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Feminism in modern China
Rebecca KARL
a
a
New York University , New York
Published online: 04 Dec 2012.
To cite this article: Rebecca KARL (2012) Feminism in modern China, Journal of Modern Chinese
History, 6:2, 235-255, DOI: 10.1080/17535654.2012.738873
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17535654.2012.738873
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
Vol. 6, No. 2, December 2012, 235–255
ARTICLE
Feminism in modern China
Rebecca KARL*
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New York University, New York
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
. . . a women’s revolution must go hand-in-hand with an economic revolution. If an economic
revolution cannot be accomplished, then the common phrase heard today calling for a ‘‘revolution between men and women’’ cannot be said to have touched the essence of the problem.
– He-Yin Zhen (also known as He Zhen) (1907)1
In 1903 Jin Tianhe (also known as Jin Yi), a liberal educator and political activist, published
in Shanghai what historians have commonly referred to as a feminist manifesto. The
pamphlet was entitled The Women’s Bell (N€
ujie zhong). In the preface, Jin conjures a vision
of happiness by contrasting his own inadequate existence with that of an imaginary scene in
Euro–America:
The muggy rainy season with its endless drizzles is stifling. Lotuses droop in the trepid hot
breeze. The trees are listless and the distant hills dormant. On the eastern end of the continent of
Asia, in a country that knows no freedom, in a small room that knows no freedom, my breathing
is heavy, my mind gone sluggish. I want to let in the fresh air of European civilization, draw it in
to restore my body.
I dream of a young, white European man. On this day, at this hour, with a rolled cigarette in his
mouth, walking stick in hand, his wife and children by him, he strolls with his head held up high
*Email: [email protected]
1
He-Yin Zhen, ‘‘Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution’’ (Jingji geming yu n€
uzi 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).
ISSN 1753-5654 print/ISSN 1753-5662 online
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17535654.2012.738873
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236
Rebecca KARL
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and arms swinging by his sides through the promenades of London, Paris, Washington.
Such happiness and ease! I wish I could go there myself.2
The fresh air of Europe that dispels the stagnation of China is symbolized by and encapsulated in the peaceful scenic depiction of a bourgeois white man strolling carefree on a
presumably well-ordered boulevard accompanied by his well-groomed wife and wellbehaved children. Just as the peaceful nature of the scene located in a generic but specific
time and place is important, the wife and children also are essential to the completion of the
picture of the happy man. We should note that the woman is hardly the focus of attention.
Strange subject position with which to open a so-called ‘‘feminist manifesto’’!
Not only does racial envy and masculine inadequacy infuse this vision, but the spatial
synchronicity and temporal simultaneity – ‘‘on this day, at this hour’’ – can only signal, in
this narrative frame, China’s backwardness with relation to Europe and its consequent
national need to catch up. In this sense, the direct juxtaposition reinforces the co-temporality
and yet the distance between Jin/China and the white man/Euro–America. As is well known,
this juxtaposition, by the turn of the twentieth century, was firmly rooted as a gendered sense
of Chinese lack vis-à-vis Euro–America; this lack was equally firmly anchored to a sense of
national weakness and inadequacy: ‘‘a country that knows no freedom’’ where the air is
sluggish and people cannot breathe. The gendered lack conjoined to national inadequacy
became a common rhetorical and discursive figure; it became the ideologically-lived reality
through which history, the present and the future were understood and narrated. By the same
token, the redress of the backward inadequacy/lack became an object of desire: with such a
wonderful vision of advancement – a free man accompanied by his wife and children
breathing free-flowing air and walking on a spacious boulevard free of violence and
pestilence. It is no wonder that many women and men at the turn of the twentieth century
in China (as elsewhere) – living lives blighted by struggle, personal and social violence, dirt,
and newly manifest unfreedoms – came alternately to cherish and to condemn this complacent form of gendered happiness. After all, such an idealized life promised stability, power
and wealth, even as it was far from the everyday subjugated semi-colonized lives most
Chinese elites (not to mention non-elites) actually led.
We might even say that the two – the carefree Europeans and the subjugated Chinese; the
strong free white man with his educated wife and the weak suffocated Chinese man with his
ignorant, bound-foot, and cloistered women – were at once mutually contradictory and
yet also mutually dependent. The stereotypical images of each – as untrue as they were
ideologically real – depended heavily on the other. In fact, we could say that much of the
historical problematic of early twentieth-century Chinese feminism (and of nationalism)
stems from this simultaneous contradiction and dependence.
To be clear, in this essay, ‘‘feminism’’ points to the variegated problem of ‘‘woman’’
(n€
uxing, funn€
u, and so on) raised insistently from the turn of the twentieth century onward
and that became one of the major touchstones of male and female theorizing about China’s
and the global situation. Feminism for the late Qing period and into the early 1920s hence
refers not so much to organized activity as to the broad realm of theorization that takes the
problem of the social relations of woman seriously in its multiple political, economic,
2
Jin 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 N€
ujie
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.
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
237
cultural and other guises. On the one hand, then, feminism is not about women as such, but
rather about the ways in which theorizations of social relations become infused with gendered
concerns about the relationship of woman to social life at a particular historical juncture. On
the other hand, feminism does not at this early time focus on the organizational forms of
activism, although it is quite clear that at the very least journalism and the practice of editorial
and narrative writing were crucial to its expression, or rather, to the basic formulations of
discourse, language, and concepts deemed adequate to the problem named ‘‘woman’’ or
‘‘feminism’’. This early feminism, then, would bear relation to, but not be synonymous with
the multiple reappearances of feminisms over the course of the twentieth century in China.
That is, in its raising of the question of woman and man as a primary social relation, historical
feminisms are obvious cognate appearances; however, the primary relations signified in the
raising of the question of woman and man changed over time, and thus must be understood
historically in their specificities. Below, the focus is on feminism’s late Qing emergence.
As one illustration of the particularity and universality of the late Qing version of
feminism, we can cite some lines that follow Jin’s melancholy statement of Chinese male
inadequacy noted above. He writes despairingly: ‘‘There is not a place in today’s world
where male domination of women has not triumphed; if they are not treated as playthings,
then they are used as colonized territory.’’3 This remark, again both contradictory to and
dependent upon his happy vision of bourgeois life described at the outset, summarizes both
the central concerns and the central historical contexts of the attack on the congeries of social
practices that Jin and many of his male and female contemporaries saw as shaping the
benighted condition of China and the early twentieth-century world. The context is supplied
by the implied contrastive problem of playthings (versus productive work) and colonization
(versus autonomous or sovereign territory). The practices that corresponded to these contexts and shaped them in the particularity of China were characterized, as Jin goes on to
argue in the fuller pamphlet, by concern with female morality and virtue (daode), the female
disposition (pinxing), ability (nengli), educational method (jiaoyu zhi fangfa), disparities in
social power and rights (quanli), political participation, and marriage.
Each of the items on this list as well as their totality refers to the whole set of social
relations that was newly coming to be recognized as having contributed to China’s so-called
backwardness (with regard to Euro–America) and decline (with regard to China’s own past).
In other words, while all of these issues had been raised individually in the past, it is their
totalized and systematized relation to the putative backwardness of China in a global frame
and the consequent sense of modern decline in a national narrative sense that makes them
signify differently as a catalogue of historical frailties. Indeed, while Jin’s catalogue of ills
later came to be named the ‘‘woman problem (fun€u wenti)’’4 and the language he used also
helped set the tone and parameters for much subsequent usage, we should nevertheless see
Jin’s summary as combining, from the perspective of a nationalist, the various issues –
playthings, colonizing, and embodied (territorial/property) relations – that constituted the
historical problematic from which his list emanates and to which it gives voice and shape in
the early twentieth-century context.
