Author: 甲

In reading Susan Glosser’s “Chinese Visions of Family and State”, we are able to register the heavy importance of the personal in spawning the New Culture Movement. The call for industrialisation by mid 20^thcentury young urban males in China simultaneously aimed to dismantle and reconfigure the family unit. Spearheading the project to disentangle themselves from their overbearing fathers, fiscal co-dependency and minimise the inventory of filial obligations, Yi Jiayue and Lou Dunwei cite superficially Marxist theory to figure themselves in the wider national context to achieve those ends. When we read Glosser against Ko, Liu and Karl’s The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, we can further see that the New Youth’s purported understanding of women’s liberation, industrialisation and the patriarchy is very limited by the male experience it largely drew on. Having intellectual tunnel-vision and clutching at theoretical straws, the proponents’ hang-ups about the family system only made visible young male and elite female urban struggles.

Yi Jiayue’s criticism of patriarchal authority was that it stood in the way of personal freedoms of men such as himself, obstructed progress for the wider Chinese world[1] and that the family institution which it that world was hinged on also inserted itself into “every aspect of [young men’s’ lives”.[2] Since Confucian ideology pervaded all matter of state – making the personal and political synonymous – the New Youth perceived the family unit as symptomatic of national failures and illnesses. Taking remedial action, the New Youth’s advocacy for industrialisation was because of their belief that it was a process capable of destroying the family system that was causing them so much distress.[3]

Interestingly, however, the New Cultural Movement’s belief that it was servicing progress and helping women realise their personhood was largely erroneous or at least exclusive.[4] The main form of progress it was affecting was not just that of young urban males’ everyday-life experiences, but the achievement of placing young Chinese men in some sort of historical moment. The New Culture radicals’ eagerness to participate in history and locate the movement in an international intellectual conversation. Although modernization and industrial mobilization may have distanced men from their family, prevented the creation of “extended families”, their antiquated ideals and led them to deferring the start-up of a new generation because of their renewed focus on factory work or intellectual engagement, as Glosser notes, the New Youth’s understanding of the past was a cursory one which was to the end of reenacting “revolution in the present”.[5] Importantly, the movement neglected the experiences of women in rural society who were adversely affected by the very industrialisation the men urged for. As Ko et al note, “laboring women and [their] rural economic hardship remained largely invisible” and male dominated discussions about the oppressed female position were largely glossed over.[6] Thus, although one may look positively on the Movement’s prohibition of “taking concubines, collecting slaves etc…”, the reality of the situation was that China’s insertion into the capitalist system was detrimental, primarily to women, in numerous ways. The Youth’s desperation for the destruction of the family unit through industrialisation and espousing Marxist ideology to justify that particular route, would thus go on to destroying some families economically. “Women, whose family livelihoods were being ruined” at the hands of “competition in silk and cotton from Japan, British-colonised India, and the revival of the American South” were not considered when rethinking the family and the nation. [7]

Ultimately, we are able to see that the superficial applications of Marxist ideology, a theory which itself focussed on class-based struggle at the expense of treating the women’s plight, in its attempt to ease the burden young urban males were subjected to by their families as well as well as in marking itself as a moment on the Chinese historical timeline. As a result of such exclusivity, the New Culture Movement failed to address the working class struggles of China, the problem of women’s rights and intersection at which those issues compound.

[1] Glosser, Susan L. Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953. University of California Press, 2003, p.9

[2] Ibid, p.7

[3] Ibid, p.6

[4] Ibid, p.17

[5] Ibid, p.5G

[6] Liu, Lydia He, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. Columbia University Press, 2013 p.32

[7] Ibid, p.31-32

With Arishima Takeo’s dissolution of the tenant farm in Niseko (1922), the consequent emergence of a cooperatist farm saw an experimental phase of anarchist living in Hokkaido. Sho Konishi understands that cooperatist activity and the alternative modes of living on the farm as a rejective response to Western notions of progress and modernity.[1] The land which the farmers inhabited was to uniquely serve as fecund ground for many different and coexistent values. The cooperatist ideology encouraged political participation of all farm members, was loose in its outline of viable economic schemes and, chiefly, espoused egalitarian ideals. Popular understandings of anarchism catalogue the ideology as traditionalist, irrational and disordered.[2] However, when we look at the development and embodiment of cooperatist farms, we see that this particular brand of anarchism was a largely equalised ground on which the inhabitants enacted the process of political, governmental and social trial and error. With that expression of trial and error in mind, a conclusive ‘right answer’ was not sought out so much as the process was to be calibrated.

