Women's Liberation in 1920s China

From the late 19th century, educated Chinese men started to call for emancipating women from the shackles of the control of a male dominated society. The emancipation included providing women with an education, allowing women to appear in public places, allowing women to have natural feet (in contrast to bound feet, which many Han Chinese women practiced although Manchu women did not), and allowing women the freedom to choose their own marriage partners instead of packed into an arranged one. Some also advocated that women should be allowed to hold jobs, and enter politics. The main reason for emancipating women was to strengthen the nation, as keeping women unfree was holding back half of the Chinese population, in the words of Liang Qichao, which would hold back Chinese development. Freeing up women's energies and allowing women participation in nation building became, for many educated Chinese men, as important as building a Chinese republic. Certainly women's freedom was an important theme in the New Culture Movement, and the oppression of women featured prominently in Lu Hsun's novels (including New Year's Sacrifice). Women's liberation was deliberated upon by a broad range of educated Chinese men, and increasingly, by educated Chinese women. Republicans, socialists, Communists, all embraced women's liberation, for overlapping reasons. Peter Zarrow's article for today's reading addresses the political views of a highly educated Chinese woman, He (pronounced Her 何) Zhen （震）, who was one of the lone voices that championed the liberation of women not for national salvation, but for the sake of the women from a moral point of view. He （何）was married to a very famous Chinese classicist Liu Shipei, who was a radical anti-Manchu revolutionary and studied in Japan with his wife, and who embraced both socialism and anarchism before eventually dropping both.  Both socialism and anarchism predated Communism in China. For people who fought initially the imperial Qing government and later warlord rule, anarchism, in the first 20 or so years of the 20th century, was an appealing idea. Anarchism, especially its Russian variation, nihilism, seemed workable because the government itself often appeared to be a gigantic force that the small group of revolutionaries were unable to overthrow simply by political opposition or ignoring the government. The Russian nihilists, facing a similar problem against their czar, frustrated with the backward government that refused to move the country forward, decided to resort to assassination of government leaders including the czar to achieve a revolutionary turnaround with the limited manpower of the anarchists. Even though the result was not very effective--very often the targets were missed, or the bomb killed the wrong people, the method of assassination was invariably picked up by many Chinese revolutionaries from Liu Shipei, He Zhen, to Cai Yuanpei, who later became chancellor of Peking University, while Liu became professor of Chinese there. A female home townsman of Cai's, Qiu Jin, tried to assassinate the local Manchu governor but failed, was arrested and had her head chopped off. With the international decline of the anarchist movement in the 1920s, anarchism eventually died down, and many former anarchists turned to mild or moderate socialism, or radical Communism, as a true solution to China's ills. Although anarchism flourished very briefly in China, being one of the "isms" introduced from the West, it had a big impact on many educated and progressive Chinese men and women. Although the harsh reality of China's political and economic conditions turned many to a more conservative and conformist view of China, and to Marxism for a more "fundamental" solution of China's problems through regime change instead of the "naive" anarchist vision of "doing away with the state." Still, many anarchists' attitude toward women's liberation was no different from other groups, and had the ultimate goal of national salvation in mind. The few dissenting voices in anarcho-feminism included that of He Zhen, who voiced her opinions in the journal Natural Justice that she published with her husband while in Japan. He （何）, from a  wealthy family in Jiangsu Province, one of the southern provinces of "fish and rice" at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was obviously permitted to receive an education by her doting parents, hence her ability of a high level of literacy that, in writing (though not in scholarship), could rival that of her husband's.  He made interesting comments on women's inferior status in society, blaming it on economic dependence on men('s income). Her solution, however, was not women going out to work and make money, too, but the abolition of a market economy and its replacement by communism, so that money as a means of exchange was abolished, and every one would work as they could and get what they needed from society without depending on any one else. Early anarchists were often receptive to socialist and Communist ideas because their ideal societies in a way were similar: communal, mutual help, equality, the state not in the way. More extreme anarchists not only wanted to abolish a market economy and government, but also abolish the family structure to free women from domestic subordination to men. He Zhen's attack on Confucian traditions resembles that by Lu Hsun in several of his novels, where Lu characterized Confucian cultural traditions as "cannibalism," because of their emphasis on women's sacrifices to the extent of their total deprivations or even death, for the sake of "chastity." Under Confucian chastity rules, a widow could be sentenced to death for having an affair, or praised with a memorial tablet set up by the government for adhering to a marriage with a man she had never met in her life, and she had never really married, as he died after their betrothal. To break away from tradition, the anarchists argued for the abolition of the institution of the family and marriage, even though few of them actually practiced it. The Chinese anarchists' attack on the traditional family system should be viewed in the context of Chinese scholars' frustration with the Chinese social system. Though from there, He Zhen obviously developed to a higher level of understanding, of gender equality in every sense of the world. Equality for her became an end in itself. Zarrow argues that this anarchist version of gender equality worked itself into the May 4th Movement, and became part of the Communist agenda for women's liberation. Anarchism, in its extreme attack on the traditions of the Chinese family, certainly resembled the iconoclasm of the May 4th writers who came afterwards, including Lu Hsun and many others, who hoped to completely reconfigure Chinese culture and traditions, though none of them completely succeeded in the endeavor.