What I am pointing to here is the general problem that was raised by the massive
articulated emergence of feminism and gender concerns in the late Qing in its simultaneity
with that immanent totalization called modernity, structured in China by capitalist expansion
3
Jin Yi (Jin Tianhe), N€ujie zhong, 12.
As the scholar Liu Jucai notes, Jin Yi’s pamphlet was ‘‘the first bourgeois Chinese monograph on the
woman question.’’ Liu Jucai, Zhongguo jindai fun€u yundong shi [A History of the Modern Chinese
Women’s Movement] (Beijing: Zhongguo fun€u chubanshe, 1989), 153.
4
238
Rebecca KARL
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in the form of imperialism and semi-colonization, which gave rise to the temporal concern
with nationalism and backwardness.5 Further, what I want to emphasize is the concurrent
emergence of a concern with everyday routines as embodied in gendered forms that were
linked inextricably to a newly discovered possibility of the political in twentieth-century
China. This realm of the political included but was not exhausted by nationalism. In this
regard, we could say that these routines and possibilities derived from and incorporated
concerns that were intimately connected to gendered positionings of laboring subjects
within global, nationalist, and family-centered discourses of the political and the economic.
I take Jin Tianhe’s comment on the nexus among playthings, colonization, and embodied
(territorial) social relations as an emblematic statement of this conjunctural problematic and,
in what follows, I outline how this conjunctural problematic came to be recognized,
articulated, and discussed in the late Qing global historical context.
The demise of the talented woman (cain€
u) and the rise of the new woman
By the early twentieth century in China, the often-fraught social ideal of cain€u (talented
woman) was being thoroughly dismantled by an emerging type of woman and man. This
emergent type found in the poetic output and deep family involvements of cain€u a lack of
public engagement that contained undesirable social values from which the new generation
now wished to distance itself. The turn-of-the-twentieth-century rejection of the cain€u and
her rapid replacement (over a couple of decades) by the new woman led to the historical
dismissal of the talented woman, now characterized as a dabbler and dilettante, whose
writings at best could be considered ‘‘ditties on the wind and moon.’’6 With her rejection,
it is possible to see that the practices of modern Chinese womanhood emerged not merely
from an emulation of Western or Japanese standards, but also importantly from an internal
reaction against the ways in which elite Chinese women had hitherto fashioned themselves
in textually ideal and socially practical terms.
However clear the dismissal of the cain€
u might be, pinning down the new woman is a bit
difficult. Recent studies of talented women7 and of the emergent new woman have shown
that what is new about the new woman is certainly not female literacy, as talented women
were highly literate and, like their modern sisters, they usually emerged from educated
families. By the same token, home management and educational roles in the family do not
mark the new woman as new, because the management and educational efforts of talented
women were often a major reason why their marital and natal families attained and retained
political and social power as well as financial solvency through the bureaucratic success
gained by their men. As is well recognized, the weaving and spinning, artistic production
and poetic prowess of the cain€
u were all crucial to the fiscal and social position of their
families. It is also not new women’s appearance in print that makes them new, as the poetic
and epistolary output of talented women was widely published from at least the end of the
Ming dynasty onwards.
Thus, even if not sociologically new, there is something ineluctably different about the
turn-of-the-twentieth-century woman. While it is clear that many of the new women came
from families where talented women had been nurtured, the vehemence of the modern
5
For 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).
6
See Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press, 2007), 197.
7
Also 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).
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
239
rejection cannot be ascribed merely to generational conflict or inevitable historical progress.
Rather, there was an apparent conceptual rupture. For example, while the modern concern
with female morality or education appears continuous with such concern from the past, it is
important to note that the modern concerns are clearly enfolded into a new set of practices
emerging for the modern woman. For Jin Tianhe, for instance, the recovery of a socially
productive concept of virtue (de) depended upon stripping the power/violence/joy from
everyday practices masquerading as play and replacing those with the production of lasting
social value through a different relation of rights to social and economic production. By the
same token, in promoting education, the social ideal of talented women’s literacy was
mocked and refashioned as both a public (national) and a family good, while the location
and content of education were shifted from boudoirs and poetry to classrooms and prose.
Meanwhile, female activity in the natal or marital family was repurposed as a virtuous
national duty to raise a newly articulated (male) citizenry even as productivity was to be
moved into more quantifiable locations and out of the family. At the same time, stirring
stories of female heroines of yore, such as Hua Mulan, were juxtaposed to stories of heroines
from Europe, such as Jean d’Arc, to create a global equivalence of heroic women spanning
time and space.8
This global equivalent helped construct new concepts of ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘modern/new’’
that became the ever-shifting and mutually-reflective form of ‘‘modern/new woman’’ for
China. The crosscurrents in discourse and practice of the 1890s onwards were in this sense
quite transformative, and all the advocacies were articulated in the overlapping real time of a
little more than a decade (1898–1911). By the end of this period and into the early
Republican moment, the main topics and valence of discussion had utterly changed by
being embedded into while also shaping an entirely different historical moment.
The late Qing historical context
This historical moment was informed by large changes in the domestic and global scene.
Beginning with the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, China’s historically selfsufficient economy was forced by wars and treaties to open to a flow of manufactured
commodities produced in the burgeoning industrial and plantation sites of Britain,
France, Prussia, the United States, and their colonial possessions. While China had
traded with foreign countries for many centuries and links with its Southern neighbors
(the nanyang) had become particularly dense by the nineteenth century through immigration and consequent family–entrepreneurial connections, the forms of commerce and
of foreign relations demanded by the incorporation of China into the global capitalist
world were qualitatively different. China was now inserted into an international system
of trade, diplomacy, and culture dominated absolutely by Euro–American military
might, economic arrangements, and emerging ideological hegemony. From the 1840s
onwards, China’s economy, society, culture, and politics increasingly came under pressure to either submit or to adapt to these global realities in geographically uneven ways.
Internal social rebellions were in part sparked by imported and adapted ideologies that
combined creatively with internal economic, social, and ideological dislocations occasioned by shifting economic and political arrangements. Missionaries from various
countries flooded into the country following the gunboats, converting few but creating
ideological and social fissures through their translation efforts and promotion of different socio–cultural values. The Chinese language itself underwent large-scale
8
See Judge, The Precious Raft of History.
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240
Rebecca KARL
transformation, with classical usages giving way and adapting to new vocabularies and
new concepts demanded by the incorporation of China into the inter-state capitalist
system of trade, governance, and politics.
From the mid-nineteenth century on, successive waves of educated men – many of
whom served or wished to serve in the dynastic bureaucracy as officials – tried to think
their way through and out the other side of the multisided catastrophes facing China
through these decades. Initiating new industrial manufactures, translation bureaus,
schools, and institutes where new forms of knowledge were learned and imparted;
going abroad to study the ways of the dominating powers; critiquing the mores and
customs of their own society, these educated and sometimes even moneyed men, in the
space of less than a generation, came to understand that the old ways of the integrated
Chinese socio–cultural and political–economic system could not and would not last.
