More Than Three Waves of Feminism

Abstract

What Chinese feminism is and is not should be what scholars have to face at the intersection of women’s/gender studies and Asian/Chinese studies. In recent US and People’s Republic of China (PRC) academia, the most discussed three waves of Chinese feminism include the May Fourth Movement (1919), the rise of Chinese Communism (1949), and the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995). However, is Chinese feminism nothing but the three waves of Chinese feminism that academics in the United States and the PRC discuss the most? I argue that feminists or elites in the Chinese cultural realm reshaped Western1 feminism and applied their knowledge about Western feminism in order to tackle all kinds of gender problems in the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), the Republican and Nationalist era (1911–1949), the PRC (1949-present), Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the rest of the Chinese cultural realm not merely Mainland gender problems in the May Fourth era, the early Communist era, and the period of the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women. For instance, the three waves of Hong Kong feminism are different from the above-mentioned three waves. They took place in the 1940s-1970s era, the decade between the middle of the 1970s and the middle of the 1980s, and the post-1980s era (Tsang, 277–283).KeywordsChinese WomanQing DynastyChinese Communist PartyMing DynastyDemocratic Progressive PartyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.