_full_journalsubtitle: Men, Women and Gender in _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 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 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 (: 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, ’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,” : 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 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, 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 , 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. These included women choosing their own mar- riage partners without parental involvement, and the scant importance

7 Cited in Xiaofei Tian, Visionary Journeys, 193. It is also significant that when Bin Chun during his mission to Europe in 1866 met the Queen of , his assumption that Chinese civilisa- tion was the benchmark for everything meant that he was able to “naturalise” this foreign “other” by unproblematically observing in a poem that she was comparable to the Chinese supreme goddess, Queen of the West (Xi Wangmu 西王母), the mythological daughter of the Heavenly Emperor (Tiandi 天帝); see Mingming Wang, The West as the Other, 1-2. On the Queen Mother of the West, see Suzanne Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). First mentioned in Shang dynasty (1766-1122 BCE) oracle bone inscriptions, by the time of the in the seventh century CE the Queen Mother of the West (also known as Wusheng shengmu 無生聖母, ‘Eternal Holy Mother’) was worshipped by a variety of ideologically re- lated sectarian traditions, mainly of Daoist and Buddhist inspiration, and perceived as the creator of the universe and upholder of cosmic harmony.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 217 married women attributed to fulfilling their role as dutiful daughters-in-law. At the same time, Liu exuded self-satisfied confidence that the ‘traditional’ Chi- nese woman represented the shining light of Chinese civilisation.8 In his diary Liu also expressed his horror at the sight of flimsily-dressed society women with their ‘bare arms and bosoms’ uninhibitedly mingling with members of sex.9 At one formal dinner hosted by the British prime minister in March 1877, Liu observed that: “The women all wore elaborate clothes and jew- els. They displayed half of their upper body, bosom and back, and rubbed shoulders and feet in the hall with the men, with whom they often shook hands.”10 Such blatant exhibitionism and indelicate physical intimacy, in Liu’s view, only confirmed the superiority of modest, self-effacing, obedient and chaste Chinese women. For Liu this contrast could only be explained by the fact that England (the West) represented an incorrigible ‘other’ (waiyi 外夷):11

Everything in England is the opposite of China. In politics, the common- ers are above the king, in family regulations, lords over the

8 J.D.Frodsham, trans., The First Chinese Embassy to the West: The Journals of Kuo Sung-t’ao, Liu Hsi-hung and Chang Te-yi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 147. 9 In Frodsham’s marvellous turn of phrase, Liu noted the “promiscuous” interaction between men and women in western society “with all the dispassionate detachment of an anthropologist commenting on the sexual mores of a Pacific Islander.” Frodsham, The First Chinese Embassy to the West, lvii. 10 Frodsham, The First Chinese Embassy to the West, 127. Similar observations were made by Li Shuchang 黎庶昌 (1837-97), who was third secretary at the Chinese Embassy in Lon- don and later became China’s Minister to in 1881. Like Liu, Li thought it highly unseemly that women in the West had the freedom to choose their own marriage part- ners, and considered it beyond the pale that at formal balls women might dance with as many as twenty different men in one evening. Li Shuchang, Carnet de Notes sur l’Occident (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sceinces de l’Homme, 1988), 21. This is a partial French translation of Li Shuchang’s Xiyang zazhi 西洋雜志 (Miscellaneous notes on the West), published after his death in 1900. Equal horror at the vestimentary and social “promiscu- ity” of western women was expressed by members of Japan’s first official mission to the United States in 1860. See Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). The irony in this case is that while Japanese members of the mission were condemning the “lewd” behaviour of scantily-clad women (especially at formal occasions), western travellers in Japan at the same time were condemning the “lewd” and “uncivilised” custom of mixed bathing and the shameless exhibition of nakedness in public amongst ordinary Japanese men. 11 Hu Ying, “Reconfiguring Nei/Wai: Writing the Woman Traveller in the Late Qing,” Late Imperial China 18.1 (1997): 72-99, and see page 73.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 218 Bailey

husband. (At home, the wife makes all the decisions and the husband follows her. At the dinner table, the wife takes the seat of honour while the husband sits in a humble position. In all matters of daily life, the hus- band serves his wife as much as the most filial son in China serves his parents….). At birth, are esteemed but not boys….This is because their country is located under the axis of the earth, so that heaven and earth are in reverse order.12

As late as 1892, Chen Jitong 陳季同 (1851-1907), the Chinese military attaché and Consul-General in France in the 1880s and early 1890s who published sev- eral works in French lauding the wonders of Chinese civilisation for a French readership, focused on Chinese family life and the nature of Chinese women as the core symbol of such a civilisation.13 In his book Mon pays: la Chine d’aujourd’hui, published in 1892, Chen not only described Chinese women as pure, loyal and devoted to family life, but also contrasted western attitudes to- wards marriage and love – driven by violent physical passion on the one hand, or motivated by potential financial gain on the other – with those in China, where marriage was underpinned by sincere feelings of mutual devotion and dedicated service to family.14 Chen’s extraordinary confidence in the natural superiority of Chinese women led him to declare that: “The Chinese woman… has no need to embark on perfection. She is born perfect, and science will nev- er teach her anything of the grace and gentleness, the two primary virtues of the household inspired by nature.”15 By the 1890s, however, this confidence was beginning to unravel as Chinese reformers such as Zheng Guanying 鄭觀應 (1842-1923) and 梁啟

12 Cited in Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918 (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1. See also J.D.Frodsham, The First Chinese Embassy, 148-49; and Emma J. Teng, “The West as a ‘Kingdom of Women’: Woman and Occidental- ism in Wang Tao’s Tales of Travel,” in Joshua Fogel, ed., Traditions of East Asian Travel (Berghahn Books: New York, 2006), 97-119, especially page 108. 13 For more information on Chen Jitong, see Catherine Vance Yeh, “The Life-Style of Four Wenren in Late Qing ,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57.2 (1997): 435-49. See also Ke Ren, “Fin-de-Siècle Diplomat: Chen Jitong (1852-1907) and Cosmopolitan Possi- bilities in the Late Qing World” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2014). 14 Tcheng-Ki-Tong (Chen Jitong), Mon pays: la Chine d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Bibliothèque Chan- tier, 1892), 26-62. 15 Tcheng-Ki-Tong, Mon pays, 40. Chen also argued that passionate, ardent love in the West was only temporary and superficial, and often meant that there were many bachelors and spinsters in French society, whereas in China love followed marriage naturally and inevi- tably, and thus resulted in long-lasting and stable unions.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 219

超 (1873-1929) began to scapegoat Chinese women (of all classes) as the root cause of the country’s economic and political decline.16 In 1891 the scholar-re- former Song Shu 宋恕 (1862-1910) drew attention to the urgent need for in China, and sought to validate his case by pointing to the fact that illiteracy amongst Chinese women was even higher than amongst and Japan.17 In lamenting the inadequacies of Chinese women, Song (with his reference to India and Japan) had placed Chinese women within a truly global context for the first time – a global context in which growing Ang- lo-American military and economic hegemony in particular compelled Chi- nese intellectuals after the turn of the twentieth century to question the raison d’être of their own social and cultural values. Several years later, two female contributors to China’s first women’s journal Nüxue bao 女學報 (Journal of women’s learning), published in 1898 by male and female reformers, contrast- ed Chinese women unfavourably with their western counterparts. Pan Dao- fang 潘道芳 thought it shameful that rural Chinese women were completely illiterate whereas in the West even servant girls could apparently read and write letters,18 while Lu Cui 盧翠 called on Chinese women to emulate the pa-

16 Paul J. Bailey, Gender and : Gender Discourses and Women’s Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 15-18. In the literary sphere, a recent article has also argued that declining confidence in the superiority of Chinese gender practices (and hence of China itself) was exemplified in the four tales of Sino-western male-female encounters by the Chinese reformer and journalist Wang Tao 王韜 published in the late 1880s in a volume entitled Songyin manlu 淞隱漫錄 (Random records of a recluse in Wusong). Even though in these tales China is “masculinised” and the West “feminised,” with talented and beautiful foreign women marrying “robust” and “wealthy” Chinese men, a certain ambivalence prevailed. Thus the highly educated, mobile and independent western heroines invariably take the lead in initiating marriage or friendship with Chinese men; even though they travel to China they are not assimilated into and retain their own identities. See Huili Zheng, “Enchanted Encoun- ter: Gender, Politics, Culture and Wang Tao’s (1828-1897) Fictional Sino-Western Romance,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 16.2 (2014): 274-307. See also Emma J. Teng, “The West as a ‘Kingdom of Women’,” 107; 117, which notes that Wang’s stories do not necessar- ily depict the Western Woman as a foil to Chinese womanhood, but rather function to enhance the exoticism of the West – in effect, employing the figure of the Western Woman to glamorise the West as a site of technological modernity and feminine sensuality. 17 Cited in Zhu Youhuan 朱有瓛, ed. Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao 中國近代學制史料 (Shanghai: Huadong daxue chubanshe, 1986), vol. 1, part 2, 865. 18 “Nüshi Pan Daofang lun Zhongguo yi chuangshe nü yixue” 女士潘道芳論中國宜創設 女義學 (Miss Pan Daofang argues that China should establish public schools for girls), reprinted in Xu Huiqi 徐輝琪, Liu Jucai 劉巨才, Xu Yuzhen 徐玉珍, eds., Zhongguo jin-

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 220 Bailey triotic and public spiritedness of western women, who (in Lu’s view) took it for granted that they be actively concerned with national affairs.19 Intriguingly, while Song Shu’s cri de coeur that Chinese women had even fallen behind those of India and Japan hinted at a condescending and dismis- sive attitude towards Asia, and the two contributors to Nüxue bao seemed to assume quite naturally that what pertained in the West constituted the appro- priate benchmark to assess the status and situation of women in China, a num- ber of Chinese students, activists and revolutionaries in Japan during the early years of the twentieth century adopted a strikingly different outlook. As a path-breaking study of the nature and evolution of Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century has noted, this particular group of Chinese activ- ists and revolutionaries took inspiration from, and sought common cause with, anti-colonial and nationalist movements in Asia, including those in India, Vietnam and the Philippines. In the process they imagined a different kind of ‘Asia’ that downplayed the particularistic traditions and interests of its polities in favour of highlighting the shared experiences and actions of its peoples fac- ing the danger of western imperialism and wangguo 忘國 (literally, loss of state or country); in Chinese political discourse, the term conventionally denoted an internal change of dynasty, but it now referred to the demise of a ‘civilisation’ or ‘nation’.20 In the same vein, whereas Chinese officials such as Zhang Zhi- dong 張之洞 (1837-1909) in the 1890s had deployed the expression tongzhong 同種 (same kind/race) specifically to describe the nature of China’s affinities with Japan, early twentieth century Chinese activists in Japan now adopted the term to underline the commonalities between the Chinese people and Filipi- nos, Vietnamese, Koreans and Indians.21

dai funü yundong lishi ziliao 中國近代婦女運動歷史資料 (: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1991), 88-90. 19 “Nüzi aiguo shuo” 女子愛國說 (A discussion of female patriotism), reprinted in Xu Huiqi, Liu Jucai, Xu Yuzhen, eds., Zhongguo jindai funü yundong lishi ziliao, 142-44. Lu specifically referred to the actions of American women during the current Spanish-Amer- ican War (April-December 1898), which included volunteering to be army nurses, and participation in a series of boycotts in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and St.Louis targeting the import of French garments and lingerie, because of the perceived French public sympathy for the Spanish cause. 20 Rebecca Karl, “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Cen- tury,” American Historical Review 103.4 (1998): 1096-1118, and especially page 1097. 21 Karl, “Creating Asia,” 1103-05. Karl, however, further observes that this kind of “expansive global or internationalist moment of identification” with the non-western world (and, in particular, with Asia) amongst some Chinese nationalist thinkers in the years 1895-1905 was supplanted by the more single-minded aim of “racial-ethnic revolution” in pursuit of

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 221

Furthermore, an extraordinary 1903 essay by a Chinese student in Japan, Tang Tiaonai 湯調鼐 (1871-1940), provided a searing critique of western impe- rialism that anticipated the approach of late twentieth century post-colonial scholarship. Tang, who was studying medicine at the time and later became chancellor of Beijing Medical College, asserted that western countries had consistently manipulated the classificatory labels of ‘civilised’ (wenming 文明) and ‘primitive’ (yeman 野蠻) in a specious attempt to both legitimise their co- lonial conquests and produce a Eurocentric world history that automatically assigned an inferior status to non-Europeans and their cultures:

I read white people’s national histories. When writing of the colonies they built up, they always decorate [their histories] with glamorous rhet- oric exaggerating their orderly rule by law. They provide plenty of indis- putable evidence on the extent of the primitive customs and ignorance of the native people, as proof of why these peoples deserve to be con- quered.22

