Chinese Feminism Research Articles

‘We Are Here’: the politics of memory in narrating China’s queer feminist history

ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of narrating feminist and queer histories in contemporary China. Focusing on Zhao Jing and Shi Tou’s 2015 film, We Are Here, a documentary made to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, I examine how the film represents queer women’s history in China and in what discourses such a representation is situated. Icontend that the processes of remembrance and forgetting are intertwined in narrating queer women’s history in China. Indeed, while the film successfully recovers a hidden queer history, it also risks erasing the history of socialist and Marxist feminism, as well as China’s socialist legacies at large. Isuggest that we should think about Chinese feminist and queer movements in terms of continuities and ruptures by paying attention to their articulations to different transnational discourses at specific historical conjunctures. While We Are Here convincingly addresses the transnational influence from liberal feminism, it is also necessary to call attention to the legacies of socialist and Marxist feminism in China and transnationally in contemporary feminist and queer historiography and mediated memories.

Exploring the Bottom-Up Reform of Sex Offender Registration in China: Carceral Feminism and Populist Authoritarianism

In 2017, the Minhang District of Shanghai introduced sex offender registration. This reform attracted positive reactions on social media. Local governments in Jiangsu, Guangdong and Chongqing quickly followed the precedent. In 2019, the central government announced that it will establish national sex offender registries by 2022, although it limited the scope of registration to paedophiles. This study explores how this bottom-up reform unfolded and what implications it has in theory and practice. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of 2261 posts on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, this study reveals two major players in the current reform: the Chinese feminists who are pursuing a punitive agenda online (a phenomenon known as ‘carceral feminism’), and the local governments that are eager to win the public’s trust, although such trust is mainly reserved for the central authority in the Chinese political culture (a culture known as ‘populist authoritarianism’). Drawing on the findings, this study pushes the discussion about Chinese penal policy beyond the dichotomy of ‘penal professionalism’ and ‘penal populism’. It argues that while the influence of professionalism is evident in central-level policy making, local penal policies can be easily led by populist punitiveness. The latter deserves more academic attention. This study also takes a non-partisan approach to the feminist movements on Chinese social media. It reveals the class conflicts and regional inequality underlying the gender schism. The polarisation effect in online discussion is also highlighted, which alerts policy makers to the reliability of ‘public opinion’ online. (246 words).

Turning limitations into opportunities: researching Chinese feminist activism as a male outsider

Back in 2015, when I was preparing for fieldwork for my research on contemporary Chinese feminism, I was quite concerned that feminist activists would decline my request for interviews since I was ...

Изучение современной русской женской прозы в китайской русистике

Chinese literary scholars studying Russian literature come to a conclusion by the end of the twentieth century that its history has many “white spots.” Thus, efforts are made to fill the existing lacunas, and one of them is the modern Russian female prose. The paper analyzes the Chinese reader’s receptive attitudes determining the interpretation and evaluation of the works of Russian women-writers. One reason for the interest in Russian female literature is the “women’s issue” relevance in China. “Soft” Chinese feminism is a receptive context defining the text interpretation. In the Russian literature scholars’ works, it is manifested in the desire to see harmonious intersexual relations in the Russian women-writers’ prose, in a high assessment of a “holy” type in the character sphere. The Chinese reader highly appreciates overcoming the male-female opposition, searching for forms of dialogue, and imagining a harmonious family. Continuity is a relevant cultural receptive attitude of the Chinese reader, the link with tradition being a significant criterion for evaluating a phenomenon. Chinese scholars note that female literature continues the realistic tradition of telling about the social “bottom” and “little man,” thereby provoking the reader’s interest. Russian female prose is the “young” object in Chinese Russian studies. The Russian philology specialists are looking for linguistic “connectors,” e. g. themes and a typology of heroes, to see the phenomenon as a whole. Chinese specialists focus on the themes of survival, love, and family. The hero typology includes such types as the “new Amazons,” playing women, saints.