When the newly-built Chinese navy was summarily destroyed and defeated by the
Japanese in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895, the sense of accumulated crises of
the time came to a climax. From 1895 to 1898, the critical energies of many concerned
and educated men – now joined by an intrepid few educated women incipiently recognizing the relation between gendered social formations and political–economic forms –
centered on reforming the dynastic structures of rule so as to allow for a fuller flexibility
in political, social, cultural, commercial, and military organization and development.
This push culminated in the one hundred-days reform period in 1898, during which the
Guangxu Emperor was petitioned and agreed to a series of political reforms. His reformmindedness was soon suppressed by the Empress Dowager Cixi and her faction of court
conservatives. This last best chance for thoroughgoing dynastic reform soon gave rise to
a revolutionary movement organized by Chinese elites now pushed into exile (mostly in
Japan, Hong Kong, and the United States). By late-1911, this revolutionary movement
succeeded in toppling the Qing dynasty and replacing China’s dynastic system with a
Republican form of government.
Early twentieth century China thus saw the final demise of the last dynasty and the
establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912. It was an extended moment of flux during
which the intertwined foundational premises of Chinese society, politics, economics, and
culture crumbled and were rethought in the context of a global situation in which any
autonomy of rethinking was impossible.9 For many educated elites, China’s geographically
incomplete but politically and economically violent subjugation to foreign powers urgently
raised the question of how to compete with the increasingly rapacious and demanding
imperialist colonizers on the pre-given terrain of militarization, enlightenment thought,
and free market, capitalist-driven socio–economic industrialization. The pre-given nature
of the terms of engagement and competition led to a simultaneous acceptance and questioning by Chinese elites of the possible modalities for the various types of adaptations and
accommodations needed to challenge the invading powers. These modalities generally
included the technological, capital, institutional requisites, and labor mobilizations for
what was called at the time ‘‘self- strengthening’’ (ziqiang), later known as ‘‘modernization’’
(jindai/xiandai hua).
While an adequate discussion of the socio–economic thinking of that time falls
outside the scope of this essay, suffice it to say that one of the primary schools of thought
to emerge to deal with this question was called The Study of Wealth and Power (Fuqiang
xue). This school in large part derived from the translation and popularization of Herbert
Spencer’s sociological reworking of Charles Darwin’s biological survival of the fittest as
9
For an extended discussion of this context, see Karl, Staging the World.
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
241
then adduced to explain the manifest military and commercial superiorities of the Euro–
American powers.10 It stressed, beyond all else, the urgent necessity for technological
militarization and institutional–bureaucratic rationalization at the national scale, as well
as the socio–economic industrialization of coastal China and the creation and integration
of a productive national economy. The source of labor to fuel these semi-public/semiprivate endeavors would be the vast agrarian population of China’s rural interior, whose
land, while not expropriated outright, nevertheless was becoming more and more
difficult to cultivate so as to produce for the increasing burdens of landlord surplus
extraction and imperial taxation.11 Particularly affected by the combination of land
squeeze, rural labor intensification, and the steady collapse of home-based handicrafts
in face of foreign-controlled industrial imports and foreign-owned coastal manufactures
were women, whose economic activities had always been – in times and places of plenty
as in times and places of scarcity – crucial to household economic viability. No mere
supplement or sideline (as many economists and economic historians continue to call it)
to a supposedly proper male-dominated economy, female-dominated spinning and
weaving activities were a central and necessary element of the functioning of any rural
household economy.12
Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this self-sufficient albeit
increasingly pressed rural economy steadily deteriorated as a consequence of ever more
rapacious landlords in collusion with newly-rising and newly-rich merchant elites in the
coastal urban areas. This led to an accelerating subordination of rural to urban space. In
consequence, there formed a lopsided competition in textile production and quality between
the rural producers on the one hand and, on the other, textiles produced in urban-based
highly-capitalized foreign-owned industries or foreign-imported manufactures protected
through tariff inequalities maintained by British colonial power. Women, whose family
livelihoods were being ruined by these combined practices and trends, labored more
intensively for lower returns within the family; were increasingly subjected to being sold
as brides and/or concubines and/or servants and/or prostitutes to anyone willing to pay; or,
they were induced to leave their families, either voluntarily (that is, forced by poverty) or in
coerced fashion (sold by their parents or in-laws to garner cash; bought by factory operatives
looking for cheap, indebted, and tractable labor; and so on). These women worked long and
hard hours in the families of the urban or rural elites, in the factories of the many foreign and
few domestic industrialists in the growing cities, and in the streets and byways of the cities,
10
See 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).
11
There 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.
12
See 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).
242
Rebecca KARL
towns, and villages; they were mortgaged to owners as servants, brides or concubines – often
for a lifetime.
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Feminism: Education, print media, and labor
The anarchist He-Yin Zhen (also known as He Zhen)13 was virtually alone in her critiques
of labor and in calling for the necessity for a simultaneous economic and women’s
revolution. Indeed, for most liberal feminist and other commentators of the late Qing,
male or female, laboring women and rural economic hardship remained largely invisible.14
A reading of Liang Qichao’s 1897 essay ‘‘On Women’s Education’’ (Lun n€uxue) makes
clear that such women did not even enter his field of vision: Liang’s essay turns on the
problem of women as parasites and consumers rather than producers.15 In this vein, the
major part of editorial commentating in the newly founded periodic journals at the turn of
the twentieth century revolved around reported news from abroad (diplomatic affairs as
well as revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings, among others) and around lamenting the
decline of the Chinese state; many editorials offered suggestions and opinions on how to
forestall the national state’s total collapse or total colonization and domination by Euro–
America or Japan. New knowledge derived from new sources along with new practices of
citizenship and of national (not family) economic production was promoted as antidotes to
the generalized decline and as methods of saving the state and saving the nation.
Education, citizenship involvement, and the rate of statistically measurable economic
production became key indicators of the health of the national people and thus of the
prospects for the Chinese nation and the state. Again, in ‘‘On Women’s Education’’, Liang
Qichao argues for the benefits of female education, albeit only in terms of the enhancement
of national productivity and nurturing of male citizens in the family. While new for the
time, such advocacies were limited by their dependence upon a concept of a national
economy that rendered female labor in the family all but invisible.
New forms of education for girls and boys were promoted, where the emphasis on classical
textual analysis, formulaic writing styles, and rote memory started to wane. The prestige of the
classical texts also began to falter, particularly after 1905 when the civil service examination
system was terminated. Girls’ educational institutions were founded alongside boys’ schools,
first by Euro–American missionaries and then soon enough by Chinese merchants, entrepreneurs, and local educated elites in shifting alliances and espousing shifting priorities. For some
of the girls’ schools, the effort was said to be about educating women for motherhood and the
13
For He Zhen as He-Yin Zhen, see Liu, Karl, Ko, eds., introduction to The Birth of Chinese
Feminism.
14
For 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.
15
Liang Qichao, ‘‘Lun n€uxue’’ [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.
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
243
more efficient raising of sons to be good citizens (the pithy phrase used here was imported
from Japan: ‘‘good wives, wise mothers’’ [xianqi liangmu]); in others, education was aimed at
basic literacy and what soon came to be called home economics or home management, a quasiscientific endeavor.16 A strong linkage was made between freeing the mind through education
and freeing the feet from the constraints of foot binding.17 These schools and efforts were
either urban-based or aimed at the upper elites of rural society.
