In modern China, discourse of race has been intertwined with that of gender ever since race became a focus of political attention during the 1898 Reform. The gaze of Western colonizers toward semicolonial China perpetuated the image of “China as woman” (Chow 1991, 9; Shih 8), emasculating the Chinese race by associating it with the inferior gender. In recent years, more and more Western scholars have warned us against the theoretical pitfall of naturalizing gender following the same logic of colonial discourses.¹ This chapter focuses precisely on the theoretical practices of modern Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century, who sought to challenge the naturalized view of gender hierarchy, thus altering the power structure embedded in the heterosexual dichotomy as a means to resist the imperialist gaze and empower the nation.

The practices of Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century showcase the “complex system of mediation” (Hewitt 143), through which a nationalist agency is constituted on the phantasmal feminine. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha asserts that agency is about “both challenging the boundaries of discourse and subtly changing its terms” (119). In modern China, the feminine becomes a strategy to create a nationalist agency that subverts colonial discourses by displacing and appropriating oppression/resistance dichotomies in racial and gender theories and in so doing subverting the master narrative of colonial discourses. The feminine intervenes and undermines colonial discourses through revealing its inherent instabilities, ambivalence, and contradictions. The cultural imagination of the feminine demonstrates how Chinese colonial modernity forms its discourse of resistance to Western hegemonic discourses paradoxically through subjection. When colonial discourses are “franchised” to semicolonial China through translation, they also bring with them the means to subvert the colonial edifice. Bart Moore-Gilbert calls such subversion a kind of cultural and psychological “guerrilla warfare” (130). It is a guerrilla warfare taking place on a diversified field of power relationships constituted by multifarious discourses. The agency created in this process is a hybrid, anamorphic, and phantasmal feminine that is multiple and heterogeneous, or, in Teresa de Lauretis’s words, “not unified or simply divided between positions of masculinity and femininity, but multiply organized across positionalities along several axes and across mutually contradictory discourses and practices” (136). This phantasmal feminine can be regarded as the proto-subject of Chinese colonial modernity.

I start this chapter with an examination of the intertwined relationship between gender and race, which binds China’s woman question squarely with that of man and the nation. Based on a reading of translated and original essays on “the woman question” in early twentieth-century China, I argue that along with the spread of Enlightenment discourse that served to demystify sexed bodies and de facto affirm the hegemonic logic of colonial discourses, there was another conspicuous “retrograde” intellectual trend to re-enchant the feminine as a mystic source of empowerment for Chinese men and the Chinese nation. Finally, I take a close look at different versions of female superiority and gynocentrism in early twentieth-century China, as a result of the complex transcultural system of mediation.

All of the texts discussed in this chapter were either authored or translated into Chinese by male intellectuals, and the majority of them were dispersed in some of the most influential periodicals in early twentieth-century China. It is not a coincidence that most of the texts are taken from New Youth (Xin qingnian) and Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi), the two major journals pioneering and engineering the discussions on “the woman question” in the Republican era. While New Youth was home to a cohort of cultural iconoclasts who unanimously identified “the woman question” as a front from which to attack traditional Chinese culture, Ladies’ Journal convened a more diverse group of authors including cultural critics, sociologists, sex theorists, and aestheticians. While these journals, as well as the authors themselves, differ in their political agendas, cultural convictions, and aesthetic tastes, they nonetheless formed a concerted campaign to empower the feminine.

Apparently, O’Rell’s “unenlightened” view on women was at odds with those of the New Culture iconoclasts in the 1910s, who welcomed the dissolution of the Confucian family and advocated gender equality and women’s liberation. Then why did Chen Duxiu publish such an essay in the first issue of New Youth? Instead of simply dismissing it as an anachronistic oversight, I ask what the relationship between women and the new youth (the ideal subject of modern China) was, and how O’Rell’s denaturalized and masculinist view on women fitted into the large landscape of “the woman question” in modern China.