Tang had clearly been influenced by ideas discussed in History of the War for Philippine Independence written by the Filipino revolutionary patriot, Mariano Ponce (1863-1918). Originally published in Spanish in 1900, the book was soon translated into Japanese (in 1901) and Chinese (in 1902). Ponce was especially scathingly critical of the ways in which Filipinos had been represented in the West as “primitives” and “relics of the stone age” and hence providing a legiti- mate rationale for their colonisation.23

state power in China. Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC; Duke University Press, 2002), 3. On the role of Asian intellectuals at this time – the Japanese Okakura Tenshin 岡倉天心 (1862-1913), the Chi- nese 章炳麟 (1868-1936) and the Indian Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) – in the promotion of a “cultural” Asia that evoked earlier (precolonial) trading and mari- time links but now greatly enabled by contemporary imperialist technologies and modes of regional integration, see Prasenjit Duara, “Asia Redux: Conceptualising a Region for Our Times,” Journal of Asian Studies 69.4 (2010): 963-83. For a wide-ranging study of how East Asian, South Asian, Arab and Persian thinkers and activists responded to western hegemony during the course of the twentieth century, and their significant impact on processes of intellectual, as much as political, decolonisation, see Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2012). 22 Cited in Karl, “Creating Asia,” 1108. Tang Tiaonai himself ended up as an official of the Japanese-sponsored Beijing government in 1937. 23 Karl, Staging the World, 102-104. Another Filipino intellectual, writer, and activist who was recognised as the quintessential Asian patriot from whom Chinese and other Asians

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 222 Bailey

During their sojourn in Japan, Chinese activists came into direct contact with Asian students and nationalists who themselves were studying in Japan; for example, the Vietnamese anti-colonial leader Phan Boi Chau in 1905-1906 orchestrated a scheme that promoted Vietnamese overseas study in Japan known as the ‘Go East’ or ‘Eastern Study’ movement (dong duc) so that by 1908 nearly three hundred Vietnamese students were in Japan, with most congre- gated in Tokyo. As a result of such encounters, Chinese and Indian activists took the lead in 1907 of creating an unprecedented (albeit short-lived) organi- sation, the Yazhou heqin hui 亞洲和親會 (Asian Solidarity Society), whose aim was to foster mutual support among peoples in Asia currently engaged in the protracted struggle to secure their cultural and political independence.24 Japa- nese socialists close to Kôtoku Shûsui 幸德秋水 (1871-1911), whose book Tei- koku shugi: Nijûseiki no kaibatsu 帝國主義：二十世紀之怪物 (Imperialism: Monster of the twentieth century) in 1901 marked the beginnings of a cosmo- politan and democratic anti-imperialist movement in Japan, were also found- ing members of the society.25 Before its demise the following year, the leading lights of the Society envisaged extending its membership to include Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese and Malays on the assumption that despite their differ- ent cultural and religious traditions they could all ultimately unite under the banner of their imagined ‘Asia’ suffering from wangguo and the depredations of modern imperialism.26

could learn was Jose Rizal (1861-96). In 1898-1900 Ponce travelled to Japan as the represen- tative of the Philippine Revolutionary Government established by Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964). On Ponce’s dealings with Japanese and Chinese activists (including Sun Yat- sen) in Japan, see Benedict Anderson, The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Antico- lonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2013), 201-03; 207-216; 219-221. 24 The Society’s official English title was the Asiatic Humanitarian Brotherhood. Chinese founders included the anti-Manchu revolutionary, Zhang Binglin, who wrote the society’s statutes and had them printed in classical Chinese and English. Mention might be made here, however, that some Chinese students in Japan had quite a different outlook. In pro- testing against the proposed presence of Chinese women (some with bound feet) in the Races of Man Pavilion as part of the 1903 Osaka Exhibition, Chinese students were espe- cially incensed that they would be “displayed” alongside “barbarian savages” (Indians, Koreans, Javanese, Ainu). Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers 1895-1905 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 127-28. 25 Robert Tierney, Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kôtoku Shûsui and Japan’s First Anti- Imperialist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 11-12, 119-122. Kôtoku himself sought to cement ties with other Asian revolutionary movements, as thousands of Asian students and revolutionaries came to Japan during the first decade of the twen- tieth century. 26 In some cases, wangguo was thought to have occurred before the coming of the West.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 223

Two prominent Chinese members of the Asian Solidarity Society were the anarchists 劉師培 (1884-1919) and He Zhen 何震 (1884-ca.1920), who together edited a journal Tianyi bao 天義報 (Journal of natural justice) pub- lished in Japan from 1907 to 1908. In all probability influenced by both Mariano Ponce’s history of the Philippines’ struggle (ultimately unsuccessful) for inde- pendence from Spanish, and then American rule, and by Tang Tiaonai’s earlier 1903 essay, Liu Shipei likewise condemned the “fraudulence” and “hypocrisy” of western colonial discourse. In a 1907 essay published in Tianyi bao, Liu acerbi- cally observed that such a discourse had simply and blatantly occluded the “barbaric” treatment of indigenous peoples, whether in Vietnam and India, or even in the United States where native Americans, blacks, and Chinese were the victims of racial oppression.27 Also, in 1907 He Zhen, a radical feminist who explored the roots and impact of Confucian patriarchal ideology, penned a re- markably prescient essay on the subject of women’s labour. In contrast to a prevailing view that western material modernity symbolised a higher stage of human civilisation, He Zhen argued that the advent of western and waged industrial labour in China, the ‘sprouts’ of which were only then just emerging in treaty ports such as Shanghai, would have disastrous consequenc- es for lower-class and poor women since such phenomena would merely exac- erbate and deepen the exploitation from which they had always suffered in the past.28 In the same year a jointly-written essay by Liu Shipei and He Zhen even imagined a successful future anarchist revolution in China, after which a new

Thus India was said to have been ‘lost’ to the Mughals, while China had been ‘lost’ to the Manchus. It might also be noted that the Middle East and Central Asia were not included in this particular early twentieth-century imagined ‘Asia’. For a discussion of the various ways Asia was “imagined” throughout the twentieth century (imperialist Asia, nationalist Asia, universalist Asia, regionalist Asia), see Amitav Acharya, “Asia Is Not One,” Journal of Asian Studies 69.4 (2010): 1001-13. Intriguingly, the concept of a pan-Asiatic community enunciated by the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh at the time of the estab- lishment of the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) in September 1945 included Viet- nam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaya, Burma, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, but not China, Japan and Korea. 27 Liu Shipei, “Wuzhengfu zhuyi zhi pingdeng guan” 無政府主義之平等觀 (The view of equality in ), reprinted in Zhang Nan 張楠 and Wang Renzhi 王忍之, eds., Xinhai geming qian shinianjian shilun xuanji 辛亥革命前十年間時論選集 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1963), vol. 2, 918-31. 28 Rebecca Karl, “On Women’s Labor: He Zhen, Anarcho- and Twentieth-Century China in the World,” Labrys/Études féministes/Estudos Feministas (e-journal) Jan-June 2009. He Zhen’s article is translated in Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 72-91.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 224 Bailey

“foreign affairs department” would seek an alliance with weaker Asian coun- tries, as well as with European anarchist parties, to subvert and ultimately overthrow white global hegemony.29 Liu Shipei and He Zhen’s sceptical attitude towards western civilisational discourse and practice was shared by the writer Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936), who was also studying in Japan at the time. In a series of essays published in 1908, shortly before returning to China in 1909, he cautioned against the simplistic conflation of the “modern” with the “civilised” West, critiquing teleological no- tions of history and the assumption that only the western experience repre- sented the universal model of modern progress. Lu Xun warned that western civilisations were no less prone to “aberrant developments” and that the ills currently plaguing western nations, that is, materialism and the erosion of moral values, might inadvertently be transmitted to those countries which mindlessly mimicked western ways.30 This article utilises the Chinese periodical press, and in particular, an emerg- ing women’s press, during the last years of the Qing monarchy and early years of the Chinese Republic – a period when Chinese commentators were increas- ingly able to analyse gender norms and practices within a global context – to explore how, and in what ways, both western and non-western, particularly Asian women, were discursively represented. In so doing, it suggests that these representations illuminate changing and multiple perceptions of Chinese women themselves, and how they were to be positioned in a wider world. Fur- thermore, an analysis of how the foreign female ‘Other’ was represented in the Chinese periodical press might reveal the extent to which the early twentieth century Chinese identification with Asia, embraced by the small group of Chi- nese activists in Japan referred to earlier, that questioned “Euro-American cen- trality” and problematised western-derived assumptions of “civilisation” and “progress” had an “afterlife” in subsequent years.31

29 He Zhen and Liu Shipei, “Lun zhongzu geming yu wuzhengfu geming zhi deshi” 論種族 革命與無政府革命之得失 (On the pros and cons of racial revolution and anarchist revolution), reprinted in Zhang Nan and Wang Renzhi,eds., Xinhai geming qian shinian- jian shilun xuanji, vol.2, 947-59. 30 Eileen Cheng, “’In Search of New Voices from Alien Lands’: Lu Xun, Cultural Exchange and the Myth of Sino-Japanese Friendship,” Journal of Asian Studies 73.3 (2014): 589-618. Cheng further observes that in his vernacular stories published after 1918, Lu Xun often implied that discourses appropriated from the West (for example, pertaining to science, hygiene, individualism) were no more than tactics of “civilising” oppression. 31 I borrow the phrase “Euro-American centrality” from Karl, Staging the World, 83. Some of the contributors (male and female) to the Chinese women’s press, having also studied in Japan before 1911, would most likely have been aware of this train of thought, as well as of

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 225

The Emergence of a Chinese Women’s Press

As noted earlier, the first Chinese women’s journal was the Nüxue bao, pub- lished by a group of female activists in 1898 at the height of the One Hundred Days Reform movement.32 Twelve issues of the journal were published; arti- cles, mostly written in classical Chinese by an all-female editorial board of twenty, urged women to develop their artistic and literary skills, as well as ex- pand their knowledge of science and medicine.33 As a pioneering study of the Chinese women’s press by the French sinologist Jacqueline Nivard noted, the publication of a women’s journal at this time constituted a “revolutionary act” in itself.34 For the first time women openly contributed to, and edited, publica- tions that called into being a new female readership, a universal category of ‘women’ who were variously addressed as ‘sisters’ (jiemei 姐妹) or ‘female com- patriots’ (nü tongbao 女同胞). Between 1898 and 1911, approximately 37 Chi- nese women’s journals appeared, most of which were published either in Japan or Shanghai.35 Unlike the more commercial women’s magazines published af- ter 1912,36 which tended to be financed by large publishing houses such as the Shanghai Commercial Press,37 the pre-1911 journals were mostly self-financed by individual founders, had limited print-runs, and tended to fold after several

the ideas of Liu Shipei and He Zhen. Furthermore, as already noted, Mariano Ponce’s study of the Philippines’ independence movement and its critique of western civilising discourse was translated into Chinese in 1902. 32 In her pioneering study of the early Chinese women’s press, Charlotte Beahan mistakenly notes that China’s first women’s journal appeared in 1902. Charlotte Beahan, “Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women’s Press 1902-1911,” Modern China 1.4 (1975): 379- 416. 33 Bailey, Gender and Education in China, 19-23. See also Lü Meiyi 呂美頤 and Zheng Yongfu 鄭永福, eds., Zhongguo funü yundong 中國婦女運動 (1840-1921) (Luoyang: Henan ren- min chubanshe, 1990), 94-99. 34 Jacqueline Nivard, “L’évolution de la presse féminine 1898 à 1949,” Études chinoises 5.1-2 (1986): 157-84, especially page 160. 35 Nivard, “L’évolution de la presse féminine,” 157. A recent study notes that “thirty-odd” women’s journals were published between 1898 and 1912. Joan Judge, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 41. 36 Thirty-one women’s journals were published between 1912 and 1937. Judge, Republican Lens, 42. 37 On the history of the Shanghai Commercial Press, see Jean-Pierre Drège, La Commercial Press de Shanghai 1897-1949 (Paris: Institut des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, 1978).