The problem of general and female suffrage was introduced and various examples of
electorates from around the world were promoted. None – other than Finland, Norway,
England, and Italy – advocated women’s suffrage and very few advocated universal male
suffrage; indeed, almost all the global examples had some version of a property and race
requirement while also being restricted to men. In China as in many other places, feminist
advocates loudly proclaimed the fitness of elite (educated, moneyed) women to join elite
(educated, moneyed) men in the proposed electorate. However, prior to the Republican
revolution in 1911, very few of these specific advocacies gained much traction, although as
elite men made their advances into electoral politics at the provincial levels, elite women
certainly staked a claim to fitness for political participation, a claim they continued through
the 1910s and onwards to press relentlessly.18
The discursive and organizational interactions among sometimes geographically diffused
groups of critics were facilitated by the rise of journals and print media around the turn of the
twentieth century. Chinese-language print media sprang up in Tokyo, Paris, China, Hawaii,
and elsewhere. Those journals started by critics of the Qing dynasty to promote their critiques
were often ephemerally supported by the wealthy family or entrepreneurial connections of
those who wished to publish their views. Women’s journals occupy a vital position in the
publishing world of the time, in part because they were so new as a phenomenon – women
writing and publishing for direct circulation in the public sphere fundamentally transformed
the earlier history of women writing for circulation by their male kith and kin. Perhaps even
more important, women’s journals gave late Qing literate women access to a medium through
which they could directly express critique of the intertwined patriarchal systems of politics,
culture, and social life at the very moment those systems were coming to be recognized as
sources of oppression. That is, journalistic writing – particularly in its editorial and essay forms
– allowed women writers to articulate, for the first time, the systemic sources of gendered life in
China at the time. It is through these editorial efforts that a language and a history of gendered
oppression were established and popularized in literate female and male society. Aside from
the editorial writing, journals also reprinted news from abroad, speeches, educational and
didactic materials, anti-foot-binding ditties and songs, encouragements to women wishing to
think beyond the horizons of their domestic lives, as well as advertisements for potions,
For 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).
17
As 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.
18
See Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2008).
16
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Rebecca KARL
lotions, and pink pill medicines that promised miraculous cures and recoveries for putative
ailments as well as newly-identified modern cosmetic needs of all types.
In this sense, female writers of essays, political critiques, and editorials (both Chinese
and Japanese) were of major importance in helping shape the late Qing and early Republican
discursive, cultural, and socio–political environment. Yet, for the critical-minded educated
women of the late Qing, the problems they perceived within their own elite lives took centerstage in their analyses of China’s ills and the consequent challenges facing women. Their
concerns – represented then and now as concerns for the newly-emergent analytical totality
of women as such (n€
uzi) – tended to concentrate on such socially reformist solutions to
women’s and China’s problems as educational opportunities, limited marriage freedom,
unbinding feet, social and cultural equality with men, the obtaining of some measure of
independence from crushing family norms that suppressed female personhood (renge), and
participation in newly-emerging forms of governance.19 These grievances and advocacies
filled those journals of the day that specialized in promoting women’s issues and/or state
reforms.
The most well-known of the late Qing commentators who wrote in this idiom was Qiu
Jin (1875–1907), the famous cross-dressing revolutionary martyr, who left her husband and
children behind to be educated in Japan and who, upon her return to China, was executed in
1907 by the Qing state for her advocacies of dynastic overthrow. In her essays, songs, poetry,
and short stories, Qiu tirelessly wrote of the nationalist political need for female emancipation.20 In addition to Qiu Jin was a host of other female voices bursting into the field of print
media at the turn of the twentieth century. On the Japanese side, perhaps most important was
the radical political and social figure Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927), whose career spanned
the liberal movement of early Meiji Japan (1868–1911) through to the birth of a socialist
movement in the early twentieth century and beyond. Editor and publisher of the journal
Women of the World (Seikai Fujin) from 1907 to 1909, when it was forcibly shut down by
Japanese authorities in a general crackdown against socialist voices, Fukuda was committed
to women’s emancipation, albeit not within the confines of the state. A fierce critic of the
Japanese Women’s Patriotic Association, Fukuda also was associated with the most famous
Japanese literary feminist journal of the early twentieth century, Bluestocking, which began
publication in 1911. The radical circles in which many women operated in Tokyo facilitated
interactions, for instance, in Women of the World in July 1907, Fukuda reprinted ‘‘The
Regulations of the Society for the Restoration of Women’s Rights’’ from the first issue of HeYin Zhen’s journal Natural Justice (Tianyi bao).21 One other important Japanese feminist,
Karl, 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.
20
For 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.
21
See 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.
19
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
245
with whom many Chinese in Japan were familiar, either personally or by reputation: Kanno
Suga (1881–1911), an anarchist and feminist activist, who, along with her partner, Kotoku
Shusui, was executed by the Meiji state in 1911 for political crimes (Kanno was the first
woman in modern Japanese history to be dealt with so harshly). Kanno was a frequent author
of political essays and editorial commentary.
Among the host of Chinese female writers for the political press of the time, there were
such prominent figures as Lin Zongsu (1878–1944), Chen Xiefen (1883–1923), and Luo
Yanbin (1869–?), among others. Lin, an early advocate for female political participation,
wrote one of the many prefaces to and commentaries on Jin Tianhe’s The Women’s Bell
commending it as an exemplary text on the historical oppression of women in China. A
founding member of the Fujian Women’s Study Society, Lin also was among the first batch
of women to join Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui) soon after its
establishment in 1905 in Tokyo. After 1911, Lin was a leading voice for female suffrage.
Chen Xiefen, for her part, was the founder of one of the earliest Chinese-language women’s
journals, The Woman’s Paper (N€
ubao), originally published as a supplement to her father’s
radical nationalist paper Subao, and then resumed, under a different name, as an independent
publication after Subao was banned by the Qing government. Xiefen broke with her father
over her impending sale as a concubine to a rich merchant. Along with Lin Zongsu and Qiu
Jin, Chen Xiefen lived and worked in Tokyo in the first decade of the twentieth century,
publishing political essays that promoted the concept of female citizenship based upon
opposition both to imperialism and patriarchy. Nationalist in orientation, Chen and Lin (as
well as Qiu) insisted on an equal place for (elite) women within a just-evolving notion of
national–state social life and governance.22
Luo Yanbin (also known as Lianshi), older by a decade than Lin and Chen, was also a
vigorous advocate for female citizenship. As the founding editor of the journal China’s New
Woman’s World (Zhongguo xin n€
ujie), Luo focused more than Lin and Chen on the problem of
the paucity of female education, even as her narrative of the history of women’s oppression was
also different from Chen’s and Lin’s. Where the latter two argued that women’s inequality had
been a fact of life since the distant past, Luo insisted that women had been equal to men earlier in
history, but had been relegated to second-class citizenship somewhere along the line. Her
strategic focus, then, was often to argue for the recovery of lost rights, rather than on the newness
of the advocacy for women’s rights in the present. With different but compatible perspectives on
the problems of women’s oppression and on the mechanisms for amelioration, Chen, Luo, and
Lin were some of the more influential mainstream voices in the burgeoning world of women’s
journalistic writing and its articulation of the sources and systems of patriarchal domination.23
In addition to the journalistic worlds in which many late Qing feminists were enmeshed
was the world of book publishing, often run as a quasi-commercial endeavor and which,
among many other things, took on the task of translating and publicizing works from abroad.
In addition to political philosophies, international relations treatises, miscellaneous histories,
See 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).