Chen Duxiu’s well-known essay “New Youth” (Xin qingnian) appeared in the same journal exactly one year later. In this essay, Chen bemoaned the effeminate characters of Chinese youth: “As far as physiology is concerned, ‘pale-faced scholar’ (baimian shusheng) has been a laudatory title for the youth in our country. The decline of our nation is exactly due to this malaise. By beautifying the appearance and weakening the body, every youth in our country has an infirm and fragile body and none of them possesses a strong and virile outlook.” In “New Youth,” Chen Duxiu not only excluded Chinese women from the category of “youth,”³ he also viewed the feminine qualities of the Chinese (male) youth as a fatal malaise that led to the decline of the Chinese nation and the extinction of the Chinese race: “People call us the sick men’s country of the East. Almost all of our youth fall into the category of sick men. How can our race manage to survive in this way?” Chen thus called for a stronger and more virile figure, one that followed the Western model of masculinity, as a remedy to China’s national problem.

Chen’s sentiment was popular among reformist intellectuals during the Republican era. Another leading cultural iconoclast Lu Xun (1881–1936), for example, also frowned on female impersonation in Chinese theatrical performances, as he believed that the confusion of gender roles would ultimately undermine Chinese masculinity.⁴ Like Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun yearned for “a strong, virile Chinese figure, as opposed to China’s old emaciated, feminine image” (D. Wang 2003, 134). In both cases, femininity was scapegoated as the representation and cause of China’s weakness.

The juxtaposition of Chen Duxiu’s “New Youth” and his translation of Max O’Rell’s essay betray the ambivalent cultural stance of the New Culture Movement leader: femininity was both banished and coveted, both condemned and fantasized. As I will show in the following pages, Chen’s polarization of the feminine actually represents a deliberate choice of Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century—one that strategically negotiates between discourses of race, gender, and nationalism.

The femininity condemned by Chinese cultural iconoclasts like Chen Duxiu and Lu Xun was a Chinese femininity invented by the same group of intellectuals under the influence of Western colonial discourses. As has been discussed in the introduction of this book, in traditional Chinese society, gender hierarchy was constructed based on cosmological order; the boundaries between the masculine and the feminine were porous and flexible in this system. However, after China became a semicolony of Western powers, the hegemonic feminizing gaze from the imperialists fundamentally altered the Chinese conception of gender ideology. Following the critical tenor of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, Sinologists have revealed the transformative power of the Western gaze that reaffirmed the persistent image of “China as woman.” The hegemonic feminizing gaze not only imposed upon the Chinese a heterosexual gender hierarchy in which females were regarded as naturally inferior to males, but also propelled Chinese intellectuals to zealously wage a campaign to identify “traditional Chinese womanhood with feudal backwardness” (Furth 6). In this way, the deficiency of the Chinese race was not so much an issue of the masculinity, as it was an effect of the malfunctioning Chinese femininity.

Chinese intellectuals’ hypersensitivity to gender was also closely linked to the debate on Chinese National Character (guomin xing). Since the late nineteenth century, Westerners’ writings on China had been a crucial source for Chinese intellectuals’ self-knowledge. Subsuming human differences “under the totalizing category of national identity” and “legitimizing Western imperialist expansion and domination of the world” (L. Liu 1995, 48), the discourse on national character is but a variation of the racial theory imported from the hegemonic West. The stereotypical national character works, to borrow Ilan Kapoor’s words, to “enable colonial power to fix the colonized subject and justify the colonizer’s superiority and authority” (563), thereby strengthening the hegemonic colonial power.⁵ In response to these Western views on China, Chinese intellectuals carried out ruthless self-anatomy and actively contributed to the proliferation of the discourse on national character. Some Chinese intellectuals compulsively read the Chinese national character in the heterosexual framework, so that the problem of “Chinaman” was displaced as the problem of “Chinawoman.”

