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Feminism in modern ChinaRebecca KARL aa New York University , New YorkPublished online: 04 Dec 2012.

To cite this article: Rebecca KARL (2012) Feminism in modern China, Journal of Modern ChineseHistory, 6:2, 235-255, DOI: 10.1080/17535654.2012.738873

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ARTICLE

Feminism in modern China

Rebecca KARL*

New York University, New York

This essay discusses the significances and meanings of the emergence of feminism asa mode of social analysis in the early twentieth century in China. It focuses on acritical examination of some of the more dominant discourses of the time, and seeks tocontextualize these in a global perspective. By concentrating in the last part of theessay on He-Yin Zhen (He Zhen), the anarchist–feminist editor of the Tokyo-basedjournal Natural Justice (Tianyi bao), and in particular on her exposition on femalelabor, the essay introduces one of the most radical critiques of Chinese and globalgender issues written at the time. In so doing, it demonstrates He-Yin Zhen’s pre-science and the ways in which her analyses can continue to inform feminisms forour day.

Keywords: He-Yin Zhen (He Zhen); feminism; nationalism; anarchism; labor; socialrelations

. . . a women’s revolution must go hand-in-hand with an economic revolution. If an economicrevolution cannot be accomplished, then the common phrase heard today calling for a ‘‘revolu-tion 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, publishedin Shanghai what historians have commonly referred to as a feminist manifesto. Thepamphlet was entitled The Women’s Bell (N€ujie zhong). In the preface, Jin conjures a visionof happiness by contrasting his own inadequate existence with that of an imaginary scene inEuro–America:

The muggy rainy season with its endless drizzles is stifling. Lotuses droop in the trepid hotbreeze. The trees are listless and the distant hills dormant. On the eastern end of the continent ofAsia, in a country that knows no freedom, in a small room that knows no freedom, my breathingis heavy, my mind gone sluggish. I want to let in the fresh air of European civilization, draw it into 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

Journal of Modern Chinese HistoryVol. 6, No. 2, December 2012, 235–255

*Email: rebecca.karl@nyu.edu1 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 RebeccaKarl, 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 & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17535654.2012.738873http://www.tandfonline.com

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and arms swinging by his sides through the promenades of London, Paris, Washington.Such happiness and ease! I wish I could go there myself.2

The fresh air of Europe that dispels the stagnation of China is symbolized by and encap-sulated in the peaceful scenic depiction of a bourgeois white man strolling carefree on apresumably well-ordered boulevard accompanied by his well-groomed wife and well-behaved children. Just as the peaceful nature of the scene located in a generic but specifictime and place is important, the wife and children also are essential to the completion of thepicture 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 spatialsynchronicity and temporal simultaneity – ‘‘on this day, at this hour’’ – can only signal, inthis narrative frame, China’s backwardness with relation to Europe and its consequentnational need to catch up. In this sense, the direct juxtaposition reinforces the co-temporalityand 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 senseof Chinese lack vis-à-vis Euro–America; this lack was equally firmly anchored to a sense ofnational weakness and inadequacy: ‘‘a country that knows no freedom’’ where the air issluggish and people cannot breathe. The gendered lack conjoined to national inadequacybecame a common rhetorical and discursive figure; it became the ideologically-lived realitythrough which history, the present and the future were understood and narrated. By the sametoken, the redress of the backward inadequacy/lack became an object of desire: with such awonderful vision of advancement – a free man accompanied by his wife and childrenbreathing free-flowing air and walking on a spacious boulevard free of violence andpestilence. It is no wonder that many women and men at the turn of the twentieth centuryin 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 compla-cent form of gendered happiness. After all, such an idealized life promised stability, powerand wealth, even as it was far from the everyday subjugated semi-colonized lives mostChinese elites (not to mention non-elites) actually led.

Wemight even say that the two – the carefree Europeans and the subjugated Chinese; thestrong free white man with his educated wife and the weak suffocated Chinese man with hisignorant, bound-foot, and cloistered women – were at once mutually contradictory andyet also mutually dependent. The stereotypical images of each – as untrue as they wereideologically real – depended heavily on the other. In fact, we could say that much of thehistorical 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 onwardand that became one of the major touchstones of male and female theorizing about China’sand the global situation. Feminism for the late Qing period and into the early 1920s hencerefers not so much to organized activity as to the broad realm of theorization that takes theproblem 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 ofChinese Feminism. For the Chinese original of this quotation, see Jin Yi (Jin Tianhe), preface to N€ujiezhong [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 theintroduction to Birth of Chinese Feminism and my collaborative work with Lydia Liu and Dorothy Ko.Other parts are adapted from various published and as-yet unpublished essays of mine.

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cultural and other guises. On the one hand, then, feminism is not about women as such, butrather about the ways in which theorizations of social relations become infused with genderedconcerns about the relationship of woman to social life at a particular historical juncture. Onthe other hand, feminism does not at this early time focus on the organizational forms ofactivism, although it is quite clear that at the very least journalism and the practice of editorialand narrative writing were crucial to its expression, or rather, to the basic formulations ofdiscourse, language, and concepts deemed adequate to the problem named ‘‘woman’’ or‘‘feminism’’. This early feminism, then, would bear relation to, but not be synonymous withthe 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, historicalfeminisms are obvious cognate appearances; however, the primary relations signified in theraising of the question of woman and man changed over time, and thus must be understoodhistorically 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 offeminism, we can cite some lines that follow Jin’s melancholy statement of Chinese maleinadequacy noted above. He writes despairingly: ‘‘There is not a place in today’s worldwhere 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 anddependent upon his happy vision of bourgeois life described at the outset, summarizes boththe central concerns and the central historical contexts of the attack on the congeries of socialpractices that Jin and many of his male and female contemporaries saw as shaping thebenighted condition of China and the early twentieth-century world. The context is suppliedby the implied contrastive problem of playthings (versus productive work) and colonization(versus autonomous or sovereign territory). The practices that corresponded to these con-texts and shaped them in the particularity of China were characterized, as Jin goes on toargue in the fuller pamphlet, by concern with female morality and virtue (daode), the femaledisposition (pinxing), ability (nengli), educational method (jiaoyu zhi fangfa), disparities insocial 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 socialrelations that was newly coming to be recognized as having contributed to China’s so-calledbackwardness (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 theirtotalized and systematized relation to the putative backwardness of China in a global frameand the consequent sense of modern decline in a national narrative sense that makes themsignify differently as a catalogue of historical frailties. Indeed, while Jin’s catalogue of illslater came to be named the ‘‘woman problem (fun€u wenti)’’4 and the language he used alsohelped set the tone and parameters for much subsequent usage, we should nevertheless seeJin’s summary as combining, from the perspective of a nationalist, the various issues –playthings, colonizing, and embodied (territorial/property) relations – that constituted thehistorical problematic from which his list emanates and to which it gives voice and shape inthe early twentieth-century context.

