Feminism in modern China

Abstract

This essay discusses the significances and meanings of the emergence of feminism as a mode of social analysis in the early twentieth century in China. It focuses on a critical examination of some of the more dominant discourses of the time, and seeks to contextualize these in a global perspective. By concentrating in the last part of the essay on He-Yin Zhen (He Zhen), the anarchist–feminist editor of the Tokyo-based journal Natural Justice (Tianyi bao), and in particular on her exposition on female labor, the essay introduces one of the most radical critiques of Chinese and global gender issues written at the time. In so doing, it demonstrates He-Yin Zhen's prescience and the ways in which her analyses can continue to inform feminisms for our day.

Keywords:

• He-Yin Zhen (He Zhen)
• feminism
• nationalism
• anarchism
• labor
• social relations

Notes

¹He-Yin Zhen, “Economic Revolution and Women's Revolution” (Jingji geming yu nüzi geming), Natural Justice (Tianyi bao), no. 13–14 (1907), no page number in the original, translated by Rebecca Karl, in The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, ed. Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

²Jin Tianhe, The Women's Bell, trans. Michael Hill and Deborah Tze-lang Sang, in The Birth of Chinese Feminism. For the Chinese original of this quotation, see Jin Yi (Jin Tianhe), preface to Nüjie zhong [The Women's Bell] (Shanghai: Datong shuju, 1903; Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2003), 1. The opening paragraph to the present essay and some other passages are indebted to the introduction to Birth of Chinese Feminism and my collaborative work with Lydia Liu and Dorothy Ko. Other parts are adapted from various published and as-yet unpublished essays of mine.

³Jin Yi (Jin Tianhe), Nüjie zhong, 12.

⁴As the scholar Liu Jucai notes, Jin Yi's pamphlet was “the first bourgeois Chinese monograph on the woman question.” Liu Jucai, Zhongguo jindai funü yundong shi [A History of the Modern Chinese Women's Movement] (Beijing: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1989), 153.

⁵For an exploration of this point, see Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

⁶See Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 197.

⁷Also see Hu Ying, Tales of Translation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

⁸See Judge, The Precious Raft of History.

⁹For an extended discussion of this context, see Karl, Staging the World.

¹⁰See James Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

¹¹There is an enormous debate in the economic history of China about whether there was absolute or even relative rural immiseration through these years. What seems absolutely clear, despite the disputes, is that intensification of land use was proceeding very rapidly; the dynastic accommodation with landlords was inimical to rural land adjustments in favor of agricultural labor; and handicraft manufacture, particularly in the realm of the traditional women's work of spinning and weaving, was severely impacted by the industrial competition in silk and cotton from Japan, British-colonized India, and the revival of the American South after the civil war as well as by the recovery of the silk industry in France and Italy after the mid-century silkworm plagues, among others. The literature on these disputes is voluminous and specialized.

¹²See Hill Gates, China's Motor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Kathy LeMons Walker, Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

¹³For He Zhen as He-Yin Zhen, see Liu, Karl, Ko, eds., introduction to The Birth of Chinese Feminism.

¹⁴For more on He-Yin Zhen and her views on labor, see Liu, Karl, Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism. In addition, as Chan and Dirlik point out: “It was … Liu Shipei and his associates in Tokyo who first introduced the necessity of labor as an integral component of anarchist revolution.” They indicate specifically Liu's 1907 Natural Justice (Tianyi bao) essay, “On Equalizing Human Labor” (Renlei junli shuo). He-Yin was perhaps more vigorous in her advocacy for the centrality of labor than even her husband, Liu Shipei. See Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik, Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927–1932 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 26–27.

¹⁵Liang Qichao, “Lun nüxue” [On Women's Education], originally published in Shiwu Bao [The Chinese Progress] on April 12, 1897, reprinted in Zhongguo jindai jiaoyushi ziliao huibian: wuxu shiqi jiaoyu [Collection of Documents on the History of Modern Chinese Education: Education in the Period of 1898 Reform], ed. Tang Zhijun, Chen Zuen, and Tang Renze (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 2007) 99–106. Translated into English by Robert Cole and Wei Peng, included in Liu, Karl, Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism.

¹⁶For more on the debates over female education of the time, see Joan Judge, “Talent, Virtue and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001), 765–803. For home management, see Helen Schneider, Keeping the Nation's House (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011).

¹⁷As Dorothy Ko has written in this regard, the end of footbinding was a tortured affair, pitting missionaries, state bureaucrats, as well as male and female elites against the common practice and against the pain of the unbinding process. Ko comments: “In the tug-of-war footbinding shrank in stature. It was not so much outlawed as outmoded; footbinding came to a virtual death when its cultural prestige extinguished. To put it another way, the end came when the practice exhausted all justifications within the existing repertoire of cultural symbols and values …” Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 13–14.

¹⁸See Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

¹⁹Karl, Staging the World, and “The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006), 52–79.

