Skin I thought I shed

I am starting to live again

                                in skin I thought I shed

                Devouring voices

                                of those who had gone before

                                                giving nourishment to past fires

                                                                        Rekindled

It's not the way it should be

It's not the way it should be

                Sneaking glimpses behind the curtain

                Living wet

                                in the stream of you

                Hiding love and knowledge

                                                from the hate and ignorance surrounding me

It's not the way it should be

                Black and Brown and Red and Yellow

                                lives burning in hidden slavery

                Covered by blocks of concrete

                                                and rebar

                                                                piercing

                                                                                me

                                Raping my hope

                                                my soul

                                                                my dust

                                                a cloud of devastation

                                                                raining acid green

                                                                                on those who purchased me

It's not the way it should be

                Brown and dirty

                                Red and dead

                                Hung time and time again

                                                In the name of

                Mammon

It's not the way I hoped it would be

                Ignorance and arrogance of youthful certainty

                                                                                the ways of children

                                                                Left behind

                                                                                                torn from me

                                                                                                                as security

It's not the way I want it to be

                Autumn dancing her song away from me

                                I hoped

                                                wanted

                                                                to dance it too

HE-YIN ZHEN AND THE RISE OF CHINESE FEMINISM IN THE 20TH CENTURY

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.

EVOLUTION OF HO CHI MINH’S POLITICAL THOUGHT

In order to understand the political evolution of Ho Chi Minh it is important to understand the ideological environment in which he was born and raised. It was his young life, and his teachers that shaped him into a driven patriot so committed to a nationalist dream that he would never marry. It was this dream, empowered by a sharp intellect and wisdom that Ho Chi Minh would try to clothe with several political systems, finally determining that Leninist Communism, with Vietnamese accents, fit best.

Ho Chi Minh was born on May 19, 1890, Ho was given the “milk name” Nguyen Sinh Cung and was the second son to Nguyen Sinh Sac and Hoang Thi Loan. His older brother had raised Sac until the age of fifteen when he was noticed and adopted by a visiting scholar named Hoang Xuan Duong. It was not an unusual occurrence for the poor son of a farmer to be adopted by a scholar for formal training in preparation for the civil service exam. Sac showed great promise as a Confucian scholar, and in 1883 he married his teacher’s daughter. Over the next seven years they would have three children.[1]

They lived a typical life for the family of a Vietnamese scholar. Sac continued his studies and Loan worked the small rice fields and family garden, and raised the kids. In 1891, Sac took the civil service exam for the first time and failed, but did well enough to encourage him to keep working. In 1894, he passed with the equivalent of a Masters of Arts degree. This was a great honor, which the local village wanted to celebrate. Sac insisted that the instead of the celebration, meat be distributed to poor families.[2]

Sac could have joined the bureaucracy at this point and earned a substantial living, but he chose instead to teach locally and continue his studies. In 1895, he attempted the imperial examinations which he failed but chose to remain in the city of Hue to study at the Imperial Academy. In 1898, after a second failure, Sac accepted a position as a teacher in the city. This was the first time that Sac’s two sons were formally introduced to “the Confucian classics in the Chinese language.”[3]

In late 1900, Sac was given an official position in a city over five hundred miles away from Hue. Loan stayed in Hue where she gave birth to their fourth child named Nguyen Sinh Xin. The birth weakened her body and in early 1901 Loan died. For several weeks ten year old Cung worked hard to find sustenance for his youngest brother. When he heard about the death of his wife, Sac left his official position, picked up his kids, and returned to his wife’s home village.[4]

After spending a few months in the village, Sac returned to Hue where he eventually passed the Imperial Examinations at the level of doctorate second degree. During this time Sac’s children stayed in their mother’s village being taken care of by their grandmother. When Cung turned eleven, his father gave him the name Nguyen Tat Thanh (he who will succeed). [5]