What I am pointing to here is the general problem that was raised by the massivearticulated emergence of feminism and gender concerns in the late Qing in its simultaneitywith that immanent totalization called modernity, structured in China by capitalist expansion

3 Jin Yi (Jin Tianhe), N€ujie zhong, 12.4 As the scholar Liu Jucai notes, Jin Yi’s pamphlet was ‘‘the first bourgeois Chinese monograph on thewoman question.’’ Liu Jucai, Zhongguo jindai fun€u yundong shi [A History of the Modern ChineseWomen’s Movement] (Beijing: Zhongguo fun€u chubanshe, 1989), 153.

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in the form of imperialism and semi-colonization, which gave rise to the temporal concernwith nationalism and backwardness.5 Further, what I want to emphasize is the concurrentemergence of a concern with everyday routines as embodied in gendered forms that werelinked inextricably to a newly discovered possibility of the political in twentieth-centuryChina. This realm of the political included but was not exhausted by nationalism. In thisregard, we could say that these routines and possibilities derived from and incorporatedconcerns that were intimately connected to gendered positionings of laboring subjectswithin 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 (talentedwoman) was being thoroughly dismantled by an emerging type of woman and man. Thisemergent type found in the poetic output and deep family involvements of cain€u a lack ofpublic engagement that contained undesirable social values from which the new generationnow wished to distance itself. The turn-of-the-twentieth-century rejection of the cain€u andher rapid replacement (over a couple of decades) by the new woman led to the historicaldismissal of the talented woman, now characterized as a dabbler and dilettante, whosewritings 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 merelyfrom an emulation of Western or Japanese standards, but also importantly from an internalreaction against the ways in which elite Chinese women had hitherto fashioned themselvesin textually ideal and socially practical terms.

However clear the dismissal of the cain€umight be, pinning down the new woman is a bitdifficult. Recent studies of talented women7 and of the emergent new woman have shownthat what is new about the new woman is certainly not female literacy, as talented womenwere highly literate and, like their modern sisters, they usually emerged from educatedfamilies. By the same token, home management and educational roles in the family do notmark the new woman as new, because the management and educational efforts of talentedwomen were often a major reason why their marital and natal families attained and retainedpolitical and social power as well as financial solvency through the bureaucratic successgained by their men. As is well recognized, the weaving and spinning, artistic productionand poetic prowess of the cain€u were all crucial to the fiscal and social position of theirfamilies. It is also not new women’s appearance in print that makes them new, as the poeticand epistolary output of talented women was widely published from at least the end of theMing dynasty onwards.

Thus, even if not sociologically new, there is something ineluctably different about theturn-of-the-twentieth-century woman. While it is clear that many of the new women camefrom 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 theTurn 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 JoanJudge, The Precious Raft of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

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rejection cannot be ascribed merely to generational conflict or inevitable historical progress.Rather, there was an apparent conceptual rupture. For example, while the modern concernwith female morality or education appears continuous with such concern from the past, it isimportant to note that the modern concerns are clearly enfolded into a new set of practicesemerging for the modern woman. For Jin Tianhe, for instance, the recovery of a sociallyproductive concept of virtue (de) depended upon stripping the power/violence/joy fromeveryday practices masquerading as play and replacing those with the production of lastingsocial value through a different relation of rights to social and economic production. By thesame token, in promoting education, the social ideal of talented women’s literacy wasmocked and refashioned as both a public (national) and a family good, while the locationand 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 virtuousnational duty to raise a newly articulated (male) citizenry even as productivity was to bemoved into more quantifiable locations and out of the family. At the same time, stirringstories of female heroines of yore, such as HuaMulan, were juxtaposed to stories of heroinesfrom Europe, such as Jean d’Arc, to create a global equivalence of heroic women spanningtime 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’’ forChina. The crosscurrents in discourse and practice of the 1890s onwards were in this sensequite transformative, and all the advocacies were articulated in the overlapping real time of alittle more than a decade (1898–1911). By the end of this period and into the earlyRepublican moment, the main topics and valence of discussion had utterly changed bybeing 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 self-sufficient economy was forced by wars and treaties to open to a flow of manufacturedcommodities produced in the burgeoning industrial and plantation sites of Britain,France, Prussia, the United States, and their colonial possessions. While China hadtraded with foreign countries for many centuries and links with its Southern neighbors(the nanyang) had become particularly dense by the nineteenth century through immi-gration and consequent family–entrepreneurial connections, the forms of commerce andof foreign relations demanded by the incorporation of China into the global capitalistworld were qualitatively different. China was now inserted into an international systemof trade, diplomacy, and culture dominated absolutely by Euro–American militarymight, economic arrangements, and emerging ideological hegemony. From the 1840sonwards, China’s economy, society, culture, and politics increasingly came under pres-sure 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 thatcombined creatively with internal economic, social, and ideological dislocations occa-sioned by shifting economic and political arrangements. Missionaries from variouscountries flooded into the country following the gunboats, converting few but creatingideological and social fissures through their translation efforts and promotion of differ-ent socio–cultural values. The Chinese language itself underwent large-scale

8 See Judge, The Precious Raft of History.

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transformation, with classical usages giving way and adapting to new vocabularies andnew concepts demanded by the incorporation of China into the inter-state capitalistsystem of trade, governance, and politics.

