Session 173: Women and Cognitive Transformation in Late Qing China

Organizer and Chair: Joan Judge, University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant: Joachim Kurtz, Emory University

Individuals living in the late Qing (1890s–1911) experienced one of the most profound moments of cultural and social realignment in Chinese history. This panel contributes to a growing body of scholarship on this period which attempts to transcend vague notions of "new ideas" and "foreign influences." It does so by examining the specific sources either individual female writers or writers targetting a female audience used to promote competing notions of feminine normativity. Encompassing the tremendous range of geographic, historical, and political resources available in this era, these sources included the Chinese Tongcheng tradition, Western knowledge, Western knowledge mediated by Japan, and Russian anarchist ideas.

The figures and texts examined by the panelists have been largely unstudied in the scholarly literature. Ying Hu explores the gendered reading of the Shiji and the Yijing put forward by Wu Zhiying who is known to history almost exclusively as a shadow of Qiu Jin. Nanxiu Qian introduces Xue Shaohui who promoted a creative blend of Western and Chinese ideas in the first Chinese women’s journal. Joan Judge traces the genealogy of a collection of Western women’s biographies widely referred to in materials of the day but as yet unanalyzed either in the Japanese original or in its Chinese translation.

Integral to all of these papers is a concern not only with particular individuals and texts, but with methods of cultural translation and reinterpretation, the field of expertise of the discussant, Joachim Kurtz.

Twelve World Heroines: Western Exemplars, Japanese Mediations, and Chinese Appropriations at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Joan Judge, University of California, Santa Barbara

Heroic Western figures were prominently featured in the new periodical press at the turn of the twentieth century. George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Mme. Roland and countless others were invoked in polemical essays, celebrated in biographical sketches, and gradually but seamlessly integrated into the late Qing cultural imaginary. While the omnipresence of the heroic Westerner has been widely noted in studies of the era, few have questioned how writers of the period aquired knowledge of these foreign figures, what their sources were, and how accurately or strategically they used them.

This paper follows the trajectory of one particular text which was seminal in the dissemination of knowledge about Western heroines at the turn of the twentieth century. The text appeared in Japanese in 1902 under the title of Sekai jûni joketsu (Twelve World Heroines). It was translated into Chinese as Shijie shier nüjie the same year and disseminated in 1903. The twelve world heroines introduced in the text reappeared either collectively or individually in later Chinese textbooks, songbooks, and women’s journals in the following years.

Based on a close reading of the Chinese biographies directly or freely translated from the Sekai jûni joketsu, this paper examines the complex processes of cultural translation, mediation and accommodation. It demonstrates that the end product of these multiply mediated processes was not only a distortion of the "host" biography(ies) but a new creation, not merely a product of cultural borrowing but of indigenous political imperatives, social preoccupations, and gender concerns. While Western men’s biographies were generally used to underscore Chinese notions of masculinity and encourage men to perform their recognized roles more effectively, for example, biographies of Western women were often appropriated in ways that destabilized Chinese principles of normative femininity and made previously unimaginable feminine roles thinkable.

The Rightful Heir: Wu Zhiying and the Tongcheng Tradition

Hu Ying, University of California, Irvine

The central question addressed in this paper is the gendered use of traditional cultural resources at a time of cognitive transformation that spans the late 19th to early 20th century, a transformation that rapidly eroded the foundations of Confucian high culture. Through a case study of a woman scholar-artist Wu Zhiying (1867–1934), who re-invented a powerful "family tradition" of the Tongcheng school to legitimize women’s political participation, this paper examines how an apparently conservative interpretation may contain radical intellectual possibilities.

Wu Zhiying was primarily known in history as a close friend of Qiu Jin’s (1875?–1907), the prominent woman revolutionary beheaded by the Qing government. Highly self-conscious of her own historical intervention, Wu made full use of the occasions of mourning Qiu Jin to introduce a radical perspective in understanding women’s role in historical change and to further argue for women’s political suffrage. These goals were accomplished not through application of popular western female models but through a highly creative engagement with traditional classics such as the Records of the Grand Historian and The Book of Changes. Her reworking of these classics indicates that radical political and social ideas could be framed without recourse to an imported vocabulary of nationalism and women’s rights.

I argue that Wu’s "usurpation" of the "male" cultural tradition was a continuation of the gradual expansion of women’s learning through the late imperial period while also showcasing a kind of creative energy that pointed to possibilities of imagining a different kind of modernity.

Borrowing Mirrors and Candles, from Where? Ideological and Cultural Resources for Late Qing Women Reformers

Nanxiu Qian, Rice University

During China’s reform period, an overwhelming volume of ideological and cultural information poured in from multiple sources, typically from the West and Japan, with the latter offering a more nationalistic translation of the former. This paper examines how these various sources influenced the women’s rights movement at the turn of the twentieth century by focusing on an analysis of the two earliest Chinese women’s journals.

The first Chinese women’s journal, Nü Xuebao (Women’s Journal), appeared at the height of the 1898 reforms. Its all female editorial board (over twenty women in all) continued the Chinese cainü (women of talent) tradition and prioritized women’s self-improvement through knowledge acquisition over national empowerment. The contributors drew upon both the Chinese tradition and foreign knowledge—primarily Western—in discussing the need for women’s equal rights in a range of spheres from education, to politics and marriage. The other women’s journal, also titled Nü Xuebao, was a successor to the first. Published in 1902 in Shanghai and from 1903 in Japan, it promoted a radical nationalist discourse that valorized the xianü (heroic women) sentiment. While the reasons for this radical change in political orientation in a mere four-year time span are complicated, this paper will examine how foreign resources swayed these two journals.

The title of this paper borrows a term from Xue Shaohui, a leading contributor to the 1898 Nü Xuebao. Xue used the mirror and candle metaphor to express her conscious awareness of Chinese women’s subjectivity in the reception of foreign knowledge. She believed the process of cultural borrowing was one of self-justification rather than self-abegnation. This strong sense of subjectivity seems to have faded in the 1902 Nü Xuebao.