Women in Republican China: A Sourcebook

A Sourcebook

Hua R. Lan, Vanessa L. Fong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317325208
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: History

Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific.

Part One

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Love, Marriage, and the Family

Editor’s Introduction

May Fourth intellectuals attacked traditional regulations on love, marriage, and the family, and demanded changes. But they disagreed over what kind of changes they wanted. The flaws in the traditional system are described in Lu Xun’s “My Views on Chastity” and “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” Ye Shengtao’s “Is This Also a Human Being?” B.E. Lee’s “How Can We Honor Women?” and Chen Duxiu’s “The Way of Confucius and Modern Life.” There was much more disagreement over what kind of system should replace the existing family.

Chen Duxiu’s “The Way of Confucius and Modern Life” and Lu Xun’s “My Views on Chastity” attack the traditional family system and the classical prescriptions supporting it. Chen Duxiu cites passages from the classics and denounces them as hopelessly outdated. Lu Xun devastatingly mocks the traditional cult of female chastity by examining glaring inconsistencies and absurdities in its logical underpinnings.

Even more powerful are Ye Shengtao’s “Is This Also a Human Being?” and Lu Xun’s “New Year’s Sacrifice,” stories about women who are victims of the traditional family system. These two stories bear many similarities in theme and plot.¹ Both depict the tragic fate of poor peasant women in an oppressive family system. These women are tormented, coerced, sold, and, as Ye Shengtao emphasizes, treated like animals. In both stories, work—even the hard, menial work of a servant—is seen as a means of escape from that system. However, neither author presents this kind of work as a solution; indeed, in both stories the position of maidservant is ultimately too low, dependent, and vulnerable to protect the protagonist from further exploitation. These two stories do not present solutions; they merely expose the horrific abuses of the traditional family system.

It was hard to find a perfect solution to the problem of the oppressive family system. The controversy surrounding suggestions about the kind of system that should replace the old one is apparent in the defensive tone of the essays by Lu Qiuxin, Yang Zhihua, and Yun Daiying. Yun Daiying argues that individual families should be completely replaced by a system of communal childcare and dining facilities. Yang Zhihua was less radical, and her essays on social contact between men and women emphasized the superiority of marriage over casual sex and free love. Yang’s essays also demonstrate the difficulty of getting those who advocate gender integration in theory to provide an environment supportive of such integration in practice. She lambasts these hypocrites as “older than the old and dirtier than dirt.” Her essay “The Debate over ‘Love and Open Socializing between Men and Women’” rebukes a man who criticized her earlier essay because she had rejected his advances. The dispute between Yang Zhihua and this failed suitor suggests that gender relations between iconoclastic activists themselves were not by any means problem-free. Yang Zhihua recognizes this in her essay on divorce, arguing that even marriages that start out as free-choice love matches should be allowed to dissolve if love fades. She focuses on the importance of true love as the basis of marriage, arguing that the option of divorce should always be available in the absence of true love—a factor that she admits is unpredictable and likely to atrophy. Lu Qiuxin cleverly points out the dissonance between male activists’ liberal views on the political system and their more conservative views on marriage. She argues that completely free marriage is the natural counterpart of democracy and compares the consensual arranged marriage advocated by some liberal male activists to constitutional monarchy, an arrangement those same activists would despise. Yet, as Ye Shengtao’s essay on his own marriage demonstrates, not all traditionally arranged marriages were unhappy.

Though May Fourth activists strongly supported the incorporation of women into the male-dominated public sphere, they were more ambivalent when it came to challenging the assumption that women would always be responsible for childrearing and domestic work. The essays by Tang Jicang, Yun Daiying, and Zhang Weici deal with how women’s domestic work and childrearing might be handled after women are emancipated. They all look to the socialization of domestic work for an answer, but they differ in the extent to which they are willing to let public institutions usurp the role of the family. Yun Daiying takes the most radical perspective, arguing that the institution of the family is not necessary to a healthy modern society and proposing that public institutions take over all the work of childrearing except possibly the nursing of infants, even if it means doing away with the family entirely. In presenting his detailed proposal about how public dining halls and childcare facilities might work, Tang Jicang also imagines a large role for public facilities, though he does not attack the family directly. Zhang Weici presents a more conservative vision of the “transformed” family, in which women remain responsible for and defined by domestic work, with the difference being that each woman would specialize in a specific kind of domestic work, get paid for doing it, and presumably benefit from the public interaction that would result from such an arrangement.

