Colonial Stereotypes and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Abstract

This article adopts an intersectional approach incorporating gender, race, and colonialism to illuminate a martial trend among Chinese men of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. Within the late Qing reformist intellectual discourses championed by Liang Qichao, it analyzes three racialized colonialist stereotypes: the “effeminate” Confucian literatus, the “Sick Man of East Asia,” and the “Yellow Peril.” The purpose is to reveal these stereotypes as collateral elements of the ideological reconfigurations of the Chinese nation and Chinese masculinities. I argue that although the homology of Western colonialist logic and gender politics powerfully manipulated narratives on Chinese masculinities, male Chinese intellectuals did not passively adopt orientalized images of “Chinamen.” Rather, they strategically reappropriated these stereotypes and invented a new homology of racial and gender politics in order to address abiding concerns with race, nation, and male sexual potency.