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 226 Bailey issues.38 On the other hand, seventeen of the women’s journals published be- fore 1911 had a female editor (four were edited by men; the editorships of the others are unknown).39 By way of contrast, the two most prominent and lon- gest-running women’s journals of the early Republic – Funü shibao 婦女時報 (The Ladies times, 1911-1917) and Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌 (The Ladies magazine, 1915-1931) – were edited by men.40 Also, whereas most contributors to the pre-1911 women’s journals were women, contributors to the early Republican women’s magazines were just as likely to be men, for the most part students or budding writers, even if, in some cases, they presented themselves as female authors, adding nüshi 女士, mean- ing ‘Miss’, before or after their names. In effect, the early Republican women’s magazines such as Funü shibao and Funü zazhi represented a new kind of pub- lication – more commercially-oriented, manifested in the greater prominence given to popular fiction amongst its contents, and appealing equally to a male constituency evincing growing interest in the ‘new-style woman’, the meaning of whom was rather fluid during this period, but which generally connoted an educated and ‘modern’ woman who still retained ‘traditional’ virtues of defer- ential wifehood and responsible motherhood.41 As with the pre-1911 journals, the content of early Republican women’s magazines included editorials, trans- lations, biographies, and foreign/domestic news, although there were now

38 Nivard, “L’évolution de la presse féminine,” 176 n24 estimates that print-runs of these jour- nals were no more than several hundred, although the editor of Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi 中國新女界雜誌 (Chinese New Women’s World), of which six issues were published in 1907, reported a print-run of 7,000 copies – which in all probability is an over-estimate. 39 Nivard, “L’évolution de la presse féminine,” 161. 40 Funü shibao was edited by the popular fiction writer, Bao Tianxiao 包天笑 (1875-1973). The Funü zazhi, until 1920, was edited by Wang Yunzhang 王蘊章 (1884-1942). He was succeeded by a series of male editors, one of whom was Zhou Jianren 周建人 (1888-1984), the younger brother of Lu Xun. For a brief period in 1917, the chief editor of Funü zazhi was a woman, Hu Binxia 胡彬夏 (1888-1931), who had earlier studied in Japan and the United States and who in her writings enthusiastically promoted the model of the dili- gent and skilled American housewife. For more information on Hu Binxia, see Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States 1900-1927 (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 136-41. 41 Print runs of these journals were considerably higher than those published before 1911. About 6,000-7,000 copies per issue of Funü shibao were published (taking into account the practice of each copy being circulated amongst several readers, the total readership of the magazine may have totalled 140,000). Judge, Republican Lens, 18. The print-run of Funü zazhi increased from 3,000 in 1915 to 10,000 in 1919. Jacqueline Nivard, “Women and the Women’s Press: The Case of the Ladies Journal (Funü zazhi), 1915-1932,” Republican China 10.1b (1984): 37-55, and especially page 37.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 227 more illustrations, including photographs, and more specialised articles on marriage and family life, science, nutrition, hygiene and medicine, child psy- chology, and practical knowledge relating to the efficient management of the household, the latter very much part of a wider agenda in the Chinese women’s press at this time to promote the virtues of professional, rational and scientific domesticity.42 Thus, in contrast to the pre-1911 Chinese women’s press – catering to Chi- nese student activists in Japan and Shanghai and for the most part critical of the ruling Qing dynasty while urging women to be more publicly active, the first issues of Funü shibao published just before and after the also discussing the merits and demerits of women’s – which was po- litically motivated, early Republican women’s magazines such as Funü zazhi and Zhonghua funüjie 中華婦女界 (Chinese women’s world, 1915-1916),43 cater- ing to an emerging urban middle class (male and female) fascinated with ma- terial modernity, had no such political ambitions. The first issues of Funü zazhi, for example, published a regular column on “new household knowledge” (jiat- ing xin zhishi 家庭新知識) that informed its readers of the latest and most sci- entific ways to wash clothes (using ‘Fuller’s Earth’, an absorbent powdery clay) or to preserve woollen garments (with judicious application of ‘Keating’s In- sect Powder’, a product much in demand in late Victorian Britain). Early issues of Funü shibao also featured advertisements, clearly aimed at a middle-class female audience, for “Hazeline Snow,” a facial moisturising cream first manu- factured in the United States in 1892. Such a phenomenon intriguingly antici- pates that of 1990s China, a period of accelerating market reform when women’s magazines increasingly advertised cosmetics and skin-whitening creams to entice the female consumer of ‘beauty’.44

42 On this phenomenon, see Paul J. Bailey, “Active Citizen or Efficient Housewife? The Debate Over Women’s Education in Early Twentieth Century China,” in Glen Peterson, Ruth Hayhoe and Yongling Lu, eds., Education, Culture and Identity in Twentieth Century China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 318-47; and Bailey, Gender and Education in China, 95-97. 43 Zhonghua funüjie was published by the Zhonghua Book Company (Zhonghua shuju 中華 書局), founded in 1912 to rival the Shanghai Commercial Press. One of its founders was Lu Feikui 陸費逵 (1886-1941), a prominent education publicist and school textbook com- piler who had earlier edited Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 (The Educational Review), one of the first specialised Chinese journals on educational thought and practice. 44 Perry Johansson, “White Skin, Large Breasts: Chinese Beauty Product Advertising and Popular Culture,” China Information 13.2-3 (1998): 59-83. See also Harriet Evans, “Market- ing Femininity: Images of the Modern Chinese Woman,” in Timothy Weston and Lionel Jensen, eds., China Beyond the Headlines (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000),

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 228 Bailey

The Multifaceted Western ‘Other’

Notwithstanding the differences between the pre-1911 women’s journals and the early Republican women’s magazines, it is evident that from its beginnings in the early twentieth century the Chinese women’s press always tended to highlight comparisons with the West, in the sense of citing or referencing west- ern practice and attitudes as the yardstick in its explication and evaluation of gender norms in China, the status of Chinese women, and features of their everyday lives.45 At times this meant contrasting Chinese women unfavour- ably with their western counterparts. For example, a 1904 article in Nüzi shijie 女子世界 (Women’s world) drew an unflattering contrast between lethargic, timid and emaciated Chinese women with supposedly more active, outgoing and physically robust western women, referred to as “immortals” (xianshen 仙 神).46 The second issue of Funü shibao in 1911 enthusiastically described the virtues of American women and their status in society (and to which Chinese women should aspire), although a curious contradiction underlay what was considered worthy of emulation. Thus, on the one hand, the article took note of the extreme respect accorded women in American society: men raising their hats to women they knew on the street, men who accompanied women on the street always walking on the outside, men always walking behind women when climbing stairs, and men always helping women to get on and off buses and trams. On the other hand, the article revelled in the fact that American women were not pampered, fragile or weak, but rather led active physical lives and sought competitive equality with men in fitness and sport.47 Given such a focus on the West, it is no coincidence either that the biogra- phies of foreign women appearing in the Chinese women’s journals primarily featured western women. Accounts of the pioneering American educator Mary Lyon (1797-1849), who founded two girls’ schools in her home state of Massachusetts during the 1830s, for example, appeared regularly throughout the 1910s, serving to demonstrate the importance of female education. In order

217-43; and Harriet Evans, “Fashion and Feminine Consumption,” in Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson and Jakob Klein, eds., Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China (London: Routledge, 2006), 173-89. 45 In more general terms, a study of Funü shibao calculates that nearly seventy per cent of the photographs of foreign individuals, landscapes and art featured in the journal were of western subjects. Judge, Republican Lens, 25. 46 Anonymous,“Nüzi jianyi tiyu” 女子簡易體育 (Women’s basic physical education), Nüzi shijie 10 (1904), jiaoyu, 1-8. 47 Anonymous, “Meiguo funü zatan” 美國婦女雜談 (Random discussion of American women), Funü shibao 2 (1911): 51-54.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 229 to valorise the beneficial and productive involvement of women in public and national affairs, translated excerpts from an 1886 work, Lives of Girls Who Be- came Famous (Taixi lienü zhuan 泰西列女傳), by the American Sarah Knowles Bolton (1841-1916), writer and active participant in the women’s temperance movement, were published by Funü zazhi in 1917.48 Significantly, all the por- traits were of western women (the Chinese translation of the book’s title spe- cifically referred to ‘western’ women/taixi), who included the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), writer and champion of native Americans Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-85), and English prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780- 1845). Even as late as 1942 only one non-western woman made an appearance in a collection of Chinese and foreign women’s biographical portraits – the Indian poet and political activist Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949).49 On the other hand, another representational strategy of the early Republi- can women’s press was to commandeer western models in order to valorise (and thereby justify) conventional Chinese notions of womanhood and femi- nine virtue, in much the same way that the first readers for girls’ schools in the last years of the Qing or the first detailed collective biography of western fe- male exemplars published in 1906 by the female poet and educator, Xue Shao- hui 薛紹徽 (1855-1911), had done.50 Thus just as school readers and Xue Shaohui’s text had exalted such figures as Joan of Arc or Florence Nightingale

48 Anonymous, “Taixi lienü zhuan” 泰西列女專 (Biographies of Western Women), Funü zazhi 3.5 (1917), jishumen, 1-11; 3.6 (1917), jishumen, 7-15; 3.7 (1917), jishumen, 1-9; 3.8 (1917), jishumen, 1-8; 3.9 (1917), jishumen, 5-14; 3.10 (1917), jishumen, 3-11; 3.11 (1917), jishumen, 8-16; 3.12 (1917), jishumen, 3-14. While Chinese women’s journals tended to feature western political and social female figures, a popular entertainment journal of the time, Libailiu 禮拜六 (Saturday), which ran from 1914 to 1923, featured illustrations and photographs of western female artistic celebrities such as the French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844- 1923) and English stage actress Ellen Terry (1847-1929) [in issue no. 3, June 1914], the Rus- sian ballerina (1881-1931) and Danish actress Ellen Aggerholm (1882-1963) [in issue no. 6, July 1914], and the Hungarian-born American singer and actress Mitzi (Mizzi) Hajos (1889-1970) [in issue no.9, August 1914]. 49 Lu Manyan 陸曼炎, Zhongwai nüjie zhuan 中外女界傳 (Chongqing: n.p, 1942). Sarojini Naidu was the first woman to preside over the Indian National Congress (in 1925); after Indian independence in 1947, she became governor of Uttar Pradesh state. The western women discussed in the collection included the Swedish educator and suffragist Ellen Key (1849-1926), the American philosopher and women’s suffrage pioneer Jane Addams (1860-1935), social activist and leader of the early women’s movement in the United States Elizabeth Stanton (1815-1902), and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). 50 Nanxiu Qian, “’Borrowing Foreign Mirrors and Candles to Illuminate Chinese Civilisa- tion’: Xue Shaohui’s Moral Vision in the Biographies of Western Women,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004):60-101; Joan Judge, “Blended Wish Images: Chinese

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 230 Bailey as the embodiment of female nurture, perseverance, and self-sacrifice, so some contributors to the early Republican women’s press co-opted western women in their quest to highlight positive aspects of ‘traditional’ Chinese woman- hood. An article in Funü shibao, for example, focused on the mother of George Washington as a paragon of frugality and maternal devotion; even after her son became president, the article observed, she continued to live in the simple family home, raising chickens and silkworms – the latter a significant econom- ic activity in which Chinese rural women, especially in central and southern China, were heavily involved – all the while exhorting her son to perform dili- gently his national duties, just as the mother of Mencius had tirelessly exhort- ed her son to study assiduously.51 Likewise, the mother of Napoleon was praised as an exemplary ‘worthy mother’ (xianmu 賢母) who embodied the virtues of modesty and self-sacrifice.52 A third feature of the representation of the gendered western ‘other’ at this time has tended to be completely overlooked by historians. During the early years of the Chinese Republic, and in the wake of a vociferous and boisterous Chinese suffragist campaign from 1911 to 1913 for equal educational and politi- cal rights,53 western discourse and practice were actually cited at times to jus- tify condemnation or rejection of perceived gender radicalism in China. In the first issue of Funü zazhi, for example, a Shanghai teacher, Yu Tiansui 余天遂, argued that the advocates of women’s rights in China had gone too far, encour- aging “our calm-natured women” (wo xing jing qingyi zhi nüzi 我性靜清逸之女 子) to engage in unrestrained and fruitless competition with men, instead of aspiring to fulfil roles more appropriate to their innate virtues (e.g. diligence, perseverance, loyalty) and talents such as handicraft skills. Contemptuously dismissing such women as “unharnessed fillies” (fan jia zhi ma 泛駕之馬), Yu underlined their “unbecoming” behaviour and outlook by citing in particular the “positive” example of the United States, where apparently ‘responsible’ American women took extremely seriously their household and marital duties,

and Western Exemplars at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 102-35. 51 Anonymous, “Yingxiong nengdu zhi Huashengdun mu” 英雄能度之華盛頓母 (The heroic and magnanimous mother of Washington), Funü shibao 5 (1911): 39-41. 52 Xu Chan 許嬋, “Napolun zhi mu Liqixia zhuan” 拿破崙之母黎琪夏傳 (Biography of Letizia, Napoleon’s mother), Funü shibao 12 (1914): 1-14. See also Xu Chan, “Napolun di zhi mu” 拿破崙帝之母 (The mother of Emperor Napoleon), Zhonghua funüjie 4 (1915). 53 Bailey, Gender and Education in China, 75-9; Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics and Democ- racy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), Chapter 3.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 231 such as encouraging and supporting their husbands.54 A contributor to Zhong- hua funüjie in 1915 likewise condemned what he perceived as the “disorderly” and “irreverent” behaviour of female students “clamouring” for equal rights; at a time, he observed, when in the West a more “prudent” and “level-headed” approach to the question of women’s rights was increasingly becoming the norm, young Chinese women were perversely demanding even more equality.55 Another article in the journal insisted that given women’s naturally empathet- ic nature, it was completely inappropriate for them to engage in “foolhardy” and “reckless” struggle with men over equal rights rather than providing help and support for their menfolk; in order to demonstrate the validity of such a view, the article drew the reader’s attention to more “civilised” practice in the West, where apparently women’s dedicated and selfless service to husbands and households was especially valued.56 As early as 1909, in fact, Hu Binxia (a future editor of Funü zazhi), in a letter sent from the United States where she was studying, enthusiastically praised the teaching of culinary skills and “practical household management” (shixi jiazheng 實習家政) in American vocational schools for girls. Unlike in China, she observed, where female students disdainfully considered household man- agement as an “inferior or mean occupation” (jianye 賤業), women in the Unit- ed States were well aware that such an activity was their “natural task” (tianzhi