From the mid-nineteenth century on, successive waves of educated men – many ofwhom served or wished to serve in the dynastic bureaucracy as officials – tried to thinktheir way through and out the other side of the multisided catastrophes facing Chinathrough 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 andcustoms of their own society, these educated and sometimes even moneyed men, in thespace of less than a generation, came to understand that the old ways of the integratedChinese socio–cultural and political–economic system could not and would not last.When the newly-built Chinese navy was summarily destroyed and defeated by theJapanese in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895, the sense of accumulated crises ofthe time came to a climax. From 1895 to 1898, the critical energies of many concernedand educated men – now joined by an intrepid few educated women incipiently recog-nizing 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 flexibilityin political, social, cultural, commercial, and military organization and development.This push culminated in the one hundred-days reform period in 1898, during which theGuangxu Emperor was petitioned and agreed to a series of political reforms. His reform-mindedness was soon suppressed by the Empress Dowager Cixi and her faction of courtconservatives. This last best chance for thoroughgoing dynastic reform soon gave rise toa revolutionary movement organized by Chinese elites now pushed into exile (mostly inJapan, Hong Kong, and the United States). By late-1911, this revolutionary movementsucceeded in toppling the Qing dynasty and replacing China’s dynastic system with aRepublican form of government.

Early twentieth century China thus saw the final demise of the last dynasty and theestablishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912. It was an extended moment of flux duringwhich the intertwined foundational premises of Chinese society, politics, economics, andculture crumbled and were rethought in the context of a global situation in which anyautonomy of rethinking was impossible.9 For many educated elites, China’s geographicallyincomplete but politically and economically violent subjugation to foreign powers urgentlyraised the question of how to compete with the increasingly rapacious and demandingimperialist colonizers on the pre-given terrain of militarization, enlightenment thought,and free market, capitalist-driven socio–economic industrialization. The pre-given natureof the terms of engagement and competition led to a simultaneous acceptance and question-ing by Chinese elites of the possible modalities for the various types of adaptations andaccommodations needed to challenge the invading powers. These modalities generallyincluded the technological, capital, institutional requisites, and labor mobilizations forwhat 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 fallsoutside the scope of this essay, suffice it to say that one of the primary schools of thoughtto emerge to deal with this question was called The Study of Wealth and Power (Fuqiangxue). This school in large part derived from the translation and popularization of HerbertSpencer’s sociological reworking of Charles Darwin’s biological survival of the fittest as

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

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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 technologicalmilitarization and institutional–bureaucratic rationalization at the national scale, as wellas the socio–economic industrialization of coastal China and the creation and integrationof a productive national economy. The source of labor to fuel these semi-public/semi-private endeavors would be the vast agrarian population of China’s rural interior, whoseland, while not expropriated outright, nevertheless was becoming more and moredifficult to cultivate so as to produce for the increasing burdens of landlord surplusextraction and imperial taxation.11 Particularly affected by the combination of landsqueeze, rural labor intensification, and the steady collapse of home-based handicraftsin face of foreign-controlled industrial imports and foreign-owned coastal manufactureswere women, whose economic activities had always been – in times and places of plentyas in times and places of scarcity – crucial to household economic viability. No meresupplement or sideline (as many economists and economic historians continue to call it)to a supposedly proper male-dominated economy, female-dominated spinning andweaving activities were a central and necessary element of the functioning of any ruralhousehold economy.12

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this self-sufficient albeitincreasingly pressed rural economy steadily deteriorated as a consequence of ever morerapacious landlords in collusion with newly-rising and newly-rich merchant elites in thecoastal urban areas. This led to an accelerating subordination of rural to urban space. Inconsequence, there formed a lopsided competition in textile production and quality betweenthe rural producers on the one hand and, on the other, textiles produced in urban-basedhighly-capitalized foreign-owned industries or foreign-imported manufactures protectedthrough tariff inequalities maintained by British colonial power. Women, whose familylivelihoods were being ruined by these combined practices and trends, labored moreintensively for lower returns within the family; were increasingly subjected to being soldas 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 incoerced fashion (sold by their parents or in-laws to garner cash; bought by factory operativeslooking for cheap, indebted, and tractable labor; and so on). These women worked long andhard hours in the families of the urban or rural elites, in the factories of the many foreign andfew 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: HarvardUniversity Press, 1964); Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking andModern 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 oreven 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 withlandlords was inimical to rural land adjustments in favor of agricultural labor; and handicraft manu-facture, particularly in the realm of the traditional women’s work of spinning and weaving, wasseverely impacted by the industrial competition in silk and cotton from Japan, British-colonizedIndia, and the revival of the American South after the civil war as well as by the recovery of the silkindustry in France and Italy after the mid-century silkworm plagues, among others. The literature onthese disputes is voluminous and specialized.12 See Hill Gates, China’s Motor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Kathy LeMonsWalker,Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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towns, and villages; they were mortgaged to owners as servants, brides or concubines – oftenfor a lifetime.

Feminism: Education, print media, and labor

The anarchist He-Yin Zhen (also known as He Zhen)13 was virtually alone in her critiquesof labor and in calling for the necessity for a simultaneous economic and women’srevolution. 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) makesclear that such women did not even enter his field of vision: Liang’s essay turns on theproblem of women as parasites and consumers rather than producers.15 In this vein, themajor part of editorial commentating in the newly founded periodic journals at the turn ofthe twentieth century revolved around reported news from abroad (diplomatic affairs aswell as revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings, among others) and around lamenting thedecline of the Chinese state; many editorials offered suggestions and opinions on how toforestall 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 ofcitizenship and of national (not family) economic production was promoted as antidotes tothe generalized decline and as methods of saving the state and saving the nation.Education, citizenship involvement, and the rate of statistically measurable economicproduction became key indicators of the health of the national people and thus of theprospects for the Chinese nation and the state. Again, in ‘‘OnWomen’s Education’’, LiangQichao argues for the benefits of female education, albeit only in terms of the enhancementof national productivity and nurturing of male citizens in the family. While new for thetime, such advocacies were limited by their dependence upon a concept of a nationaleconomy that rendered female labor in the family all but invisible.