23
I should also note L€u Bicheng (1884–1943), pioneering journalist at Dagong bao published in
Tianjin. Like Chen, Luo, and Lin, L€u 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
L€u Bicheng (1883–1943) Life and Song Lyrics’’, Nan N€
u: Men, Women & Gender in Early & Imperial
China 6, no. 1 (2004), 12–59.
22
246
Rebecca KARL
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and hosts of other types of texts, such as didactic children’s literature and adult educational
books, a huge and influential sector of publishing in the first decade of the twentieth century
concentrated on the translation of novels and stories from abroad. One of the most prolific
promoters of foreign fiction of the time, Lin Shu, translated from French, German, English,
and so on, without knowing a single foreign language, by collaborating with those who knew
one of the languages. Lin Shu’s classical-Chinese renditions loosely based on Euro–American
works – Shakespeare as well as Dumas, H. Rider Haggard as well as Sherlock Holmes and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, among many others – took the reading public by storm. The new plots,
romantic twists, semi-independent women, heroic roles, political intrigues, and vast mobility
of characters over time and space provoked debates and large-scale rethinking about the role of
fiction in political life and the role of women in social life. Previously less valued as a form of
writing, fiction (short stories and novels) now became acknowledged as a key popular textual
form for promoting new ideas, new senses of community, and new modes of social being in the
world, including, crucially, gendered social being in the world.
Feminism and temporality
It is not coincidental that the majority of the writers of the essays, pamphlets and books from
which late Qing feminism first emanated were concerned with the relation between labor and
consumption. It is also not coincidental that women/wives/concubines were increasingly
referred to as parasites, the commoditized objects of men, who themselves were often figured
as consumers of women.24 This concern – a very recent one – often appeared in a temporality
articulated as a critical evocation of thousands of years of female oppression and of female
dependence. Not only registering the awareness that the routines of the past were incommensurable to the demands of the present, this temporality expressed an indefinite notion of the
past as a unified concept, and thus a more tentative marking of the indeterminate present
against which this past was to be thought. That is, the utter flattening of the past that began in
the May Fourth historiography had yet to take hold in the late Qing,25 where temporal
indeterminacy gave rise at the time both to ideas about global solidarity with other colonized
peoples as well as completely opposed notions about a global evolutionary teleology of strong
statism and industrialization. Again, the anarchist He-Yin Zhen was one of the only commentators at the time who evoked an unbroken past–present temporal structure as part of her
systemic thinking about the historical instantiations of female oppression, as an interpretation
of the social totality of the early twentieth-century world and China. That is, unlike other
Chinese feminists of her time – all pioneers of a critique of extant Chinese social organization –
He-Yin Zhen alone completely melded an analysis of gendered power relations with an
analysis of the systems of state and social authority. Rather than take a piecemeal reformist
approach or an exceptionalist approach based on China’s cultural Confucian particularities
(approaches more common to her time and place, and in fact more common to our time as
well), He-Yin Zhen’s critical targets were the continuously produced and reproduced intertwined systems of scholarly knowledge, female bodily subjugation, and state–legal practice
that not only had resulted in the subjection of Chinese women in the past, but that would
continue to provide the basis for women’s subjection in the civilized present and future. For
He-Yin Zhen, these practices were not merely by-products of history, but rather constitutive of
24
Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
25
These, 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.
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
247
that history as well as of the present. One could no sooner read history without the gendered
problem of what she called nann€
u (man/woman) than one could read history without the texts
that underpinned it. Moreover, instead of looking to Euro–America or Japan as models of the
future for China to follow, as many feminists and other critical intellectuals of the time did, for
He-Yin Zhen, Euro–America and Japan merely represented more advanced ways in which
newly-emerged and now-globalizing forms of oppression – industrial waged labor, democratic
polities, enlightenment knowledge – could attach themselves to native forms of subjection, to
reconfigure and deepen these extant forms on a larger, more thorough, and more disguised
scale. In her critiques, He-Yin Zhen proved to be both prophetic and prescient about women’s
issues, but also, through her insights on labor, she was prescient about the system of global
capital that, then as now, preys upon local forms of oppression, configuring them into practices
useful for accumulation and domination on a world scale.
For many others, what the past that weighed so heavily on the present was said to be was
very different for different commentators. Some marked the past as having begun with the rise of
the Confucian trend (ruzhe zhi feng),26 some from the Qin/Han dynasties; others dated it to the
Manchu conquest 260 years previously.27 Correspondingly, the causal factors involved in
specifying how the everyday became violently oppressive for women or, rather, which practices
were indeed violent, were also various: whether it was said to be Confucian patriarchy as a
socio–cultural issue, the Manchus as a political issue, agrarianism and family-based economics
as a socio–economic issue, or the eclipse of xia (knight-errancy) values in favor of social stability
as a cultural issue.28 These various designations, while not mutually exclusive or even exhaustive
of the possibilities, were articulated through different readings of what the past referred to, and
thus where the sites and original sources of violence lay. These different articulations of the past
can at least partially account for one major split in liberal gendered discourses on society and
politics of the time: where some advocated that women must derive their natural rights and
power from a reconfigured everydayness of the family/society (for example, as represented
through the unbound foot and the acquisition of knowledge); where others sought to suppress the
everyday altogether by inventing new modes of being in the world – as heroic knights-errant, as
Sofia Perovskaia-like activists, as revolutionary martyrs, and so on. Many commentators,
however, simultaneously advocated many of these positions, a simultaneity that conceals within
the very formulations precisely the crisis of representation and temporality that most closely
characterizes modernity as an immanent totalization.
Complicating the task of understanding the temporality of the past in its relation to the
present, the commentaries were often not clear on whether China’s current weakness was
due to gender oppression, or gender oppression an effect of China’s weakness. Nor was it
clear whether commentators understood Europe’s strength as a cause or effect of superior
gender equality in their societies.29 With this confusion over how to understand both China’s
Chuwo (Ding Chuwo), ‘‘Ai n€uzhong,’’ [Lamenting Womankind], N€
uzi shijie, no. 6 (1904), 3.
Any number of essays from this time could be cited.
28
See, for example, Ding Chuwo, who promoted a return to the female bravery forsaken 2000 years in
the past by counterposing the female slave (n€uzi 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 N€uzhong,’’ 2, 3.
29
For 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,
‘‘N€uquan pingyi,’’ [A Comment on Women’s Rights], Zhongguo xin n€
ujie [China’s New Women’s
World], no. 1 (February 5, 1907), 3.
26
27
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Rebecca KARL
and Europe’s past and the relationship of those pasts to their respective presents, the
temporality of the present contradictorily appeared simultaneously socially immanent and
revolutionarily urgent. This confusion was in part a consequence of the growing impetus to
view the late Qing present simultaneously, in Peter Osborne’s words, ‘‘from the practical
perspective of the radical openness of the historical process,’’30 as well as from the
perspective of the irrevocable tendencies and legacies of China’s past in the present.
This problem is particularly noticeable in the many essays that variously cried for a
restitution of women’s rights (huifu n€
uquan) – presumably rights lost somewhere along
the line in the (variously-dated) pasts – or those essays that argued for the development of a
consciousness of women’s rights that had never existed previously. In this confused
situation, then, the resolution to the gender problem was articulated either in terms of an
extrapolation from the (forgotten) past into the present, or in terms of the need to
revolutionarily create something new that had never existed. Most essayists straddled
these positions.
