Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948

Haiping Yan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134570881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Asiatische Literaturkritik

Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948 provides a compelling study of leading women writers in modern China, charting their literary works and life journeys to examine the politics and poetics of Chinese transcultural feminism that exceed the boundaries of bourgeois feminist selfhood.

Unlike recent literary studies that focus on the discursive formation of the modern Chinese nation state and its gendering effects, Haiping Yan explores the radical degrees to which Chinese women writers re-invented their lives alongside their writings in distinctly conditioned and fundamentally revolutionary ways.

The book draws on these women's voluminous works and dramatic lives to illuminate the range of Chinese women's literary and artistic achievements and offers vital sources for exploring the history and legacy of twentieth-century Chinese feminist consciousness and its centrality in the Chinese Revolution. It will be of great interest to scholars of gender studies, literary and cultural studies and performance studies.

1 Unseen Rhythms, Sea Changes

What is it? What is it? It is the life and death turning point for us women as for China.

Chen Xiefen, 1904¹

You are so fortunate to have found yourselves in such a moment; you are so unfortunate to have only such a moment to find!

Ya Lu (Liu Yazi), 1904²

In her narrative script for a southern-style performance (tanci) written in 1904, Qiu Jin arranges a scene in a gentry household wherein the father is engaged in a conversation with an elder cousin who tutors his son. The teacher first reports on the scholarly merits of his pupil and then proposes to offer his pupil’s younger sister the same schooling: “She is highly intelligent and has been learning to read and write remarkably well.” The father replies with questions: “What’s the use of such study to a girl, since it’s impossible for her to bring glory to the family like a man? Even if she were endowed with eight bushels of talent, when did the government ever establish official exams for women?”³ Those questions implicitly confirm recent feminist historiography that explicates how elite Chinese women gained high level of literary cultivation in “the high Qing period” (1683–1839) with a developed female writing tradition behind them that can be traced as early as Tang Dynasty. The Confucian teaching that “virtuous women are those who do not have literary talent” in this sense ironically invalidates any assumption that women by their bioethnic definition lack the thinking and writing faculty.⁴ The father’s objection is not based on any notion that marks “femaleness” as such inherent lack. Rather, he points to the unavailability of institutions whereby women’s learning may gain social values.⁵ The problem about women’s reading and writing, then, is a problem about the structures of institutional recognition, mechanisms of regulatory rewards, and arrangements of social worth.

Qiu Jin was then an emerging woman writer, revolutionary activist, and a member of the numerically small group of women students in Tokyo.⁶ She witnessed how militant elite women partook in social upheavals across the country since the 1898 Constitutional Reform,⁷ precipitating hostility from the hard core of the gentry. Schools for girls set up by European and Euro-American missionaries in China since 1844 had been growing, their impact on society though was as uncertain as it was unsettling.⁸ Those Chinese who took the idea of women’s public education seriously, meanwhile, found themselves in predicaments. The first Chinese school for women founded by reformers in Shanghai in 1898, Shanghai Women’s Public Academy (Shanghai nüzi gongxüe), for instance, was closed down in 1900 under political pressures and financial difficulty.⁹ Women who dared to found and head schools were besieged. The tragedy of Ms. Huixing is a case in point. A Manchu from Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, Ms. Huixing attracted public notice when she sold her property and jewelry to found a women’s school. She committed suicide on November 25, 1905, leaving a letter explaining that when the funds promised by official and private patrons were inexplicably discontinued, her efforts to find support were met with not only refusal but gendered slander. Since “this is the first women’s school in the city of Hangzhou, no woman would dare again to found and run schools for women if I let it fail,” she wrote, “I exchange my life for public opinion to help it survive.”¹⁰

Such scenes indicate the magnitude of the challenge that those women must confront in their attempt to find social space and institutional articulation for women, and how such challenge gave a distinctive definition to their acts of reading and writing. Indeed, those women distinguished themselves from their literary predecessors. They were no longer “talented women” (cainü) housed in the cloistered inner chambers (guifang) of the gentry family with however extensive a reach over literary venues.¹¹ Rather, they had become “learned” and “learning” women whose effort amounted to a revolutionary program to remake themselves and their social relations. This status, which was highly fluid or precisely because of its fluidity, asserted their cultural and political presence beyond the structure of gentry family which was foundational to the imperial system while the system was itself in total crisis. The destruction of the first Chinese navy in the war with Japan in 1895, the failure of the Constitutional Reform of 1898, and the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion Movement by Eight-Allied-Forces in 1900 were all catastrophic events for China. The effect of these events was to place the country on the brink of becoming another Poland, Burma, or India in colonial subjugation, where “native women” were re-made only to be the “slaves next to the [native male] slaves” to the colonial masters.¹² The imperial decree issued by the precarious Manchu court in August 1905, that abolished the centuries-long system of civil examination, not only resulted in the formal loss of Chinese male gentry’s privilege and the institutional foundation upon which they built their career, livelihood, and authority. It was also constitutive of the fundamental disintegration of a civilization. Such civilizational disintegration did not automatically give rise to women’s gain in terms of institutional articulation. Rather, Chinese women found themselves in a double state of emergency where they were suffering the retaliation from the hard core of the gentry and caught up in a historical confluence of violent fluidity.¹³