The “Hokkaido cooperative” resisted subscription to Western ideas of modernity which the wider Japanese state adopted.[1] On the smaller and larger scale, the anarchists sought to enshrine “sōgo fujo” (mutual aid) as a central tenet to an ideal lifestyle. Both interpersonal relations and the organisation of labour were to be characterised as interdependent and harmonious, rather than Darwinist, competitive and tension inducing.[2]However, to the end of that cooperation, conflict was not eschewed. Indeed, discursive conflict was encouraged where it could service democratic decision making and secure future relations. With the “elimination of hierarchy”, society’s reorganisation along horizontal lines naturally saw a greater range of opinions and perspectives on the affairs of the farm as well as its relation to other political actors.[3] The “day-long discussions” which required the result of “every members’ approval” before ratifying decisions demonstrates that the cooperatist farm did not stubbornly and naively aim to develop a utopian and fully agreeable society. Instead, cooperativism decided its idea of a progressive society included compromise, and was even necessary for, consensus. In this way, we can see that the cooperative farm, a society in which many values were cultivated, was without a strict hierarchical order but not disordered.

Economically, while the Hokkaido anarchists sought to distance themselves from the liberal capitalist system projected by the West, the farmers located themselves as “part of and a response to the modern condition”.[4]Therefore, at the time they were disowning personal property, communalising resources and pooling their labour efforts, they were not violently and universally overthrowing the “existing system”.[5] Furthermore, cooperatist modernity was not only subsistent, but, in entrepreneurial and profit seeking spirit, it also allowed for the marketing its agricultural produce.[6] In 1926 when rice prices in Japan fell, there was a sober reality that their trajectory was affected by the international and so the farmers experimented with dairy farming after learning from Utsunomiya farm.[7] This small case illustrates the way in which the anarchists located themselves not as an isolated society far removed from the wider globe, but rather a community, working with the help of others, which could carve out its own path to a modernity they defined on their own terms. Their embracement of agricultural technology was also a nod to the constant trial and error they practiced in developing an ideal, but not insular, society.[8]

Ultimately, the cooperatist farm did not abide by a strict ideological doctrine which prevented it from participating in a particular system or espousing certain ideals. Instead, with its basic aim to operate as an egalitarian society in which interdependent individuals lifted each other up, the definition of modernity was constantly updated in line with the processes which most well lent to that foundation. Understanding the cooperatist farm in this way is important to reconceptualising as forward thinking not only in terms of its ideals, but also as a process which continually revise itself.

[1] Konishi,Sho“OrdinaryFarmersLivingAnarchistTime:ArishimaCooperativeFarminHokkaido.”Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 6 (November 2013), p.1847

[2] Ibid, p.1846

[3] Ibid, p.1845

[4] Ibid, p.1848

[5] Ibid, p.1852

[6] Ibid, p.1863

[7] Ibid, p.1864

[8] Ibid, p.1860

 

In early 20^th century Chinese intellectual discourse, the thread of utopianism and revolution were weaved into the concepts and movements of both nationalism and anarchism, it was just done in very different patterns. While imperial China and emergent Chinese interests within that political bloc were reorienting themselves to external influences and also internally reorganising society, they were discursively reshaping time and space in revolutionary ways. Indeed, the meaning of revolution and its political legitimacy here are the contested concepts which characteristically define that competition of ideas. In the abstract sense, Arif Dirlik’s analysis of nationalism, utopianism and anarchism helps us treat revolutionary politics in China as a topic which is centred on the discomfort of the individual, political authority, and their divergent visions of the China as a social space in the future

 

Focusing on external forces, a Darwinian take on the new national consciousness China was to realise explains that building the state was crucial to China’s survival on the wider global stage.[1] In protection of China, a streamlined and dynamic political system would “ward off the threat to the country’s existence in a new world”.[2] While the idea that an encounter with the West directly caused a national conscience is a one-dimensional one, an appreciation of the global helps us treat the problematique of revolutionary discourse as hinged upon China’s place and mode of operation in a reconfigured world. On this note, Dirlik points to the state’s “ability to represent” the “society over which it rules” as a barometer of its success.[3] Ironically, as a result, subjects became conscious citizens of the state and occupied space in a way that led them to more closely criticise social relationships themselves and vis-à-vis political authority.[4]

 

Dirlik cites “discomfort” as a key precondition to anarchist revolutionary intellectual discourse in China.[5] The utopian aim to insert itself as a transformer of humanity on the global scale was developed in order to form a nationalist ideology that went beyond creating the state as an end in itself.[6] By locating itself on the globe this way, China set a project to spatially revolutionise the scope of its political legitimacy. However, internally, this understanding of scope did other things. Tan Sitong’s belief that there should exist “one world” where no one “belongs to any state” and where there are “no boundaries” is an anarchist sentiment expressed in response to the incipient nationalist sentiment in China. The belief is based on an almost utopian desire to eliminate power struggles, inequality between the sexes, as well as the rich and the poor, and culture of war which the nation was said to foster.[7] This anarchist resolution of “mutual harmony” provides an alternative vision and treatment of time and space. It was a vision that, in terms of ideals, departed greatly from the nationalist one.

 

In this way, Chinese political revolution in the early 20^th century was defined differently within nationalist and anarchist discourses. While nationalism sought to bring society closer to the state through political reorganisation, anarchists sought to dismantle the very idea of a politically organised community. These intellectual concepts do diverge in their views of political authority and the end image of the future, but both ideologies have a key interest in re/disorganising society through reflecting on social interests. Through this process, they have also revolutionised the way time and space were thought of in China.