Activists such as Daiying, Tang Jicang, and Zhang Weici believed that the emancipation of Chinese women from the Confucian family was essential to the project of “modernizing” China. Zhang Weici’s discussion of how “women’s narrow-mindedness is a big obstruction to social evolution” reflects the common May Fourth belief that China could not compete with Western nations because the Confucian family produced petty-minded drones inferior to the patriotic citizens of the idealized West. Chinese men and women could become modern, patriotic citizens only if they were freed from the fetters of Confucianism. Yet, as the arguments of Yun’s opponent Yang Xiaochun suggest, many feared the social disorder that might result if women abandoned their domestic roles.

Though public childcare and public dining halls did not replace the family, as Yun Daiying hoped and Yang Xiaochun feared, such services did indeed become available in urban areas of the People’s Republic of China. Yet, with the possible exception of short-lived experiments implemented during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the socialization of domestic work never became as comprehensive or ubiquitous as Tang Jicang and Yun Daiying hoped. Of the essays in this section, Zhang Weici’s comes closest to predicting what the transformation of the family and women’s roles would look like in the New China.

Note

1. While the former is largely unknown to readers in present-day China, the latter has enjoyed enormous popularity, both in China and abroad, and has been adapted into many versions of opera, ballet, and film in China. Ye Shengtao’s story was originally published in February 1919, while Lu Xun’s story was originally published in February 1924. It is not possible to tell whether the similarities between their stories result from one’s influence on the other or from both men’s independent observation of a ubiquitous phenomenon and subject of public discourse.

1

The Way of Confucius and Modern Life

Chen Duxiu (December 1916) (Excerpts)

Originally published in New Youth, vol. 2, no. 4 (December 1916): 3–5. This translation was previously published in Sources of Chinese Tradition, ed. William Theodore De Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964, pp. 815–818. It is reprinted with permission from Columbia University Press. The Wade-Giles romanizations have been converted to pinyin for consistency with the rest of our collection.

The pulse of modern life is economic and the fundamental principle of economic production is individual independence. Its effect has penetrated ethics. Consequently, the independence of the individual in the ethical field and the independence of property in the economic field bear witness to each other, thus reaffirming the theory [of such interaction]. Because of this [interaction], social mores and material culture have taken a great step forward.

In China, the Confucianists have based their teachings on their ethical norm. Sons and wives possess neither personal individuality nor personal property. Fathers and elder brothers bring up their sons and younger brothers and are in turn supported by them. It is said in chapter 30 of the Book of Rites that “while parents are living, the son dares not regard his person or property as his own” [27:14]. This is absolutely not the way to personal independence…

In all modern constitutional states, whether monarchies or republics, there are political parties. Those who engage in party activities all express their spirit of independent conviction. They go their own way and need not agree with their fathers or husbands. When people are bound by the Confucian teachings of filial piety and obedience to the point of the son’s not deviating from the father’s way even three years after his death¹ and the woman’s obeying not only her father and husband but also her son,² how can they form their own political party and make their own choice? The movement of women’s participation in politics is also an aspect of women’s life in modern civilization. When they are bound by the Confucian teaching that “to be a woman means to submit,”³ that “the wife’s words should not travel beyond her own apartment,” and that “a woman does not discuss affairs outside the home,”⁴ would it not be unusual if they participated in politics?

In the West some widows choose to remain single because they are strongly attached to their late husbands and sometimes because they prefer a single life; they have nothing to do with what is called the chastity of widowhood. Widows who remarry are not despised by society at all. On the other hand, in the Chinese teaching of decorum, there is the doctrine of “no remarriage after the husband’s death.”⁵ It is considered to be extremely shameful and unchaste for a woman to serve two husbands or a man to serve two rulers. The Book of Rites also prohibits widows from wailing at night [XXVII:2I] and people from being friends with sons of widows [IX:2I]. For the sake of their family reputation, people have forced their daughters-in-law to remain widows. These women have had no freedom and have endured a most miserable life. Year after year these many promising young women have lived a physically and spiritually abnormal life. All this is the result of Confucian teachings of decorum [or rites].

In today’s civilized society, social intercourse between men and women is a common practice. Some even say that because women have a tender nature and can temper the crudeness of man, they are necessary in public or private gatherings. It is not considered improper even for strangers to sit or dance together once they have been introduced by the host. In the way of Confucian teaching, however, “Men and women do not sit on the same mat,” “brothers- and sisters-in-law do not exchange inquiries about each other,” “Married sisters do not sit on the same mat with brothers or eat from the same dish,” “Men and women do not know each other’s name except through a matchmaker and should have no social relations or show affection until after marriage presents have been exchanged,”⁶ “Women must cover their faces when they go out,”⁷ “Boys and girls seven years or older do not sit or eat together,” “Men and women have no social relations except through a matchmaker and do not meet until after marriage presents have been exchanged,”⁸ and “Except in religious sacrifices, men and women do not exchange wine cups.”⁹ Such rules of decorum are not only inconsistent with the mode of life in Western society; they cannot even be observed in today’s China.

