_full_journalsubtitle: Men, Women and Gender in China _full_abbrevjournaltitle: NANU _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 1387-6805 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5268 (online version) _full_issue: 2 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_author_running_head (change var. to _alt_author_rh): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (change var. to _alt_arttitle_rh): Chinese Women Go Global _full_alt_articletitle_toc: 0 _full_is_advance_article: 0 NAN N Ü Chinese Women Go GlobalNan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 213 brill.com/nanu Chinese Women Go Global: Discursive and Visual Representations of the Foreign ‘Other’ in the Early Chinese Women’s Press and Media Paul J. Bailey University of Durham [email protected] Abstract This article explores the multiple and complex ways in which the gendered foreign ‘Other’ was discursively represented in primarily women’s magazines during the late Qing and early Republic, a period that begins with an unravelling of the confidence in the ‘traditional’ Chinese Woman as the symbol of China’s superior civilisation (and, in a larger context, when Chinese elites were increasingly compelled to interrogate the rai- son d’être of their own social and cultural values amidst growing Anglo-American global hegemony). The article suggests that the ‘othering’ of the foreign woman in the early twentieth century anticipates contemporary Han Chinese representations of the Western Woman as an ‘ambiguous fetish’ and of ethnic minority women as exotic fig- ures on the lower rungs of a civilisational ladder. Keywords Gendered ‘other’ – Asia/Africa – Chinese women’s press – gender conservatism – women’s bodies Introduction During the latter half of the nineteenth century, as a result of increasing and troublesome interaction with the West and the subsequent opening of perma- nent Chinese diplomatic embassies abroad, Chinese officials, diplomats and dignitaries encountered at first hand a largely unknown Other. This encounter ©Nan koninklijke Nü 19 (2017) brill 213-262 nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/15685268-00192P02Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 214 Bailey compelled them to negotiate between an entrenched worldview that posited China as tianxia 天下 (fount and centre of civilisation) and the new realities of China’s evident geopolitical vulnerability in the wake of ever intrusive western imperialism throughout the world.1 In their travel accounts, these elite Chi- nese travellers to the West, in the words of a recent study, made it at once the target of “intense scrutiny, analysis, probing and distortion and the object of desire, admiration, contempt and loathing”; their observations in effect consti- tuted a metaphorically “colonialist” discourse as they analysed the West through the prism of their own conceptual categories and systems of classifi- cation.2 A key aspect of this discursive encounter was gender-inflected, in which the ‘traditional’ Chinese Woman and Chinese gender (and sexual) prac- tices were implicitly or explicitly upheld as symbolising the superiority of Chi- nese civilisation vis-à-vis the western ‘other’. Such an assumption had underpinned earlier fictional accounts of Chinese travellers in the wider world, especially to an imagined West.3 A good example of this kind of fiction is the late eighteenth-century novel, Yesou puyan 野叟曝 言 (Humble words of an old rustic), by Xia Jinqu 夏敬渠 (1705-87).4 The novel 1 Xiaofei Tian, Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings From Early Medieval and Nineteenth Century China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 155. Tian compares the Northern and Southern Dynasties (317-589 CE) with the nineteenth century as periods witnessing con- siderable anxiety over the invasion of outside influences, (in the former case, referring to Buddhism) and a consequent loss of cultural heritage, while also experiencing the appropria- tion of foreign ideas and their incorporation into indigenous culture. 2 Tian, Visionary Journeys,158. See also Mingming Wang, The West as the Other: A Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2014), 1-2. 3 Note also that non-Han women in Chinese frontier travel literature and ethnographical writ- ing frequently served as a symbol for the cultural and racial ‘other’, contrasted with the Chinese Confucian Woman as the emblem of a civilising mission promoting the superiority of Confucian marriage rituals or normative gender relations. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 219; Peter Perdue, “Nature and Nurture on Imperial China’s Frontiers,” Modern Asian Studies 43.1 (2009): 245-67, and see especially page 252. For more detailed studies of ethnographical and travel writing pertaining to non-Han women in China’s border and frontier zones, especially during the Qing period, see Stevan Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Emma J.Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures 1683-1895 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). 4 The following discussion draws on Keith McMahon, “A Case for Confucian Sexuality: The Eighteenth Century Novel Yesou puyan,” Late Imperial China 9.2 (1988): 32-55; Martin Huang, “From Caizi to Yingxiong: Imagining Masculinities in Two Qing Novels Yesou puyan and Sanfen DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 215 narrates the domestic and overseas exploits of a male Confucian hero, Wen Suchen 文素臣, as well as of those of his offspring and male literati friends, with the aim, in the words of a recent study, to construct a “universal empire of Confucian orthodoxy” that ultimately prevails over various forms of gender and sexual heterodoxy in the world.5 In its depiction of Europe the novel drew on popular images of the ‘far west’ (Da Qin 大秦) dating from the Han dynasty period (third century BCE – third century CE), and conventionally thought to refer to the Roman empire as a legendary exotic kingdom populated by conju- rors and acrobats. Significantly, however, the novel now also described Da Qin as a dystopian land of heresy because of its divergence from Confucian gender ideology – symbolised by the overly sexualised bodies of degenerate women. Thus Wen Suchen declares to two foreign women from Da Qin he has encoun- tered on his travels: In the future if I had the support of the emperor, I would spread [Confu- cian norms] overseas and transform the barbarians into Chinese, and I would have all the people in Da Qin follow Chinese marriage ritual.6 Wen Suchen’s agenda is later realised by his great grandson when he travels to Europe and successfully “improves” sexual practices amongst members of var- ious royal families, instructing them in the more “rational” ways of sexual inter- course based on virtuous self-control rather than resorting to unrestrained behaviour propelled by lustful desires, so as to produce more sons. In so doing, the superiority of Han Chinese masculinity and Chinese gender norms in gen- eral is affirmed. The “Confucianisation” of Europe is then dramatically illus- trated with the marriage of Wen’s great grandson to a Portuguese princess, who (along with her two sisters who become his secondary wives) is brought back meng quan zhuan,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 25 (2003): 59-98, especially pp. 64-76; Susan Mann, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 161, 177-78; and Huili Zheng, “Gendering Other: The Representation of Foreigners in Yesou puyan,” Sino-Platonic Papers 232 (2012):1-39. The novel was circulated as a hand-copied manuscript until the late nineteenth century when it was published. Both McMahon and Mann translate the novel’s title as A Country Codger Puts His Words Out to Sun. In a later study of polygamy in Chinese fiction, however, McMahon trans- lates the novel’s title as An Old Man’s Radiant Words. See Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth Century Chinese Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 5 Huili Zheng, “Gendering Other,” 3. The novel also describes Wen’s successful eradication of Buddhism within China. 6 Cited in Huili Zheng, “Gendering Other,” 10. Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 216 Bailey to China where she adopts the appropriate role of a Chinese wife, now re- named Haowen 好文 (literally, ‘lover of Chinese civilisation’), and becomes an enthusiast of Confucian teachings. The early Qing diplomats travelling to the West in the 1860s and 1870s exhib- ited a similar proclivity to criticise gender norms there as a means of reaffirm- ing their belief in the superiority of Chinese women and, by extension, of Chinese civilisation. Thus, for example, Zhang Deyi 張德彞 (1847-1918), who had been a member of the Qing government’s first official mission to Europe led by Bin Chun 斌春 (1803-71) in 1866, during his second overseas trip in 1867, this time to the United States, expressed in a diary entry his dislike of the ‘un- feminine’ and uncouth behaviour of American women: The women of the US do not have much feminine manners. No matter whether they are married or not, they intervene in everything outside their household. I am afraid that it is unavoidable that they breach moral codes and violate moral principles. Even a young woman is allowed to live alone in the outside world and follow a male acquaintance to travel for ten thousand miles, and her parents do not utter a word of disap- proval. Instead of crouching like a hen, they fly like a cock; though women they act like men.7 Likewise, Liu Xihong 劉錫鴻 (d.1894), a member of China’s first diplomatic mission to Britain in 1876, and later China’s first minister to Germany, was scathing in his criticism of ‘strange’ and ‘outrageous’ gender norms he wit- nessed during his sojourn.