New forms of education for girls and boyswere promoted, where the emphasis on classicaltextual analysis, formulaic writing styles, and rote memory started to wane. The prestige of theclassical texts also began to falter, particularly after 1905 when the civil service examinationsystem was terminated. Girls’ educational institutions were founded alongside boys’ schools,first by Euro–American missionaries and then soon enough by Chinese merchants, entrepre-neurs, and local educated elites in shifting alliances and espousing shifting priorities. For someof 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 ChineseFeminism.14 For more on He-Yin Zhen and her views on labor, see Liu, Karl, Ko, eds., The Birth of ChineseFeminism. In addition, as Chan and Dirlik point out: ‘‘It was . . . Liu Shipei and his associates in Tokyowho first introduced the necessity of labor as an integral component of anarchist revolution.’’ Theyindicate 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 thaneven 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 [TheChinese Progress] on April 12, 1897, reprinted in Zhongguo jindai jiaoyushi ziliao huibian: wuxu shiqijiaoyu [Collection of Documents on the History ofModern Chinese Education: Education in the Periodof 1898 Reform], ed. Tang Zhijun, Chen Zuen, and Tang Renze (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chu-banshe, 2007) 99–106. Translated into English by Robert Cole and Wei Peng, included in Liu, Karl,Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism.

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more efficient raising of sons to be good citizens (the pithy phrase used here was importedfrom Japan: ‘‘good wives, wise mothers’’ [xianqi liangmu]); in others, education was aimed atbasic literacy andwhat soon came to be called home economics or homemanagement, a quasi-scientific endeavor.16 A strong linkage was made between freeing the mind through educationand freeing the feet from the constraints of foot binding.17 These schools and efforts wereeither urban-based or aimed at the upper elites of rural society.

The problem of general and female suffrage was introduced and various examples ofelectorates from around the world were promoted. None – other than Finland, Norway,England, and Italy – advocated women’s suffrage and very few advocated universal malesuffrage; indeed, almost all the global examples had some version of a property and racerequirement while also being restricted to men. In China as in many other places, feministadvocates loudly proclaimed the fitness of elite (educated, moneyed) women to join elite(educated, moneyed) men in the proposed electorate. However, prior to the Republicanrevolution in 1911, very few of these specific advocacies gained much traction, although aselite men made their advances into electoral politics at the provincial levels, elite womencertainly staked a claim to fitness for political participation, a claim they continued throughthe 1910s and onwards to press relentlessly.18

The discursive and organizational interactions among sometimes geographically diffusedgroups of critics were facilitated by the rise of journals and print media around the turn of thetwentieth 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 critiqueswere often ephemerally supported by the wealthy family or entrepreneurial connections ofthose who wished to publish their views. Women’s journals occupy a vital position in thepublishing world of the time, in part because they were so new as a phenomenon – womenwriting and publishing for direct circulation in the public sphere fundamentally transformedthe earlier history of women writing for circulation by their male kith and kin. Perhaps evenmore important, women’s journals gave late Qing literate women access to a medium throughwhich 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 assources of oppression. That is, journalistic writing – particularly in its editorial and essay forms– allowedwomenwriters to articulate, for the first time, the systemic sources of gendered life inChina at the time. It is through these editorial efforts that a language and a history of genderedoppression were established and popularized in literate female and male society. Aside fromthe editorial writing, journals also reprinted news from abroad, speeches, educational anddidactic materials, anti-foot-binding ditties and songs, encouragements to women wishing tothink beyond the horizons of their domestic lives, as well as advertisements for potions,

16 For more on the debates over female education of the time, see Joan Judge, ‘‘Talent, Virtue and theNation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,’’ AmericanHistorical 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, pittingmissionaries, state bureaucrats, as well as male and female elites against the common practice andagainst the pain of the unbinding process. Ko comments: ‘‘In the tug-of-war footbinding shrank instature. It was not so much outlawed as outmoded; footbinding came to a virtual death when its culturalprestige extinguished. To put it another way, the end camewhen the practice exhausted all justificationswithin 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).

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lotions, and pink pill medicines that promised miraculous cures and recoveries for putativeailments as well as newly-identified modern cosmetic needs of all types.

In this sense, female writers of essays, political critiques, and editorials (both Chineseand Japanese) were of major importance in helping shape the late Qing and early Republicandiscursive, cultural, and socio–political environment. Yet, for the critical-minded educatedwomen of the late Qing, the problems they perceived within their own elite lives took center-stage in their analyses of China’s ills and the consequent challenges facing women. Theirconcerns – represented then and now as concerns for the newly-emergent analytical totalityof women as such (n€uzi) – tended to concentrate on such socially reformist solutions towomen’s and China’s problems as educational opportunities, limited marriage freedom,unbinding feet, social and cultural equality with men, the obtaining of some measure ofindependence from crushing family norms that suppressed female personhood (renge), andparticipation in newly-emerging forms of governance.19 These grievances and advocaciesfilled those journals of the day that specialized in promoting women’s issues and/or statereforms.

The most well-known of the late Qing commentators who wrote in this idiom was QiuJin (1875–1907), the famous cross-dressing revolutionary martyr, who left her husband andchildren behind to be educated in Japan and who, upon her return to China, was executed in1907 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 emancipa-tion.20 In addition to Qiu Jin was a host of other female voices bursting into the field of printmedia at the turn of the twentieth century. On the Japanese side, perhaps most important wasthe radical political and social figure Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927), whose career spannedthe liberal movement of early Meiji Japan (1868–1911) through to the birth of a socialistmovement in the early twentieth century and beyond. Editor and publisher of the journalWomen of the World (Seikai Fujin) from 1907 to 1909, when it was forcibly shut down byJapanese authorities in a general crackdown against socialist voices, Fukuda was committedto women’s emancipation, albeit not within the confines of the state. A fierce critic of theJapanese Women’s Patriotic Association, Fukuda also was associated with the most famousJapanese literary feminist journal of the early twentieth century, Bluestocking, which beganpublication in 1911. The radical circles in which many women operated in Tokyo facilitatedinteractions, for instance, in Women of the World in July 1907, Fukuda reprinted ‘‘TheRegulations of the Society for the Restoration ofWomen’s Rights’’ from the first issue of He-Yin Zhen’s journal Natural Justice (Tianyi bao).21 One other important Japanese feminist,

19 Karl, Staging the World, and ‘‘The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China,’’ inEverydayModernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein (Seattle, WA: Universityof 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 andKristina 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: StanfordUniversity 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 ofpeople have recently formed a ‘Society for the Restoration of Women’s Rights’ and are publishing ajournal called Natural Justice . . . Although there are some idiosyncrasies, as is often the case with theChinese (Shinajin), and there are some clauses we cannot fully endorse, these [Chinese youth] areincredibly strong-willed and spirited. This is something we ought to have observed more among theJapanese.’’ See Seikai Fujin, no. 13 (July 1907), 100.

