Marriage in Death and the Cyberspace of Feminist Intervention in Contemporary China

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Chinese to English are mine. Unless the persons under discussion prefer otherwise, Chinese names are recorded in the native tradition, with the family name preceding the given name. Standard pinyin romanization is used to document proper nouns.

2 Contemporary Chinese people refers to different generations by the decade in which they were born. The post-1990s generation refers to people born in the 1990s and the post-2000s refers to people born from 2000 to 2009.

3 According to the most recent census released in May 2021, the male–female sex ratio was 105.07, a number consistent to the last census in 2010 (105.20), slightly lower than the 2000 census (106.74) and 1990 census (106.60) (National Bureau of Statistics 2021). The sex ratio in the 20 to 40 age group tends to be more skewed because women have a longer life expectancy.

4 May Fourth intellectuals refer to the educated men and women who participated in or subscribed to the tenets of the May Fourth Movement (1919). On 4 May 1919, students in Beijing demonstrated against the Paris Peace Conference at which Western powers among the Allies of World War I transferred Germany’s privileges in China to Japan. The movement soon spread to other parts of China in the form of protests and strikes, which marked the beginning of the mass mobilization for nationalist and anti-imperialist purposes in modern China. On the cultural front, influence of the movement lasted into the mid-1920s, with intellectuals introducing new ideas from abroad and critiquing the Confucian tradition.

5 He-Yin Zhen’s official name is He Zhen. In her published writings, she added her mother’s name Yin to her patrilinear name, forming He-Yin as her family name (Liu, Karl and Ko 2013: 2).

6 When Western staging was introduced to China at the turn of the twentieth century, it was promoted as a tool to educate the masses. It was students in Shanghai and Tokyo who first channelled the new theatre. When the professional stage became artistically conservative due to its eagerness to please a paying public in the 1910s, amateur theatre came to the rescue. In 1922, intellectual Chen Dabei argued for ‘aimeide xiju’, a transliteration of ‘amateur theatre’, which means beauty-loving theatre (Chen 1922:13); the rest of the decade saw director Hong Shen working closely with student amateurs in Shanghai to adapt Western staging practices for huaju.

7 The translation of Yindaozhidao to ‘The Vagina’s Way/Say’ is attributed to Wu and Dong (2019: 483).

8 For a systematic analysis of Chinese cyber-nationalism, see Wu (2007).

9 The expression ‘the rivers and the mountains’ is often used as a synecdoche for the entire realm over which a regime rules, hence the connection of Jiangshanjiao to nationalism.