Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China

The Case of the Huang-Lu Elopement

Qiliang He

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319896922
• Thema: Letteratura
• Thema: Critica letteraria asiatica

Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China's patriarchal system. Qiliang He's text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women's history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.

© The Author(s) 2018

Qiliang HeFeminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century ChinaChinese Literature and Culture in the Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89692-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Qiliang He¹

(1)

Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA

Qiliang He

End Abstract

In July 1928, Huang Huiru (1907?–March 20, 1929?), a young lady from a well-to-do family in Shanghai, braved the wrath of her family to elope with Lu Genrong (1907?–November 30, 1975?), a male servant in her household, to Suzhou, a city 50 miles north of Shanghai.¹ The Huang–Lu love affair instantly aroused intense interest in the media and sparked off fierce debates regarding love, family, and women’s sexual behavior. The influence of the love affair spilled out of the Yangzi Delta. Newspapers circulated in northern China such as the Beiping-based Shijie wanbao (World Evening, edited by Zhang Henshui [1897–1967]), and those in Manchuria also followed the elopement closely.²

The love affair and its ensuing legal battle took place at an eventful historical juncture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927–1937). This period witnessed the Nationalist Party’s (GMD) unification of China and then imposition of its control over the populace, the decline of iconoclastic radicalism in the New Culture Movement (roughly 1917–1925), the enactment of new legal codes, the intensification of competition among newspapers, and the rise of a vibrant film industry. This attention-grabbing illicit affair thus provides a prism to refract a parade of issues in Republican China (1911–1949), including the new womanhood , journalist practices, legal reforms, an ever-expanding urban culture, and a multidimensional network of communication.

By studying the illicit affair as a sensational narrative in the press, a criminal case, and fictionalized stories in novels and films, I argue, first of all, that the decade-long effort made by enlightenment intellectuals to preach a new womanhood bore fruit in this period, as non-elite women appropriated the largely male-dominated feminist discourses to mount their resistance in day-to-day life. Second, middle- and lower-class members gained access to May Fourth theories and concepts thanks to a network of communication that connected people of differing economic and educational backgrounds. Third, within this network, consumers of various cultural products selectively used, redefined, revised, and reworked—namely, vernacularized —New Culture terms and idioms to attain their desire to be worthy participants of modernity and address their nagging moral concerns. Fourth, the diversification of urban culture and the rise of a network of communication in the late 1920s and 1930s was conducive to the making of a polyphonic and participatory public , in which intellectuals of different political orientations—the self-asserted agent of sociopolitical change—did not necessarily command an absolute authority. Finally, elite intellectuals’ growing apprehension at losing control over the highly diversified public was compounded by their suspicion of the Chinese woman’s qualification of exercising her self-activating agency , which they had ironically been promoting. As a consequence, intellectuals were in complicity with the GMD’s conservatism to trivialize and repudiate the new public and call for both disciplining women’s behaviors and regulating the polyphonic and massively participatory public.

The Elopement

Huang Huiru, the protagonist of this social drama, originally lived in Shanghai with her grandmother, mother, eldest brother, and a couple of servants including Lu Genrong. Lu hailed from Wuta in the greater Suzhou area in southern Jiangsu where he had already married. In 1927, Huang was engaged to a certain Mr. Bei from Suzhou, but the proposed arranged marriage fell through because, as various sources revealed, of her grandmother’s opposition. Consequently, the saddened Huang reportedly attempted suicide. When Lu managed to comfort her, Huang began to carry on a clandestine love affair with him in early 1928. In late July 1928, the pregnant Huang eloped with her sweetheart to Suzhou, but the Suzhou police, at the behest of the Huang family, soon arrested Lu. In the August 24 trial in the Wuxian Regional Court (Wuxian difang fayuan), Huang’s family charged Lu with abducting their daughter and stealing jewelry. Lu was sentenced to two years in prison despite Huang’s vigorous defense.