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with whom many Chinese in Japan were familiar, either personally or by reputation: KannoSuga (1881–1911), an anarchist and feminist activist, who, along with her partner, KotokuShusui, was executed by the Meiji state in 1911 for political crimes (Kanno was the firstwoman in modern Japanese history to be dealt with so harshly). Kanno was a frequent authorof political essays and editorial commentary.

Among the host of Chinese female writers for the political press of the time, there weresuch prominent figures as Lin Zongsu (1878–1944), Chen Xiefen (1883–1923), and LuoYanbin (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 Bellcommending it as an exemplary text on the historical oppression of women in China. Afounding member of the Fujian Women’s Study Society, Lin also was among the first batchof women to join Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui) soon after itsestablishment 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’sjournals, The Woman’s Paper (N€ubao), originally published as a supplement to her father’sradical nationalist paper Subao, and then resumed, under a different name, as an independentpublication after Subao was banned by the Qing government. Xiefen broke with her fatherover her impending sale as a concubine to a rich merchant. Along with Lin Zongsu and QiuJin, 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 uponopposition both to imperialism and patriarchy. Nationalist in orientation, Chen and Lin (aswell as Qiu) insisted on an equal place for (elite) women within a just-evolving notion ofnational–state social life and governance.22

Luo Yanbin (also known as Lianshi), older by a decade than Lin and Chen, was also avigorous advocate for female citizenship. As the founding editor of the journal China’s NewWoman’s World (Zhongguo xin n€ujie), Luo focused more than Lin and Chen on the problem ofthe paucity of female education, even as her narrative of the history of women’s oppression wasalso different from Chen’s and Lin’s. Where the latter two argued that women’s inequality hadbeen a fact of life since the distant past, Luo insisted that women had been equal to men earlier inhistory, but had been relegated to second-class citizenship somewhere along the line. Herstrategic focus, then, was often to argue for the recovery of lost rights, rather than on the newnessof the advocacy for women’s rights in the present. With different but compatible perspectives onthe problems of women’s oppression and on the mechanisms for amelioration, Chen, Luo, andLin were some of the more influential mainstream voices in the burgeoning world of women’sjournalistic 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 enmeshedwas 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,

22 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, seeDifferent Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and EarlyRepublican 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 inTianjin. Like Chen, Luo, and Lin, L€u advocated for female education and equal rights and she helpedraise 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 ofL€u Bicheng (1883–1943) Life and Song Lyrics’’, Nan N€u: Men, Women &Gender in Early & ImperialChina 6, no. 1 (2004), 12–59.

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and hosts of other types of texts, such as didactic children’s literature and adult educationalbooks, a huge and influential sector of publishing in the first decade of the twentieth centuryconcentrated on the translation of novels and stories from abroad. One of the most prolificpromoters 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 knewone of the languages. Lin Shu’s classical-Chinese renditions loosely based on Euro–Americanworks – Shakespeare as well as Dumas, H. Rider Haggard as well as Sherlock Holmes andHarriet Beecher Stowe, amongmany others – took the reading public by storm. The new plots,romantic twists, semi-independent women, heroic roles, political intrigues, and vast mobilityof characters over time and space provoked debates and large-scale rethinking about the role offiction in political life and the role of women in social life. Previously less valued as a form ofwriting, fiction (short stories and novels) now became acknowledged as a key popular textualform for promoting new ideas, new senses of community, and newmodes of social being in theworld, 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 fromwhich late Qing feminism first emanated were concerned with the relation between labor andconsumption. It is also not coincidental that women/wives/concubines were increasinglyreferred to as parasites, the commoditized objects of men, who themselves were often figuredas consumers of women.24 This concern – a very recent one – often appeared in a temporalityarticulated as a critical evocation of thousands of years of female oppression and of femaledependence. Not only registering the awareness that the routines of the past were incommen-surable to the demands of the present, this temporality expressed an indefinite notion of thepast as a unified concept, and thus a more tentative marking of the indeterminate presentagainst which this past was to be thought. That is, the utter flattening of the past that began inthe May Fourth historiography had yet to take hold in the late Qing,25 where temporalindeterminacy gave rise at the time both to ideas about global solidarity with other colonizedpeoples as well as completely opposed notions about a global evolutionary teleology of strongstatism and industrialization. Again, the anarchist He-Yin Zhen was one of the only commen-tators at the time who evoked an unbroken past–present temporal structure as part of hersystemic thinking about the historical instantiations of female oppression, as an interpretationof the social totality of the early twentieth-century world and China. That is, unlike otherChinese 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 ananalysis of the systems of state and social authority. Rather than take a piecemeal reformistapproach 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 aswell), He-Yin Zhen’s critical targets were the continuously produced and reproduced inter-twined systems of scholarly knowledge, female bodily subjugation, and state–legal practicethat not only had resulted in the subjection of Chinese women in the past, but that wouldcontinue to provide the basis for women’s subjection in the civilized present and future. ForHe-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 historicaldebates in the 1920s and 1930s were to be.

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that history as well as of the present. One could no sooner read history without the genderedproblem of what she called nann€u (man/woman) than one could read history without the textsthat underpinned it. Moreover, instead of looking to Euro–America or Japan as models of thefuture for China to follow, as many feminists and other critical intellectuals of the time did, forHe-Yin Zhen, Euro–America and Japan merely represented more advanced ways in whichnewly-emerged and now-globalizing forms of oppression – industrial waged labor, democraticpolities, enlightenment knowledge – could attach themselves to native forms of subjection, toreconfigure and deepen these extant forms on a larger, more thorough, and more disguisedscale. In her critiques, He-Yin Zhen proved to be both prophetic and prescient about women’sissues, but also, through her insights on labor, she was prescient about the system of globalcapital that, then as now, preys upon local forms of oppression, configuring them into practicesuseful 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 wasvery different for different commentators. Somemarked the past as having begun with the rise ofthe Confucian trend (ruzhe zhi feng),26 some from the Qin/Han dynasties; others dated it to theManchu conquest 260 years previously.27 Correspondingly, the causal factors involved inspecifying how the everyday became violently oppressive for women or, rather, which practiceswere indeed violent, were also various: whether it was said to be Confucian patriarchy as asocio–cultural issue, the Manchus as a political issue, agrarianism and family-based economicsas a socio–economic issue, or the eclipse of xia (knight-errancy) values in favor of social stabilityas a cultural issue.28 These various designations, while notmutually exclusive or even exhaustiveof the possibilities, were articulated through different readings of what the past referred to, andthus where the sites and original sources of violence lay. These different articulations of the pastcan at least partially account for one major split in liberal gendered discourses on society andpolitics of the time: where some advocated that women must derive their natural rights andpower from a reconfigured everydayness of the family/society (for example, as representedthrough the unbound foot and the acquisition of knowledge); where others sought to suppress theeveryday altogether by inventing new modes of being in the world – as heroic knights-errant, asSofia Perovskaia-like activists, as revolutionary martyrs, and so on. Many commentators,however, simultaneously advocated many of these positions, a simultaneity that conceals withinthe very formulations precisely the crisis of representation and temporality that most closelycharacterizes modernity as an immanent totalization.

