New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics

The Centennial of the End of the Qing Dynasty

Chen Ya-chen, Ya-chen Chen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135020057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

The past century witnessed dramatic changes in the lives of modern Chinese women and gender politics. Whilst some revolutionary actions to rectify the feudalist patriarchy, such as foot-binding and polygyny were first seen in the late Qing period; the termination of the Qing Dynasty and establishment of Republican China in 1911-1912 initiated truly nation-wide constitutional reform alongside increasing gender egalitarianism. This book traces the radical changes in gender politics in China, and the way in which the lives, roles and status of Chinese women have been transformed over the last one hundred years. In doing so, it highlights three distinctive areas of development for modern Chinese women and gender politics: first, women's equal rights, freedom, careers, and images about their modernized femininity; second, Chinese women's overseas experiences and accomplishments; and third, advances in Chinese gender politics of non-heterosexuality and same-sex concerns.

This book takes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on film, history, literature, and personal experience. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, women's studies, gender studies and gender politics.

Part I

New modern women in China

1 Equal rights before the law at the founding of the Chinese Republic, 1911

Daniel C. Palm

Introduction

Visitors to the People’s Republic of China during the month of July 2011 could hardly fail to note that the month had been selected as the focal point for celebrations commemorating the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) (“China Celebrates,” 2011). Nationwide the Party sponsored events from the flashy to the academic, from the serious to the not-so-serious, including concerts, plays, speeches, museum displays and reenactments; the Party commissioned and producing no fewer than 28 films, including the blockbuster Beginning of a Great Revival. As recorded in a pictorial collection at the Washington Post website, one could visit the city of Chongqing—a city whose officials periodically participate in field labor in the spirit of the Cultural Revolution (Hille 2011)—for ceremonies and dress up with period costumes and props (“Chinese Communist Party’s 90th Anniversary,” 2011).

Another anniversary celebration, somewhat less pronounced, was simultaneously in the works. In October 2010 the Standing Committee of the 11th National Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference had announced that 2011 would be commemorated as the centennial of the 1911 Chinese Revolution, commonly remembered outside China as the Republican or Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命) (“China to Commemorate the 100th Anniversary,” 2010). In January 2011, five Chinese cities announced plans to commemorate the events of 1911 at their respective Sun Yat-sen memorial buildings during the months of September and October.

A cursory internet search reveals no significant celebrations of the CPC anniversary outside China, but the 1911 Revolution’s centenary was the subject of several. Xinhua News Agency reported in July that the anniversary had been observed in Hanoi “with a seminar held by Chinese Embassy in Vietnam and Institute of Chinese Studies under the Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences” (“Seminar Held in Hanoi,” 2011). Similar seminars and academic meetings in honor of the event were sponsored in locations from Denmark to Washington, DC.

Like any anniversary in Chinese history, the Revolution of 1911 within China was very much a matter of political interpretation, marking as it did at once the death of the Qing Dynasty and China’s long centuries under the imperial system, and the founding event for the Chinese Republic. But the Republican period is remembered by China scholars as an era of internal warfare, invasion and occupation by Japan, and terrible loss of life, finally brought to an end with the victory of Mao and the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Outside China, the centenary offers the opportunity for scholars to revisit the central political questions essential to understanding the modern nation-state, and how citizenship, rights, and civil liberties are properly understood. This is especially the case because the 1911 Revolution marks success for the tongmenghui (中國同盟會) or Chinese Revolutionary Alliance, led for a time by Sun Yat-sen, whose threefold platform aimed “to expel the barbarians and thereby restore Chinese sovereignty, establish a republic, and redistribute land equally among the people.”

Within China, the 1911 Revolution is considered a beginning point but a defective or insufficient one, leading as it does to further problems decisively rectified by the Communist Party, an interpretation made clear in the 1982 PRC Constitution’s Preamble:

The Revolution of 1911, led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, abolished the feudal monarchy and gave birth to the Republic of China. But the Chinese people had yet to fulfill their historical task of overthrowing imperialism and feudalism. After waging hard, protracted and tortuous struggles, armed and otherwise, the Chinese people of all nationalities led by the Communist Party of China with Chairman Mao Zedong as its leader ultimately, in 1949, overthrew the rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism, won the great victory of the new-democratic revolution and founded the People’s Republic of China. Thereupon the Chinese people took state power into their own hands and became masters of the country.

(People’s Republic of China Constitution)

Two characteristic features of modern political society are rule of law (as opposed to rule by a single individual, clan, class, religious sect, ideology or party) and equality before the law, with the latter either supported explicitly in codified law, expressed as an objective, or at least claimed as a concept even if not, in fact, respected (Coase and Wang 2012: 183). The core ideas of individual rights to life, freedom, property, and pursuit of happiness are grounded in recognition that no one human being is, by nature, the ruler of another, and that just laws treat citizens equally without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, ancestry, gender, social or economic class, or special understanding. A centenarian born in 1850 would have passed through life alongside great worldwide debates about slavery, political rights for property-less citizens and ethnic minorities, colonialism, and greatly expanded rights for women, both in the developed world and in newly independent countries.