 

[1] Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. University of California Press, 1991, p.48

[2] Ibid,p.47

[3] Ibid, p.50

[4] Ibid, p.49

[5] ibid

[6] ibid

[7] Ibid, p.56

Bibliography: 

 

The pre and early modern relationship between East Asian feminism, Confucian hegemony and Western imperialism is an extremely intricate one that cannot be dichotomised. While there were and are numerous points of conflict, as well as cooperation, between the mentioned institutions, their orientations and the modes of argument espoused across time, these dynamics must be complicated. By exploring the lived female experiences in Premodern in Korea and China, both rural and urban, and then tracing the emergence of Chinese feminism, we can see the ways in which women oriented themselves against and also alongside the Confucian tradition and, later, Western Imperialism. Indeed, the configuration of power between the latter two institutions can also be located against a gendered global hierarchy. In synthesising these notions, this article delineates women’s complex social roles and the emergence of feminism in East Asia. As well as this, it problematises female and feminist existence under Confucianism and their engagement with Western imperialism, two institutions which are themselves conversant.

The domestic and public spheres do not conceptually exist in a Confucianised East Asia in the same way they do in the Western world. Rather, the scholar JaHyun Kim Haboush has referred to them here as loose “spheres of activity [and/or] signifiers of morality”.[1] The ontological ambivalence of the inner quarters[2] and therefore those who operate within, however, meant that women had a basis from which they could renegotiate their station. The porosity of these boundaries can be seen both regionally and temporally. And of course, the female experience within premodern Korea saw vast difference differences between the rural and urban demographics as well as the upper and lower classes. With respect to that, different sections of the population, operating in those different spaces, were assigned particular class and gender-based roles which have been injected with different moral sentiments. In Korea and China, the establishment of separate moral literature for women was important to consolidating neo-Confucian culture as they were seen to be the transmitters of its particular brand of ethics and Way of life. Women were to fulfil this obligation through, note the androcentrism of the system, imparting a filial education, preserve her violable chastity/body, take care of her affines and servicing her husband.[3] Interestingly, a woman thereby held a position of considerable influence since she was tasked to ensure a conflict-free familial unit and therefore facilitated her husband’s efforts and complete devotion to outside civil affairs. With that appreciated, a woman’s value and role ultimately became heavily based on streamlining and priming the path to success of her male counterparts and she was only to exert more indirect forms of power under this system.[4]

On the note of female instruction, European missionaries and Chinese merchants, among other groups who espoused shifting agendas, began introducing girl’s educational institutions in the late 20^th century.[5] On one hand, they sought to educate rural elite women or those in urban environments on how to be competent wives and wise mothers. On the other hand, they were to be delivered lessons of basic literacy and an understanding of home economy and management.[6] In these two objectives, we can see the dimensionality given to the female role and the ways in which the same forces were both furthering and hindering the feminist cause in different ways. Furthering in the fact that Western imperial projects impacted the female position in East Asia through informing and impressing their feminist framework. Indeed, the works of British liberal men such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer were imported into China and arguably formed the foundations of Chinese feminism.[7] He Yin’s engagement with Euro-American models of progress and equality was, however, very critical and she observed them to be societies which simply constituted less visible and economic form of oppression. A case in point, the forces of free market capitalism ruined many [female] livelihoods in China as they could not compete and it led them to working multiple jobs, being sold as wives and losing more of their agency to patriarchal forces.[8]  Simply another form of inequality, the departure from liberalist values is seen at work also in the socio-economic subjugation of China by imperialist colonisers. The Western operations of gunboat diplomacy, opening China up to free market capitalism and the Opium Wars of the 1800s all speak to the gendered and racialised domination of the nation by the west and, in particular, Britain.[9] We can see that the global hierarchy that was being created, through a forceful imposition, emulated the domestic hierarchies. This was while the same imperial forces were in an indirectly cooperative dialogue with feminist thinkers of China.

By taking an in depth look at the lives of women in the Korean and Chinese societies, especially the instructions prescribed to them in the inner quarters, we can understand it as microcosmic of the gendered global hierarchy which began to emerge more clearly in the 20^th century. This is an order which has also shaped the origins of the feminism which seeks to agentically contest and renegotiate the very hegemony that was created. The relationship between feminism, Confucianism and imperialism is therefore heavily intertwined and dense; we should not quickly simplify the individual components nor polarise their dynamics.

[1] Dorothy Ko, Jahyun Kim Haboush and Joan Piggott, Women and Confucian Cultures In Premodern China, Korea, And Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p.7

[2] Ibid, p. 135

[3] Ibid, p.152

[4] Ibid, p.165

[5] Liu, Lydia He, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia University Press, 2013) p. 34

[6] ibid

[7] Ibid, p. 36

[8] Ibid, p. 32

[9] Ibid, p.28