Complicating the task of understanding the temporality of the past in its relation to thepresent, the commentaries were often not clear on whether China’s current weakness wasdue to gender oppression, or gender oppression an effect of China’s weakness. Nor was itclear whether commentators understood Europe’s strength as a cause or effect of superiorgender equality in their societies.29 With this confusion over how to understand both China’s

26 Chuwo (Ding Chuwo), ‘‘Ai n€uzhong,’’ [Lamenting Womankind], N€uzi shijie, no. 6 (1904), 3.27 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 inthe 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; thisthen yielded to slavery, which produced colonization (wangguo)... If one is not a knight errant, one is aslave.’’ Chuwo, ‘‘Ai N€uzhong,’’ 2, 3.29 For example, when Sparta is cited as a positive example of women’s strength, commentators believethat Sparta’s strength derives from its women’s strength, the corollary being that China cannot bestrong if Chinese women are not made strong first. However, other commentators argue that femalestrength 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’sWorld], no. 1 (February 5, 1907), 3.

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and Europe’s past and the relationship of those pasts to their respective presents, thetemporality of the present contradictorily appeared simultaneously socially immanent andrevolutionarily urgent. This confusion was in part a consequence of the growing impetus toview the late Qing present simultaneously, in Peter Osborne’s words, ‘‘from the practicalperspective of the radical openness of the historical process,’’30 as well as from theperspective 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 arestitution of women’s rights (huifu n€uquan) – presumably rights lost somewhere alongthe line in the (variously-dated) pasts – or those essays that argued for the development of aconsciousness of women’s rights that had never existed previously. In this confusedsituation, then, the resolution to the gender problem was articulated either in terms of anextrapolation from the (forgotten) past into the present, or in terms of the need torevolutionarily create something new that had never existed. Most essayists straddledthese positions.

For example, the journalist Lianshi (also known as Luo Yanbin)31 wrote in her February1907 essay, ‘‘AComment onWomen’s Rights’’ (N€uquan pingyi), that a strictly evolutionaryview of women’s low positions was not derivable from Darwinian natural selection, asnatural selection would dictate the elimination of the weakest; yet, ‘‘over the thousands ofyears of human life, nature has not eliminated the one [men] or the other [women], but hasbasically ensured a proportional mix of both.’’ Therefore, she concluded, respect for menand prejudice against women cannot be rooted in a view of natural determination (or, historyas a natural extrapolation of the past in the present).32 However, in her next section, Lianshistates that the social problem of prejudice against women stems from the originary act ofnaming: ‘‘if ‘woman’ had been named ‘man’ and vice versa, the world would be a differentplace.’’ Lianshi clearly draws upon the classical concept of rectification of names (zhengming) to appeal to some inevitable correlation between social names and social reality, acorrelation that is purported to be, in idealist philosophical terms, independent of historicaltemporality. 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; norcan she account for how either the reality or the name got transmitted into the present. Sincethe 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 historicalprocess – looking for the origins of that openness in some version of the past that emphasizesthe metaphysics of naming practices – she is nevertheless trapped in an extrapolation fromthat past that completely contradicts the openness she wishes to promote. In such atemporal–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 wishedto fashion.

30 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 2.31 Luo Yanbin frequently wrote under her penname Lianshi, she was the editor-in-chief of the Tokyo-based journal, Zhongguo xin n€ujie zazhi, and she was a member of the Revolutionary Alliance fromHenan 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 eachhave 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 theWomen’sWorld], Yunnan zazhi[Yunnan Magazine], no. 1 (October 15, 1906), 1.

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He-Yin Zhen, the ontology of labor and the commodification of female bodies

He-Yin Zhen was not troubled by such ambivalence. In her early 1907 two-part essay, ‘‘Onthe Question ofWomen’s Labor’’ (Lun n€uzi laodong wenti), He-Yin Zhen is most concernedwith the proliferating forms through which women’s bodies were being commodified at thebeginning of the twentieth century.33 This concern stems for her from the fact that labor is notwhat historically had been called ‘‘n€ugong’’ (womanly work/woman’s work), or, the tradi-tional practice of household production in weaving and spinning. This household labor He-Yin 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 auton-omous (ziyou duli de) form of labor. Her modern concept of labor (laodong)34 is premisedupon the suppression of the non-commodified form: for modern labor is free only in thesense that it is tied to waged work (that is, in a quasi-Marxist, fully anarchist sense). By thesame token, the modern form of labor – free waged labor – in He-Yin Zhen’s analysiscontinues to be tied to the variety of ways in which women’s bodies have been subjugatedand 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 rupturalhistorical moment. Indeed, she names the older forms of subjection upon which modernwaged 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 basedupon a critical distinction. The connection is between the older forms of female bodilysubjugation and the newer forms of waged labor, all now classified under the rubric ofcommodified (enslaved) labor. The distinction she makes is between labor as free, autono-mous human activity and practice – or, practical labor as a vital aspect of any vision ofindividual and communal freedom and sociality – in contrast to labor in most of itshistorically and contemporary forms, which is not ontologically free, but rather is commo-dified and enslaved. The crux of the connection and the difference, in philosophical andhistorical terms, is the acknowledgement that labor must be understood as a basic humanactivity, 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 fundamentalantagonism, an instrumentalization, or a historical abjection. This concept of labor is amaterialist ontology that proposes labor not as an always-already appropriable power forprivate gain, but rather as organic to life itself. By contrast, for classical and neo-classicalpolitical economy – just as for the late-nineteenth century Chinese ‘‘Study of Wealth andPower’’ based upon those principles – labor is a purely economic category in analyticalseparation from the remainder of human life (which eventually comes to be ideologicallysegmented into work-time, leisure-time, and so forth). He-Yin Zhen articulates precisely adistinction between labor as an autonomous ontological practice and labor as an enslaved orcommodified form, even though she does not designate the latter form as marking an entirely

33 He-Yin Zhen’s ‘‘Lun n€uzi laodong wenti’’ [On the Question of Women’s Labor] was originallypublished 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 ChineseFeminism. 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-inspiredloan word from the Japanese; gong is the traditional Chinese word for human activity, or work, in whatI am calling the ontological sense.35 Bruno Gulli, Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2005).

