At the turn of the 20th century, China was in a state of turmoil. Between having its territories seized upon as “the colonization urge directed the eager attention” of Europe, America, and Japan towards carving up “the Chinese colossus” and the internal political strife that resulted from this, there was a desperate need for a reorientation of Chinese thought to confront this threat to its territorial sovereignty in order to prevent China from suffering a total collapse. In what many viewed as the inability of the ailing Qing state to effectively rise to this challenge, China’s intellectuals responded accordingly with a flowering of new ideas combining both traditional Chinese thought and the more recent influence of “Western” ideologies that would kick off almost a century of revolutionary ideals in the Middle Kingdom.(( Clubb, Edmund. “Collapse of the Confucian Order.” Chapter. In 20th Century China, 33–33. Columbia Univ. Press, 1978. https://archive.org/details/20thcenturychina00oedm/page/30/mode/2up.; Spence, Jonathan D. The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980. London: Penguin Books, 2012. )) As part of this movement, the feminists He-Yin Zhen and Qiu Jin emerged, advocating for an end the oppressive power structures that dominated the lives of Chinese women at the turn of the 20th century, including the autocratic Manchu government, and for their fellow women to cast off the “shackles” that men had placed on them.(( Ono, Kazuko and Fogel, Joshua A. “Four: Women in the 1911 Revolution.” Chapter. In Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950, edited by Joshua A Fogel, 54–92. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. https://content.talisaspire.com/sta/bundles/5d53fbd40cb4c33e3577ecc4.; Liu, Lydia He, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. “‘On the Question of Women’s Liberation’- He-Yin Zhen (1907).” Chapter. In The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, 54–71. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/st-andrews/detail.action?docID=1103412.)) Both women’s writings would help to shape the course of Chinese intellectual history as their conceptions of women’s past and present states, as well as how what liberation would look like, have had a lasting impact on the Chinese sociopolitical landscape.
To both women, disseminating a firm understanding of the oppressive structures that governed Chinese women’s lives both past and present was crucial. While little studied, it is worth noting that, in contrast to earlier histories written about the period, the lives of women were not as bleak as previously thought, according to Rankin, and there were some opportunities for women to receive an education; however, I, as well as both Qiu Jin and He Zhen, would take issue with this characterization since, while it is true that women were given more educational opportunities, the pre-existing societal norms regarding women’s roles in the domestic sphere, as well as the practice of arranged marriages and concubinage, made it exceedingly difficult for many women to receive the benefits that came from increased access to education. Even when they were in a position to be able to do so, this was largely restricted to the upper classes.((Wolf, Margery. Women In Chinese Society. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975. https://hdl-handle-net.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/2027/heb.04207. EPUB.; Ono and Fogel, Ibid.)) In their writings, both women compare the treatment of women in their homelands to that of animals, with He-Yin Zhen placing the blame on China’s socioeconomic system and Confucian moral teachings for “sanctioning” men’s “indulgence in sexual gratification”, thereby encouraging them to view “women as nothing more than instruments to make and nurture human seed”.((Liu, Karl, and Ko, Ibid.)) While the two women may have agreed on the current state of affairs for Chinese women, however, they vastly differed in how the viewed the past. For Qiu Jin, the past, such as Hua Mulan could be looked upon as containing examples for the independent woman to follow, whereas He Zhen viewed it with disdain, decrying men as having been women’s “archenemy” for thousands of years and cataloguing Han sovereigns’ mistreatment of women.((Liu, Karl, and Ko. Ibid.)) To He Zhen, then, the solution was not to simply replace the Manchus with a Han ruler, but, rather, the complete and total abolition of any form of government in favor of a communal form of governance brought about with women’s liberation at the forefront of the movement. It was only then, she argued, that women would truly be liberated. Qiu Jin, however, was not willing to go as far, instead joining the Revolutionary Alliance, which advocated for Han republican rule in China and the establishment of equal rights.((Ono and Fogel, ibid.; Liu, Karl, and Ko, Ibid.))
As time has gone on, both women’s ideas have had varying levels of impact on China’s political, intellectual, and social life. He Zhen’s anarcho-feminist ideals gained popularity during the May Fourth movement, especially among female communists, while Qiu Jin’s ideas became immortalized after her death, with her legacy having been abstracted into that of generalized patriotism as it was written and rewritten throughout the 20th century, indelibly intertwined with the shifts and changes in modern Chinese history.((Zarrow, Peter. “He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China.” The Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (1988): 796–813. doi:10.2307/2057853.; Bibliography; Qian, Nanxiu. “Burying Autumn: Poetry, Friendship, and Loss: Chung-Kuo Wen Hsueh.” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews 39, (12, 2017): 195-201. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/burying-autumn-poetry-friendship-loss/docview/2222484400/se-2?accountid=8312.)) After multiple burials and reburials, Hu concludes, the commemoration of Qiu Jin’s life, and who was able to lay claim to her revolutionary ideals, became a test of political power, with the Chinese Communist Party all too happy to do so in order to shore up its own legitimacy. Almost one hundred and ten years after Qiu Jin’s death, a very similar event took place. The killing of scholars, or shashi, remains a brutal yet effective way to silence dissident intellectuals, making it all the more important to preserve and understand the writings of people like Qiu Jin in order to advance both our historical understanding of feminism in China and the goal of the Chinese feminist movement in the 21st century.
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