Feminism movements emerged in modern China since the lase decades of the Qing dynastic rule. He Zhen (also known as He Yin-Zhen) was among the most famous Chinese feminists during this period, while she was also very well-known for her anarchist ideologies. Qiu Jin, while was not usually recognised as an anarchist as He, was indeed a “feminist warrior” and radical in advocating of anarchism-patterned ideologies, as claimed by Louise Edwards.[1] While if we look into He and Qiu’s positions of thoughts, we could see that both of their feminist thoughts were going side-by-side closely with anarchism (and some communism characteristics) that was also popular in the last decades of Qing dynasty and the early years of Republican China.
He Zhen’s speech delivered in 1907 unveiled the connection of her beliefs in both feminism and anarchism, and she further combined these two ideologies together into one to develop a datong-style society. He Zhen in her speech outright rejected the traditional and repressive attitudes against women in Chinese society that existed for thousands of years since the Yellow Emperor until Manchu (Qing government) reign.[2] He Zhen heavily criticised the traditional Confucian and Neo-Confucian led customs in Chinese society such as a woman must remain ‘true’ to one man until death as a cult of purity, and to categorise women struggles in China as a result of the establishment of a patriarchal society which put men over women in social hierarchy.[3] Her solution to eliminate the suppressions against women by men in Chinese society was to remove the old social institutions and rites through radical social transformations, not only in customs and culture, but also to redistribute wealth and to abolish old social classes.[4] Her plan to redistribute social wealth was to transform land and property into communally owned without either a Manchu government or a Han Chinese government, and this was the only way to ensure the existence of “universal equality” and “universal justice” for women and men.[5] In this way, He Zhen’s feminist efforts to approach her “universal” values – absolute equal distribution for everyone without the existence of a state – was very similar to the contemporary anarchist and communists’ scholars in the early 20th century China.
Qiu Jin’s approach to feminism was also in line with anarchist ideologies by advocating using violence and assassination to be a “warlike female hero”, which she was even in planning to assassin key officials in the local provinces to seek for social changes before her arrest and execution in 1907.[6] However, Qiu seemed to only apply some but not most of anarchist ideologies to help her develop early feminism in China, as she’s goal of these actions was to save the Chinese state from the Manchurian Qing government reign and to seek for the nation’s survival, rather than to eventually abolish the state system and to achieve economic equality in society to create a datong society as many anarchists and communists planned in early 20th century China.[7]
[1] Louise P. Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China (Cambridge, 2016), p. 40.
[2] ‘On the Revenge of Women’, in Dorothy Ko, Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl [ed.], The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York, 2013), pp. 119 – 120.
[3] Ibid, p. 124.
[4] Ibid, p. 121.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Louise P. Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China (Cambridge, 2016), p. 41.
[7] Ibid, p. 43.