²⁰For an introduction to Qiu Jin's life and an extended translation of an excerpt from her political story, see “Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” in Writing Women in Modern China, ed. Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 40–78. Also see Hu Ying, “Writing Qiu Jin's Life: Wu Zhiying and Her Family Learning,” Late Imperial China 25, no. 2 (December 2004), 119–160.

²¹See Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution 1850–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 65–66. The Japanese editor appended a commentary to the reprint. It reads: “Among the revolutionary youths from the Qing state who currently reside in Japan, a number of people have recently formed a ‘Society for the Restoration of Women's Rights’ and are publishing a journal called Natural Justice … Although there are some idiosyncrasies, as is often the case with the Chinese (Shinajin), and there are some clauses we cannot fully endorse, these [Chinese youth] are incredibly strong-willed and spirited. This is something we ought to have observed more among the Japanese.” See Seikai Fujin, no. 13 (July 1907), 100.

²²See Mizuyo Sudo, “Concepts of Women's Rights in Modern China”, Gender and History 18, no. 3 (November 2006), 472–489 (translated from Japanese by Michael Hill). For other women writers, see Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China, ed. Nanxiu Qian, Grace S. Fong, and Richard J. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

²³I should also note Lü Bicheng (1884–1943), pioneering journalist at Dagong bao published in Tianjin. Like Chen, Luo, and Lin, Lü advocated for female education and equal rights and she helped raise funds for the founding of Beiyang Women's Public School in 1904. See Grace S. Fong, “Alternative Modernities, or a Classical Woman of Modern China: The Challenging Trajectory of Lü Bicheng (1883–1943) Life and Song Lyrics”, Nan Nü: Men, Women & Gender in Early & Imperial China 6, no. 1 (2004), 12–59.

²⁴Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

²⁵These, in other words, were not yet formally interpretations of the past as history, as the historical debates in the 1920s and 1930s were to be.

²⁶Chuwo (Ding Chuwo), “Ai nüzhong,” [Lamenting Womankind], Nüzi shijie, no. 6 (1904), 3.

²⁷Any number of essays from this time could be cited.

²⁸See, for example, Ding Chuwo, who promoted a return to the female bravery forsaken 2000 years in the past by counterposing the female slave (nüzi wei nuli) of contemporary times to the knight errant (xia) figure of yore: “Knight errancy yielded to Confucianism and thence to national weakness; this then yielded to slavery, which produced colonization (wangguo)... If one is not a knight errant, one is a slave.” Chuwo, “Ai Nüzhong,” 2, 3.

²⁹For example, when Sparta is cited as a positive example of women's strength, commentators believe that Sparta's strength derives from its women's strength, the corollary being that China cannot be strong if Chinese women are not made strong first. However, other commentators argue that female strength is contingent upon national strength, and not the other way around. For the latter, see Lianshi, “Nüquan pingyi,” [A Comment on Women's Rights], Zhongguo xin nüjie [China's New Women's World], no. 1 (February 5, 1907), 3.

³⁰Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 2.

³¹Luo Yanbin frequently wrote under her penname Lianshi, she was the editor-in-chief of the Tokyo-based journal, Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi, and she was a member of the Revolutionary Alliance from Henan Province for biographical information. See Sun Shiyue, Zhongguo jindai nüzi liuxueshi [A History of Modern Chinese Women Students Abroad] (Beijing: Zhongguo heping chubanshe, 1995), 111.

³²Lianshi, “Nüquan pingyi,” 3. Also, Zhang Xiongxi notes, albeit without reference to Darwinism, that “the world is based upon yin/yang for material things, without prejudice; men and women each have their duties and each enjoys their rights” See Zhang Xiongxi, “Chuangli nüjie zili hui zhi guize” [Establishing the Rules for the Creation of Independence Society of the Women's World], Yunnan zazhi [Yunnan Magazine], no. 1 (October 15, 1906), 1.

³³He-Yin Zhen's “Lun nüzi laodong wenti” [On the Question of Women's Labor] was originally published in Tianyi bao, no. 5 (July 10, 1907), 71–80, Tianyi bao, no. 6 (August 10, 1907), 125–134. This essay was translated by Rebecca Karl, included in Liu, Karl, Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism. All citations in this section to He-Yin Zhen, unless otherwise noted, are to this essay.

³⁴The difference is signaled in He-Yin Zhen's linguistic usage: laodong – labor – is a Marxist-inspired loan word from the Japanese; gong is the traditional Chinese word for human activity, or work, in what I am calling the ontological sense.

³⁵Bruno Gulli, Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

³⁶I should note here that He-Yin Zhen's notion of nügong is quite idealized and, compared to later anarchists and radicals in general, her critique of the family as a social institution is tame.

³⁷Emphasis in original.

³⁸For the split between Tokyo-based and Paris-based early-century Chinese anarchists, and for the philosophical and ideological sources behind that split, see Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).