54 Yu Tiansui 余天遂, “Yuzhi nüzi jiaoyu guan” 余之女子教育觀 (My views on Chinese women’s education), Funü zazhi 1.1 (1915): lunshuo, 1-7. Such a view is very different from one that supposedly hailed the United States as the most advanced country in terms of women’s rights and highlighted by Carol Chin, “Translating the New Woman: Chinese Feminists View the West 1905-1915,” Gender & History 18.3 (2006): 490- 518, especially pages 498-499. 55 Wu Chongmin 伍崇敏, “Nannü ziyou pingdeng zhenjie” 男女自由平等真解 (A true explication of male-female equality), Zhonghua funüjie 1.1 (1915). The article also referred to the views of former American president Theodore Roosevelt, who apparently thought that the extension of women’s rights did not necessarily bring happiness to women or benefit for the country. On the critical discourse pertaining to Chinese female students during the early Republic, see Paul J Bailey, “’Unharnessed Fillies’: Discourse on the ‘Mod- ern’ Female Student in Early Twentieth Century China,” in Lo Jiu-jung 羅久容 and Lü Miaw-fen 呂妙芬, eds., Jindai Zhongguo de funü yu wenhua 近代中國的婦女與文化 (Taibei: Institute of Modern history, Academia Sinica, 2003), 327-57; and Paul J Bailey, “’Women Behaving Badly’: Crime, Transgressive Behaviour and Gender in Early Twentieth Century China,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 8.1 (2006): 156-97. 56 Liang Lingxian 梁令嫻, “Suo wang yu wuguo nüzi zhe” 所望於吾國女子者 (What I expect from our country’s women), Zhonghua funüjie 1.1 (1915).

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 232 Bailey

天職) and contributed to national prosperity.57 Hu later suggested that the American household was the ideal model to which a country should aspire since it was “the site where the housewife has developed her knowledge and skills.”58 Other commentators such as Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 (1873-1958), a prominent school textbook compiler and an educational official during the early years of the Republic, sought to convince his readers that Chinese female students’ “arrogant” refusal to take seriously the acquisition of household skills was harmful for society by pointing admiringly to the West (and especially the United States), where, he noted, the teaching of domestic science was consid- ered an essential component of women’s education, with “housewifery” valo- rised by society as a professional vocation.59 Not coincidentally, translations from American and British middle class magazines on domestic management, as well as on organised and competent American housewives, filled the pages of the Chinese women’s press in the 1910s.60

57 Hu Binxia, “Fu Yang jun Baimin lun Meiguo nüzi zhiye shu” 復楊君白民論美國女子職 業書 (A letter in reply to Mr Yang Baimin on women’s vocations in America), Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 1.6 (1909): diaocha, 19-34, especially page 31. 58 Hu Binxia, “Meiguo jiating” 美國家庭 (American households), Funü zazhi 2.2 (1916): sheshuo 1-8, especially page 7. 59 Jiang Weiqiao, “Lun nüxuexiao zhi jiashi shixi” 論女學校之家事實習 (On the concrete practice of domestic science in girls’ schools), Jiaoyu zazhi 9.6 (1917): 105-11. A contributor to another specialised educational journal likewise bewailed the decline of household skills amongst Chinese female students at a time when in the West all girls were taught domestic science. Gao Junyin 高竣尹, “Lun nüxuexiao dang zhuzhang jiashi ke” 論女學 校當主掌家事科 (Girls’ schools should emphasise courses in domestic science), Zhong- hua jiaoyujie 中華教育界 1.3 (1913): 42-44. See also another educational report that claimed the United States was the most advanced country in the world for teaching women domestic skills. Anonymous, “Meiguo xiaoxue zhi jiashi jiaoshou” 美國小學之 家事教授 (The teaching of domestic science in American primary schools), Jiaoyu zazhi 11.11 (1919): diaocha, 81-84. 60 See, for example, “Meiguo yibai xianqi zhi zishu” 美國一百賢妻之自述 (The personal stories of one hundred virtuous American wives), Zhonghua funüjie 1.8 (1915); 1.9 (1915); 1.12 (1915); 2.1 (1916), a translation from an American housewives magazine on the compe- tition to discover the superior housewife in each American state. In the early twentieth century Chinese translations of western works (books, articles in periodical literature, etc) were based primarily on original Japanese translations. By the late 1910s, however, articles from British or American women’s magazines and periodicals were being trans- lated directly into Chinese. For example, a 1918 article in Funü zazhi on the “scientific” way of washing dishes and thereby extinguishing dangerous bacteria, was translated directly from an American publication, Mother’s Magazine (Chinese title: Mufan zazhi 母範雜誌, “Model Mother Magazine”), which ran from 1905 to 1936. See “Xizhuo pandie yu xiaochu

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 233

In the context of this domesticity discourse in the early Republic, as well as the growing concerns voiced by some Chinese commentators that young Chi- nese women (especially students) were becoming increasingly attracted to the lifestyle choice of “singlehood” (dushen zhuyi 獨身主義), it is no coincidence either that the valorisation of motherhood in the writings of the Swedish fem- inist Ellen Key (1849-1926) became a popular topic in the Chinese women’s and periodical press at this time.61 As early as 1906 translated excerpts from Key’s book The Century of the Child (1900) had appeared in China’s first specialised educational journal, Jiaoyu shijie 教育世界 (Educational world), while ­ex­­­­cerpts from her other major work, Love and Marriage (1911), appeared in Funü zazhi in 1920.62 In the same year, a contributor to the major current affairs journal, Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern miscellany), praised Key’s concept of moth- erhood (muzhi 母職) as the pre-eminent focus of a woman’s life (apparently based on solid scientific, psychological and biological evidence), and described her as a “pure feminist” (chuncui de nüzi zhuyizhe 純粹女子主義者) because she accepted that the natures of men and women were different and recog- nised the necessity of a division of labour between the two.63 It was not only the “sensible” attitude of women in the West, as well as its “praiseworthy” cultivation of women’s domestic skills, that attracted the admi- ration of some Chinese commentators. In terms of social customs and public behaviour, there were also lessons to be learned from western practice. Thus a 1911 article criticised the “unseemly” behaviour of young Shanghai women (both amongst the “lower classes” and the more well-to-do) who brazenly smoked in public, contrasting this with more refined attitudes in the West,

meijun zhi ” 洗濯盤碟與消除黴菌之關係 (On the connection between washing dishes and the elimination of germs), Funü zazhi 4.11 (1918): jiazhengmen, 1-3. 61 Bailey, Gender and Education in China, 102, 116, 222 n16. Key argued that marriage and fam- ily were the central focus of a woman’s life, and that work outside the home made women sterile or incapable of bringing up children. Ellen Key, “The Woman Movement (1912),” in Sheila Jeffreys, ed., The Sexuality Debates (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 573- 601, especially page 575. 62 Jiaoyu shijie 127 (1906): 1-19; Funü zazhi 6.3 (1920): mingzhu, 1-12. 63 Yan Bin 燕彬, “Ailunkai de muxing lun” 愛倫凱的母性論 (A discussion of Ellen Key’s concept of motherhood), Dongfang zazhi 17.7 (1920): 57-64. See also Se Lu 瑟盧, “Jindai sixiang jia de xingyu guan yu lian’ai” 近代思想家的性慾觀與戀愛 (Modern day think- ers’ views on sex and the concept of love), Funü zazhi 6.10 (1920): 1-8, which discusses Ellen Key’s views on the spiritual nature of love; and Zhang Xichen 章錫琛, “Ailunkai de jiaoyu sixiang” 愛倫凱的教育思想 (The educational thought of Ellen Key), Jiaoyu zazhi 14.8 (1922): 1-9. Other excerpts from Key’s writings are in Funü zazhi 8.8 (1922): 20-25; 8.9 (1922): 73-76.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 234 Bailey where men and women did not smoke openly in each other’s company.64 A 1919 report on the United States likewise referred to the “appropriate” disciplin- ing of young women in public, to the extent that if they paraded through the streets with their faces daubed with make-up, they were apprehended by fe- male police officers and taken to the local police station for a clean-up.65 Sig- nificantly, a petition addressed to the military governor of and Zhejiang in the wake of the 1911 Revolution proposing the creation of a women’s military training institute was rejected on the grounds that even in the West there were no military schools for girls.66 Chinese commentators who were fiercely critical of what they perceived as excessive gender radicalism in China might also draw attention to supposed differences amongst women in the West to add weight to their argument. In magazines such as Funü zazhi and Zhonghua funüjie, for example, women’s ‘exuberant’ life-styles and ‘provocative’ attitudes in France were held up as a negative example, portrayed as the very epitome of hedonism, decadence and recklessness leading to the break-up of families, increasing rates, and a declining birth-rate (often referred to as the “French disease” in the Chinese women’s press). In the radical May Fourth journal, Xin qingnian 新青年 (New youth) one contributor in 1917 wondered whether such tendencies might even “corrupt” conscientious and hardworking American housewives.67 By way of contrast, German women were frequently depicted as authentic “good wives and wise ” (liangqi xianmu 良妻賢母) because they were “obedient,” “patient,” “soft and gentle” (wenrou 溫柔), prudent household managers, and less arrogant and domineering than their French counterparts.68 This particular discourse drawing inspiration from a supposed more “con- servative” and “prudent” approach to the “woman question” in the West as a way of critiquing excessively radical demands in China represents, of course,

64 Anonymous, “Funü yu zhiyan” 婦女與紙煙 (Women and cigarettes), Funü shibao 1 (1911): 81-82. 65 Funü zazhi 5.7 (1919): nüjie yaojian, 4. I presume the article is referring to street prostitutes. 66 Minli bao 民立報 (The People’s Stand Newspaper), 2 January, 1912. 67 Liang Hualan 梁華蘭, “Nüzi wenti” 女子問題 (The woman question), Xin qingnian 3.1 (1917): 1-2. 68 Xu Chan 許嬋, “Oumei geguo furen yuedan” 歐美各國婦人月旦 (The new dawn of and America), Funü shibao 6 (1912): 23-26; Wang Changlu 王長祿, “Fu’de” 婦德 (On women’s virtue), Zhonghua funüjie 1.1 (1915); Liu Sheng 劉墭, “Zhongguo nüxue shifan lun” 中國女學師範論 (On women’s normal schools in China), Zhonghua funüjie 1.6 (1915); Zhi Yuan 致遠, “Deyizhi zhi nü” 德意志之女 (On German women), Zhonghua funüjie 1.7 (1915); Li Foru 李佛如, “Nüjie zhenyan” 女界箴言 (Exhortation to women’s circles), Zhonghua funüjie 1.10 (1915).

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 235 the complete opposite of the approach adopted by some contemporary May Fourth radical intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879-1942) who explic- itly drew on the example of a “modern” and “progressive” West to denounce China’s more “backward” and “feudal” gender norms and practices. In a wider sense, however, it also complicates our understanding of how the West was perceived in early twentieth-century China, especially after 1912. Although lit- tle recognised by intellectual historians of the period, the fact that some con- tributors to the Chinese women’s and periodical press (both men and women) often enlisted western attitudes and practice in order to legitimise their conser- vative outlook on gender issues suggests there were multiple imagined ‘Wests’ from which different lessons could be drawn to further particular agendas.69 A recent article has also suggested that even some Hollywood films that be- gan to be shown in Shanghai and other major cities at this time may have been the bearers of conservative messages that struck a chord with Chinese elite and popular audiences. Thus D.W.Griffiths’ Way Down East (1920), which pre- miered in China in 1922, with its melodramatic portrayal of a victimised young woman (played by Lillian Gish) deceived into marriage and then deserted by an unscrupulous gigolo who is at the last minute “rescued” by the morally im- peccable son of a rural squire – Griffiths’ films were frequently underpinned by an anti-modern/anti-urban outlook – spoke to the growing concerns amongst intellectuals of all stripes (whether “progressive” or “traditionalist”) about the dangers of May Fourth gender radicalism that championed “free love” (ziyou lian’ai 自由戀愛) and freedom from parental or family con­trol.70 The contem-

69 With regard to education reform in early twentieth century China, I have previously argued that the lessons some Chinese educators drew from Western educational practice were very different from those conventionally thought to have been significant (i.e. its “liberal” and “democratic” nature). Many Chinese educators and educational journals at this time, for example, expressed admiration for the West’s focus on centralisation, stan- dardisation (including more government control over textbook material), and extensive official supervision (including censorship) of popular culture. See Paul J Bailey, Reform the People: Changing Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth Century China (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 190-93; and Paul J Bailey, “Globaliza- tion and Chinese Education in the Early Twentieth Century,” Frontiers of Education in China 8.3 (2013): 398-419, especially pages 415-17. 70 Qiliang He, “Way Down East: ‘Way Down West’: Hollywood Cinema and the Rise of Con- servatism in 1920s China,” Frontiers of History in China 6.4 (2011): 505-24. The article con- cludes that ultimately such a conservative stance on women denied them their subjectivity and agency, which would have allowed them to control their own destinies. This “May 4 conservatism” anticipated, and prepared the ground for, the Guomindang’s agenda from the late 1920s on to construct a tutelary regime that sought, amongst other things, to revive the gender ideal of “good wife, wise mother.”

