When Chen Ke was in the Soviet Union, he had said that a Marxist political party must have discipline like iron. For Chen Ke, this was something proven by history. The Northeast already had new arsenals, yet the commanders of the two major military regions, North and South, could not directly issue orders to the arsenals to produce Japanese-style weapons and ammunition. Such orders required the approval of the Central Military Commission.

Discussions within the Central Military Commission were easy enough, but as the saying goes, "The King of Hell is easy to see, but the little devils are hard to deal with." Things were not so simple for the commanders. Soon, a demobilized subordinate of Mu Husan came to ask for a meeting with the commander.

"Not seeing him!" Mu Husan replied to the guard crisply.

Liu Guange did not find this reaction strange, but Mi Feng looked at Mu Husan with some surprise. "Commander Mu, isn't this..."

Mu Husan remained unmoved. He said seriously, "We are the military, they are the local administration. What is there to see? In the future, don't see anyone for this kind of thing."

Mi Feng had never seen Mu Husan so stern and was somewhat taken aback. As Deputy Commander and a member of the Party Standing Committee—and rumored to be promoted to Political Commissar of the Military Region after the merger of the North and South Northeast Military Regions—Liu Guange saw the look of a political simpleton on Mi Feng's face and felt compelled to speak up. "Commander Mi, Henan has been rectifying things very severely recently. Our troops have been strictly grasping the propaganda and education on gender equality. You should know about this matter. In the local areas of Henan, the implementation of the Marriage Law has driven quite a few people to suicide. The Center is currently investigating this matter. Let's not get involved in local administrative affairs!"

Mi Feng didn't understand the connections involved, nor did he understand how the Marriage Law could drive people to suicide. Even with the steady demeanor of a commander, a sense of bafflement still showed.

Liu Guange didn't care if Mi Feng could figure these things out; what he cared about was Mi Feng's lack of an attitude of keeping a respectful distance. Military interference in politics was a great taboo. Unless Mi Feng could be as politically mature as Chai Qingguo and completely follow the Party's direction, getting involved in political struggles would be a dead end. Compared to Chai Qingguo, Mi Feng's political experience was like someone who had grown up in a honeypot. Chai Qingguo dared to struggle against any unhealthy tendencies; Liu Guange did not have such confidence in Mi Feng.

Mu Husan's view of Mi Feng was the same as Liu Guange's. Just seeing that Mi Feng didn't have an attitude of keeping a respectful distance, Mu Husan understood that he couldn't harbor any illusions about Mi Feng politically. So Mu Husan also made a prompt decision. He said, "Commander Mi, there are some things where we have to position ourselves correctly. No position possesses special privileges."

Facing the joint opposition of the Commander and Deputy Commander of the Northeast Military Region, and having no desire to intervene in the local government himself, Mi Feng let the matter drop.

Mu Husan's choice was correct. The person outside asking to see Mu Husan was a local cadre from Henan, and one who was about to be processed. After the Center took direct control of Henan, the days for local cadres in Henan became very difficult. When there was still a Henan Provincial Government, they only had to be responsible to the Provincial Party Secretary and the Governor at most. Now, the various ministries and commissions were not the Governor. Talking big wouldn't work, talking small wouldn't work either. The heads of the ministries were impenetrable; they just demanded that the local areas do exactly as instructed!

When Chen Ke was visiting the Soviet Union, there was a major study campaign for both the Party and government teams back home. Study definitely meant discussing problems, and the issues with the Marriage Law were one of the important contents of the study.

In April 1921, New China promulgated the "Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China." This was the first legal document in Chinese history formulated by the proletariat regarding women's liberation and freedom of marriage, thereby opening the prelude to the reform of the Chinese marriage system. It had epoch-making significance.