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new era. Her anarchist vision, however, is encoded in the possibility of a historical potentialto reground labor in a human ontology rather than in human capital.

Overall, the conceptual thrust of her essay is to explore how the commodification ofwomen’s bodies over the long course of Chinese (and human) history has effectively crushedthe possibility for any re-imagining of the futurity of labor as genuinely free and autono-mous. She notes repeatedly, that alongside the ever-proliferating commodified versions oflabor 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 globaladvent of textile factories and collectivized wage labor, that He-Yin Zhen sees the possibilityfor an alternative to commodified labor slipping away. Hinging her understanding of labor inhistory on the figure of the subjected and abjected female body – the very body that makesstarkly visible the enslaved form of all commodified labor – He-Yin Zhen proceeds toanalyze the ways in which, through time, women’s bodies have been subordinated to andappropriated by wealthy men for private gain for almost the entirety of the past. Here, He-Yin Zhen’s is a historical argument about the continuity of forms of enslavement; it is not anargument based upon a historicist principle. That is, in He-Yin Zhen’s narrativization there isno 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 ofdevelopment. He-Yin Zhen’s narrative is absolutely not historicist. In fact, in He-YinZhen’s telling, for centuries, the ontology of women’s labor (n€ugong) had existed co-temporally with the various forms of commodified labor (laodong). It is, thus, only withwhat she sees as the imminent disappearance of the enduring possibility of n€ugong labor thatthe supremacy of laodong labor appears now to be secured.36 And this supremacy is beingsecured 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 thelens of the coerced distortion and constant appropriation of the female body for wealth-accumulation. She is clear that understanding the conditions for female commodificationcannot be confined to waged labor in the newer workplaces of the textile factories and otheremerging sites of public female toil of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Qing China, MeijiJapan, or Europe and the United States. Instead, for her the concept of bodily subjectionthrough commodification has to be expanded outside of what she calls the recent advent ofthe class system (jieji zhidu) to encompass the myriad practices through which women’sbodies have been turned into sites of exchange value over the long course of history. Thisvariety of subjected practices originates in and is perpetuated by what He-Yin Zhen calls theproblem of livelihood (shengji wenti), or, quite simply poverty. That is, in her account, thedifficulty in securing livelihood by the families of most women is inextricably linked to theunequal distribution of property between the wealthy and the poor, which she ties to theproblem 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 ofunequal social relations from the past to the present, while the right and ability to appropriatelabor – to commodify bodies – is the central modality for the ongoing production andreproduction of the private wealth that forms the basis for unequal social relations. It is thefundamental inequality in property that informs the historical conditions for all forms ofcommodified labor, even while it is the fundamental mechanism of commodified labor thatinforms the historical fact that, as she says in the first two sentences of her essay: ‘‘Fromancient 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 lateranarchists and radicals in general, her critique of the family as a social institution is tame.

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called the slave–girl breeding [system].’’He-Yin Zhen’s argument in a nutshell, then, wouldgo: if private wealth accumulation and the reproduction of unequal property relations restsupon the enslaved bodies of laboring women, then the whole social system that secures suchunequal relations is merely a mechanism to facilitate the breeding of female slaves. Allwomen, regardless of social status and wealth, are potential slaves, because all women canbecome concubines and prostitutes. This is why women’s bodies are the key to under-standing the historical centrality of labor and property and why women as a total socialcategory only can be understood through a focus on labor as bodily subjugation andproperty. In this sense, it is evident how He-Yin Zhen’s essay is suffused with the mergingof her feminist concerns with the commodified female body and her anarchist concerns withunequal property distribution and the appropriation of value through labor. She reads the twosides – the feminist and the anarchist – completely through one another, such that there is noseparating the one from the other. That is, property and labor become visible through thefeminist lens, just as women’s subjection becomes visible through the problem of propertyand labor.

By the same token, while she uses the vocabulary of Marxist-inspired socialism then inwide 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) hasaltered in any crucial manner the age-old realities of the commodification of female bodies inthe production and reproduction of unequal social relations. Instead, for her, capitalists arejust an extension of the existing social category wealthy people (fumin); class society is justan extension of the historically-continuous and ever-worsening poor–rich differentiation(pinfu zhi cha); and waged labor is just an extension of commodified female bodilysubjugation in service to others. Thus, unlike Marxists of her time, who took the emergenceof waged labor as the key to the production of a new system of unequal social relationsthrough the commodification of labor power and the extraction of surplus value; and unlikeliberals of her time, who took the emergence of waged labor (female and male) as the key toindividual emancipation, freedom, and self-realization as well as key to the concurrentnational pursuit of wealth and power, He-Yin Zhen takes waged labor as just one morepotent 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 newideological 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 whichfemale bodies have been pressed into the service of the wealthy over the long course ofhistory. So, even while she recognizes factory-waged labor as a new form of bodilysubjugation and ethical/moral subjection, she nevertheless maintains that its essential con-tent or reality remains the same as the traditional forms of bond-servitude, concubinage, andprostitution. This is so precisely because waged labor is also about the enslavement of afemale body for someone else’s gain, no matter whether that gain is material (riches) or thesatisfaction of lust (physical). In a historical sense, then, He-Yin Zhen is not making anargument about the birth of a new female identity or class subjectivity emergent throughwaged labor, rather she is marking the continuity between the bodily subjection of the pastand the present. Thus, so far as He-Yin Zhen is concerned, any emergent notion of femalesubjectivity had to be based on that continuity, rather than on the newly-emergent potentialproletarian class basis of factory work.