Western women make their own living in various professions, such as that of lawyer, physician, and store employee. But in the Confucian way, “In giving or receiving anything, a man or woman should not touch the other’s hand,”¹⁰ “A man does not talk about affairs inside [the household] and a woman does not talk about affairs outside [the household],” and “They do not exchange cups except in sacrificial rites and funerals.”¹¹ “A married woman is to obey,” and the husband is the standard of the wife.¹² Thus the wife is naturally supported by the husband and needs no independent livelihood.

A married woman is at first a stranger to her parents-in-law. She has only affection but no obligation toward them. In the West, parents and children usually do not live together, and daughters-in-law, particularly, have no obligation to serve parents-in-law. But in the way of Confucius, a woman is to “revere and respect them and never to disobey day or night,”¹³ “A woman obeys, that is, obeys her parents-in-law,”¹⁴ “A woman serves her parents-in-law as she serves her own parents,”¹⁵ she “never should disobey or be lazy in carrying out the orders of parents and parents in-law.” “If a man is very fond of his wife, but his parents do not like her, she should be divorced.”¹⁶ (In ancient times there were many such cases, like that of Lu Yu [1125— 1210].) “Unless told to retire to her own apartment, a woman does not do so, and if she has an errand to do, she must get permission from her parents-in-law.”¹⁷ This is the reason why the tragedy of cruelty to daughters-in-law has never ceased in Chinese society.

According to Western customs, fathers do not discipline grown-up sons but leave them to the law of the country and the control of society. But in the way of Confucius, “When one’s parents are angry and not pleased and beat him until he bleeds, he does not complain but instead arouses in himself the feelings of reverence and filial piety.”¹⁸ This is the reason why in China there is the saying, “One has to die if his father wants him to, and the minister has to perish if his ruler wants him to.” …

Confucius lived in a feudal age. The ethics he promoted is the ethics of the feudal age. The social mores he taught and even his own mode of living were teachings and modes of a feudal age. The political institutions he advocated were those of a feudal age. The objectives, ethics, social norms, mode of living, and political institutions did not go beyond the privilege and prestige of a few rulers and aristocrats and had nothing to do with the happiness of the great masses. How can this be shown? In the teachings of Confucius, the most important element in social ethics and social life is the rules of decorum and the most serious thing in government is punishment. In chapter 1 of the Book of Rites, it is said that “the rules of decorum do not go down to the common people and the penal statutes do not go up to great officers” [1:35]. Is this not solid proof of the truer spirit of the way of Confucius and the spirit of the feudal age?

Notes

1. Referring to Analects, 1:11.

2. Book of Rites, IX:24.

3. Book of Rites, IX:24.

4. Book of Rites, 1:24.

5. Book of Rites, IX:24.

6. Book of Rites, 1:24.

7. Book of Rites, X:12.

8. Book of Rites, X:51.

9. Book of Rites, XXVII: 17.

10. Book of Rites, XXVII:20.

11. Book of Rites, X:12.

12. Book of Rites, X:24.

13. I-li ch. 2; Steele, Vol. 1, p. 39.

14. Book of Rites, XLI:6.

15. Book of Rites, X:3.

16. Book of Rites, X:12.

17. Book of Rites, X:12.

18. Book of Rites, X:12.

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2

My Views On Chastity

Lu Xun (August 15, 1918)

This translation was published in Silent China: Selected Writings of Lu Xun, ed. and trans. Gladys Yang, published by Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 148–154. It is reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

“The world is going to the dogs. Men are growing more degenerate every day. The country is faced with ruin!”—such laments have been heard in China since time immemorial. But “degeneracy” varies from age to age. It used to mean one thing, now it means another. Except in memorials to the throne and the like, in which no one dares make wild st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction by Christina Kelley Gilmartin
• Editors’ Preface
• Biographical Notes on the Authors
• Part One: Love, Marriage, and the Family
• Part Two: The New Women Martyrs
• Part Three: Women’s Education
• Part Four: Women’s Emancipation
• Part Five: Women and Social Activism
• Works Cited
• Glossary
• Index