The May Fourth Movement of 1919 also gave birth to the Chinese Communist Party. The Communists, who formally took over China in 1949 after a long armed struggle, soon began a program of purging landowners, whom they disparagingly labeled as capitalists, as well as anyone associated with the previous nationalist regime. Under communism, farmland was seized and redistributed among peasants, who spoke out against their former landlords and thereby were responsible for the Communist government's massacring anywhere from fifty thousand to several million former landowners.
Although Kingston discusses only briefly how the 1949 Communist takeover affected her relatives still living in China, the political problems these Chinese family members experienced certainly occurred during the period immediately following the governmental change of power. For example, in "White Tigers," Kingston recounts how in 1949, when she was nine years old, her parents received letters mailed from China that reported that Kingston's uncles "were made to kneel on broken glass during their trials and had confessed to being landowners." As such, they were executed. More gruesome is Kingston's account of the aunt "whose thumbs were twisted off." And the senseless killings of Kingston's relatives during the Communists' purge of landlords is best seen in the story of the uncle who is inhumanely slaughtered for "selfishly" capturing two doves to feed his family. Without allowing the man to defend his actions, the Communists trap him in a tree and then shoot him to death, "leaving his body in the tree as an example" to others.
A third political event that shapes Kingston's The Woman Warrior is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was later followed by other anti-Chinese immigration laws in 1888, 1892, and 1924, all of which were passed into law by United States congresses intent on severely limiting the number of Chinese immigrants allowed into the country. In the nineteenth century, during the declining years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), China experienced great famines, internal uprisings, and wars against Western powers. During this tumultuous period, many Chinese came to America to find work; they participated in the California gold rush and worked on the transcontinental railroad. Like European immigrants, the Chinese considered America, which they colloquially termed "Gold Mountain," a land of opportunities.