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In a discursive sense, He-Yin Zhen is interested in articulating a new correlation betweenthe name (ming) and the reality (shi) of female bodily commodification or enslavement. Aswe saw with Lianshi, above, in addition to a linguistic/discursive confusion over the adventof new vocabularies and practices, this modern iteration of the name/reality issue emergesfrom a long- standing dynastic historical concern with maintaining and rectifying names(zhengming) as a means of enforcing a particular discursive domination and closure on theperception and defining of reality. For He-Yin Zhen, then, naming refers not only to amodern-conceptual language problem – that is, how to call new phenomena when nolanguage or concept exists for such a thing. It is also not only a hegemonic discursiveproblem – or a problem of how to impose a closed interpretation on reality. Naming is, moreimportantly, a problem of discursive speech in Gayatri Spivak’s sense; that is, discursivespeech as a way to create an agentive voice that intervenes in reality while also becomingintelligible to itself individually, collectively, and to others. For He-Yin Zhen, seizing thepower of discursive speech through naming is absolutely vital to defining the reality of hercontemporary 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 labormakes clear the mutations in the form of female enslavement in the modern period, yet it ismerely 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 wageform but rather the global spread and extension of this form of commodification of femalebodies. Indeed, absent the existence of systems of bond-servitude and concubinage in manyother countries (Euro–America and Japan are the ones she cites), what He-Yin Zhen sees atthe turn of the twentieth century is the global universalization and standardization of femalebodily commodification through waged labor. In this universalization and standardization,older (particular and Chinese) forms of enslavement (bond-servitude, concubines) arerendered equivalent and thus comparable to the contemporary (global universal) form ofwage labor, insofar as all these forms take the female body as the primary site of exchange forthe private appropriation of value. Here, then, He-Yin Zhen not only outright condemns themodern system of waged labor, but she also condemns it through its equivalence to andcontinuation 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. Insetting up this kind of equivalence and comparability, on the one hand, He-Yin Zhen placesChina 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 onsystems of exploitation that transcend national and cultural borders. However, on the otherhand, He-Yin Zhen also recognizes that China’s particular historical forms of femaleenslavement can and will be monopolized and mobilized by the newer forms of wagedlabor to further subjugate Chinese women in an unequal global structure of profits, accu-mulation, and production of wealth. He-Yin Zhen makes this absolutely clear towards theend of her essay when she emphasizes:

. . . before the modern period, for those who were concubines and prostitutes it was their bodiesbut not their labor power that was swallowed up; for bond-servants, it was their labor power andnot their bodies that was swallowed. But in today’s system, the bitterness of having both laborpower and the body swallowed up is concentrated on the bodies of women of the poor.37

37 Emphasis in original.

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As she sums up this observation: ‘‘Isn’t it the case that the misery of selling her body isalready 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 rightthat this subservience confers upon the wealthy to instrumentalize women of the poor fortheir own purposes, whether material or physical. That this appropriation now – in the earlytwentieth century – had reached a global scale of accumulation and universalization throughthe modality of waged labor means, on the one hand, that the solution to the problem ofcommodification cannot be merely Chinese. That is, it cannot be affected through theabolishing of bond-servitude and concubinage, those quintessentially Chinese culturalexpressions of female enslavement. Yet this is what the mainstream feminism of He-YinZhen’s time advocated: that a transvaluation of Chinese cultural values would suffice tobring Chinese women and thus China as a nation out of the dark ages and into the civilizedmodern world, as we saw with Jin Tianhe above.

Instead, as He-Yin Zhen forcefully argued, since native forms of enslavement had nowbeen conjoined to, transformed and reinforced by the newer forms of wage labor, and sincethose 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 inabolishing what she called the worldwide system of mutual dependence, or, that systemthrough which the poor were rendered dependent on the rich for food and survival while thewealthy cultivated a dependence on the poor for service. Indeed, replacing mutual depen-dence and the attendant Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest with the concept ofmutual aid was one route some Chinese anarchists at the turn of the century proposed out ofthe 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 asystem of communalized property (gongchan zhi zhidu), whereby ‘‘some people’s indepen-dence would no longer be dependent on other people’s [dependence] . . .’’ This would ensurethat, while everyone would labor, it would be in a system of equal exchange, thus ontolo-gically 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, raisedmany of the major and important issues that were to inform subsequent critiques of Chineseand 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 beenever since. Indeed, each of the individual issues, as well as the issues in their totality, becamefraught over and over again as the social, cultural economic, political, and global situationsshifted relations internally and externally. Clearly, beginning in the Republican period andlasting through into the People’s Republic of China, organizations formed around some orall 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, theyeach 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 thephilosophical and ideological sources behind that split, see Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the ChineseRevolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

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plural – feminisms – albeit always referring back to an over-riding concern with historicalsocial relations in general and particular instantiations of those social relations. To under-stand feminism and feminisms in their multiple Chinese iterations, then, wemust be attentiveto the cluster of social relations to which they refer and in which they are embedded, bothlocally and globally. It is this dialectical analysis that late Qing feminism inaugurated in theChinese case, and it is this dialectical analysis to which Chinese feminisms today continue tocontribute.

Glossary

cain€u 才女

Chen Xiefen 陈撷芬

Cixi 慈禧

Dagong bao《大公报》

daode 道德

de 德Fukuda Hideko 福田英子

fumin 富民

fun€u 妇女

fun€u wenti 妇女问题

Fuqiang xue 富强学

gongchan zhi zhidu 共产之制度

Guangxu 光绪

He-Yin Zhen 何殷震

He Zhen 何震

Hua Mulan 花木兰

huifu n€uquan 恢复女权

jiaoyu zhi fangfa 教育之方法

jieji zhidu 阶级制度

Jin Tianhe 金天翮

Jin Yi 金一

jindai/xiandai hua 近代/现代化

Kanno Suka 管野スガ

Kotoku Shusui 幸德秋水

laodong 劳动

laoli 劳力

Lianshi 炼石

Lin Shu 林纾

Lin Zongsu 林宗素

Liu Shipei 刘师培

L€u Bicheng 吕碧城

Lun n€uxue 论女学

Lun n€uzi laodong wenti 论女子劳动问题

Luo Yanbin 罗燕斌

ming 名

nann€u 男女

nanyang 南洋

nengli 能力

N€ubao《女报》

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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 bibliographyChuwo (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。

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