It is noteworthy that this concept of a weakening femininity is but a duplicate of Western colonial discourses that intend to defend the purity of the dominant race by distancing it from the corrupting power of the dominated race. Gender and sex has a complicit relationship with racial discourse, because representations of gender and sexuality always “figure strongly in the articulation of racism” (Lugones 205). The colonizer’s supremacy is asserted in terms of national and racial virility, while colonial discourse on sex management is always characterized by a deep fear of the contamination of the “master” by the “slave.” Ann Laura Stoler asserts in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power that the making of racial boundaries always turns on “the management of sex” (16). Stoler regards gender and sexuality as foundational to colonial rule, because “the micromanagement of sexual arrangements and affective attachments was so critical to the making of colonial categories and deemed so important to the distinctions between ruler and ruled” (8). However, Stoler’s discussions are limited to sexual management implemented by the colonizer that affects both the colonized and the colonizer. Chinese intellectuals’ self-perpetuation of the discourse on national character, by contrast, serves as an interesting case of the psychological response of the “inferior” race, and the intersection of race and gender is key to understanding this psychological response.

Chen Duxiu’s castigation of the effeminate Chinese men in “New Youth” appropriated the same logic of colonial gender discourse. The crisis of Chinese men, according to this logic, arose when they were plagued by a malaise originating from an inferior ethnographic group—Chinese women. If Chinese men were enslaved by the imperialists seeking to divide China up like a melon, Chinese women were the slaves of slaves, who perched at the very bottom of the racial and gender hierarchy and were considered as a source of degeneracy.

However, Chen’s displacement of race by gender is more than a misogynist move. It strategically destabilizes colonial discourses by exposing the limit of their representational radius and inherent ambiguity. Some feminist scholars have argued that categories have been understood as homogenous by reading the dominant in the group as the norm: “women picks out white bourgeois women, men picks out white bourgeois men, black picks out black heterosexual men, and so on” (Lugones 192–193). In this sense, although Western women can be categorized either as racially superior or sexually weaker, they are left out of racial discourse, which is exclusively concerned with men. When race becomes the issue in question, the referent of the weaker, and analogously the feminine, is men of color. Western women, as sexually inferior others, are thus connected to Chinese men, racially inferior others. It is impossible to talk about Western women without evoking a certain ambiguity and undecidability caused by the internal tensions among colonial discourses. In contrast, Chinese women, as the slaves of slaves, are left out of racial discourse that is concerned with Western men and Chinese men, as much as they are excluded from universal gender discourse that is reserved for white bourgeois men and women. This symbolic exclusion necessitates the invention of various discursive practices in discussions of the Chinese woman question, as a displacement for Chinese man question at the local level, on the one hand, and serves to free the Chinese feminine, making it malleable and anamorphic for all kinds of self-modernizing projects, on the other.

An idealized and mystified Western femininity was selected as the source of agency from which power could be potentially derived. The focus on the feminine works in two ways: first, it partially submits to hegemonic colonial discourses that define the superiority of the white race, and second, it challenges the hierarchy embedded in colonial gender discourse by modifying the power positions of men and women. Since both racial theory and the gender theories are imbricated in the production of colonial discourses, singling out the Western feminine as the object of empowerment partially keeps and partially subverts the power hierarchy of colonial discourses. The Western feminine, as the paradoxical joint of the racially stronger and sexually weaker other, creates a form of discursive instability, which, “while rendering the master’s narrative contradictory and ambivalent, can also empower the subaltern to resist and interrupt it” (Kapoor 563). Modeled on this universal ideal of femininity, the category of woman in China was “at large,” or, in Barlow’s words, “categorized precisely by its instability” (1988, 8). The feminine is both anamorphic and powerful as it enables a form of subversion “founded on the undecidability that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention” (Bhabha 112). In this way, the feminine not only provides a polemical field with relatively less imperialist discursive supervision, but also promises a malleable agency with great potential of self-development.

Homi Bhabha’s postcolonialist theory helps explain why Max O’Rell’s “Thoughts on Women” was a significant component for Chen Duxiu’s first issue of New Youth and the latter’s vision of the future Chinese race. Western femininity, with its ambiguous position in colo...