The case instantly received enormous attention from the media. For example, the Shanghai-based Minguo ribao (the Republican Daily), an organ of the ruling GMD, had a number of essays published to sing high praise of Huang Huiru’s self-sacrifice and hailed her as “a practitioner of revolution in the old family” (jiu jiating zhong shixing geming zhe).³ Inspired and emboldened by the contributors to this daily newspaper, Huang tried to enlist support from the press by resorting to the New Culture rhetoric of love and revolution and portraying herself as a defector from a feudal family in pursuit of free-choice marriage . As discussions and debates surrounding the Huang –Lu affair were raging in various periodicals across the Yangzi Delta, the couple appealed to the Jiangsu High Court (Jiangsu gaodeng fayuan) several times starting in late 1928. To the astonishment of the couple and their attorney, nevertheless, the judges in Suzhou doubled Lu’s jail time rather than exonerating him in their first appeal, in spite of the instruction to the contrary from the Supreme Court (Zuigao fayuan).

As the legal battle was dragging on, Huang Huiru relocated to Lu’s home village in Wuta to stay with the man’s family. Her relatively peaceful life was quickly disrupted with the arrival of a steady stream of good-will visitors and prying journalists. Huang’s communication with outsiders including newspapermen from Shanghai prompted her to weigh her option once again. Judging from publications released immediately after an interview in winter 1928, Huang’s confidence in staying in the countryside gradually waned. A combined factor of a sense of helplessness—particularly because she accepted a new image of herself as a physically and mentally weak woman that the editor of Shenghuo zhoukan (Life Weekly) conjured up—and the rustic life of unwonted discomfort propelled her to return to Suzhou in January 1929. Huang stayed in a Suzhou hospital until March 1929.

The hospitalized Huang had to face greater media exposure and cope with harassments of unsolicited visits and offensive letters. The press coverage and commentaries on the love affair again swayed Huang’s decision to raise the infant as a single mother. Among all readings that she perused in hospital, editorials and essays published in Life Weekly, a middle-brow magazine serving mostly young professionals in Shanghai, struck a chord in Huang as its contributors showed deep sympathy with her and urged her to return to family life. Shortly before she bore a son on March 7, 1929, Huang secretly met with her mother in Suzhou to make an arrangement for going back to Shanghai. On March 21, two days after Huang landed in Shanghai, news was circulating that she had suddenly died from labor complications. Quite a lot of observers, including journalists of various newspapers, remained unconvinced by the claim of Huang’s unexpected death. A flurry of debate on Huang’s life and death among various newspapers in Shanghai and beyond ensued throughout 1929. Lu continued to appeal before he eventually regained his freedom in June 1930, signifying the long overdue end of this love affair.

From 1928 to the 1930s, the story of the Huang–Lu elopement attracted wide publicity. Novelists and publishers produced books on the elopement as soon as it began to rivet media attention. Theaters kept pace with the development of the affair and regularly updated their repertoire. Chinese filmmakers, likewise, drew inspiration from this elopement and made two feature films and one documentary in the late 1920s. Folksingers, storytellers, and street artists were all revved up to produce their own products to cater to their audience. In retrospect, a researcher of Chinese popular culture contends that the famous wedding of the GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) and Mayling Soong (1897–2003) paled in comparison with the Huang–Lu affair in the press.⁴

The enormous attention this love affair held was a testimony to a flourishing urban culture in Shanghai in the early Republican era. Around the 1920s, demands for newspapers, novels, operatic plays, films, folksongs, storytelling, gramophone records, and street arts in the city skyrocketed. The circulation numbers of two major Shanghai daily newspapers (Xinwen bao and Shen bao), for example, exceeded one hundred thousand, whereas the numbers had been lower than ten thousand at the turn of the twentieth century; the publishing and printing industry in Shanghai grew twenty-fold between 1912 and 1932,⁵ and the three major publishers in Shanghai published two-thirds of all Chinese books nationwide⁶; a film industry sprouted to precipitate a “golden age” of the Chinese motion picture in the 1930s and 1940s⁷; and Shanghai was the home to China’s only phonographic industry.⁸

With the efflorescence of the urban media and culture, the Huang–Lu affair exemplified, in Haiyan Lee’s words, the “scandals that roiled the media in the 1920s and 1930s” and “...