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 pupilâs younger sister the same schooling: âShe is highly intelligent and has been learning to read and write remarkably well.â The father replies with questions: âWhatâs the use of such study to a girl, since itâs 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?â3 Those questions implicitly confirm recent feminist historiography that explicates how elite Chinese women gained high level of literary cultivation in âthe high Qing periodâ (1683â1839) with a developed female writing tradition behind them that can be traced as early as Tang Dynasty. The Confucian teaching that âvirtuous women are those who do not have literary talentâ in this sense ironically invalidates any assumption that women by their bioethnic definition lack the thinking and writing faculty.4 The fatherâs objection is not based on any notion that marks âfemalenessâ as such inherent lack. Rather, he points to the unavailability of institutions whereby womenâs learning may gain social values.5 The problem about womenâs 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 womenâs public education seriously, meanwhile, found themselves in predicaments. The first Chinese school for women founded by reformers in Shanghai in 1898, Shanghai Womenâs Public Academy (Shanghai nĂŒzi gongxĂŒe), 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 womenâs 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 âthis is the first womenâs school in the city of Hangzhou, no woman would dare again to found and run schools for women if I let it fail,â she wrote, âI exchange my life for public opinion to help it survive.â10
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 âtalented womenâ (cainĂŒ) housed in the cloistered inner chambers (guifang) of the gentry family with however extensive a reach over literary venues.11 Rather, they had become âlearnedâ and âlearningâ 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 ânative womenâ were re-made only to be the âslaves next to the [native male] slavesâ 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 gentryâs 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 womenâs 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 womenâs appearance amid a civilizational collapsing, they gestured toward a reading public as the human dynamics of such space in the making. Womenâs publications appeared in waves from 1897 to 1919. A total of fifty-four womenâs 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 womenâs public journals appeared in Chinaâs coastal areas or treaty ports and many were initiated overseas right after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894â1895 and throughout the Reform Movement (1897â1898) may interest scholars specializing in the problem of the âWest-Eastâ 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. Womenâs Paper for Learning (NĂŒxĂŒebao), 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), womenâs history (nĂŒjie jinshi), literary writings and poetry (cihan), and personalized correspondence with readers (chisu), where their imaginations for a âmodern Chinaâ were engendered with an impetus to alter womenâs social status and forms of being.15 In her article On independence (âDuli pianâ), one of the earliest documents in Chinese womenâs feminist thought, for example, Chen Xiefen evoked the issue of âtraditionalâ womenâs formation as the bodily site where her envisioning of a âmodern Chinaâ 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 womenâs 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 âwidowed.â 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 womenâs oppression. In Chen Xiefenâs eyes, while the âservant girlsâ 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 âbeautyâ which is an effect of male-gendered masochistic desire and a signifier of the status of the gentry family in Chenâs 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 âsocial punishment in two phases.â Her âown feelings and wishes,â 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 âparticularly against human feeling and reason (qingli)â18 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 âbeautyâ as the âcrippled sex,â a painful scene of the gendered arrangement of human relations operative in and emblematic of the power structures of the imperial Chinese regime.
Che Xiefenâs indictment of this double violence as âagainst human feeling and reasonâ 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 âthe crippled sex,â whereas volumes written by most male leaders enlisted such âcrippledâ body as an expression of the mental or cognitive state of the âtraditional Chinese woman.â Chinese women were rendered into social tropes of the âmost unenlightened,â âidiotic,â and âuseless 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 nationâ (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 âthe wealthâ of ânationsâ as âenlarged families.â20 Such a regime turned womenâs bodies, once packaged for the reproduction of the male-centered genealogy of kinship and traditional hierarchy, into evidences of their incapability of being functionally âmodernâ or their culpability of being the âorigins of troublesâ and sights of a âbackwardâ nation in danger of being annihilated by the âmodern world of competitive nationsâ and justly so according to its protocols of human normality.21
Breaking away from the gender rubrics of the ancient regime, Chen Xiefenâs unpacking of the female-bodied effect of its âlaw of corporal punishmentâ at the same time resists modernizing discourses that convicted the bodies of âthe crippled sexâ as newly found examples of âuseless humanity.â Such an anatomy recurs in women authorsâ writings, haunted by and precipitating often an unspoken sense of anxiety. Chen Chao writes in her noted essay titled âTo Mr. Meipo and My Friend Chen Xiefenâ 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 womenâs 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 âacquire skillsâ 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 âskills of livingâ in a changing world full of uncertainty. It would be fatal if âcrippledâ 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 âtraditionallyâ deformed, they are likely to be re-nailed as the âuselessâ and logically disposable body parts in a âfast-forwardâ 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 Chinaâs shifting social geography. As early as in 1903, Chen Xiefen noted with overt anger and hidden anxiety how, in the past, âChinese 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 â the royal court, high officialdom, lower officials, commoners, men, and women â are subordinated to the foreigners! They all become the ignorant subordinate!â24 Chen apparently did not have a critical category to designate the historical contents of those âforeigners.â She was nonetheless in tune with the meanings of the fact that such âforeignersâ 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 âbackwardâ 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 âthe foreignersâ 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. XĂŒ 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 âthe new worldâ and, more interesting to my discussion here, her own reflection. In an interview in San Francisco for Womenâs paper for learning (NĂŒxĂŒe bao) in 1903, XĂŒ Jinqin told the reporter how, when the steamer reached the harbor, âpassengers 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 â We are convicted by our given âChinese nationality.â â25 (my italics).
With similar anger and anxiety, XĂŒ 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 âsubordinatedâ in a generalized political sense as Chen Xiefen noted but also in specific ways that find converging descriptions in Chenâs anatomy of Chinese womenâs 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, XĂŒ 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 âconviction of the convict,â such bioethnic politics evokes what was performed and inscribed on the body of woman in âold Chinaâ and doubles it into a modern mechanism with a tyrannical logic that claims variable ca...