Reddit reviews The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

I'm currently reading The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory and it's really interesting! It reintroduces He-Yin Zhen, an anarchafeminist, as an integral theorist during the start of Chinese feminism.

>The editors begin with a detailed portrait of He-Yin Zhen’s life and an analysis of her thought in comparative terms. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1873–1947) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), to which He-Yin’s work responds and with which it engages. Jin Tianhe, a poet and educator, and Liang Qichao, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that “enlightened” male intellectuals like themselves should defend. Zhen counters with an alternative conception of feminism that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends in thought. Ahead of her time within the context of both modernizing China and global feminism, He-Yin Zhen complicates traditional accounts of women and modern history, offering original perspectives on sex, gender, labor, and power that continue to be relevant to feminist theorists in China, Europe, and America.

I've only gotten through her biography and the translators' analyses along with one of her essays, but it's been really cool to read about her opposition to the "paternalistic" feminism that was dominant at the start of the 20th century, as western culture was trickling in:

>Chinese men worship power and authority. They believe that Europeans, Americans, and the Japanese are civilized nations of the modern world who all grant their women some degree of freedom. By transplanting this system into the lives of their wives and daughters, by prohibiting their practices of footbinding, and by enrolling them in modern schools to receive basic education, these men think that they will be applauded by the whole world for having joined the ranks of civilized nations.… I am inclined to think that these men act purely out of a selfish desire to claim women as private property. […] In the past, when traditional rituals prevailed, men tried to distinguish themselves by confining women in the boudoir; when the tides turn in favor of Europeanization, they attempt to acquire distinction by promoting women’s liberation. This is what I call men’s pursuit of self-distinction in the name of women’s liberation.

She also critiques western marriage and the women's suffrage movement:

>Liberation means setting [the body and the mind] free from bondage. The problem with the marriage systems in Europe and America is that individuals remain constrained by three bondages: power/privilege and self-interest/profit (quanli), morality, and law.

>[…]

>A minority of women holding power is hardly sufficient to save the majority of women. In the case of Norway, for instance, the few aristocratic women who occupy political office do little in the way of bringing benefits to the general population. And as representatives of women from the upper classes and gentry families, these women have gained political rights and are assisting men from the upper classes in perpetrating damages even further. If their legislative work benefits upper-class women only, it deepens the suffering of lower-class women.

>The majority of women used to be oppressed by two major forces in the world: the government on the one hand and men on the other. Today, women are being subjected to a third force next to the oppressive forces of the government and men, and this third force is upper-class women who inflict yet another layer of oppression upon them.

>In my view, the ultimate goal of women’s liberation is to free the world from the rule of man and from the rule of woman. Herein lies fundamental reform: how not to allow the struggle for universal suffrage as stipulated by parliamentary representation to limit our efforts? I would be gratified to see women renounce their desire to mobilize with the objective of governmental rule and to begin to look toward the eventual abolition of government.