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 236 Bailey porary Chinese women’s and periodical press at this time, not surprisingly, were full of stories of women “abusing” or “wilfully misunderstanding” their new-found freedoms and indulging in “dangerous” passions, and who eventu- ally become tragic victims of society (and men) or slip down the path to moral perdition.71 Taking into account, however, the remarkably cacophonous nature of gen- der discourse during the early Republic, a fourth theme in the representation of the western gendered ‘other’ was apparent. Some contributors to the wom- en’s press were anxious to warn of the potentially dangerous influence of the West in undermining social and gender mores. A 1911 article in Funü shibao, for example, claimed that ill-considered ‘Europeanisation’ (oufeng 歐風) was gradually “infecting” or “contaminating” (wuran 污染) China’s women; this meant, the article continued, that couples were blindly emulating western cus- toms such as holding hands and kissing in public.72 Several years later a con- tributor to Funü zazhi insisted that what China needed at the present time was not a “western-style new woman” (xiyangpai xin nüzi 西洋派新女子) who ar- rogantly disdained to cultivate domestic skills, but rather a “circumspect” (jin- shen 謹慎) and “courteous” (limao 禮貌) domestic manager ensuring the successful and harmonious life of the household.73 An article in Xin qingnian likewise argued that education for girls in China should not go the same way as in Europe or America, where biological differences were being “ignored” in al- lowing the sexes to study the same subjects at school. In a bizarre echo of Liu Xihong’s valorisation in the 1870s of the “traditional” Chinese woman, the ar- ticle insisted that female education in China should develop Chinese women’s “innate” virtues of obedience and selfless service; in so doing, it was predicted,

71 Bailey, Gender and Education in China, 117-18. On the heated press debate surrounding the significance and meaning of the 1922 suicide of an educated “new woman” who worked in the offices of an economics journal (and which chimed with a wider discussion of how the still relatively rare phenomenon of the professional single woman was to be inte- grated into the public sphere and of the need to develop a new morality of gender rela- tions), see Bryna Goodman, “The New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory and the New Republic,” Journal of Asian Studies 64.1 (2005): 67-101. 72 Jiang Wanlan 江紈蘭, “Lun funü zuixin xifa yi jiezhi” 論婦女醉心西法宜節制 (Women should curb their infatuation with western ways of doing things), Funü shibao 3 (1911): 13-16. See also “Zhongguo nannü lifang da chi zhi keju” 中國男女禮防大弛之可懼 (The relaxation of street etiquette amongst Chinese men and women is to be feared), Dagong bao 大公報 18 May,1913. 73 Wang Jiting 汪集庭, “Funü yingyou zhi zhishi” 婦女應有之知識 (The knowledge women need to have), Funü zazhi 3.1 (1917): jiazhengmen, 10-12.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 237

Chinese women would enhance the country’s international reputation and oc- cupy “the top rank amongst women in the world.”74 Finally, it must be emphasised that contributors to the women’s and peri- odical press who championed women’s political, educational and economic rights in China also predominantly framed their discourse with reference to western women – in the sense that they believed, given the right opportuni- ties, Chinese women would surpass their western counterparts in impact and achievement. Significantly, the first history of Chinese women, published in 1913, insisted that Chinese heroines of the past were the equals of western her- oines such as Joan of Arc and Queen Victoria.75 As early as 1903, Chen Xiefen 陳 擷芬 (1883-1923) – a pioneer of the Chinese women’s press who had studied in Japan before 1911 – confidently claimed in her journal Nüxue bao 女學報 (Jour- nal of women’s learning) that the long history of Chinese women’s oppression had endowed them with both unstinting perseverance and a deep hatred of social injustice – character traits that would uniquely equip them in the future to achieve far more than their western sisters.76 Such unabashed confidence was heightened in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution. A certain Ms Zhang Fengru 張風如 in 1912 predicted that the potential of Chinese women to con- tribute to national restoration and prosperity was limitless; she advocated the creation of a women citizens’ bank (nüzi guomin yinhang 女子國民銀行) in which women would pool their resources (that is, through donations of jewel- lery, hairpins, rings, bracelets) and thereby take on the role of the nation’s cred- itors. In a burst of Maoist-like voluntarism, Zhang declared that with their growing economic clout, and taking advantage of imminent educational op- portunities, Chinese women would be able to “surpass” western women within ten years; as she put it, “in one leap they [Chinese women] will reach the peak

74 Liang Hualan, “Nüzi wenti,” 1-2. 75 Xu Tianxiao 徐天嘯, Shenzhou nüzi xinshi 神州女子新史 (Shanghai: n.p., 1913). Xu began his account with a hagiography of the mythical goddess and sage-ruler Nü Wa 女 媧, who assisted her brother Fuxi 伏羲 to repair the pillars of heaven, create humanity, and invent cooking and music. 76 Chen Xiefen, “Zhongguo nüzi zhi qiantu” 中國女子之前途 (The future path of Chinese women), Nüxue bao 2.4 (1903): lunshuo, 1-6. For more analysis of Chen’s extraordinary article, see Bailey, Gender and Education in China, 58. In a similar vein, an article on wom- en’s work confidently predicted that with increased educational opportunities made available to Chinese women, together with their innate patience and diligence superior to those of their western counterparts, China’s economic development would outstrip that of the West. Anonymous, “Lun nügong” 論女工 (On women’s work), Dongfang zazhi 1.8 (1904): shiye, 109-112.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 238 Bailey of perfection” (yizu er dengfeng zaoquan 一足而登峰造全).77 In the same vein, an article in Funü shibao in 1912 claimed that the advent of the Chinese Repub- lic provided the perfect opportunity for China to move ahead of the West by immediately implementing women’s suffrage, a right that another newspaper contributor gleefully remarked was “a dream yearned for in the West” but not yet actualised.78

The Non-Western ‘Other’: Kindred Spirit or ‘Primitive’?

Given the crucial role Japan played in the early years of the twentieth century as a conduit for Chinese intellectuals to access knowledge about the West (pri- marily through translation), how did the Chinese women’s and periodical press represent Japanese women? Before addressing this question it might be interesting to take note of the views of Shan Shili 單士釐 (1858-1945), perhaps the most significant of an emerging group of elite/gentry women at the turn of the century who themselves were becoming international travellers.79 The

77 Zhang Fengru, “Faqi nüzi guomin yinhang zhi shuoming” 發起女子國民銀行之說明 (Explanation concerning the launch of a women citizens’ bank), Shenzhou nübao 神州女 報 1.3 (1912): zhuanjian, 1-5. 78 Jiang Wanlan 江紈蘭, “Shuo nüzi canzheng zhi liyou” 說女子參政之理由 (On the rea- sons for women’s suffrage), Funü shibao 8 (1912): 1-6; Ou Peifen 歐培芬, “Jinggao zheng xuanjuquan zhi nü tongbao” 警告爭選舉權之女同胞 (Respectful words to our female compatriots fighting for the vote), Minli bao, 7 June, 1912. The latter was presumably unaware of the fact that Finland had granted women voting rights in 1906, while New Zealand and Australia had also granted limited voting rights for women in 1893 and 1902 respectively. 79 On Shan Shili, see Hu Ying, “Reconfiguring Nei/Wai,” 88-93; Ellen Widmer, “Foreign Travel Through a Woman’s Eyes: Shan Shili’s Guimao lüxing ji in Local and Global Perspective,” Journal of Asian Studies 65.4 (2006): 763-91; and Yanning Wang, Reverie and Reality: Poetry on Travel by Late Imperial Chinese Women (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 147-60. Chinese women had first begun to go abroad in the 1860s and 1870s, either as western missionary-sponsored students or wives/consorts of Chinese diplomats. Shan Shili was one of the first female travellers abroad who published travelogues providing exhaustive detail on her journeys and places she visited. It might also be noted that female travel within China in imperial times was not uncommon, with wives, daughters and daughters- in-law often accompanying husbands or fathers sitting provincial/metropolitan examina- tions or taking up official posts. Susan Mann, “The Virtue of Travel for Women in the Late Empire,” in Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Lanham MD: Rowman & Little- field, 2005), 55-74.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 239 wife of a late Qing diplomat, Shan Shili spent several months in Japan in 1903 en route to Russia in the company of her husband with whom she had earlier visited Japan in 1899. Identifying herself very much as a model guixiu 閨秀 (elite woman of talent embodying the virtues of female piety, gentleness, mod- esty and marital fidelity), Shan Shili clearly admired Japanese women, who in her view combined an adherence to traditional notions of female virtue with a desire to expand their knowledge. In 1903, after a visit to the Osaka Exhibition, she informed her daughter-in-law that:

… China has a superior sense of womanly virtue; what is regrettable is [Chinese] women’s lack of learning. Japanese women are able to hold to the rules of wifely virtue, while increasing their learning. In this they are admirable.80

She went on to warn her daughter-in-law that many western women “trans- gressed” the “rules of virtue” even though on the surface they appeared edu- cated and beautiful. Chinese women, she insisted, had to learn from their Japanese counterparts. By way of contrast, Chinese periodical discourse on Japanese women exhib- ited near-schizophrenic attitudes. In the journals published by Chinese stu- dents and activists in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, Japanese womanhood was either portrayed as a model worthy of emulation, or as the very embodiment of “backward” submissiveness. Thus while in 1909 Chen Yiyi 陳以益 (1889-1962) described Japanese women in the pages of Nübao 女報 (Women’s Journal) as nothing more than high class slaves (gaodeng nuli 高等奴隸) because of Japan’s pervasive and reactionary gender ideology of ryôsai kenbo 良妻賢母 (good wife and worthy mother),81 a contributor to Nüzi shijie (Women’s World) in 1904 praised the public spiritedness of Japanese women, declaring that Chinese women were not even the equal of lowly Japa-

80 Cited in Ellen Widmer, “Foreign Travel Through a Woman’s Eyes,” 772. 81 Chen Yiyi, “Nanzun nübei yu xianmu liangqi” 男尊女卑與賢母良妻 (Respect for men and contempt for women, and [the concept of] worthy mother and good wife), reprinted in Zhang Nan 張楠 and Wang Renzhi 王忍之, eds., Xinhai geming qian shinianjian shi lunxuanji 辛亥革命前十年間時論選集 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1977), vol.3, 482-84. See also Liu Jucai 劉巨才, Zhongguo jindai funü yundong shi 中國近代婦女運動史 (Lia- oning: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1989), 218. Chen Yiyi maintained that Japanese wom- en’s slavish deference to men was even more iniquitous than that of their Chinese counterparts.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 240 Bailey nese prostitutes who had at least demonstrated a measure of patriotism by donating their valuables to help finance Japan’s current war with Russia.82 Moreover, while in Japan in 1903 Chen Xiefen was impressed with the confi- dent outward demeanour of Japanese female students. She observed:

Every morning … you will see groups of female students with their hair rolled up in buns, and wearing crimson skirts with a belt around the waist passing by. Not one of them wears face powder, and they are distinctive with fair and clear skin …83

Another commentator contrasted vigorous and outgoing Japanese female stu- dents with Chinese women of leisure “solely concerned with prettifying them- selves in the inner chambers and spending the entire day mindlessly wriggling about like playthings on exhibit at a zoo.”84 During the early Republic the women’s and periodical press similarly pre- sented complex and ambivalent images of Japanese women. Thus a key May Fourth journal such as Xin qingnian might highlight the significance and im- pact of the Japanese symbolised by Seitô 青襪 (Bluestock- ing Society), established by a group of Japanese women writers in 1911 who identified themselves as “new women” (atarashii onna 新しい女) and sought to promote free thinking in both their lives and literary works.85 In 1918 Lu Xun’s younger brother, Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885-1967), published in Xin qingnian his translation of an essay Watakushi no teisô kan 私の 貞操觀 (On chastity) written by one of Seitô’s most celebrated members, Yosano Akiko 與謝野晶子 (1878-1942), to support his critique of Chinese male ‘double standards’ con- cerning female sexuality. On the other hand, a contributor to Xin funü 新婦女 (New Woman), a journal published in Shanghai (1920-1921) and one of the first Chinese women’s journals to include investigative reports on Chinese working women as well as articles publicising the case for birth control, preferred to

82 Ya Te 亞特, “Lun zhuzao guomin mu” 論鑄造國民母 (On forging mothers of the nation), Nüzi shijie 女子世界 (Women’s World), 7 (1904): lunshuo, 1-7. 83 Chen Xiefen, “Zuo xuesheng de kuaile” 做學生的快樂 (The joy of being a student), Nüxue bao 女學報 (Journal of Women’s Learning), 2.4 (1903): yanshuo, 3-6. 84 Tai Gong 太宮, “Dongjing zashi shi” 東京雜事詩 (Poems on various topics from Tokyo), Zhejiang chao 浙江潮 (Tides of Zhejiang), 2 (1903): 162. 85 On the role of Seitô in the Japanese feminist movement, see Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 46-52. See also Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitô 1911-1916 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2007).