What is made-in-China feminism(s)? Gender discontent and class friction in post-socialist China

ABSTRACTContemporary Chinese feminism has drawn much attention in academe and popular media, yet its ontological roots and the politics of naming has largely escaped scrutiny. This paper first demonstrates that China’s post-socialist transition has given rise to a new gendered structure of power, in response to which urban young women have assembled various discursive and material practices in their struggles. Second, the social rupture and shock caused by these practices have led to the popular perception that an undifferentiated “feminism” has been proliferating in contemporary China. Combining historiographical and ethnographic research, this paper maps out the overall landscape of women’s agitations and identifies two latent strands of “made-in-China feminism” – with varied sociopolitical significance – that engage with cultural norms at the grassroots level. In grasping China’s ongoing gender antagonism with its full complexity, this paper discusses the limitations of existing scholarly approaches to contemporary Chinese feminism. This analysis contributes to the ongoing conversation on imagining a feminist politics in non-Western societies that disrupts the political, economic, and cultural orders all at once.

Towards a Chinese Hip-hop Feminism and a Feminist Reassessment of Hip-hop with Breakdance: B-girling in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China

ABSTRACTBased on data collected through interviewing b-girls (breakdancing girls) and participant observation of b-girling, we analyse gender inequalities confronting women who practise breakdancing in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, document these women’s struggles against gender inequality, and illustrate that these inequalities and struggles differ somewhat from those found in the US context and even from those found in studies of women who practise rap music. We outline the contours of a Chinese hip-hop feminism and suggest adopting it to investigate the local specificities of hip-hop-based gender politics in Chinese societies. We find that culture is a key part of the matrix of domination on which Chinese hip-hop-based gender politics focuses, but that racism is not. We discuss how such local specificities pose difficulties for the internationalisation of hip-hop feminism. We also construct a tentative signpost for understanding how a feminist assessment of hip-hop based on research on breaking differs from that based on research on rap. The signpost, which sums up the central findings of current studies and the present one, is “remaking hip-hop, redoing gender”: the remaking of hip-hop in a way that is fairer for women and the redoing of gender by b-girls for themselves, their audiences and society at large.

Female Solidarity as Hope: A Re-Examination of Socialist Feminism in the Literary Works of Ding Ling and Christa Wolf

Recent scholarship has questioned the validity of Western feminism as a model for feminist movements in contemporary China and highlights a gap in the scholarly understanding of the tradition and trajectory of socialist feminism in China (Song, 2012; Wang, 2017). In this article, I will examine the practicality of socialist feminism as an alternative model for contemporary Chinese feminism by comparing the depiction of women in the literary works of the Chinese writer Ding Ling and the East German author Christa Wolf. In Ding Ling’s novel In the Hospital, she strives for gender equality via collaborative work between men and women, while incorporating this feminist task into the agenda of socialist revolution. Christa Wolf’s novel The Quest for Christa T., in contrast, explores female friendship as a means of overcoming stagnation and cynicism in the GDR. I ask how both authors articulate their concerns and criticism of inadequate gender practices in socialist states through the lens of women’s perspectives. This article thereby offers an insight into the way their writings negotiate women’s concern with the official narrative of life in socialist states and the extent to which these texts illuminate alternative Chinese feminist approaches in a contemporary context.
 At time of publication, the journal operated under the old name. When quoting please refer to the citation on the left using British Journal of Chinese Studies. The pdf of the article still reflects the old journal name; issue number and page range are consistent.

Chinese Feminism as We Know It: Public Pedagogies of the Anglophone Media Space

Chinese Feminism as We Know It: Public Pedagogies of the Anglophone Media Space

Global Connections: Chinese Feminism, Tibet, and Xinjiang

Global Connections: Chinese Feminism, Tibet, and Xinjiang

The spectral interior: Gender and representations of household objects in the work of three Chinese artists

