How Male Reformers Reframed the “Woman Question” in China

The rise of feminist discourse in early twentieth-century China is typically framed as a battle between tradition and modernity. However, this is a simplified view overlooking the constraints of modernity. The modern Chinese legal and political system proved incapable of legislating genuine gender liberation. This is because the hierarchical logic of patriarchy was philologically embedded within the very textual and institutional fabric of the state.

Progressive male reformers appropriated the radical language of female “slavery” and “property” to articulate their own economic and psychological anxieties. In doing so, they minimised women’s constitutive historical oppression, recasting it as a mere symptom of male frustration. Part of the  “enlightenment and national self-strengthening, coded either “male” or “patriarchal”.1 This is a continuity that anarcho-feminist theorist He-Yin Zhen rejected as a “metaphysical-political principle” woven into the fabric of history.2 She demonstrated that this oppression was intrinsically economic, arguing that the “beginning of the system of women as private property is also the beginning of the system of slavery.”3

He-Yin Zhen grounded this theory in philological and historical evidence:

      • The character for “slave” incorporates the radical for “woman”
      • The character for “treasure” or “stored wealth”  had an alternative form meaning “women and children”, explicitly equating them with property.4

He-Yin Zhen concluded that the figure of “woman” embodied the “combined humiliation of being both prisoner and slave.”5 This was a continuous  feature of the Chinese social order and thus the the state was the defender of this property system, making its abolition a prerequisite for women’s liberation.6  Female slavery was a concrete, historical condition from which all subsequent social ills flowed.

Similarly, when male intellectuals addressed the “woman question,” they used the same vocabulary of subjugation but fundamentally reframed its meaning. For them, it was not a problem of systemic female enslavement, but one of national productivity and male identity. The liberal thinker Liang Qichao argued that because women could not support themselves, men were forced to “raise women as livestock or slaves.”7 This framed subjugation as a consequence of women’s economic uselessness, not its cause. Women were recast as consumers who impeded national self-strengthening.

This focus on male economic anxiety intensified during the New Culture Movement. Male reformers like Yi Jiayue and Luo Dunwei articulated their frustrations in journals like Family Research, placing immense faith in the state and its ability to legislate a new, rational xiao jiating (conjugal family).8  They linked the oppressive patriarch to forces of “power” and “class” that stifled China. Their fight for family reform was driven by a “search for a new identity” and the goal of “economic self-mastery.”9 They argued that patriarchal control over finances was not just shameful, but that it “restricted productivity and stunted the potential of China’s youth.”10. As this was deeply woven into the fabric of authority, law, and language, this validated He-Yin Zhen’s uncompromising view that the only solution was to “abolish all governments” and overturn the category of distinction itself.11 

For example, as Yi Jiayue noted, the patriarch could evade his duty to support children for education by simply claiming insufficient resources, a claim the “court’s investigations are unreliable”.12  Furthermore, one man lamented that divorce was “extremely difficult” and remarriage “against the law”.13 They even required state intervention to “prohibit parents from deciding their sons’ marriages”. demonstrating the practical limits of their individualistic approach. 14 

The central contradiction emerges when these male anxieties merged with the rhetoric of female dehumanization. Their ideal of modern manhood, built on “moral autonomy” and “economic self-mastery,” required educated wives who could provide “enlightened companionship.”15  Confronted with the reality of uneducated, parent-chosen brides, the reformers inverted He-Yin Zhen’s logic. In extreme fictional accounts, the traditional woman was depicted not as a victim, but as a parasitic “ghostly fire” or a “corpse that gets smellier day by day.”16

Thus, the concept of woman-as-property was co-opted and flipped. The male reformers, despite their progressive aims, ultimately recentered their own plight. In reframing female oppression as a barrier to male self-realization and national progress, young men remodelled and “joined” the patriarchy.17 The profound, systemic critique articulated by He-Yin Zhen was thus contained, demonstrating how the language of emancipation can be harnessed not to abolish hierarchy, but to renegotiate the terms of power within it.

  1. Dorothy Ko, Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl [ed.], The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York, 2013), p.7 [↩]
  2. Ibid, p.21 [↩]
  3. Ibid, p.22 [↩]
  4. Ibid.114-115 [↩]
  5. Ibid, p.118 [↩]
  6. Ibid, p.70 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 24 [↩]
  8. Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953, (Berkeley, 2003), p.44 [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.36 [↩]
  10. Ibid, p.34 [↩]
  11. Ko, Liu and Karl, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p.107 [↩]
  12. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, p.43 [↩]
  13. Ibid, p.51 [↩]
  14. Ibid, p.79 [↩]
  15. Ibid, p.52 [↩]
  16. Ibid, p.55 [↩]
  17. Ko, Liu and Karl, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p.159 [↩]