” legacies imposed by communist regimes.