China’s
sense of self-sufficiency was challenged in the mid-nineteenth century when the
two Opium Wars forced the opening of trade with Britain, France, Prussia, and
the United States. While China had been open to international trade for
centuries, the new global situation was dominated by Europe and America. Missionaries
arrived with the economic changes, bringing with them new ideas and new
sociocultural values. China had to find a way to adapt or submit to the new
situation. The way the Chinese intellectuals dealt with the issues of
injustice, particularly the “woman problem,” is indicative of the struggle to
form a new identity in the face of the changing global situation.[1]
It
was China’s educated class who tried to find strategic ways to manage the
changes. They started new industries, translated foreign works, and started
schools that embraced new forms of knowledge from abroad. They traveled the
world trying to learn how they could use the methods and ideas of the now
dominant cultures to bring China to a prominent position among the globe’s most
powerful nations. These efforts also gave them more ammunition to critique
their own society.[2]
By 1895, many of the educated, both men and women, had centered their efforts on reforming the political, social,
cultural, commercial, and military organizations in China. The Hundred Days’
Reform in 1898, during which the young emperor, Guangxu, agreed to sweeping
reforms, was, in many ways, the culmination of their efforts.[3] However,
the dowager empress, Cixi, who was the aunt of the twenty-two year old emperor,
fearing the group who supported the reforms, made China even more open to the
control of the West, returned to the Forbidden City and issued a statement that
the emperor had asked her to assume power. She immediately set about
eliminating the group of intellectuals who had influenced her nephew; she put
several to death, but others were able to flee. Liang Qichao was one of those
who were able to escape.[4]
One
of the reformers was Liang Qichao who is considered the “foremost modern intellectuals of China” of the early
twentieth century. After the coup by the Empress Dowager Cixi, Liang fled to
Japan where he systematically spread his influence with the publication of
several journals. His essay “On Women’s Education,” first published in 1897,
was a major contribution to the growing sense of the need to empower women.[5]
Liang’s work is an example of the prevailing perspective on the empowerment of
women in meeting China’s nationalist needs.[6]
In “On Women’s Education,” Liang
asserts that women are capable of being educated and that their education was a
necessary component of the pursuit of a national enlightenment. He advocated
the opening of women’s schools, arguing that education is the only road that
will lead to women citizens who are knowledgeable, independent, and who will
hold the new values of intelligence, ethics, and force.[7]
Jin Tianhe is another intellectual
who contributed to the growth of Chinese feminist thought in the early
twentieth century. He was a writer, educator, and political figure who helped
to fund “The Revolutionary Army,” a short written work that called for the
overthrow of the Qing court. Jin published “The Women’s Bell” in 1903, which is
commonly called a “feminist manifesto.” This work demonstrates a perspective
that was common among intellectuals of the time: a desire to emulate the
values, manners, and methods of the European upper class white male.[8]
These intellectuals were challenged by the hyper-masculinity of the military
might of the Western man, but they were also being confronted by accusations of
the Chinese enslavement of women, which was used as justification for the
colonization of the “barbarous” and “half-civilized” Eastern societies. They
met these challenges by completely rethinking their social and governmental
conventions. However, their perspective on the empowerment of women was related
only to the strength of the nation and, by extension, their own power, rather
than the innate value of women as human beings.[9]
This is where He-Yin Zhen, another
advocate of Chinese feminism, differs most significantly from other Chinese
feminist
thinkers. He-Yin Zhen viewed
the feminist struggle as both the beginning, and the result of, a complete
social revolution “that would abolish the state and private property to bring
about true social equality and the end to all social hierarchies.[10]”
He-Yin Zhen was born in 1884. She
married Liu Shipei, a renowned classical Confucian scholar, in 1904. In 1907,
they moved to Tokyo and became acquainted with the Chinese revolutionaries in
exile there. It was in Japan that He-Yin was exposed to the anarchist thinking
of the early twentieth century. Also in 1907, along with several exiles, He-Yin
started the Society for the Restoration of Women’s Rights and began “Natural
Justice,” the society’s journal.[11]
The
journal only lasted a year, but, in that time, it became the primary means
whereby the ideas of feminism, socialism, Marxism, and anarchism were
articulated in final part of the Qing dynasty. Both He-Yin and Liu Shipei wrote
for the journal. Each used pseudonyms, which has led to the misattribution of
some of He-Yin’s articles to Liu Shipei.[12]