But this is only half the story. Complicating matters was the simultaneous appearance and expansion of Marxist thought, and less (or non-)violent but nonetheless philosophically related progressive ideologies offering an alternative understanding of equality. That understanding is connected to a larger, more active government, much less limited in its understood scope and duties to its citizens. In this context, China in 1911 is intriguing as home to a massive population, with an intellectual class supported by much of the public, eager to found a non-imperial political system, aiming as well for independence from foreign occupation, and debating—often clashing over—which understanding of equality the new regime would follow. In this chapter we consider the general concept of equality as it appears in a few prominent pre-Revolutionary points in Chinese history and during the 1911 Revolution, as a means of beginning to understand the possibility of an expanded political participation for Chinese women. Political equality for women, we contend, becomes possible alongside a larger understanding of human equality, and technological improvements that come with empirical science.

The end of China’s ancien régime

The Qing Dynasty, launched in the period 1636–44 by Manchu peoples from the north of China, had weakened significantly during the nineteenth century. Resentment by the ethnic majority Han population, kept in check for over two centuries, reemerged alongside a series of difficulties for the Qing regime: most notable of these were the outcomes of the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60); trade concessions forced by France, Britain, Japan, and the US; territorial encroachments by Russia; and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Revolt (1850–71). A final blow to the dynasty would come with the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the Treaty of Shimonoseki (Gasster 1969: 6). Each of these, in addition to the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and long-standing trade and Christian mission concessions, served to demonstrate the weakness of the Qing regime.

Beginning in the half-century from 1861 to 1911, two broad yet ultimately moderate attempts at reform from within the Dynasty were attempted. The first of these, the Self-Strengthening Movement (洋務運動 1861–95), emphasized Chinese acquisition of modern weapons and technology as cautiously first proposed by Lin Tse-hsu shortly after the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842. The second, the Hundred Days Reforms (戊戌變法), was attempted during the summer of 1898 by Guangxu Emperor (reigned 1875–98) but was stymied by his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi, who used the Reforms as an excuse for her de facto coup d’état, ending any chance for moderate reform from within (Gasster 1969: 14). The following three years featured the dramatic rise of the Society of Harmonious Fists, invasion in response by the Eight-Nation Alliance, and the further weakening of the regime over the next decade. In 1905 the premier Chinese advocate for political reform, Sun Yat-sen, returned from travels in Europe, founding the Tongmenhui (China Revolutionary League) with other Chinese reformers in Japan. A separate movement had aimed to transform the regime into a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary legislature, but the death of Guangxu Emperor in 1908 ended that prospect (Jeans 1997: 19–20). Following several ineffective attempts at sparking revolution, the Tongmenhui realized success with the Wuchang Uprising of October 10, 1911. Following several weeks of armed conflict in late 1911, the establishment of the new Republic of China on January 1, 1912, and the abdication of the Qing emperor in February, the last of China’s many dynasties had come to an end.

The idea of equality in Chinese political history

One recognizes at the outset that any attempt to discuss a broad political concept such as “equality” is necessarily fraught with several levels of difficulty. China began to emerge from centuries of introversion and imperial rule at a complex moment in the history of ideas—a moment informed by ideas about the state of nature and the natural condition of human beings and, by extension, the proper role and extent of government. These ideas had been explored and explained most notably by John Locke, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Those political concepts had been directly contested by a new wave of ideas about human beings, nature, and government launched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Hegel. While the former group looked to the concepts of an unchanging human nature, individual rights, rule of law, and limited government, the latter looked to history and progress, rejecting the idea of a consistent human nature, holding out hope for significant change, and allowing an expanded, even limitless government. (It should come as no surprise that the application to politics of this philosophic emphasis on progress and change emerges at this general time period, during which Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace are writing about biological evolution, innovation in the physical sciences is significant, and the industrial revolution in the United States and Europe was in full swing.) These latter ideas informed Marx, writing in the mid-nineteenth century just as China began its own early efforts at reform. For Marx and his disciples, the future held a traumatic period of revolution that would usher in a new phase of human existence with property, family, and political life abandoned in favor of communism, and it was the duty of those relatively few who understood this inevitable telos of history to lead the remainder of humanity toward that goal and to be willing to fight and crush the entrenched opposition. For others without the stomach for the violence that Marx prescribed, or thinking it illusory, the objectives of an improved society and humanity could be achieved without the violent cataclysm that Marx proposed, but requiring larger, more active government and an emphasis on collective rather than individual rights.

With respect to the idea of equality generally, the essential distinction would over time become one between equality of rights vs. equality of result. The Jeffersonian understanding of a self-evident truth, “that all men are created equal,” and his aiming toward equal treatment by the law would be rejected as insufficient by progressives, who required their proposed larger government to engage in policies leading toward equality of result. Applied to economics, progressivism past and present promotes the idea of economic leveling as “social justice”; applied to gender and in the form of feminism, progressivism argues for as much distance as possible from the inequalities imposed by nature and toward a telos of greater, perhaps even perfected equality. (The classic statement of social justice theory is John Rawls’ 1971 volume, A Theory of Justice, while a representative feminist critique of Rawls is Susan Moller Okin’s 1991 monograph, Justice, Gender and the Family.)

This intellectual movement, with origins in German, French, and British universities, would quickly inform political thought throughout the European continent and would mi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I New modern women in China
• Part II New modern Chinese women with overseas experience
• Part III Queer issues in new modern Chinese gender politics
• Index