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This article was downloaded by: [115.85.25.194] On: 25 March 2014, At: 02:33 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Modern Chinese History Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmoh20 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 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions Journal of Modern Chinese History Vol. 6, No. 2, December 2012, 235–255 ARTICLE Feminism in modern China Rebecca KARL* Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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 http://www.tandfonline.com 236 Rebecca KARL Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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 Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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). Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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 Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 244 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 Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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 Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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 Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 248 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 Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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 Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 250 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 252 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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. Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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》 Downloaded by [115.85.25.194] at 02:33 25 March 2014 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。