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Anarchism, Gender and Beyond: Discourses and Practices of Social Change in early 20th-Century China
Organizer: Rachel Hui-chi Hsu, Tunghai University, Republic of China
Chair: Edward S. Krebs, China Bridge
Discussant: John A. Rapp, Beloit College and Jianmei Lui, University of Maryland
From the mid-1900s through the 1920s, anarchism played a central role in shaping China’s radical culture. This panel sheds new light on this history from a gendered perspective: How was the gender question integrated into anarchist vision for social change? In anarchists’ articulations of that question, what particular modules of issues and agendas were featured? How did the gender factor play out in anarchist practice? Finally, was there a global/local matrix of power and culture to mediate the trajectory of Chinese anarcho-feminism? Three papers are presented to explore these questions. Fang-yen Yang takes up the prism of global/local duality to scrutinize late Qing anarcho-feminism through comparison: anarchism versus nationalism, and the Tokyo anarchists versus the Paris anarchists. She pursues both similarities and differences and thus presents a broadly contextualized understanding of the subject. Gotelind Mueller-Saini confronts discourse with practice and examines anarchist activities against the rising tide of new life-style experiments in the early Republic. She unveils the working of the gender factor in practice by highlighting the economic preconditions of women’s difficulty in reconciling ideals with reality. Rachel Hui-chi Hsu explores the debates over love and sex that erupted between anarchists and liberals in the late 1920s. She examines how the issues of love and sex became a conspicuous site to contest different visions of social change while the struggle between KMT and CCP took place. Our discussants, John Rapp and Liu Jianmei, will engage an interdisciplinary dialogue based on their related research in political science and literature, respectively.
Discovering Gender in Society: The Woman Question in the Late Qing Anarchist Vision of Total Revolution
Fang-yen Yang National Taiwan University
This paper examines the late Qing anarchist intervention to promote women’s liberation via two lines of comparative inquiry. The first one concerns a comparison between anarchism and nationalism in terms of (1) their appropriations of the social space signified by the neologism “society” (shehui); and (2) the shared collectivism in their communal ideals. I focus on how the anarchists were able to deepen contemporary understanding of women’s oppression by invoking the state/society binary and the concepts of class and division of labor, so as to expose gender inequalities in the family and in society that were otherwise largely foreclosed by the nationalist imposition of unity via the family/nation/state continuum. I also argue that although the anarchists substituted sexual desire for reproductive service to the family as the foundation of human identity, their ideal of free love/sex was compromised by their collectivism.
The second inquiry involves a comparison between the anarchists in Tokyo and those in Paris. Following Arif Dirlik, I view their difference in terms of antimodernism and modernism, but I propose to pursue further by analyzing the effects of difference in their overseas geo-cultural locations. More specifically, I explore the processes whereby pan-Asian and Eurocentric epistemologies worked to shape their respective visions of “new human” and “new society.” One of the results, I argue, was a pair of contrasting models of woman, with the “proletarian woman” echoing the Tokyo anarchists’ agrarianism and laborism, and the “eugenic woman” (to borrow Tani Barlow’s phrase) reflecting the Paris anarchists’ scientism and evolutionism.
Living Anarchism in early Republican China: Gender, Education and Money
Gotelind Mueller-Saini, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Anarchism has been credited a pioneering role in reformulating gender issues in China. Analyses of this role usually are based on anarchist publications, focusing on the discursive level, to define anarchism's specific contributions to gender issues. This paper tries to integrate this discursive perspective with the additional dimension of social practice: Did both relate to each other and - if so - how? Have proclaimed convictions ever been lived out? Have there even been challenges to discourses, provoked by lived experiences? Since the 1910s and early 1920s saw a high tide of experiments in new life-styles in China (and beyond), this paper will focus on the time-span, integrating anarchist (and closely related) experiments with this general trend to find new ways of living prevalent at the time.
During these experiments a couple of problems arose: besides the challenge of living out anarchist convictions in terms of a newly defined male-female partnership (and e.g. the consequences for sexual behavior this entailed), one of the main issues that was difficult to resolve for both sexes (but especially so for women) was to reconcile quests for education and the needs of financing with a new understanding of the individual and its relation to society. Even though much of this issue was framed in a gender neutral way on the level of discourse, I argue that in social practice the gender factor became heavily involved.
Free Love, Non-Love and New Sexual Morality: the Struggle between Anarchism and Liberal Reformism in Xin Nuxing (New Women, 1926-1929)
Rachel Hui-chi Hsu, Tunghai University, Republic of China
During the May Fourth period (1915 to mid-1920s), many intellectuals and students of different ideological backgrounds clung to the imported ideal of free love as a weapon to attack the conventional family and marriage. As it happened, some male liberals appropriated the issues of free love and new sexual morality (i.e., sex based on mutual love and loyalty) to promote their reformist ideal of social change. This was evident in the Ladies’ Journal (1915-1931) during its “innovating phase” in the first half of 1920s. Meanwhile, the anarchists, who claimed total sexual freedom and upheld a radical ideal of social change, did not see in free love a panacea and denounced it (and new sexual morality) as petit bourgeois cravings. To propagate their views, the anarchists chose a battlefield in Xin Nüxing (New Women, 1926-1929), then run by former editors of Ladies’ Journal. They challenged the editors’ pro-free-love standpoint and advocated a radical concept of “non-love,” leading to several disputes in 1927-1929.
Focusing on these disputes, this paper explores the ways in which the liberals and the anarchists manipulated the issues of love and sex, with special attention paid on the anti-authoritarianism and anti-capitalism of the anarchists. I argue that at stake were two contesting visions of social change. The issues of love and sex were engaged by both sides to negotiate space for different types of social change as well as to criticize the status quo during the revolutionary years marked by pronounced strife between the KMT and the CCP.