For example, the journalist Lianshi (also known as Luo Yanbin)31 wrote in her February
1907 essay, ‘‘A Comment on Women’s Rights’’ (N€uquan pingyi), that a strictly evolutionary
view of women’s low positions was not derivable from Darwinian natural selection, as
natural selection would dictate the elimination of the weakest; yet, ‘‘over the thousands of
years of human life, nature has not eliminated the one [men] or the other [women], but has
basically ensured a proportional mix of both.’’ Therefore, she concluded, respect for men
and prejudice against women cannot be rooted in a view of natural determination (or, history
as a natural extrapolation of the past in the present).32 However, in her next section, Lianshi
states that the social problem of prejudice against women stems from the originary act of
naming: ‘‘if ‘woman’ had been named ‘man’ and vice versa, the world would be a different
place.’’ Lianshi clearly draws upon the classical concept of rectification of names (zheng
ming) to appeal to some inevitable correlation between social names and social reality, a
correlation that is purported to be, in idealist philosophical terms, independent of historical
temporality. On this latter view, Lianshi is left with no strong statement for why, historically,
the naming came to represent the reality, or the reality came to correspond to the name; nor
can she account for how either the reality or the name got transmitted into the present. Since
the name cannot be revolutionarily changed as such, what course of action is there left?
While Lianshi is clearly groping towards some notion of the openness of the historical
process – looking for the origins of that openness in some version of the past that emphasizes
the metaphysics of naming practices – she is nevertheless trapped in an extrapolation from
that past that completely contradicts the openness she wishes to promote. In such a
temporal–social confusion, Lianshi had no clear way to call for something radically new;
and yet nor could she appeal to a past that corresponded in any way to the present she wished
to fashion.
30
Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 2.
Luo Yanbin frequently wrote under her penname Lianshi, she was the editor-in-chief of the Tokyobased journal, Zhongguo xin n€ujie zazhi, and she was a member of the Revolutionary Alliance from
Henan Province for biographical information. See Sun Shiyue, Zhongguo jindai n€
uzi liuxueshi
[A History of Modern Chinese Women Students Abroad] (Beijing: Zhongguo heping chubanshe,
1995), 111.
32
Lianshi, ‘‘N€uquan 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 n€
ujie 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.
31
Journal of Modern Chinese History
249
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He-Yin Zhen, the ontology of labor and the commodification of female bodies
He-Yin Zhen was not troubled by such ambivalence. In her early 1907 two-part essay, ‘‘On
the Question of Women’s Labor’’ (Lun n€
uzi laodong wenti), He-Yin Zhen is most concerned
with the proliferating forms through which women’s bodies were being commodified at the
beginning of the twentieth century.33 This concern stems for her from the fact that labor is not
what historically had been called ‘‘n€
ugong’’ (womanly work/woman’s work), or, the traditional practice of household production in weaving and spinning. This household labor HeYin Zhen construes as labor for and within the family is an affective not an economic unit.
This tradition of n€
ugong is, according to her analysis, a non-commodified free and autonomous (ziyou duli de) form of labor. Her modern concept of labor (laodong)34 is premised
upon the suppression of the non-commodified form: for modern labor is free only in the
sense that it is tied to waged work (that is, in a quasi-Marxist, fully anarchist sense). By the
same token, the modern form of labor – free waged labor – in He-Yin Zhen’s analysis
continues to be tied to the variety of ways in which women’s bodies have been subjugated
and subjected through historical time. In this, He-Yin Zhen is specifically not Marxist,
insofar as she does not find the arrival of waged labor to provide a fundamentally ruptural
historical moment. Indeed, she names the older forms of subjection upon which modern
waged labor is imposed as enslaved domestic service in the form of bond-servitude,
concubinage, and prostitution.
From the very beginning of her essay, He-Yin Zhen makes a crucial connection based
upon a critical distinction. The connection is between the older forms of female bodily
subjugation and the newer forms of waged labor, all now classified under the rubric of
commodified (enslaved) labor. The distinction she makes is between labor as free, autonomous human activity and practice – or, practical labor as a vital aspect of any vision of
individual and communal freedom and sociality – in contrast to labor in most of its
historically and contemporary forms, which is not ontologically free, but rather is commodified and enslaved. The crux of the connection and the difference, in philosophical and
historical terms, is the acknowledgement that labor must be understood as a basic human
activity, or, what philosopher Bruno Gulli calls an ontology of ‘‘organic, creative labor.’’35
This is not labor as an economic concept and thus does not harbor within it a fundamental
antagonism, an instrumentalization, or a historical abjection. This concept of labor is a
materialist ontology that proposes labor not as an always-already appropriable power for
private gain, but rather as organic to life itself. By contrast, for classical and neo-classical
political economy – just as for the late-nineteenth century Chinese ‘‘Study of Wealth and
Power’’ based upon those principles – labor is a purely economic category in analytical
separation from the remainder of human life (which eventually comes to be ideologically
segmented into work-time, leisure-time, and so forth). He-Yin Zhen articulates precisely a
distinction between labor as an autonomous ontological practice and labor as an enslaved or
commodified form, even though she does not designate the latter form as marking an entirely
He-Yin Zhen’s ‘‘Lun n€uzi 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.
34
The 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.
35
Bruno Gulli, Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2005).
33
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Rebecca KARL
new era. Her anarchist vision, however, is encoded in the possibility of a historical potential
to reground labor in a human ontology rather than in human capital.
Overall, the conceptual thrust of her essay is to explore how the commodification of
women’s bodies over the long course of Chinese (and human) history has effectively crushed
the possibility for any re-imagining of the futurity of labor as genuinely free and autonomous. She notes repeatedly, that alongside the ever-proliferating commodified versions of
labor has co-existed – at least until quite recently – the autonomous version of labor. Indeed,
it is at the cusp of the final suppression of n€
ugong (as autonomous labor) with the global
advent of textile factories and collectivized wage labor, that He-Yin Zhen sees the possibility
for an alternative to commodified labor slipping away. Hinging her understanding of labor in
history on the figure of the subjected and abjected female body – the very body that makes
starkly visible the enslaved form of all commodified labor – He-Yin Zhen proceeds to
analyze the ways in which, through time, women’s bodies have been subordinated to and
appropriated by wealthy men for private gain for almost the entirety of the past. Here, HeYin Zhen’s is a historical argument about the continuity of forms of enslavement; it is not an
argument based upon a historicist principle. That is, in He-Yin Zhen’s narrativization there is
no inevitable supersession and thus no necessary sublation of n€ugong (as autonomous labor)
by laodong (as commodified labor) in some predestined march of historical stages of
development. He-Yin Zhen’s narrative is absolutely not historicist. In fact, in He-Yin
Zhen’s telling, for centuries, the ontology of women’s labor (n€ugong) had existed cotemporally with the various forms of commodified labor (laodong). It is, thus, only with
what she sees as the imminent disappearance of the enduring possibility of n€ugong labor that
the supremacy of laodong labor appears now to be secured.36 And this supremacy is being
secured through the spread of the new form of enslaved labor called industrial waged work.