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 241 dwell on what he saw as Japanese women’s extreme subservience to men. As a result of their lowly status, he observed, Japanese women were obliged to walk a respectful distance behind male companions on the streets, give seating pri- ority to men on public transport, and to turn their faces away when addressing or talking to others.86 Moreover, even a recognition of Japan’s progress in fe- male education could be a double-edged sword. Thus Zheng Yuxiu 鄭毓秀 (1891-1959), who gained a law degree from the Sorbonne in 1926 and became China’s first female lawyer, in a 1920 recollection of the earlier time she had spent studying in Paris before 1914 referred to the painful humiliation she had felt when people frequently mistook her for a Japanese woman (since it was thought unlikely that a Chinese woman could be so highly educated).87 There was, however, another representation of Japanese women other than that of obedient subjects of male authority, or outgoing, public-spirited and active seekers of knowledge. The first issues of Funü zazhi in 1915, for example, deployed quite a different image of Japanese womanhood in its advertise- ments trumpeting the benefits of a brand of fortifying pills especially for wom- en (with the brand name of qingkuai wan 清快丸). The advertisement is illustrated by the image of a Japanese woman in traditional dress (kimono) as the epitome of the ‘good wife and wise mother’ (liangqi xianmu) who ensures her personal health in order to fulfil her duty as a diligent and caring house- hold manager (see Figure 1). In this instance, Japanese womanhood is clearly meant to represent the exemplary Asian ideal in contradistinction to the West- ern ‘other’. Did such a representation extend to other Asian women in the pages of the early Republican women’s and periodical press? The few articles that were published on the lives and experiences of non-western women in the 1910s and early 1920s tended to represent them as the “backward” and “primitive” Other. Thus, while earlier Chinese radicals and revolutionaries in Japan before 1911 (however briefly) had sought common cause with Indian nationalists on the basis of their shared experience with imperialism (while recognising a diver- sity of religious and cultural traditions), articles on India in the women’s press after 1912 were adamant that its loss of independence was due solely to weak,

86 Fu Yanzhang 傅嚴長, “Riben de funü” 日本的婦女 (Japanese women), Xin funü 1.5 (1920): 39-41. In the same article, however, Fu (who apparently spent two years in Yoko- hama) remarked that adolescent girls in Japan were more “natural” (ziran 自然) than their Chinese counterparts, who were only and obsessively concerned with superficial outward appearance, manifested in their wearing of modish fashion items such as high- heeled shoes and fancy spectacles. 87 “Zheng Yuxiu nüshi zhi tanhua” 鄭毓秀女士談話 (Chats with Ms. Zheng Yuxiu), Funü zazhi 6.4 (1920): tonglun, 6.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 242 Bailey

Figure 1 A notice by a Shanghai pharmacist advertising the benefits of a fortifying pill (brand name: qingkuai wan) for women. Noting that all outstanding and heroic figures in the past and present in both China and the West were all raised by ‘wise mothers’, the advertisement insists that it is obligatory for ‘good wives and wise mothers’ (liangqi xianmu) to ensure their own good health in order to perform their required tasks. Source: Funü zazhi 1.5 (May 1915)

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 243 uneducated and superstitious Indian women. A long 1916 article on female customs in India in Funü zazhi warned that China would share India’s fate if the country failed to develop and expand women’s education. Citing early Hin- du religious texts such as Manusmriti (The laws of Manu), the author of the article painted a gloomy picture of Indian women – betrothed at the age of six and married before the age of twelve, kept under close control and supervision at all times, regularly beaten, and expected to treat husbands as gods. Since Indian women were treated as ornaments, the author continued, not only did they not possess any ‘personhood’ (renge 人格), but the only thing that occu- pied their minds was an obsessive hankering for material wealth. The article also referred to the custom of sati (widow suicide) as a clear example of the “cold-hearted cruelty” amongst the people, and which was only abolished with the ‘compassionate’ intervention of the British.88 What is perhaps the most significant feature of this article is its assertion that those sections of Manusmriti dealing with a woman’s strict duty to obey her father and husband had had a direct and malign influence (without speci- fying how and when) in China, resulting in the emergence of a rigidly imposed behavioural code for women that prescribed the “three obediences” (sancong 三從), that is to say obedience to one’s father when young, obedience to one’s husband when married, and obedience to one’s son when widowed. Several years later another contributor to Funü zazhi discussing Indian women like- wise claimed that the low status and restricted lives of Chinese women were directly linked to the influence of “Indian thought,” with its valorisation of fe- male chastity, women’s seclusion within the home, and absolute obedience to husbands.89 While male intellectuals like Liang Qichao in the 1890s or May Fourth radicals in the 1910s tended to associate the “oppressed,” “ignorant” and “pitiful” Chinese Woman with the stultifying impact of Confucian , these articles in the Chinese women’s press located the source of Chinese women’s plight in the thought and customs of a “backward” Asian Other. More-

88 Zhang Zhaosa 張昭洒, “Yindu nüzi fengsu tan” 印度女子風俗談 (A discussion of female customs in India), Funü shibao 20 (1916): 36-46. Curiously, having emphasised Indian women’s subservience, the author later expressed horror at an alarming tendency amongst some of them (especially those from the lower classes) to fly into a rage and verbally abuse people in the street – a phenomenon, the author observed incredulously, that was not generally considered shameful by the public. 89 Ke Shi 克士, “Yindu de funü shenghuo” 印度的婦女生活 (The lives of women in India), Funü zazhi 8.10 (1922): 72-73. The early marriage of boys and girls in India was another custom that horrified Chinese commentators. See, for example, Anonymous, “Kehai zhi zaohun” 可駭之早婚 (The shocking custom of early marriage), Shenzhou nübao 2 (1913): zazu, 53.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 244 Bailey over, while Tang Tiaonai earlier in the century had questioned the West’s ci- vilising discourse as a cynical ploy to legitimise its control over “backward natives,” an article in Funü zazhi in 1918 noted that the positive social reform initiatives championed by western missionaries to improve Indian women’s lives were constantly thwarted by “superstitious” religions and practices.90 This early Republican discourse on the ‘backwardness’ of Indian women and the negative impact of Indian civilisation on Chinese women anticipated the views of prominent male and female intellectuals during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Thus male writers, such as Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) and Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895-1976) later claimed that a major factor in the decline of women’s status in China and the increasing restrictions imposed on them from the period (tenth through thirteenth centuries) onwards was the baneful influence of Indian civilisation (in the guise of Buddhism). Such views were shared by Zeng Baosun 曾寶蓀 (1893-1978), great granddaughter of the nine- teenth-century statesman Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811-1872) and the first Chi- nese woman to gain a university degree in England (in 1916), as well as by Chen Hengzhe 陳衡哲 (1893-1976), China’s first female university professor (when she was hired by Beijing University in 1920), both of whom condemned the dire impact of Indian religion in medieval China on the lives of women and causing their worsening social status.91 Intriguingly, this may have been a far cry from earlier attitudes; Zhang Mojun 張默君 (1884-1965), the daughter of a Qing official who joined Sun Yatsen’s anti-Qing movement before 1911 and be- came a prominent educator after 1912, for example, recalled in her 1953 autobi- ography that at the age of nine she persuaded her mother not to bind her feet on the grounds that female Buddhist saints (bodhisattvas) worshipped by her mother all had “natural feet.”92 For Zhang Mojun at least, Buddhist religion had been a source of empowerment.

90 Jiang Xuehui 江學輝, “Yindu nüjie jinwen” 印度女界近聞 (Recent news on the world of Indian women), Funü zazhi 4.5 (1918): 4-6. By way of contrast, another article maintained that Christianity had been successful in elevating the status and improving the lives of Japanese and Philippine women. Anonymous, “Yadong nüzi ziyou zhi dongji’ 亞東女子 自由之動機 (Motivations for Asian women’s freedom), Funü zazhi 5.5 (1919): jishumen, 1-6. 91 Tseng Pao-sun [Zeng Baosun], “The Chinese Woman Past and Present” (1931), in Li Yu- ning, ed., Chinese Women Through Chinese Eyes (New York: ME Sharpe, 1992), 59-71; Ch’en Heng-che [Chen Hengzhe], “The Influence of Foreign Cultures on the Chinese Woman” (1943), in Li Yu-ning, ed., Chinese Women, 73-86. 92 Chang Mo-chün [Zhang Mojun], “Opposition to Footbinding,” in Li Yu-ning, Chinese Women, 125-28.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 245

Just as articles on Indian women emphasised their seclusion, so the few ref- erences to Turkish women at this time similarly highlighted the isolated and restricted lives they endured; in the view of one contributor to Funü shibao, oppressed Turkish women covered from head to foot in the burqa scarcely ap- peared as human beings. The article, in fact, conflated Turkish women with Muslim women in general since it continued with a description of the seclud- ed lives of , where, in the view of the author, their lack of human contact had apparently given them the mentality of children.93 It should also be noted here that by the late 1910s, Chinese periodical contribu- tors could translate directly from western sources, which themselves might convey assumptions of the inferior non-western “other.” Thus in 1918 Funü za- zhi published a translated essay by an American teacher, Hester Jenkins, on the ‘pitiful’ and limited experience of Turkish women imprisoned in the harem (helun 呵倫).94 In the case of the Philippines, whose anti-colonial struggle against the Span- ish and then the Americans had been so much admired by early twentieth century Chinese revolutionaries,95 a rather contradictory image was presented in the pages of Funü zazhi – a displacement perhaps of the magazine’s am­ bivalent attitudes towards the West (perceived as both a valuable source of material modernity and the harbinger of disruptive and corrupting values). On the one hand, the Philippines was described as a place that had been ‘con- taminated’ (zhanran 沾染) by European mores; this had resulted in the prac- tice of free-choice marriage and couples outrageously expressing their feelings openly and publicly. On the other hand, the lives of pre-colonial Filipinos (es- pecially the women) were apparently mired in a web of superstitious beliefs and customs (albeit exacerbated by the influence of Catholicism). This ex- plained, in the view of the article, the people’s enthusiastic resort to the con- fessional in Catholic churches (translated in Chinese as gaizui suo 改罪所, literally “a place to correct one’s crime”) in order to absolve any guilt they might feel; even women, another article maintained, attend church to openly admit their “crimes” of adultery.96

93 Anonymous, “Lun tuerqi nüzi” 論土耳其女子 (On Turkish women), Funü shibao 4 (1911): 54-56. 94 Anonymous, “Tuerqi guisheng” 土耳其閨乘 (Turkey’s inner world), Funü zazhi 4.1 (1917): 1-2; 4.2 (1918): 1-2. 95 In 1907 Chen Xiefen’s journal published an illustration of the Philippines’ Declaration of Independence from Spain that had first been issued in the Philippines province of Cavite (south of Manila) in June 1898. See Nüxue bao 4 (1907). 96 Ya E 亞娥, "Feilibin xinnian zazhi" 菲利賓新年雜誌 (Notes on new year in the Philip-

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 246 Bailey

Figure 2 Right: photograph of a ‘Chinese old-style wedding’ (under the general title ‘Preservation of the national essence’). Left: photograph of a ‘European new-style wedding’ (under the general title ‘The sweet taste of freedom’). Source: Funü shibao, no.2 (1911)

Visual depictions of the non-western female ‘other’ in such magazines as Funü shibao suggest an evolutionary schema based on dress and marriage practices. Significantly, in its second issue Funü shibao published two photo- graphs juxtaposing the scene of an “old-style” Chinese marriage (with the bride veiled and hidden from view, and the couple flanked by the husband’s parents) with that of a ‘new-style’ European marriage depicting the couple alone arm in arm (see Figure 2). This contrast is further developed in the magazine’s third issue, in which a photograph of a large crowd at a Javanese royal wedding is juxtaposed with an image of a group of seemingly sophisticated European women in “new-style” dress (see Figure 3). The following issue displays the photographs of two Javanese elite women in simple “native” dress (see Figure 4). In 1911 Jiaoyu zazhi featured two photographs of Malayan women (both in

pines), Funü zazhi 3.1 (1917): jishumen, 9-10; Anonymous, “Feilibin fengsu lüeshu” 菲利賓 風俗略述 (Brief account of Philippine customs), Funü zazhi 7.11 (1921): 91.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 247