Both obscured by and submerged in the widely accepted chronology of China’s seemingly frictionless entrance into capitalist modernity, the history of Chinese socialist feminism haunts the present moment. In their subjective and circuitous quality, imbued in specific moments or materials as opposed to developing in a linear fashion, memories contain the potential to reread the present. Drawing from Tani Barlow’s formulation of Chinese feminism as operating in the ‘future anterior’ tense, this article examines the work of three contemporary Chinese visual artists whose works explore the memory of maternal figures through their portrayals of household objects. The first installation, Song Dong’s Waste Not, meticulously assembles five decades worth of family possessions taken from his mother’s Beijing home. Song’s installation underscores such objects as out of place in the present moment, existing beyond their projected use-value. Embroidered sculptures of household items comprise the second installation, Gao Rong’s The Static Eternity. The materiality of Gao’s work makes the intersection of gendered labour, artistry and reproduction visible. Her choice of medium stands in critical comparison to contemporary valuations, which prioritizes product over process. The third installation is Dong Yuan’s A Short History of Everything: Grandmother’s House and Bosch’s Garden, an exhibition made up of photorealistic oil paintings. Her work depicts ordinary kitchenware, furniture and decorations juxtaposed with her isolated replications of Hieronymous Bosch’s surrealist creatures. This combination reflects contemporary understandings of China’s socialist feminist history, represented by her grandmother’s belongings, as imagined and aberrant. But Dong’s work attests to just how fruitlessly the constructed present attempts to cast off its phantoms. Taken together, the works of these three artists constitute a refusal to depoliticize the quotidian, critiquing a surrender to the lure and logic of endless capital accumulation. This article assesses the urgency and stakes of such an endeavour in postsocialist Chinese visual art.

Kang Tongbi’s Pioneering Feminism and the First Transnational Organization of Chinese Feminist Politics, 1903–1905

This article fills a scholarly lacuna in Chinese feminist and diasporic literature by revealing the long-neglected pioneer feminism of Kang Tongbi (1881–1969), especially her organization of Chinese women across Canada and the United States to promote gender equality and reformist politics from 1903 to 1905. Drawing on Kang Tongbi’s unpublished autobiography and other untapped sources, this study shows that she initiated or helped found at least 11 chapters of Baohuang nühui, the Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association, in 12 Canadian and American cities and mobilized its members into struggles for women’s rights and the political reforms led by her famous father, Kang Youwei. The organization especially pursued female suffrage and gender equality in education. Most chapters declined after 1905 because of the organization’s overreliance on Kang Tongbi’s personal leadership and inconsistent endorsement from male reformers. Nonetheless, its short history reflects both the historical limitations and significance of early feminism in China and the Chinese diaspora.

Forever Her Chinatown

This essay adopts and adapts memory work, as developed by Annette Kuhn, as a method to search for the author's grandmother in Chinese American feminist film history. Foregrounding a trans-feminist perspective that moves across and between nations and film cultures, it introduces readers to a relatively unknown “orphan” documentary film, Forever Chinatown (1960). For the author and her family, the film carries with it a history of trauma that shapes what is remembered about it. Drawing on work in feminist film studies, particularly the notion of an archive of feelings, the essay blends life writing, theory, and visual-textual analysis to both allow the author to write her way into the film and trace her grandmother's presence in and labor on the film.

Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964 by Zheng Wang

Reviewed by: Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964 by Zheng Wang Aminda Smith Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964 by Zheng Wang. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Pp. xv + 380. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book. I recently attended a lecture by a well-known China watcher who is often cited for her expertise on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies related to women and gender equality. When an audience member asked whether there were contestations, over antifeminist policies, between the Party leadership and officials in the Women's Federation (Funü lianhehui 妇女联合会, or Fulian), the speaker responded by claiming that the Fulian cannot be considered a feminist organization as it is simply an arm of the Party. While this claim is not entirely false, it is misleading. Moreover, such a position is all too common in the reportage and scholarship on the People's Republic of China (PRC): the CCP is often portrayed as a thoroughly patriarchal, Borg-like monolith, just as masculinist and oppressive to women as any other modern state power, despite its early claims to the contrary. Thus, Zheng Wang's forceful and convincing argument to the contrary makes her new book a crucial intervention in the fields of PRC history and the history of Chinese feminism. As her title suggests, among [End Page 408] Party members and PRC state leaders, Wang finds committed feminist women, who truly endeavored to bring about a socialist feminist revolution. Finding Women in the State, organized into two parts and eight chapters, considers the work of Chinese Communist feminists through a series of cases. Because Wang's argument requires the close reading and unpacking of extremely rich and detailed source materials, her chapters are quite dense. And her discussion is so wide-ranging that one sometimes senses at least two different books in this one volume. But in the end, all of the pieces coalesce around Wang's answer to an important historiographical question: how do we evaluate the CCP's famous claim to have liberated women, epitomized in Mao Zedong's all-too-oft-quoted pronouncement that "women hold up half the sky"? The research conducted over the past several decades suggests one answer: Chinese women were, and remain, partially liberated—thanks to the whims of a male-dominated and patriarchal Communist Party that nevertheless maintained its rhetoric supporting gender equality and thus sporadically promoted women's rights when doing so did not undermine other Party goals. Wang shows, however, that what appears to be a series of half-hearted and superficial concessions made by a masculinist state are actually evidence of hard-won victories achieved by women working in the Women's Federation and other Party-state units; these feminists were truly committed to the Maoist claim that women's liberation was central to China's socialist revolution. Wang does not deny that the sites in which state feminists worked, such as the Women's Federation, were inseparable parts of the Communist Party. Indeed, it was enthusiasm for socialism's liberatory promise that led these women to join the revolution. Those feminists who held positions within the PRC state certainly demonstrated their loyalty to the Party. Crucially, however, Wang shows that cadres and leaders who did women's work (funü gongzuo 妇女工作) also saw themselves as quasi-independent actors, dedicated to opposing patriarchy in Chinese society and in the Communist state. And their pursuit of a bona fide feminist agenda caused repeated clashes between state feminists and other Party members, including those in the central leadership. This book traces the histories of those state feminists committed to women's work. It demonstrates that while their battles were all uphill and against strong opposition from many Party men, [End Page 409] state feminists fought hard and sometimes successfully fomented real change for Chinese women. Wang reveals that the effects of state feminism can be seen everywhere during the socialist period, even in high-level Party policy and propaganda. She also argues, however, that historians must search for feminism in PRC history because it...

“Equal Discipleship”

AbstractFeminist theology is known for its various critical principles and methods of biblical interpretation. In the process of doing feminist biblical interpretation, feminist theologians have started to build their theological frameworks. This article takes the feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and her construction of the New Testament as an example. In her book Discipleship of Equals, Schüssler Fiorenza put forward the important viewpoint of “equal discipleship.” This viewpoint provides a dialogue between Schüssler Fiorenza and the theological concerns of women in China. Like Schüssler Fiorenza, Chinese theologians have also noted the testimonies of Chinese women Christians in the development of the church. These can help female Christians realize who they are and the significance of being a member of the church. Christian Chinese traditional culture still influences the understanding of women's identity. This will be a significant challenge and task in practising Chinese feminist theology.

Nudity, feminists, and Chinese online censorship: A case study on the anti-domestic violence campaign on SinaWeibo

Chinese feminist activists are actively participating in the Chinese online public sphere. In this study, we examine a case – the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos Campaign (裸照反家暴活动) – and the response of Chinese online censorship to this campaign. Campaign activists used nude photos to mobilize the public’s support. According to the existing theoretical perspectives such as the collective action potential theory, this kind of online campaign with pornographic elements and the potential to mobilize people is very likely to be censored. Counter to this expectation, we found that not all of the original photos were removed. Our finding suggests that the interactive manner in which activists responded to the public on SinaWeibo’s discussion threads matters in terms of the degree of censorship. This study complements the existing studies on the Chinese online censorship system, echoes scholars’ call for studies on censorship from a more interactive angle, and furthers our understanding of the Chinese feminist movement.