As a feminist, then, He-Yin Zhen views the history of commodified labor through the
lens of the coerced distortion and constant appropriation of the female body for wealthaccumulation. She is clear that understanding the conditions for female commodification
cannot be confined to waged labor in the newer workplaces of the textile factories and other
emerging sites of public female toil of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Qing China, Meiji
Japan, or Europe and the United States. Instead, for her the concept of bodily subjection
through commodification has to be expanded outside of what she calls the recent advent of
the class system (jieji zhidu) to encompass the myriad practices through which women’s
bodies have been turned into sites of exchange value over the long course of history. This
variety of subjected practices originates in and is perpetuated by what He-Yin Zhen calls the
problem of livelihood (shengji wenti), or, quite simply poverty. That is, in her account, the
difficulty in securing livelihood by the families of most women is inextricably linked to the
unequal distribution of property between the wealthy and the poor, which she ties to the
problem of who labors for whom, or who legally appropriates the value of labor from whom.
For He-Yin Zhen the anarchist, then, property is the key category of the reproduction of
unequal social relations from the past to the present, while the right and ability to appropriate
labor – to commodify bodies – is the central modality for the ongoing production and
reproduction of the private wealth that forms the basis for unequal social relations. It is the
fundamental inequality in property that informs the historical conditions for all forms of
commodified labor, even while it is the fundamental mechanism of commodified labor that
informs the historical fact that, as she says in the first two sentences of her essay: ‘‘From
ancient times to the present, China has had an unequal system with regard to women. It is
36
I should note here that He-Yin Zhen’s notion of n€
ugong is quite idealized and, compared to later
anarchists and radicals in general, her critique of the family as a social institution is tame.
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
251
called the slave–girl breeding [system].’’ He-Yin Zhen’s argument in a nutshell, then, would
go: if private wealth accumulation and the reproduction of unequal property relations rests
upon the enslaved bodies of laboring women, then the whole social system that secures such
unequal relations is merely a mechanism to facilitate the breeding of female slaves. All
women, regardless of social status and wealth, are potential slaves, because all women can
become concubines and prostitutes. This is why women’s bodies are the key to understanding the historical centrality of labor and property and why women as a total social
category only can be understood through a focus on labor as bodily subjugation and
property. In this sense, it is evident how He-Yin Zhen’s essay is suffused with the merging
of her feminist concerns with the commodified female body and her anarchist concerns with
unequal property distribution and the appropriation of value through labor. She reads the two
sides – the feminist and the anarchist – completely through one another, such that there is no
separating the one from the other. That is, property and labor become visible through the
feminist lens, just as women’s subjection becomes visible through the problem of property
and labor.
By the same token, while she uses the vocabulary of Marxist-inspired socialism then in
wide circulation in Japan (where she was living at the time) – ‘‘capitalists’’ (zibenjia),
‘‘class’’, ‘‘labor’’ ‘‘labor power’’ (laoli), and so on – in fact she rejects that, historically,
the advent of capitalists (as a social category) or of class society (as a social formation) has
altered in any crucial manner the age-old realities of the commodification of female bodies in
the production and reproduction of unequal social relations. Instead, for her, capitalists are
just an extension of the existing social category wealthy people (fumin); class society is just
an extension of the historically-continuous and ever-worsening poor–rich differentiation
(pinfu zhi cha); and waged labor is just an extension of commodified female bodily
subjugation in service to others. Thus, unlike Marxists of her time, who took the emergence
of waged labor as the key to the production of a new system of unequal social relations
through the commodification of labor power and the extraction of surplus value; and unlike
liberals of her time, who took the emergence of waged labor (female and male) as the key to
individual emancipation, freedom, and self-realization as well as key to the concurrent
national pursuit of wealth and power, He-Yin Zhen takes waged labor as just one more
potent form through which the wealthy enslave the bodies of (poor or potentially all) women.
This form intensifies the appropriation of the value of labor under the guise of the new
ideological sanction, The School of Wealth and Power (Fuqiang xue). In her total critique of
(Japanese) Marxists and (Chinese, Japanese, and Euro–American) nationalists and liberals,
He-Yin Zhen was quite unique among feminists and other intellectuals of her time.
For He-Yin Zhen, commodification is a capacious category. It refers to the ways in which
female bodies have been pressed into the service of the wealthy over the long course of
history. So, even while she recognizes factory-waged labor as a new form of bodily
subjugation and ethical/moral subjection, she nevertheless maintains that its essential content or reality remains the same as the traditional forms of bond-servitude, concubinage, and
prostitution. This is so precisely because waged labor is also about the enslavement of a
female body for someone else’s gain, no matter whether that gain is material (riches) or the
satisfaction of lust (physical). In a historical sense, then, He-Yin Zhen is not making an
argument about the birth of a new female identity or class subjectivity emergent through
waged labor, rather she is marking the continuity between the bodily subjection of the past
and the present. Thus, so far as He-Yin Zhen is concerned, any emergent notion of female
subjectivity had to be based on that continuity, rather than on the newly-emergent potential
proletarian class basis of factory work.
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Rebecca KARL
In a discursive sense, He-Yin Zhen is interested in articulating a new correlation between
the name (ming) and the reality (shi) of female bodily commodification or enslavement. As
we saw with Lianshi, above, in addition to a linguistic/discursive confusion over the advent
of new vocabularies and practices, this modern iteration of the name/reality issue emerges
from a long- standing dynastic historical concern with maintaining and rectifying names
(zhengming) as a means of enforcing a particular discursive domination and closure on the
perception and defining of reality. For He-Yin Zhen, then, naming refers not only to a
modern-conceptual language problem – that is, how to call new phenomena when no
language or concept exists for such a thing. It is also not only a hegemonic discursive
problem – or a problem of how to impose a closed interpretation on reality. Naming is, more
importantly, a problem of discursive speech in Gayatri Spivak’s sense; that is, discursive
speech as a way to create an agentive voice that intervenes in reality while also becoming
intelligible to itself individually, collectively, and to others. For He-Yin Zhen, seizing the
power of discursive speech through naming is absolutely vital to defining the reality of her
contemporary moment; to rendering visible the fact of enslavement to women themselves;
and to capturing the possibility of imagining social life differently. In this sense, waged labor
makes clear the mutations in the form of female enslavement in the modern period, yet it is
merely a new name for the same old reality of female bodily subjection.
Genuinely new in He-Yin Zhen’s eyes about the modern wage system is not the wage
form but rather the global spread and extension of this form of commodification of female
bodies. Indeed, absent the existence of systems of bond-servitude and concubinage in many
other countries (Euro–America and Japan are the ones she cites), what He-Yin Zhen sees at
the turn of the twentieth century is the global universalization and standardization of female
bodily commodification through waged labor. In this universalization and standardization,
older (particular and Chinese) forms of enslavement (bond-servitude, concubines) are
rendered equivalent and thus comparable to the contemporary (global universal) form of
wage labor, insofar as all these forms take the female body as the primary site of exchange for
the private appropriation of value. Here, then, He-Yin Zhen not only outright condemns the
modern system of waged labor, but she also condemns it through its equivalence to and
continuation of the older forms of labor. As He-Yin Zhen says numerous times in the essay,
modern wage labor is no better than and differs little from all other forms of slavery. In
setting up this kind of equivalence and comparability, on the one hand, He-Yin Zhen places
China in a completely coeval temporality and spatiality with universal global trends. Indeed,
as an anarchist or a feminist, her critical sights are never on China exclusively, but rather on
systems of exploitation that transcend national and cultural borders. However, on the other
hand, He-Yin Zhen also recognizes that China’s particular historical forms of female
enslavement can and will be monopolized and mobilized by the newer forms of waged
labor to further subjugate Chinese women in an unequal global structure of profits, accumulation, and production of wealth. He-Yin Zhen makes this absolutely clear towards the
end of her essay when she emphasizes:
. . . before the modern period, for those who were concubines and prostitutes it was their bodies
but not their labor power that was swallowed up; for bond-servants, it was their labor power and
not their bodies that was swallowed. But in today’s system, the bitterness of having both labor
power and the body swallowed up is concentrated on the bodies of women of the poor.37
37
Emphasis in original.
