Who is He-Yin Zhen and why is her work so important? He-Yin Zhen was a preeminent anarcho-feminist who constructed her critique in an early twentieth century China marked by turbulent political, social and cultural reinvention. Her article On the Question of Women’s Liberation utilises nannü, an analytical term that frames the ideological and historical bases of institutionalised gendered social relations.
In The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts of Transnational Theory, Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko argue that He-Yin’s work represented a fundamental challenge to the conventional ideological foundations of patriarchal society, including that of progressive Chinese male intellectuals who also wrote about women’s rights. For instance, she critiqued Jin Tianhe’s The Women’s Bell for framing the struggle for equality within a nationalist rhetoric of self-strengthening, the slogan behind late Qing modernisations.1 From this perspective, the feminist movement became a means of reforming China in line with Western ideas of gender equality to restore the country’s global prominence as a modern nation, rather than for the sole sake of bettering the lives of women. He-Yin Zhen, on the other hand, saw the emerging movement as a chance to deconstruct traditional conceptions of gender as a source of power, not as a means of enabling women to become better agents of the nationalist cause, but for women to gain true independence in their own right. For instance, she brought these ideas into practice by incorporating her maternal surname with her traditional patrilineal surname, thus including the female element of her identity in a traditional conventionalised space.
While these divergences demonstrate the range of perspectives prevalent in China at the time, this argument can be taken further than Liu, Karl and Ko go by positing that progressive Chinese male intellectuals like Tianhe and Liang Qichao should not be defined as ‘feminists’ at all. While they may advocate for reforms that have characteristics that further women’s rights, such as ending the practice of foot binding or endorsing women’s education, their ultimate motivation to strengthen China undermines the core characteristic of feminism that believes in equality as a sufficient goal in itself. He-Yin expresses this point succinctly when she writes of ‘men’s pursuit of self-distinction in the name of women’s liberation’2, where these men critique the traditions that do not conform with their nationalist agenda and emulate Western powers in a manner that perpetuates the very social and structural hierarchy He-Yin seeks to overturn.3
Liu, Karl and Ko also discuss He-Yin’s solution to the misconception that the state could be anything but a system that perpetuates oppression.4 He-Yin’s anarchism and feminism were fundamentally intertwined. Her theory of shengji, defined as ‘livelihood’ and a more encapsulating term than ‘class’, thus critiques patriarchal capitalism, coloniality, and state tradition by foregrounding the gendered universality of nannü within each of these social systems.5 This attack on the state as a reproducer of conditions that systematically exclude and subordinate women diverges from many of her contemporary reformers, who largely sought to exchange the imperial dynastic regime with a republican state. He-Yin instead called upon women to be the agents of their own liberation, advocating for a social revolution to relieve society of the oppression of nannü. She argued that only with genuine motivation to uproot systems of material oppression will current power structures not be repeated, and women freed from the commodification of their bodies. (ibid., p.25.)) The very point she makes about such historic social hierarchies can be practically evidenced by confronting institutionalised, largely western, terms of reference in attempts to translate nannü.6 Confronting this will enable scholars to adequately acknowledge the discursive multiplicity in the global formation of feminist theory, in which He-Yin played a significant part.
- Liu, Lydia He, Rebecca E. Karl, Dorothy Ko (ed.) The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York, 2013), p.7. [↩]
- He-Yin Zhen, ‘Question of Women’s Liberation’, in The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, p.60. [↩]
- Hershatter, Gail, ‘Disturbances, 1840-1900’, in Women and China’s Revolutions (Maryland, 2018), p.84. [↩]
- Liu et al. The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p.23. [↩]
- ibid., p.22. [↩]
- ibid., p.10. [↩]