Socialist Feminism in Postsocialist China

Since around 2010, a new theoretical strand within Chinese feminism has been forming, which, for lack of a programmatic label, the author calls “socialist feminism.” Broadly speaking, Chinese socialist feminism shows an interest in political economy and attributes women’s status to their place in the economic structures of Chinese society. Productive and reproductive work (past and present) are therefore main fields of research. The distinctive terminological mark of socialist feminism, however, is its emphasis on China’s socialist past as a legacy and resource for today’s society. Differing from its Western counterpart, Chinese socialist feminism derives its profile not from theoretical debates on the relation between class and gender or capitalism and patriarchy and their empirical manifestations in Western industrialized societies, but from the very fact that socialism and a socialist approach to women’s problems have been a reality on Chinese soil that deserves recognition for feminist theory building. Socialism as a historical legacy and memory is indicative of China’s postsocialist situation, which, as the author argues, has a deep impact on the epistemological, theoretical, and political outlook as well as the identity of socialist feminists in today’s China.

“A Cross-Fire between Minorities”

This article examines the Japanese American Citizens League’s (JACL) postwar campaign to secure U.S. citizenship eligibility for first-generation Japanese (Issei) as a civil rights effort that brought Japanese Americans into contention with African American and Afro-Caribbean community leaders during the height of the U.S. Cold War in East Asia. At the same time, JACL’s disagreements with Chinese Americans and Japanese American liberals precluded any coherent Japanese or Asian American position on postwar immigration policy. The resulting 1952 McCarran-Walter Act formally ended Asians’ exclusion from U.S. immigration and naturalization, even as a colonial quota in the law severely restricted black immigration from the Caribbean and galvanized black protest. This episode of black-Japanese tension complicates scholarly understandings of the liberalization of U.S. immigration and naturalization laws toward Asian peoples as analogous with or complementary to black civil rights gains in the postwar years. In so doing, it suggests the need to think more critically and historically about the cleavages between immigration and civil rights law, and between immigrant rights and civil rights.

Chinese feminists on social media: articulating different voices, building strategic alliances

ABSTRACTThis article considers the importance of social media to contemporary Chinese feminism, in the process introducing two important groups, Feminist Voice and Women’s Awakening, who have used social media platforms for their activism in the past few years. Various online strategies have been taken up by their young members to ensure the best outcome for their advocacy. In particular, these feminists use social media to articulate a specific presence, or voice, that would be more difficult to sustain using more traditional modes of Chinese feminism. And they also attempt to cultivate relationships with mainstream journalists, building alliances they hope will encourage more gender-conscious reporting and more positive representations of feminism. While social media does not overcome all the obstacles to feminism that is becoming more visibly influential in China, these media groups stand out as key voices in Chinese feminist and youth activism today, with implications for how we understand contemporary feminism on an international scale.

From “Non-governmental Organizing” to “Outer-system”—Feminism and Feminist Resistance in Post-2000 China

ABSTRACTIn post-2000 China, both the frontiers and the landscape of feminism and feminist resistance have changed, and this change embodies a move away from the “non-governmental organizing” path that characterized the development of feminism during the 1980s and 1990s. This article addresses this “paradigm shift” in Chinese feminism by examining the “outer-system” political stand of post-2000 feminism and their domains of action through performance art, philanthropic volunteerism, and cyberfeminist articulations. These novel modes of feminist protest in the absence of a formal organizational structure challenge our understanding of feminism as a process of “non-governmental organizing” in public space and warrant a cultural analysis to shed light on how feminism engages in cultural contestation and subversion, often in semiprivate and semipublic spaces, in order to develop new and alternative cultural patterns and interpretive frames.Abbreviations CPPCC The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference WF The All-China Women’s Federation

Young Feminist Activists in Present-Day China: A New Feminist Generation?

This article studies post-2000 Chinese feminist activism from a generational perspective. It operationalises three notions of generation— generation as an age cohort, generation as a historical cohort, and “political generation”—to shed light on the question of generation and generational change in post-socialist Chinese feminism. The study shows how the younger generation of women have come to the forefront of feminist protest in China and how the historical conditions they live in have shaped their feminist outlook. In parallel, it examines how a “political generation” emerges when feminists of different ages are drawn together by a shared political awakening and collaborate across age.