At first Thanh studied with his father, but was eventually sent to study with Vuong Thuc Qui. Both rejected the methods of route memorization which characterized the classical methods of Confucian education. Instead Qui emphasized the humanitarian nature of the Confucian writings and a deep patriotism and nationalism. Under Qui, Thanh wrote a number of patriotic essays and was allowed to serve the number of guest lecturers who would visit Qui’s school. Qui’s patriotism was such that he soon closed his school to embrace rebel activities.[6]

Thanh returned to study with his father who held similar views. Sac is known to have said, “Why should I force my students to memorize the classics just to take the exams? I won’t teach my kids that way.” This allowed Thanh to immerse himself in the popular heroic tales he preferred over the classics. Thanh would also join the other village children around the forge of the local blacksmith who would tell tales of the heroes of Vietnam’s past. Thanh also learned to forge and hunt from this man.[7]

All of this together formed the foundation of a personal calling to patriotic nationalism that would drive this boy to become Ho Chi Minh, “He Who Enlightens.” He would explore several political systems with the primary purpose of finding an adequate expression for this calling. It is probably Phan Boi Chau who was most influential to Thanh’s move away from traditional models for the realization of his nationalist dreams.

Chau was a friend of Sac and when he would visit Thanh served the men while they talked. Chau was contemptuous of the monarchy and felt strongly that Vietnam needed to abandon the traditional models and look abroad for modern systems. Chau looked to Japan and the Japanese Emperor Meiji who used foreign models to modernize Japan. Thanh however turned down an offer to join Chau’s movement because Chau wanted to invite the Japanese to drive out the French. It is said that Thanh felt such an action would be like “driving the tiger out the front door while welcoming the wolf in through the back door.” This was not the only reason for Thanh to reject Chau’s offer. When Thanh asked Chau how Japan was able to take the technological steps necessary for its modernization, Chau told him they learned from the West. In 1905 Thanh was able to begin his journey of understanding the West, he began studying the French language and culture with a group of his father friends who taught him “if you want to defeat the French, you must understand them. To understand the French, you must study the French language.”[8]

In 1906 Sac was once again summoned to court to accept an official appointment. He had been able to refuse such appointments in the past, but he felt he could no longer escape such service. It is possible that his continual refusals had brought him negative attention at court. He was granted a position that allowed him to supervise the students of the Imperial Academy. It seems he grew to question the meaning of traditional phrase “loyalty to the king, love of country” when the king was nothing more than a puppet to a foreign ruler. He talked openly about this to his friends and advised his student against pursuing an official career.[9]

When they reached Hue Thanh and his brother were enrolled in the Dong-Ba upper-level elementary school where classes were taught in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French. Thanh was an exceptionally serious and disciplined student. He finished the two-year program in one year. In 1907 both Thanh and his brother were accepted to the highest-level school in Hue that focused on both French and Vietnamese education. It was here that Thanh was introduced to such thinkers as Socrates, “Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.”[10] Thanh is known to have been well like by his teachers, but it was during this time that his anti-colonial activity really began.[11]

The anti-colonial activity of Thanh and his brother eventually cause his father to be closely watched by the authorities. Sac was transferred to a magistrate’s position in a problematic city two hundred miles away from Hue in an attempt to get rid of him. It worked, by 1910 he was officially removed from office. In 1914, Thanh’s brother was found guilty of treasonous activity and spent several years in prison.[12]

Thanh ended up blacklisted and on the run. He took a post at the Duc Thanh School that espoused reformist ideals and a nationalist agenda. The school was divided between the ideologies of Phan Chu Trinh, which taught that the French could be trusted to act in a moral way if they were approached correctly, and that of Phan Boi Chau who wanted Japan’s aid to oust the French. “According to one Vietnamese source, he (Thanh) respected both Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Boi Chau, but had resurvations about both approaches, dismissing the former’s trust in the French goodwill as Naïve and the latter’s reliance on Japan and members of the royal family as misguided.”[13]