In 1908, the couple had a falling out with the other revolutionaries, who
claimed that they were in league with the Qing regime, which led to their
ostracism after the 1911 fall of the Qing dynasty.[13]
Liu
Shipei died in 1919, and He-Yin was lost to history. Only rumors remain about
the end of her life. One of these rumors claims that she became a Buddhist nun,
and another claims that she had a mental disorder that led to her death soon
after her husband. He-Yin’s ideas, however, remain as a radical rethinking of
foundational ideas such as man and woman (nannu), and livelihood (shengji).[14]
Nannu
is comprised of the words for man (nan) and woman (nu). This literal
translation of nannu as male/female or man/woman does not adequately express
the way in which He-Yin used the term. In He-Yin’s article, “On the Question of
Women’s Liberation,” she claims that male created morality and politics were
designed to separate man from woman. She claims that this separation was one of
the first misguided dualistic ideas of male dominated cosmologies.[15]
She uses the term as a primary
category in itself, as a class designation, and one that is subtler than the
Western concepts of sex, gender, sexuality, or even gender differences. She
insists that feminist thinkers need to see beyond what she sees are
artificially created categories, which establish the chains of oppression,
where woman is the problem of man, and which demand a complex social hierarchy
to meet the needs of the dual categories.[16]
In her essay, “On the Question of
Women’s Liberation,” He-Yin suggests that the person is imprisoned by the
social and political structure in which the designation between man and woman
and their appropriate place in society is a foundational structure on which
hierarchies of power are constructed, long before the person is given a gender
designation. To put it another way, the very existence of the simple dualistic
designation at the core of the Confucian system of political and social life is
a prison for the individual prior to actively being divided into the categories
of the system.[17]
In her use of the term nannu, He-Yin
attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses inherent in any social or political
system. She uses the concept of shengji (livelihood) to criticize “capitalism,
modernity, coloniality, the state, and imperial traditions.[18]”
To He-Yin, private property was the primary issue in political and social
structures. She saw the beginning of the institution of slavery as the view of
woman as private property.[19]
From this perspective, He-Yin saw the primary inquiry for feminist thinkers was
the accumulation of power through wealth as private property supported by a
political structure. All political structures were suspect. He-Yin believed
that the government existed only to secure power and wealth for the already
powerful and wealthy. This was why she was so drawn to anarchism. To He-Yin
anarchism and feminism were pieces of a whole.[20]
This view was in direct conflict with most of the Chinese
intellectuals and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. Both Liang
Qichao and Jin Tianhe worked for a form of freedom that had a state political
structure at its core. They did not believe that freedom could be guaranteed
unless it was enforced by the state. He-Yin was suspicious of any idea in which
the freedom of women was solely guaranteed by the state.[21]
The issue of shengji, then, was the
freedom of the woman to invest herself into the universal struggle to survive
and thrive through the reality of labor unencumbered by the artificial dictates
of any given social or political structure. Thus, she viewed the new
industrialized setting that her contemporaries favored as a different form of
the same enslavement to “industrial waged work.[22]”
At the beginning of the twentieth
century, He-Yin Zhen lifted her voice in opposition to what she believed was
the causes of injustice in the world. Her thought was original and complex, if
extreme, and often quite different than such male contemporaries as Jin Tianhe
and Liang Qichao, who believed freedom for all could be secured through the
establishment of a new socio-political order.
[1] Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential
Texts in Transnational Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013),
28.
[2] Ibid, 29.
[3] Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2013), 218.
[4] Ibid, 221.
[5] Liu, Karl, and Ko, Chinese
Feminism, 187.
[6] Tani E. Barlow, The
Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006), 50.
[7] Liang Qichao, “On Women’s Education,” in The Birth of Chinese Feminism, ed. Lydia
H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013), 189 – 203.
[8] Liu, Karl, and Ko, Chinese
Feminism, 1.
[9] Ibid, 6.
[10]Ibid, 7.
[11] Ibid, 51.
[12] Ibid
[13] Ibid
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid, 13.
[16] Ibid, 20.
[17] Ibid, 21.
[18] Ibid, 22.
[19] He-Yin Zhen, “Economic Revolution and Women’s
Revolution, “ in The Birth of Chinese
Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, ed. Lydia H. Liu,
Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, 92. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
[20] Ibid, 23.
[21] Ibid
[22] Ibid, 25.