A piece of legal text could not immediately change the backward state of the Chinese marriage and family system at the time. The concepts of "Three Obediences and Four Virtues" and "the husband guides the wife" were still deeply rooted in the land of China. Marriage cases emerged one after another, and in many provinces and regions, tragic incidents of women committing suicide or being killed due to marital relations still occurred. According to statistics from the East China Region Democratic Women's Federation, in 1922, there were 1,245 verifiable cases in Shandong Province of suicide due to involuntary marriage and family abuse. In the nine counties of the Huaiyin Prefecture in Northern Jiangsu, 119 women were driven to suicide or beaten to death from May to August 1922. In Linquan County of Fuyang Prefecture in Northern Anhui, 52 women were abused to death from January to September 1922. In Xin'an District of Lu'an County, four women were beaten to death due to marriage disputes in six days. In Huian City, Fujian, because the feudal marriage system was deeply rooted, the local Party organization and People's Government did not pay enough attention to solving the special suffering of women and did not seriously organize forces to thoroughly destroy the barbaric marriage system, resulting in multiple incidents of collective suicide by women in the city. According to incomplete statistics: from October 1921 to August 1922, 122 women committed collective suicide in Huian. In the entire East China Region, according to incomplete statistics from the promulgation of the Marriage Law to the end of 1923, more than 11,500 men and women committed suicide or were killed due to lack of freedom in marriage.

This was just the situation reported by the provinces. After the Center took direct control of Henan, the situation in Henan had nowhere to hide. A considerable number of cadres still could not get used to freedom of marriage, especially freedom of divorce. They considered it "bad influence" and "immoral," often intentionally or unintentionally obstructing and undermining the "Marriage Law," and infringing upon women's personal freedom. A female judge at the Kaifeng People's Court in Henan Province, after joining the court work, refused to study, did not accept criticism, and had serious erroneous thoughts of not handling cases according to the "Marriage Law." In 1922, in a divorce case judgment for a peasant couple, this judge actually believed that the man "is a peasant" and "it wasn't easy to spend one hundred and twenty yuan on betrothal gifts," so she did not grant the divorce. She even interfered with her younger sister's freedom of marriage, opposing her sister's romance and union with a bailiff.

Regarding the implementation of the "Marriage Law," some Henan cadres adopted an attitude of indifference. They did not sympathize with or support women suffering from the persecution of the feudal marriage system, causing many women who rose up to struggle to fail due to isolation and lack of help. A relatively common phenomenon was simply ignoring marriage cases or delaying their handling. For example, a woman in Luoyang City, Henan Province, was married by her parents to a young man in Yanshi County in August 1922. The couple's relationship was bad, and they often quarreled. After the promulgation of the "Marriage Law," the woman went to the Luoyang People's Court to apply for a divorce. But she went four times, and each time was refused by the court's case receiver (who also handled mediation) with excuses like "it's late," "no petition filed," or "doesn't meet divorce conditions." On August 23, 1922, after her fourth request for divorce was not granted, the woman was brutally killed by the man in the suburbs that very night.

In Huaiyang Prefecture of Henan Province, within less than a year of the promulgation of the "Marriage Law," 212 women were abused and killed; in Shangqiu Prefecture of Henan Province, more than 30 women committed suicide due to marriage problems from January to April 1923.

According to a summary of reports from various places in the Central-South Region, within one year from May 1922 to May 1923, more than 10,000 people were killed or committed suicide due to marriage problems in the region. Among them, 2,042 women died in Henan Province from 1922 to June 1923. After June 1923, the "Marriage Law" received a certain amount of attention in Henan Province, but within the five months from July to November 1923, there were still 60 women who died due to marriage problems.

Chinese people all know that even an upright official finds it hard to settle family affairs. In the process of judicial implementation, legal workers also upheld the attitude of advising reconciliation rather than separation. Women truly wanted to achieve self-liberation after receiving land or working in factories. The People's Party felt that its fairly robust grassroots political power was already powerless to protect the people who should be protected when faced with the opposition of a portion of the people.

A life for a life. Whether it is judged as intentional homicide is based on whether there is a clear intent to commit a crime. For thousands of years, imperial power did not extend below the county level. Now that the Central Government's power had suddenly intervened in every corner of society, this triggered maladjustment and backlash from the masses.

A husband killing his wife was already a tragedy, and now killing the man meant paying with another life; wasn't this ruining the family? The masses didn't care about your many laws. The masses didn't participate in the formulation of the laws when they were made, nor did they sign or pledge anything. The government above produced a law that violated long-standing historical traditions, causing "family discord," so basically no one among the masses clearly supported the government. This was the rhetoric of the officials below.

Xu Dian was not misled by this rhetoric at all. His attitude was extremely clear: "No matter what the masses think, the fact that such things emerge one after another is primarily because Party members and civil servants everywhere have not thoroughly understood women's liberation, or even oppose women's liberation in their hearts! No matter how much the masses oppose, what they do first when facing the government is observe the wind and direction. If government civil servants don't understand women's liberation correctly enough, how can the masses possibly have a correct understanding of women's liberation?"