Figure 3 Top: A Javanese royal wedding. Bottom: Fashionably-dressed European women. Source: Funü shibao, no.3 (1911) bare feet) – one of a servant woman and the other of a “lower middle class” couple (with the woman standing obediently alongside her seated husband, who is wearing footwear), their ‘traditional’ appearance accentuated by the insertion of ‘modern’ accoutrements in both images (a colourful umbrella in

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 248 Bailey

Figure 4 Right: A wealthy Javanese woman. Left: An aristocratic Javanese woman. Source: Funü shibao, no.4 (1911)

Figure 5 Right: A Malayan servant woman. Left: A Malayan ‘lower middle class’ couple. Source: Jiaoyu zazhi 2.12 (1911)

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 249 one, and a table clock in the other) (see Figure 5). Photographs of topless Pa- cific islander women (one of which is juxtaposed with photographs of immac- ulately dressed British and German royal princesses) are featured in issues of Zhonghua funüjie in 1915.97 In many ways, these visual representations of the female Asian ‘Other’ in the Chinese women’s press at this time, embodying timeless and unsophisticated “tradition,” foreshadows the orientalising depic- tion of ethnic minority women within China that became especially ubiqui- tous at the end of the twentieth century. Finally, looking further afield, the very few references to African women in Funü zazhi emphasised their “primitive” nature. A 1920 article on the apparent tendency of Chinese female students to wear elaborate ear-rings in a “vain quest for beauty” was considered especially unacceptable because it made them look like “backward” African women.98 One year later, in the only article specifically on African women during the first decade of the Republic (the source of information for which is not given, but it may very well have come from western missionaries), the author focused on the “strange marriage cus- toms” amongst the Owamba people of southern Angola and northern Namib- ia, highlighting in particular the “primitive” initiation rites amongst young women and the frenzied group celebrations and dancing that occurred before marriage.99 Yet an intriguing satirical cartoon in a 1921 issue of Funü zazhi illustrating the difference between a “primitive” condition and “civilisation” juxtaposes an image of a barely-clothed African woman and her child (representing the “primitive”) with that of a western socialite couple (representing “civilisa- tion”). Given the fact that many contributors to Funü zazhi in the 1910s were highly critical of female students in China, who, in their view, were guilty of

97 Zhonghua funüjie 5 (1915), 7 (1915). One of the very few illustrations of Asian women in Funü zazhi at this time depicts a Malay couple adorned in rich “native” dress. See 6.2 (1919), 12. 98 Xu Shiheng 徐世衡, “Jinhou funü yingyou de jingshen” 近後婦女應有的精神 (The required outlook for women in the future), Funü zazhi 6.8 (1920): changshi, 12-18. See also Shen Weizhen 沈維槙, “Lun xiao banbi yu nüzi tiyu” 論小半壁與女子體育 (On sleeve- less undergarments and girls’ physical education), Funü zazhi 1.1 (1915): jiazheng, 1-2, a rare example of western and non-western women being categorised together as a negative model. The article criticised Chinese young women for wearing tight undergarments in order to flatten their breasts in their “quest for beauty” and thus falling into the trap expe- rienced by western women who wear corsets to bind their waists or African women who “flatten” their heads. 99 Feng Xiqing 封熙卿, “Feizhou jiehun qisu” 非洲結婚奇俗 (Strange marriage customs in Africa), Funü zazhi 7.5 (1921): 65-67.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 250 Bailey

Figure 6 Satirical cartoon illustrating ‘civilisation’ (left) and ‘savagery’ (right). Source: Funü zazhi 7.7 (1921)

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 251 superficial westernisation, championing absolute equality with men, and ar- rogantly refusing to take their ordained future role as diligent and obedient household managers seriously,100 may have contained a hidden message (casting doubt on western gender norms). After all, it pictures the African woman and child deferentially and obediently offering up food to a barely seen patriarch figure, while in the picture of the western couple, the man is wistfully (and hopelessly?) looking at a brash and confident woman who simply ignores his presence as she casually walks past him. (See Figure 6).

Active Western Women and Female Bodies

While doubts may have been raised by some Chinese commentators about the wisdom of emulating western gender norms, what excited readers of, and con- tributors to, the women’s and periodical press in the early twentieth century (despite the plaintive plea by one author that more attention should be paid to promoting indigenous heroines such as Qin Liangyu 秦良玉, the late Ming poet and general)101 was the deeds of derring-do by “active” western women. These included the Frenchwoman Marie Marvingt (1875-1963), the world’s first “great female athlete” (da yundongjia 大運動家) who also flew air balloons, climbed mountains and won awards in shooting and ski-jumping (see Figure 7) and the American Lillian Boyer (1901-1989), the “world’s greatest female daredevil” (shijie diyi maoxian zhi nüzi 世界第一冒險之女子) who performed aerial stunts and parachute jumps.102 Not coincidentally, there was a particular interest in western female aviators at this time.103 As early as 1911 a reader’s letter in Funü shibao expressed admi­ ration for “heroic” western female aviators, who put weak and timid Chinese

100 Paul J Bailey, “’Modernising Conservatism’ in Early Twentieth Century China: The Dis- course and Practice of Women’s Education,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 3.2 (2004): 217-41, especially pages 222-33. 101 Shao Ying, “Qin Liangyu zhuan” 秦良玉傳 (Biography of Qin Liangyu), Nüzi zazhi 女子 雜誌 (Women’s Magazine), 1.1 (1915), zhuanji. 102 On Marie Marvingt, see Anonymous, “Weixian zhi xinfu” 危險之新婦 (The bride of dan- ger), Nüzi shijie 女子世界 (Women’s World), 3 (1915): yizhu, 1-10; on Lillian Boyer, see Liang Zijun 梁子駿, “Bo’er nüshi fangwenji” 波耳女士訪問記 (Record of an interview with Lillian Boyer), Funü zazhi 8.12 (1922): 54-58. Marie Marvingt was the first woman to fly solo in a hot-air balloon in 1909, and during World War One served as a volunteer pilot flying bombing missions over German-held Metz in eastern France. Siân Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 67. 103 Bailey, Gender and Education in China, 71-72.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 252 Bailey

Figure 7 Snapshots of Marie Marvingt illustrating her activities in aviation and flying hot-air balloons, , diving, boxing and rowing. Source: Nüzi shijie, no.3 (1915)

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 253 men to shame,104 while an article in the previous issue highlighted the exploits of British and French female aviators.105 In 1922 Funü zazhi brought readers’ attention to Andrée Farman (1905-1975), who made her first solo flight in 1920 at the age of fourteen.106 Finally, the American aviator Katherine Stinson (1891- 1977), the first woman to carry the US mail by air in 1913, was a source of awed fascination when she gave flying exhibitions over Beijing and Shanghai in 1917, with one Chinese newspaper report claiming that up to 40,000 people watched her perform aerial stunts over Jiangwan, near Shanghai (in an interview during her trip to China Stinson was reported to have maintained that women made better flyers than men because they avoided the dissipating indulgence of to- bacco and alcohol).107 A collage of photographs recording Stinson’s aerial per- formances over Shanghai and her confident pose alongside the plane appeared in a 1917 issue of Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany) (see Figure 8). Illustra- tions of such western women on the move and involved in vigorous and daring activities contrasted with the static and immobile appearance of non-western women featured in figures four and five. Fiction in the Chinese women’s press took its cue from the exploits of west- ern female aviators to imagine even more daring Chinese women taking to the

104 Funü shibao 3 (1911): duzhe julebu, 84. 105 Anonymous, “Yingfa funü lingkong tan” 英法婦女凌空談 (British and French women soar into the skies), Funü shibao 2 (1911): duanwen, 82-83. 106 Liang Zijun, “Faguo diyi youshao zhi nü feixingjia” 法國第一幼少飛行家 (France’s youngest female pilot), Funü zazhi 8.12 (1922): 58-60. Other reports on western female aviators are in Nüzi shijie 1 (1914): biji, 1-7; Zhonghua funüjie 3 (1915); and Jiefang huabao 解 放畫報 (Liberation Pictorial), 2 (1920): xinwen, 4. On the significance of these early flights for female empowerment, see Siân Reynolds, “High Flyers: Women Aviators in Pre-War France,” History Today 39.4 (1989): 36-41. On Katherine Stinson, see Judy Lomax, Women of the Air (London: John Murray, 1986), 29-33. For a study of Chinese female aviators during the World War Two period such as Yan Yaqing 顏雅清 (1906-1970), Li Xiaqing 李霞卿 (1912-1998) and Zheng Hanying 鄭漢英, all of whom made long-distance mercy and fund raising flights across north America, see Patti Gully, Sisters of Heaven: China’s Barnstorm- ing Aviatrixes: Modernity, Feminism and Popular Imagination in Asia and the West (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2008). 107 Funü zazhi 3.3 (1917): yuxing, 20; Zhonghua xinbao 中華信報 (China News), 2, 8, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 22, 23 February, 1917; Da Han gongbao 大漢公報 (Chinese Times), 18 May, 1917. A recent study of Chinese “celebrity” male aviators in the late 1920s and 1930s completely overlooks the early Republican fascination with western female aviators. See Amy O’Keefe, “Stars in the Nation’s Skies: The Ascent and Trajectory of the Chinese Aviation Celebrity in the Prewar Decade”, in Paul Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Liangyou: Kaleidoscope Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis 1926-1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 135-49.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 254 Bailey

Figure 8 Katherine Stinson’s flying exhibition in Shanghai. Source: Dongfang zazhi 14.3 (1917) air (echoing the particular discourse discussed earlier that positioned Chinese women as potentially superior to their western counterparts). Thus a short story published in Funü zazhi in 1917 recounts the adventures of an intelligent young woman, Su Yufen 蘇毓芬, the daughter of a Hong Kong merchant origi- nally from . After studying English and science, she travels to Lon- don where she enrols in a flying school. Although “only a young woman” Su Yufen’s will and ambition (zhiqi 志氣) are greater than those of the average man, and she is rather contemptuous of the so-called “new” men of China who in her view are fit only to drive fancy cars, gorge on luxury food, and adopt “superficial” western habits. After three years in flying school Su Yufen be- comes a highly skilled pilot and attracts the admiration of the entire London population. She then purchases a plane with her father’s help and performs exhibitions all over England, prompting the English press to hail her as an “as- tonishing Chinese woman” (Zhongguo de qi nüzi 中國的奇女子). The story concludes with her triumphant return to Hong Kong, after which she gives ex- hibitions of her flying prowess throughout China.108

108 Xie Zhijun 謝直君, “Zhongguo zhi nü feixingjia” 中國之女飛行家 (A Chinese female aviator), Funü zazhi 4.1 (1917): xiaoshuo, 1-14. Even when Su Yufen was forced to crash land

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 255

In subsequent years, during the late 1920s and 1930s, Chinese pictorials such as Beiyang huabao (Pei-yang Pictorial News, 1926-1937), Liangyou 良友 (The Young Companion, 1926-1945) and Shanghai manhua 上海漫畫 (Shanghai Sketch, 1928-1930) evinced growing interest in female bodies per se (drawing on appropriated new discoveries in science and natural history).109 A recent study has noted that by the mid-1920s photographic portraits of western female nudes (the sources for which were primarily erotic postcards then circulating in the West) were considered iconic symbols of both beauty and western civili- sation.110 Portraits in Beiyang huabao, for example, were accompanied by cap- tions designed to emphasise their wider value in the appreciation of beauty (mei 美) and “fine arts” (meishu 美術).111 At the same time, captions might also contain Chinese classical allusions (eg from erotic Tang poems or Song lyrics), a phenomenon described as “transculturation” (or “recontextualisation”) that

on an uninhabited island near Hong Kong on returning from Guangdong, her resourceful- ness and ingenuity allowed her to survive for several months before being rescued by a passing boat. Note that the term nü feixingjia (female aviator) was newly coined at this time. 109 Jun Lei, “Producing Norms and Defining Beauty: The Role of Science in the Regulation of the Female Body and Sexuality in Liangyou and Furen huabao”, in Pickowicz, Shen and Zhang eds., Liangyou, 111-34, especially page 112. Another chapter in this volume by Maura Cunningham, “The Modern in Motion: Women and Sports in Liangyou,” 95-110, and especially page 104, notes that after 1930 Liangyou’s features on sports tended to focus increasingly on physicality rather than competitive achievement, so that women were no longer presented as athletes “but as embodiments of health and sexuality, photographed within an athletic context”. On Shanghai manhua, see Ellen Johnston Laing, “Shanghai Manhua, the Neo-Sensationalist School of Literature, and Scenes of Urban Life” (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center, 2010). See also Yingjin Zhang, “Artwork, Commodity, Event: Representations of the Female Body in Modern Chinese Pictorials”, in Jason Kuo, ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s (Washington DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007), 121-62, especially page 122, which notes that paintings and photographs of western female nudes appeared frequently in pictorials from the late 1920s to mid- 1930s. On the female nude as a commercial icon during this period, see Carrie Waara, “The Bare Truth: Nudes, Sex and the Modernization Project in Shanghai Pictorials”, in Kuo, ed., Visual Culture, 162-203. 110 Sun Liying, “An Exotic Self? Tracing Cultural Flows of Western Nudes in Pei-yang Pictorial News (1926-1933)”, in Christianne Brosius and Roland Wenzlhuemer, eds., Transcultural Turbulences: Towards a Multi-Sited Reading of Image Flows (Springer-Verlag: Berlin, 2011), 271-300. 111 The editor of Beiyang huabao insisted that the decision to publish images of nudes was “to introduce fine arts from all over the world and not to propagate licentiousness”. Sun Liy- ing, “An Exotic Self?”, 280.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 256 Bailey

