Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China  

Oleh:

Edwards, Louise

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Modern China vol. 26 no. 2 (Apr. 2000), page 115-147.
Topik: Republican China
Fulltext: 115MC262.pdf (93.13KB)

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During the 1920s and 1930s, China’s reformist intellectuals in the burgeoning modernizing cities engaged in a protracted discussion about the condition of the nation’swomen. The apparent focus of their concern was the modern woman (xiandai funü) or new woman (xin nüxing). The arguments raged, “What are the characteristics of a real modern woman?” and “How does one identify a pseudo-modern woman?” External manifestations of modernity clothing, hairstyles, and shoe styles were dismissed as superficial trappings. Truly modernwomen, itwas argued, had inner qualities that centered on an abiding concern for China’s national welfare. However, focusing on the detailed behavior of China’s women obscures the deeper significance of the debate. The modern woman discourse disclosed the reformist intellectual class’s concerns about power and governance in modern China during a period when they were increasingly repressed and politically marginalized. Fredric Wakeman (1972) argued that China’s reformist intellectuals revolutionized the relationship between the people and the rulers during the late Qing by creating a republic and, in the process, inadvertently lost their traditional access to power. “They automatically ceased to function as interpreters—brokers—of a transcendental source of legitimacy” (Wakeman, 1972: 67). This preoccupation with the moral attributes of the modern woman was an attempt by some reformist intellectuals to reclaim their role as enlightened moral guardians and therefore leading advisers for the nation. Discussions about the policing of the modern Chinese woman, then, were synecdochical discussions about governing a modernizing Chinese population.

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