Bioethnic Convicts: An Anatomy

Without ready-made maps for navigating such historical rupture, those Chinese women seized the moment and made it into a social opening by reflecting upon their own lives through public writing. Imagining an institutional space for women’s appearance amid a civilizational collapsing, they gestured toward a reading public as the human dynamics of such space in the making. Women’s publications appeared in waves from 1897 to 1919. A total of fifty-four women’s journals were published during these years; forty-seven of which appeared between 1905 and 1912. Half of those had their base in Shanghai and others had headquarters in Guangzhou, Tokyo, Beijing, Chengdu, and Hong Kong, quickly gathering a group of women authors largely from the gentry-class background. That most of those women’s public journals appeared in China’s coastal areas or treaty ports and many were initiated overseas right after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and throughout the Reform Movement (1897–1898) may interest scholars specializing in the problem of the “West-East” encounters or the dialectic of modernity.¹⁴ What centrally concerns me here is how those publications afford us some of the earliest materials produced by Chinese women when they articulated themselves with distinctive feminist impulses. Women’s Paper for Learning (Nüxüebao), one of the earliest, was founded by Chen Xiefen in 1902. Women authors Du Qingchi, Jiang Suixing, Wang Heqing, and more made themselves known by writing, theoretical essays (lunshuo), public speeches (yanshuo), women’s history (nüjie jinshi), literary writings and poetry (cihan), and personalized correspondence with readers (chisu), where their imaginations for a “modern China” were engendered with an impetus to alter women’s social status and forms of being.¹⁵ In her article On independence (“Duli pian”), one of the earliest documents in Chinese women’s feminist thought, for example, Chen Xiefen evoked the issue of “traditional” women’s formation as the bodily site where her envisioning of a “modern China” was shaped up through a critical analysis of the lives of women and a call for radical change of such lives:

Practices such as piercing the female ears for inserting metal earrings, and binding the female feet for marking the crippled sex, are manifestations of the elementary phase of the social law of corporal punishment (chuji xingfa). Those who refuse to be punished will be forced into submission, with cries of pain and tears of agony going unheard and unseen. The second phase of the social law of corporal punishment (ciji xingfa) is matchmaking that regards women’s own feelings as irrelevant. Wedded to strangers without any consideration for their feelings and wishes. When the promised husband dies before the marriage, the woman is forced to remain “widowed.” Let us not even talk about the servant girls, whose labor is enslaved and whose bodies are bought and sold like cows, horses, pigs, and chickens!¹⁶ (my italics)

The class-differential forms of social injustice are rendered here as a gender-specific problem of women’s oppression. In Chen Xiefen’s eyes, while the “servant girls” are openly dehumanized, the gentry women are penalized in culturally naturalized ways. When her social value is marked with her bound feet and pierced ears, she turns into a gender-specific “beauty” which is an effect of male-gendered masochistic desire and a signifier of the status of the gentry family in Chen’s critical examination.¹⁷ Unpacking such effect and signifier, Chen focuses on how the female body is crippled literally for life and confined to a life of social un-freedom as the naturally given form of existence for the crippled, an in effect “social punishment in two phases.” Her “own feelings and wishes,” along with the possibility of her being a subject, are written off by the way of her bodily deformation as a designation of her given function. Chen Xiefen regards such an operation performed on women as “particularly against human feeling and reason (qingli)”¹⁸ as it renders their body into a witness to their own being as emptied of self-defining humanity and in need of a lifelong arrangement of dependency. While unpacking the double violence at work here that cripples the woman and marks her into a sign of proper and desirable womanhood, Chen discloses the pain of such “beauty” as the “crippled sex,” a painful scene of the gendered arrangement of human relations operative in and emblematic of the power structures of the imperial Chinese regime.

Che Xiefen’s indictment of this double violence as “against human feeling and reason” is discernibly evocative of the humanist discourse of the Enlightenment and its concept of reason. Such citations were common in the works by leading Chinese reformers and modernizers at the time; yet irreducible differentiations internal to the citational acts are noteworthy. It is striking that a wide range of writings by women including Chen Xiefen foregrounded the bodily suffering of “the crippled sex,” whereas volumes written by most male leaders enlisted such “crippled” body as an expression of the mental or cognitive state of the “traditional Chinese woman.” Chinese women were rendered into social tropes of the “most unenlightened,” “idiotic,” and “useless Chinese females who only know how to use up wealth and have no idea about how to produce wealth for their family as for their nation” (zhizhi yongli, buzhi shengli).¹⁹ A regime of modern intelligibility was ushered therein, in the light of which the value of humanity was now hinged on her re-assigned function harnessed to the acquisition of “the wealth” of “nations” as “enlarged families.”²⁰ Such a regime turned women’s bodies, once packaged for the reproduction of the male-centered genealogy of kinship and traditional hierarchy, into evidences of their incapability of being functionally “modern” or their culpability of being the “origins of troubles” and sights of a “backward” nation in danger of being annihilated by the “modern world of competitive nations” and justly so according to its protocols of human normality.²¹