Figure 9 Body dimensions of (from top left clockwise) an Australian aboriginal woman, an African woman, an Asian woman, and a European woman. Source: Shanghai manhua, no.47 (1929)

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 257 framed the images with traditional Chinese elements and literary connota- tions.112 In Shanghai manhua, on the other hand, a series of descriptions and photo- graphs (without “recontextualisation”) of the naked bodies of various western and non-western women illustrating supposed differences in body shape and dimensions aimed specifically to highlight the former as meeting the highest standards of physical beauty.113 Thus while the first of these features referred to African women as having over-extended arms, Japanese women as having ex- cessively short legs, and Indian women as having a similar physical shape to that of men, western (ie white) women were described as possessing the most natural and perfectly-proportioned bodies.114 Another article and matching photographs contrasted the rough-skinned, unrefined and muscled (zhuangcu yexing 壯粗野性) bodies of “simple-minded” (chunzhi 蠢直) young Vietnam- ese women (due to exposure to tropical heat and work in the fields) with a “perfectly proportioned” and “healthy” (jianquan 健全) English female youth (owing to the society’s valorisation of physical training).115 Other photographs in the pictorial illustrated contrasting body dimensions of European, Asian, African and Australian aborignal women, noting that Europeans were the most “refined” (yunzhi 韻致), or contrasted African native women with elon- gated necks and protruding mouths with a “beautiful” and well-proportioned Dutch woman (see Figures 9 and 10). Two further aspects of these photograph- ic images (and accompanying texts) are worthy of note. The Asian (not Chi- nese), African and Australian aboriginal women featured in figure 9 are portrayed as remarkably unselfconscious and relaxed in their naked pose (in contrast to the more knowing and seated European woman, who is set apart from the others), anticipating the later representation of ethnic minority women in China as more uninhibited in terms of their sexuality than their Han Chinese counterparts.116 The accompanying text to figure 10, on the other hand, as with many others in the series describing the physical appearance of non-western women, attributes the “unusual” features of the African women

112 Sun Liying, “An Exotic Self?”, 273, 292-297. 113 The series was entitled “Shijie renti zhi bijiao” 世界人體之比較 (A comparison of human bodies throughout the world). Significantly, although the non-gendered term renti was used, the series focused solely on women’s bodies. 114 “Shijie renti zhi bijiao”, Shanghai manhua 11, 30 June 1928: 3. 115 “Shijie renti zhi bijiao”, Shanghai manhua 13, 14 July, 1928: 6. 116 A good example of this is the 1985 Chinese film Sacrificed Youth (Chinese title Qingchun ji 青春祭) in which Dai women in celebrate their sexuality in an open and spontaneous way much to the horror of the more reserved Han Chinese woman “sent down” to their community during the .

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 258 Bailey

Figure 10 Right: two African native women. Left: front and back view of a Dutch woman. Source: Shanghai manhua, no.54 (1929)

to their “peculiar” customs and way of life (in this case carrying food provisions on their heads), thus implicitly highlighting their “primitive” environment. It might be noted here that the increasing visual representation of African women in Chinese pictorials of the late 1920s and 1930s (largely absent before then) in particular is not unrelated to the “primitivist” thinking of Chinese modernist writers of the time (belonging to the “neo-sensationalist” school/ xin ganjue pai 新感覺派) such as Mu Shiying 穆時英 (1912-1940), Shi Zhecun

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 259

施蟄存 (1905-2003), and Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906-1968), who evinced grow- ing fascination with “savages” abroad (especially Africans and Pacific islanders, often conflated as an undifferentiated representation of the “primitive”) and on China’s frontiers as a counterpoint to the urban modernity of Shanghai.117

Conclusion

An exploration of how the foreign female ‘Other’ was discursively and visually represented in the women’s and periodical press during the last years of the Qing dynasty and early years of the Republic reveals two interconnected trends. First, attention was always primarily focused on the West as a frame of reference for evaluating, critiquing or even valorising women’s status and lives in China. In a way, this was not surprising when one considers, for example, how the world was represented in Chinese school textbooks of the time.118 While at the turn of the century “Asia” emerged for some (such as those Chi- nese members of the Asian Solidarity Society referred to earlier) as a collection of peoples resisting European imperialism, by the time of the Republican pe- riod world history textbooks imagined a dominant centre of Euro-America and a world-wide trend of “Europeanisation” (ouhua 歐化) to which non-European regions and peoples (including colonised ones) had to adapt in order to gain

117 On this, see William Schaefer, “Shanghai Savage,” positions 11.1 (2003): 91-133, especially pages 92-93, 110. In Mu Shiying’s 1933 short story “Five in a Nightclub” (Yezonghui lide wugeren 夜總會裡的五個人) reference is made to the “primitive African” music of jazz in a Shanghai nightclub. The story is translated in Andrew Field, Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2014), 37-63, and see page 45. On the other hand, Mu Shiying’s narrator in some of his stories frequently refers to western film celebrities (such as Clara Bow and Norma Shearer) to demonstrate his sophistica- tion. See, for example, “The Man Who Was Treated as a Plaything” (Bei dangzuo xiaoqian de nanzi 被當作消遣的男子), translated in Field, Mu Shiying, 3-34. 118 The following discussion draws on Robert Culp, “’Weak and Small Peoples’ in a ‘European- izing World’: World History Textbooks and Chinese Intellectuals’ Perspectives on Global Modernity”, in Tze-ki Hon and Robert Culp, eds., The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 211-45. In terms of “knowledge pro- duction” in a wider context, it is interesting to note that Beijing University Library in 1917 stocked 8,350 volumes in western languages compared to 1,580 in Asian languages (pre- sumably most of which were Japanese). In 1920 stocked 17,485 volumes in west- ern languages compared to 2,431 in Japanese. Fabio Lanza, Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (New York: Columbia University, 2010), 237n63. Unfortunately, Lanza does not include a separate category in the 1920 figures for volumes in other Asian lan- guages.

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 260 Bailey parity and compete with the West.119 In the final analysis, Chinese textbooks of the 1920s offered such regions and peoples a stark choice: either emulate the Euro-American order and assume the status of a “historical nation” or refuse to “Europeanise” and become objects of history (like Korea and Africa).120 Second, there is little evidence in the women’s and periodical press of an attempt to imagine a particular Asian community of women based on shared experiences and notions of solidarity. Significantly, while some early twentieth century Chinese revolutionaries in Japan before 1911 had used the term Yazhou 亞洲 for their imagined Asian community, there is no reference to this term in the Chinese women’s press. While a few references are made to Yadong 亞東 (another possible translation for “East Asia”) in some women’s journals, invari- ably the author is referring to China only.121 Likewise, the relatively new term Dongfang 東方 (literally, “the East”) usually applied to China only.122 Rather tellingly, in a 1916 article that blamed Chinese women for the country’s lowly position in an international league table measuring the state of household hy- giene, Hu Binxia, a prominent female contributor to Funü zazhi, expressed par- ticular concern that China ranked even below Iran, Turkey and India.123 Such a

119 Culp, “Weak and Small Peoples,” 212, 221. Culp also notes on pp. 214-15, that Chinese ­history itself in middle school textbooks of the 1920s tended to be subsumed within a “master narrative of world progressive change, European-style modernisation, and impe- rialism.” In Chen Hengzhe’s pioneering textbook on western history published in 1926 the world since the nineteenth century was characterised by a “globalisation” (shijie hua 世界化) of European culture. See Culp, “Weak and Small Peoples,” 232-33. On Chen Hengzhe and “globalisation,” see also Denise Gimpel, “Taking China to the World, Taking the World to China: Chen Hengzhe and an Early Globalizing Project,” in Jürgen Renn, ed., The Globalization of Knowledge in History (Berlin: Edition Open Access, 2012), 399-416. 120 Robert Culp, “’Weak and Small Peoples’,” 229. Some textbooks, however, in distinguishing between “historical” and “non-historical” nations, were keen to point out that both the white and yellow (i.e. China) races belonged to the former. 121 For example, see Ji Wei 季威, “Puji jiaoyu yu nüzi jiaoyu” 普及教育與女子教育 (Univer- sal education and women’s education), Shenzhou nübao 2.5 (1913). One exception is a two- part article (referred to in note 90) praising the role of western missionaries in championing female education, which uses the term Yadong to include China, Japan, India and the Philippnes. “Yadong nüzi ziyou zhi dongji”, Funü zazhi 5.5 (1919): jishumen, 1-6; 5.6 (1919): jishumen, 4-9. 122 For example, see Wang Pingling 王平陵, “Dongfang furen zai falüshang de diwei” 東方婦 人在法律上的地位 (Chinese women’s standing under the law), Funü zazhi 8.10 (1920): 23-30. 123 Hu Binxia, “Hezhe wei wu funü jinhou wushinian zhi zhiwu” 何者為吾婦女今後五十 年之職務 (What should be our women’s tasks over the next fifty years?), Funü zazhi 2.2 (1916): sheshuo, 1-5.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access Chinese Women Go Global 261 dismissive attitude, also evident in Song Shu’s earlier warning that Chinese women were even more “backward” than Indian or Japanese women, persists to the present day. Thus following the publication in 2002 of an international chart of “women in politics” by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (established in 1889 and headquartered in Geneva) that revealed China had slumped from twelfth position in 1994 to twenty-eighth in 2002, one official Chinese report gloomily observed that “we are not even as good as Vietnam or Cuba” (empha- sis mine).124 Finally, notwithstanding the focus on western women that characterised the Chinese women’s press from its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century and the later valorisation of their physical beauty in the pictorials of the 1920s and 1930, it is evident that by the early years of the Republic in the 1910s multiple and sometimes contradictory images of the Western Woman prevailed (either as a model worthy of emulation or a source of “contagion” to be avoided). No doubt this reflected how significant and contested the “woman question” was at this time in grappling with issues of national and cultural identity. In some ways, also, the “othering” of the Western Woman at this time foreshadows what one scholar has described as an ambivalent “racial fetish- ism” that pervaded advertising and popular (e.g. television) media of the 1990s.125 While western women were portrayed (in contrast to Chinese women) as pow- erful, active and self-confident (as well as overtly eroticised), they were also perceived as loud and showy – in contrast to the “inner beauty” of modest and polite Chinese women.126 At the same time, the early twentieth century repre- sentation of non-western women (primitive figures “trapped in time”) likewise has its contemporary counterpart in the “internal orientalism” of the post-Mao period, which, amongst other things, has constructed China’s ethnic minori- ties (especially women) as the foil to a modern and urban Han Chinese culture,

124 Louise Edwards, “Strategizing for Politics: Chinese Women’s Participation in the One- Party State”, Women’s Studies International Forum 30.5 (2007): 380-90, and especially, page 380. By 2006 China had declined even further to forty-ninth position (Cuba and Vietnam were eighth and twenty-fifth, respectively). 125 Perry Johansson, The Libidinal : Gender, Nationalism and Consumer Cul- ture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 87-88. See also Louisa Schein, “The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skin in Post-Mao China”, Social Text 41 (1994): 141-164 (especially page 144); and Perry Johansson, “Consuming the Other: The Fetish of the Western Woman in Chinese advertising and Popular Culture,” Postcolonial Studies 2.3 (1999): 377-388. 126 As Johansson notes in The Libidinal Economy of China, page 141, in a wider sense the West “is simultaneously constructed as an object of desire and …a source of danger, contami- nation and disease.”

Nan Nü 19 (2017) 213-262 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:00:28PM via free access 262 Bailey occupying the lower rungs of an evolutionary ladder of “civilisational devel­ opment”.127

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Harriet Zurndorfer, who kindly invited me to give a public lecture on this topic at Leiden University on 26 February 2016 as part of a lecture series ‘Interdisciplinary Explorations of China’s Changing Gender Dynamics 1900-2015’, funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (Project LS 001-U-14) and jointly sponsored by Leiden University’s Asian Mo- dernities and Traditions Programme and St. Gallen University, Switzerland.

127 Dru Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identi- ties,” Journal of Asian Studies 53.1 (1994): 92-123; Louisa Schein, “Gender and Internal Ori- entalism in China,” Modern China 23.1 (1997): 69-98.

DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com10/02/202119 (2017) 213-262 01:00:28PM via free access