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
253
As she sums up this observation: ‘‘Isn’t it the case that the misery of selling her body is
already inscribed in the buying and selling of [a woman’s] labor power?’’
For He-Yin Zhen, then, it is not the fact of women’s labor that is at issue. As she says,
‘‘Labor is a natural calling for women.’’ The core of the problem is the subservience of some
(poor women) to others (the rich, men and women) and the socio–political and legal right
that this subservience confers upon the wealthy to instrumentalize women of the poor for
their own purposes, whether material or physical. That this appropriation now – in the early
twentieth century – had reached a global scale of accumulation and universalization through
the modality of waged labor means, on the one hand, that the solution to the problem of
commodification cannot be merely Chinese. That is, it cannot be affected through the
abolishing of bond-servitude and concubinage, those quintessentially Chinese cultural
expressions of female enslavement. Yet this is what the mainstream feminism of He-Yin
Zhen’s time advocated: that a transvaluation of Chinese cultural values would suffice to
bring Chinese women and thus China as a nation out of the dark ages and into the civilized
modern world, as we saw with Jin Tianhe above.
Instead, as He-Yin Zhen forcefully argued, since native forms of enslavement had now
been conjoined to, transformed and reinforced by the newer forms of wage labor, and since
those newer forms now had spread the world over (even to the Turkish harems, she notes),
the solution to commodified labor, which is tantamount to enslavement, had to be found in
abolishing what she called the worldwide system of mutual dependence, or, that system
through which the poor were rendered dependent on the rich for food and survival while the
wealthy cultivated a dependence on the poor for service. Indeed, replacing mutual dependence and the attendant Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest with the concept of
mutual aid was one route some Chinese anarchists at the turn of the century proposed out of
the condition of unequal social relations. But this was not He-Yin Zhen’s solution.38 Rather,
for He-Yin Zhen, the route out of mutual dependence lay in the global implementation of a
system of communalized property (gongchan zhi zhidu), whereby ‘‘some people’s independence would no longer be dependent on other people’s [dependence] . . .’’ This would ensure
that, while everyone would labor, it would be in a system of equal exchange, thus ontologically free and autonomous, rather than commodified, enslaved and hence unequal labor.
Conclusion
Feminism in the late Qing period, up through the beginning of the Republican era, raised
many of the major and important issues that were to inform subsequent critiques of Chinese
and global social formations. These included issues of education, suffrage, labor, and family,
among others. As is clear, no real resolution was achieved at that time, or, arguably, has been
ever since. Indeed, each of the individual issues, as well as the issues in their totality, became
fraught over and over again as the social, cultural economic, political, and global situations
shifted relations internally and externally. Clearly, beginning in the Republican period and
lasting through into the People’s Republic of China, organizations formed around some or
all of these issues in their multiple ideological, geographical, and political guises. However,
it is important to note that the issues themselves never signified singularly; rather, they
each raised a cluster of possible significations in relation to a cluster of possible socio–
political positions. Feminism, in this sense, was never and can never be singular; rather it is
38
For 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).
254
Rebecca KARL
plural – feminisms – albeit always referring back to an over-riding concern with historical
social relations in general and particular instantiations of those social relations. To understand feminism and feminisms in their multiple Chinese iterations, then, we must be attentive
to the cluster of social relations to which they refer and in which they are embedded, both
locally and globally. It is this dialectical analysis that late Qing feminism inaugurated in the
Chinese case, and it is this dialectical analysis to which Chinese feminisms today continue to
contribute.
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Glossary
cain€
u 才女
Chen Xiefen 陈撷芬
Cixi 慈禧
Dagong bao《大公报》
daode 道德
de 德
Fukuda Hideko 福田英子
fumin 富民
fun€
u 妇女
fun€
u wenti 妇女问题
Fuqiang xue 富强学
gongchan zhi zhidu 共产之制度
Guangxu 光绪
He-Yin Zhen 何殷震
He Zhen 何震
Hua Mulan 花木兰
huifu n€
uquan 恢复女权
jiaoyu zhi fangfa 教育之方法
jieji zhidu 阶级制度
Jin Tianhe 金天翮
Jin Yi 金一
jindai/xiandai hua 近代/现代化
Kanno Suka 管野スガ
Kotoku Shusui 幸德秋水
laodong 劳动
laoli 劳力
Lianshi 炼石
Lin Shu 林纾
Lin Zongsu 林宗素
Liu Shipei 刘师培
L€
u Bicheng 吕碧城
Lun n€
uxue 论女学
Lun n€
uzi laodong wenti 论女子劳动问题
Luo Yanbin 罗燕斌
ming 名
nann€
u 男女
nanyang 南洋
nengli 能力
N€
ubao《女报》
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Journal of Modern Chinese History
255
n€
ugong 女工
N€
ujie zhong《女界钟》
N€
uquan pingyi 女权平议
n€
uxing 女性
n€
uzi 女子
n€
uzi wei nuli 女子为奴隶
pinfu zhi cha 贫富之差
pinxing 品性
Qiu Jin 秋瑾
quanli 权利
renge 人格
Renlei junli shuo 人类均力说
ruzhe zhi feng 儒者之风
Seikai Fujin《世界妇女》
shengji wenti 生计问题
shi 实
Shinajin 支那人
Shiwu bao《时务报》
Subao《苏报》
Tianyi bao《天义报》
Tongmen hui 同盟会
wangguo 亡国
xia 侠
xianqi liangmu 贤妻良母
zheng ming 正名
Zhongguo xin n€
ujie《中国新女界》
zibenjia 资本家
ziqiang 自强
ziyou duli de 自由独立的
Chinese language bibliography
Chuwo (Ding Chuwo) 初我（丁初我），‘‘哀女种’’，
《女子世界》
，第6期 ，1904年6月，3页。
He-Yin Zhen (He Zhen) 何殷震（何震），‘‘经济革命与女子革命’’ ，
《天义报》
，第13–14期合
刊，1907年12月30日, 125–134页。
——，‘‘女子劳动问题’’，
《天义报》
，第5期，1907年7月10日，71–80页。
——，‘‘女子劳动问题（续）’’，
《天义报》，第6期 ，1907年8月10日，125–134页。
Jin Yi (Jin Tianhe) 金一（金天翮），
《女界钟》
，上海 ：大同书局 ，1903年初版；上海：上海古籍
出版社，2003年重印。
Lian Shi 炼石，‘‘女权平议’’，
《中国新女界》
，第1期，1907年2月5日，3页。
Liang Qichao 梁启超，‘‘论女学’’，汤志钧、陈祖恩、汤仁泽编：
《中国近代教育史资料汇编：戊
戌时期教育》
，上海：上海教育出版社，2007年 ，99–106页。
Liu Jucai 刘巨才，
《中国近代妇女运动史》
，北京 ：中国妇女出版社，1989年。
Sun Shiyue 孙石月，
《中国近代女子留学史》，北京 ：中国和平出版社 ，1995年。
Zhang Xiongxi 张雄西 ， ‘‘创立女界自立会之规则’’，
《云南杂志》，第1号 ，1906年10月15日,
1–2页。