The *People's Daily* also immediately published a front-page article: "The 'Marriage Law' is Not a Divorce Law, Nor a Marriage Law, But a Law to Protect Everyone and Liberate Everyone!"

Taking this as the entry point, the Party launched another "anti-feudal" rectification movement.

The last large-scale anti-feudal movement used "anti-meritorious service mentality" as the entry point to rectify the parochial thinking within the Party and military. This anti-feudal movement not only inherited the previous line of thought but also added deeper content: "No one possesses ownership over another person's body," and "Everyone is equal before the law."

When Chen Ke returned from the Soviet Union and saw the latest reports, even he felt the speed of this advancement was a bit fast. The new "Marriage Law" was actually formulated from the perspective of an industrial nation. China in 1923 had not yet entered such a high-level industrial age.

In the 21st century, industrial countries universally experienced the problem of declining fertility rates. This trend was not bound by any political ideology. Iran, ruled by Shiite Muslims, could at least be linked to theocracy. However, Iran itself was an industrial country, and such a Muslim industrial country also experienced a problem of drastically declining birth rates. While other Muslims were relying on the "womb weapon" to give birth wildly, the fertility rate of Iranian women dropped to below 2. Chen Ke roughly remembered a statistic: from 1981 to 1991, Iran's population grew by 18 million, with a growth rate of 3.5% to 4%. However, in the following years, the growth rate dropped to 1.3%.

The most fundamental reason for the population decline in industrial countries is that women have been liberated. With the development of productive forces, the range of female employment has greatly increased. Men are by nature fond of "doing big things." When they are struggling out there risking their lives to realize their self-ideals, girls do not have such great ambitions. Girls show a trend of overwhelming boys in those jobs that do not have too much mobility but require patience. Boys jump up and down, making a few deals a year, earning fifty or a hundred thousand. Girls work steadily for more than two thousand a month, and with the year-end bonus, they also have thirty or forty thousand a year. Men do not show an overwhelming advantage.

Men are by nature fond of playing. If they have money, they go out to be happy. For someone earning a hundred thousand a year, the money remaining in their own pocket by the end of the year might not necessarily be more than the girls. In most Chinese families in the 21st century, women manage the money, and without the woman's salary, life would really be hard to get by.

Girls rely on their own work to support themselves, and can even have a house and a car. Under the modern industrial state system, gender equality based on economic and work equality can naturally be realized. This was what Chen Ke learned from Chairman Mao.

In the 21st century, a Chinese literary worker actually ridiculed Chairman Mao's women's liberation as a "women's work movement." Chen Ke felt this person was the standard model of an "ignorant fool who doesn't know what's good for them."

So upon returning to China, Chen Ke convened a Politburo meeting. At the meeting, Chen Ke first approved of Xu Dian's criticism of the Party members and civil servants. "The comrades of the Politburo must first determine for themselves whether they support gender equality! Then determine under what circumstances they support gender equality! Finally, determine how we are to achieve gender equality! If the Politburo cannot solve its own ideological problems, then there is no need to even think about the levels below."

The style of the People's Party was to speak the truth. Anyone who discussed things by bringing up old scores at a meeting would suffer for it. So the group of masters in the Politburo began to speak out.

"Gender equality doesn't mean women riding on top of men's heads!"

"At home, it can't be that whatever the woman says goes!"

Remarks like these were nothing much. The comrades who said these things had married female revolutionary comrades, and in terms of income, these comrades did not hold the advantage.

"Does a woman get a divorce just because she says she wants a divorce? This decision can't be made unilaterally, right? I feel the regulations in the Marriage Law are too harsh. Emotional incompatibility is a reason for divorce! Which family doesn't have some bumps and scrapes?"

"Women can also initiate divorce; I think this really hurts a man's face!"

Remarks like these also appeared.

Xu Dian knew self-awareness that he did not have Chen Ke's rallying power. Firstly, it would be very difficult for him to convene such a Politburo meeting. Secondly, even if he convened it, he might not be able to get the comrades to speak their hearts. Moreover, listening to the complaints of the Politburo comrades, Xu Dian felt a vague unease. These complaints sounded like a counterattack against the law no matter how he listened. Xu Dian had already discussed legal issues with Chen Ke many times, and he had come to profoundly understand the fragility of this thing called law. No matter how advanced a law is, if it cannot synchronize with the economic and social conceptual development of the time, various problems will ensue.

