UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Gender, Criminality, and the Prison in China, 1928-1953 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/39x2z8g3 Author Montgomery, Stephanie Michelle Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ GENDER, CRIMINALITY, AND THE PRISON IN CHINA, 1928-1953 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by Stephanie M. Montgomery June 2018 The Dissertation of Stephanie M. Montgomery is approved: _______________________________ Professor Gail Hershatter, chair _______________________________ Professor Emily Honig _______________________________ Professor Noriko Aso ____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Stephanie M. Montgomery 2018 Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................... v Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: “The Eyes of Science” .......................................................... 16 Chapter Two: The Courtroom ..................................................................... 62 Chapter Three: Inside the Women’s Prison ................................................. 103 Chapter Four: Health and Hygiene in the Prison ......................................... 141 Epilogue ..................................................................................................... 177 Appendix A: Glossary of Prison Names...................................................... 189 Bibliography .............................................................................................. 190 iii Abstract Gender, Criminality, and the Prison in China, 1928-1953 Stephanie Montgomery This dissertation examines the relationship between state visions of penal reform and actual conditions in women’s prisons in the coastal cities of Shanghai and Tianjin during a quarter century of political change encompassing Nationalist political control, Japanese occupation, civil war, and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. In particular, my research addresses a body of literature on the “woman problem,” a topic of heated public debate centered on the status of women and their proper role in twentieth-century China. I ask the following question: what was the place of problem women — the unruly, the indigent, and the criminal — within the woman problem? Even though women criminals were among the most disenfranchised members of Chinese society, their lives touched on important issues of national debate about women’s purported inherent weakness and its relationship to national weakness. Government reformers and planners believed that the reform of criminal women — who were often compelled to serve sentences in modern prisons — played an integral role in successful state building. iv Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful for the community of scholars at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I wish first to thank my exceptional advisors, Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig. Their wisdom, generosity, and patience saw us all through many difficult moments. My work has also greatly benefited from coursework and conversations with faculty at UCSC, especially Noriko Aso, Nancy Chen, Alan Christy, Chris Connery, Minghui Hu, David Keenan, Marc Matera, and Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther. I am especially grateful to all of the faculty and staff in the Department of History. From my undergraduate years at the University of Nevada, Reno, I would like to express my gratitude for the unending and enthusiastic support of Hugh Shapiro, without whom I would not be an historian of China. The coursework and research necessary to complete this dissertation would not have been possible without generous funding from the University of California, Santa Cruz Department of History and the Humanities Institute. The University of California Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship allowed me to focus solely on research on writing for several crucial years. With the support of the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) Small Grant, the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies Predissertation-Summer Travel Grant, and the U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship Program, I was also able to do extended research and language study in China. My research was made easier with the help of many scholars at the Ocean University of China in Qingdao, Fudan University, and Nankai University. I v especially wish to thank professors Zhao Hailin and Jin Guangyao. My dissertation also benefited greatly from the assistance of the archivists, librarians, and staff of the Qingdao Municipal Archives, the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Tianjin Municipal Archives, the Shanghai Library, and the Nankai University Department of History Library. None of this research, of course, would be possible without the excellent training I received from the many Chinese language instructors of the University of Nevada, Reno, the Chinese language program at Middlebury College, and the International Chinese Language Program at National Taiwan University. Thank you all for your patience, care, and friendship, especially Viv He and Yeh Fang-Wen. I consider myself very fortunate to be part of our close-knit group of graduate students at UCSC. The hardships of graduate school were easier with their intellectual companionship. I am most thankful for my closest comrades Faye Gao and Melissa Brzycki. Without their keen eyes, sharp wit, and steadfast emotional support, my days would have felt much bleaker. I look forward to re-living my research days with Melissa Brzycki in Minnesota. My family has been a continuous source of support, especially my grandfather, Joseph McCoy. The women in my family in particular, and their resilience despite many difficulties, bolstered my commitment to this study of incarcerated lower-class women. My partner, Andrei Anatoilevich Tcacenco, provided continuous support, suggestions, and company during late-night writing sessions. vi Introduction On a particularly hot summer day in the Qingdao Municipal Archives, after a month of slogging through countless archival sources (hospital records from maternity wards, newspaper articles on the Soviet-developed Lamaze method of childbirth, and receipts from Japanese midwives from the occupation years), I stumbled across a startling set of documents: bail requests from 1932 on behalf of four female inmates who were to be temporarily released to give birth outside of the Qingdao city prison. These documents raised a series of questions: were pregnant women always released to give birth? Were they released into the care of family members or a hospital? How common was it for newborns to be returned to the prison with their incarcerated mothers? Were children also raised in the prison? These questions changed the direction of my research. I set out to track female inmates in Republican-era women’s and co-ed prisons in the eastern coastal cities Shanghai and Tianjin, where prison officials left a rich and plentiful paper trail on the female inmates in their care. This project examines the reformist goals of the modern prison and argues that a new gendered ideology of penal reform emerged in early twentieth-century China. For both men and women inmates, the new penal system required an institution based on the principles of science, run by modern, efficient administrators. For female inmates in particular, administrators’ main task was to incorporate women criminals into a regimented, meticulously documented system that would produce a new, modern woman subject. A criminalized woman required special intervention to 1 eliminate her difference from other Chinese women so that she, too, could be a productive citizen and raise her children for the nation. Women criminals, most from impoverished backgrounds, were among the most disenfranchised members of Chinese society, and yet, their lives touched on important issues of national debate in early twentieth-century China. During the years when the Chinese revolution was taking shape, heated public debate centered on the status of women and their proper role. In newspapers, journals, and the print world, the so-called “woman problem” was arguably one of the most important issues of concern in twentieth-century China. Intellectual reformers, such as the early twentieth-century scholar Liang Qichao and China’s most famous modern writer, Lu Xun, focused on a specific, marginalized group — women — and concluded that their uneducated, illiterate, foot-bound state signified the national weakness of the Chinese state and people.1 The so-called “woman problem,” and women’s purported inherent weakness, were thus directly tied to larger conversations about national 1 All Chinese and Japanese names are listed surname first, given name last, except in footnotes and the bibliography, where they are given according to Chicago-style conventions. Liang Qichao, for example, is listed surname first, followed by given name. On foot-binding: Laurel Bossen et al., “Feet and Fabrication: Footbinding and Early Twentieth-Century Rural Women’s Labor in Shaanxi,” Modern China 37, no. 4 (2011):