Breaking away from the gender rubrics of the ancient regime, Chen Xiefen’s unpacking of the female-bodied effect of its “law of corporal punishment” at the same time resists modernizing discourses that convicted the bodies of “the crippled sex” as newly found examples of “useless humanity.” Such an anatomy recurs in women authors’ writings, haunted by and precipitating often an unspoken sense of anxiety. Chen Chao writes in her noted essay titled “To Mr. Meipo and My Friend Chen Xiefen” as follows:

Our two million women are made unable to produce wealth and earn their own living. Women of rich households only know luxury and air of arrogance; women of poor family or low social status are viewed and treated as slaves and mindless servants by their masters and mistresses. [We are taught that] the woman must follow her husband and care for her children; but how many of us can live in this way or make our life into something outstanding? This is why we should create women’s journals, using our gentle hands to work with powerful pens; this is why we should sell our jewels and offer our bridal money to publish newspapers, and light the lamps by which we can produce books and ideas. I suggest that we all begin to acquire skills … we have our share to do in confronting and overcoming the crisis of our times²² (my italics).

Chen Chao was more aware than Chen Xiefen of the class difference among women as a problem irreducible to the category of gender. Like Chen Xiefen, she leveraged on the gender-specific links among women in their pressing need to gain economic means and socio-cultural resources for independent living in the midst of a civilizational crisis. This advocacy for women to “acquire skills” involves an overt rejection of the old arrangement of the gender economy and an implicit recognition of the new stakes for women to learn the “skills of living” in a changing world full of uncertainty. It would be fatal if “crippled” women remain chained to a ruling power mechanism that crippled them but was also collapsing itself; and those who refused to sink with the mechanism must simultaneously seek ways to re-form their existences and inhabit a time when the gender roles were shifting and yet the gendered power relations were reinventing themselves. The anxiety inherent in such unchaining-cum-remaking project is in other words a felt cognizance of the modern predicament of Chinese women. As “traditionally” deformed, they are likely to be re-nailed as the “useless” and logically disposable body parts in a “fast-forward” moving time-regime.²³

Gender-specific, such cognitive anxiety is yet not gender-confined. Rather, it kindles a feeling cognizant of the links between the operations of gendering and other modalities of power relations in China’s shifting social geography. As early as in 1903, Chen Xiefen noted with overt anger and hidden anxiety how, in the past, “Chinese high officials were subordinated to the court, lower-ranking officials to the high officials, common people to the lower-ranking officials, and women to men. But as of 1903, all of them – the royal court, high officialdom, lower officials, commoners, men, and women – are subordinated to the foreigners! They all become the ignorant subordinate!”²⁴ Chen apparently did not have a critical category to designate the historical contents of those “foreigners.” She was nonetheless in tune with the meanings of the fact that such “foreigners” came from the major powers of the modern West, encroached on China and other countries to claim their extraterritoriality, and regarded those countries they encroached upon as “backward” elements of modern humanity in need of their civilizing leadership and redemptive authority. Other Chinese women went further (as did Chen Xiefen herself a few years later). They traveled to and studied in those places from where “the foreigners” came, came to grips with the power relations implemented in a range of institutions including that of juridical classification there, and reflected upon such encounters with poignant acumen. Xü Jinqin, one of the earliest Chinese women students traveling to the U.S. for an education, for instance, left on print record an incident that occurred at the moment she and her fellow students reached the land of “the new world” and, more interesting to my discussion here, her own reflection. In an interview in San Francisco for Women’s paper for learning (Nüxüe bao) in 1903, Xü Jinqin told the reporter how, when the steamer reached the harbor, “passengers of all nationalities went ashore except the Chinese. We were interrogated over and over again. Why were we so interrogated if the modern law stipulates that only those who have committed crimes be detained and interrogated? I began to realize that we were regarded as convicts without any evidence of criminal offense other than our being and being so regarded – We are convicted by our given ‘Chinese nationality.’ ”²⁵ (my italics).

With similar anger and anxiety, Xü Jinqin articulated how the apparatus of juridical classification at the metropolitan centers of world modernity hailed her and her male Chinese fellow travelers. In such a hailing, they were not only “subordinated” in a generalized political sense as Chen Xiefen noted but also in specific ways that find converging descriptions in Chen’s anatomy of Chinese women’s specific predicament: They were disempowered in a specific bodily way, twice. First they were rendered into bodies whose features had been classified as that of social liability, and then they were convicted as species of such social liability by the evidence of their corporal features. They were walking human deficiency. Without the aid of theoretical notions such as bioethnic politics and its retrospective logic, Xü Jinqin revealed the double violence of the bioethnically posited body politic and its ethno-rationality she encountered in the U.S. and made it disturbingly palpable. At work in “conviction of the convict,” such bioethnic politics evokes what was performed and inscribed on the body of woman in “old China” and doubles it into a modern mechanism with a tyrannical logic that claims variable ca...