In 1911 Thanh left the school without telling anyone he was leaving, for Saigon. It is unclear why he left, but shortly after a French official showed up at the school to ask about him. Thanh was able to contact his father who was also in Saigon, and on his advise prepared to go abroad. He spent the next two years mostly at sea where he discovered the horrors of colonialism in areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[14]

Thanhs’ time abroad solidified his determination to do whatever he could to realize a free Vietnam. It is probable that he was first exposed to the writings of Karl Marx during this time. Evidence is sparse for his activities during this time, but he did live for a time in the United States and in London before arriving in France.

Thanh went to Paris after World War I where he organized the Association of Vietnamese Patriots and took the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot). The leaders of the AVP thought that the peace program of the victorious Allies could provide opportunities for Vietnamese freedom. Quoc presented a petition to the Allies calling for the recognition of Vietnam as an independent nation, but it was officially ignored.[15]

It is not as farfetched as it seems at first that Quoc would present such a petition. Even though there was no official response to the petition, Colonel House, President Woodrow Wilson’s senior advisor in the US delegation at the post World War I meeting, acknowledged receipt of the petition and sent a note stating that it would be brought to the attention of President Wilson. Wilson was having a very hard time, meeting resistance at almost every turn. Colonialism was a major issue at these meetings, but the compromises necessary to ensure peace changed little.[16]

Even though Quoc’s father and teachers had rejected the rigidity of the Confucian system, it can’t be ignored that the culture of Vietnam was largely shaped by Confucian ideals. From the perspective of Confucianism, Western capitalism is its ideological opposite, while socialism embraces a morality much more compatible. Like many from Asia, Quoc’s fist exposure to Western capitalism was through exploitative colonialism. The horrors of colonialism created an automatic, unconscious rejection of the potential for Western style capitalism to be effective in serving his nationalist vision. Even given this socialist tendency, it wasn’t until July 1920 that Quoc would find the spark and the inspiration to build on his nationalist foundation. [17]

There is evidence to suggest that Quoc was involved in socialist organizations even while in London. While in Paris he was not accepted as a full member of the French Socialist Party until after the impact of the petition had been felt. The petition made Quoc something of a minor celebrity among socialist circles by 1919. In 1920 Quoc was attending regular meetings and taking a more active role in the political discussions of the French Socialist Party. What was important to Quoc, what was an immediate concern to him, the exploitation of colonial peoples, was a peripheral issue to the majority of the party and European socialists who were most with the issue of world capitalism.[18]

It seems the debates were disheartening for Quoc, and his friends would often comment that he know nothing of socialist or communist theory. He asked a friend to suggest what to read to gain the education he lacked. He read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (which he would continue to study for the rest of his life), but it was not this masterwork that provided the major shift Quoc needed.[19]

In July 1920, Quoc read Lenin’s “Theses on the Nationals and Colonial Questions,” and his life was give focus and purpose. Here was exactly what he had been searching for years. Quoc is known to have said, “This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation.” This document spoke directly to Quoc, it caused an almost religious conversion experience. This is the moment where everything changed, where evolution became refinement. The man who would come to be known as Ho Chi Minh now had the ideological tools to build on the foundations of his patriotic nationalism, and turn him into a legend during his own lifetime.[20] 

---

1.       William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York, NY: Hyperion Publishers, 2000), 17.

2.       Ibid, 18

3.       Ibid, 20

4.       Ibid, 22

5.       Ibid

6.       Ibid, 23

7. Ibid, 24

                8. Ibid, 27, 32

                9. Ibid, 29

                10, Ibid, 39

                11. Ibid, 36

                12. Ibid, 38

                13. Ibid, 40

                14. Ibid, 45

                15. Gary Hess, Vietnam and the United States (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 15.

                16. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 60

                17. Ibid, 62

                18. Ibid, 63

                19. Ibid, 64

                20. Ibid, 65