Even facing so many opposing opinions from the Politburo, Xu Dian did not think there was any problem with the line of thought behind the new Marriage Law. This was a law truly based on scientific socialism and based on universal care for humanity; it was a law to liberate human society and remove the shackles of human society.

However, this law indeed faced many resistances. Because the development of social productive forces had indeed not reached that height.

Chen Ke was not overwhelmed by these opposing opinions. After all, he came from downstream in history. Even if he couldn't summarize the inevitability of historical development, Chen Ke had at least seen the results of the inevitability of historical development with his own eyes. "I now already know that comrades think this law is relatively ahead of its time. Now I want to ask another question: does anyone oppose the gender equality under the future industrial society that I spoke of?"

This time no one dared to voice opposition. It was obviously unrealistic to ask men to take the initiative to kneel down to promote women's status. But if faced with women who already possessed their own independent economic status, this bunch in the Politburo might still dare to use their own status to gain an overwhelming advantage in the family, but they could also imagine that ordinary laborers would absolutely not dare to do so.

Chen Ke looked around the silent conference room and continued, "Then let us study this law. Let's see what exactly this law wants to regulate, what it wants to oppose, and what it wants to protect. Comrade Xu Dian will explain."

Two days later, the Politburo's problem was finally resolved. The comrades of the Politburo reached a consensus: the legitimate rights and interests of working women must be protected. As for the problems of non-working women, they would be solved by strengthening the work of the Women's Federation. And the execution of women's employment work would be promoted.

Once the Politburo solved the problem, it was the turn of the Central Committee. At the Central Committee level, diehards appeared. Chen Ke didn't even need to name names; the Central Committee unanimously agreed that certain comrades had strong concepts of feudal hierarchy and deeply rooted discrimination against women, and they must be temporarily relieved of their work. Thus, high-ranking cadres who attended study classes because they opposed gender equality appeared.

After resolving the Central Committee, comrades at the level of governor and provincial party secretary had to start accepting education. Because they were responsible for concrete work, there were no diehards among the governors and provincial secretaries. What they needed was a more detailed scope of legal application and methods of legal application. This was Xu Dian's professional duty and strong suit, so the Politburo handed this aspect of work to Xu Dian. A matter that had once nearly caused a huge uproar at the high levels was resolved just like that.

With the upper levels reaching a consensus, the subsequent matters, though tedious, were quite easy to smooth out. After completing the work assignments for the provincial level, Xu Dian also applied to go down to the grassroots. He wasn't going to punish people. "The work of the grassroots comrades is too hard," Xu Dian said seriously. "The upper levels are still a bunch of muddleheads, let alone speaking of the hardship of the grassroots comrades."

Chen Ke laughed. "Who will be responsible for the work of your position? Are you strictly supporting Comrade Zhang Yu's suggestion about high-level comrades going down to the grassroots in a disguised form?"

Xu Dian also laughed, which was rare. "Political and Legal Affairs has a Party Committee. If I go down, the Party Committee can naturally select personnel to be temporarily responsible. If there aren't enough personnel in the Party Committees at various levels, they can recommend people from the lower-level Party Committees to come up and take over the work. Besides, Chairman Chen, you are sitting in the Center, so we are at ease. If something goes wrong with the Center's work, we in the Party Committee will hold a meeting to call you to account!"

These words actually had a bit of a bootlicking flavor. For the stern-natured Xu Dian to say such things was also quite a rare occurrence.

Chen Ke put away his smile. "Since you are going down to the grassroots, study the grassroots organizations well, as well as the institutional problems of legal implementation at various levels. Listen more, learn more, see more. Don't give work instructions, and don't start spouting nonsense just because you get excited. This is the key to going down to the grassroots."

"If one starts gesturing and dictating the moment they get off their horse, the work will invariably go wrong." Xu Dian recited a passage related to "On Practice." "Talk about it every day, talk about it every year—this is absolutely not enough. I will speak this way when I go down too."

Chen Ke sighed. "These few years are just the last of the peace." He couldn't help but speak the words that should have been hidden in his heart.

Xu Dian was slightly stunned, but he quickly replied, "Rest assured, we will definitely do our utmost to prepare before the war."