Аннотация:The founders of the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1920s were commritted to the revolutionary questioning of many aspects of their own culture, including male-female relations, the patriarchal family structure, and the social and legal status of women. However, at the same time that they formulated a radical program on gender transformation that challenged the dominant culture, they reproduced and reinscribed central aspects of the existing gender system from the larger society within their own revolutionary party organization. This contradiction was further mirrored in the radical egalitarian fashion in which male Communists conducted their personal lives, while at the same time replicating certain traditional aspects of gender hierarchy. As a result, during the 1920s a patriarchal gender system was constructed in the body politic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that proved to be of an enduring nature. Consolidated during the course of the revolution, it became entrenched in the organs of political power of the Communist state after 1949, and is still in operation today. This article explores the process through which patriarchy was established in the institutional power structures of the CCP in its formative years.' Through an examination of the development of the Party's ideological position on women's issues, the politicalization of women, the processes through which leaders gained power and legit-
