Obscured Names: Outstanding Female Poets of Ancient China
Reporter: Luyao Liu, Shanshan Liu, Yihuan Zhang
Editor: Yihuan Zhang
12/3/2022
In the history of China, there have been many talented women, who either came from learned families, or grew up in prestigious houses, or came from the folk wells, or fell into misery, and their literary styles were distinctive and varied due to the different environments and encounters they encountered. In the history of Chinese literature, there are more than 120 women poets who have made their mark, with over 300 surviving poems, and this article introduces four of the most famous ancient Chinese women poets.
Cai Wenji (177 - 249)
Cai Wenji is a famous talented woman, poet and literary scholar in Chinese history. Born in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai experienced numerous hardships in her life. As a result of war, Cai followed the refugees and fled. One day, she was taken by the Xiongnu to be the wife of the Zuo Xian Wang, which she did for twelve years. She was later redeemed by Cao Cao. Cai Wenji was a learned and versatile woman who excelled in literature and calligraphy. She was the earliest female calligrapher recorded in Chinese history. Cai Wenji's works have been handed down to the world in addition to 'Eighteen beats of Hu Jia' and 'Poem of Grief and Anger', which is known as the first autobiographical five-line long narrative poem written by a literati in the history of Chinese poetry.
Xie Daoyun (Eastern Jin Dynasty)
Xie Daoyun, character Ling Jiang (令姜), was a female poet of the Eastern Jin Dynasty. She was born into a prestigious family and was the daughter-in-law of the famous Chinese calligrapher Wang Xizhi. According to records, Xie's married life was not a happy one. Decades later, an uprising broke out and Xie witnessed the murder of her husband and children. Since then, she has lived the life of a hermit. Unlike other female poets, Xie's poetry is full of masculinity. With her intelligence, courage and refined taste, Xie Daoyun was named the most humane female poet. The original biography of her in the Book of Jin describes her as having a high and masculine style, with a loose and lively demeanour.
Shangguan Wan'er (664 - 710)
Shangguan Wan'er was a Chinese politician and poet. Shangguan Wan'er grew from an ordinary court attendant to secretary and principal advisor to Empress Wu Zetian of the Zhou Dynasty. Under Empress Wu, Shangguan Wan'er was responsible for drafting imperial edicts and won acclaim for her writing style. One of the most talented women in history, Shangguan Wan'er led a chequered and legendary life. Although she did not have the name of Chancellor, she did have the reality of one. By the Kaiyuan period, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang remembered Shangguan Wan'er's talent and ordered her poems and writings to be compiled in a collection of 20 volumes.
Li Qingzhao (1084 - 1155)
Li Qingzhao, Pseudonym Householder of Yi'an, was a Chinese poet and essayist during the Song dynasty. She is considered one of the greatest poets in Chinese history. During the early period, most of her poems were related to her feelings as a maiden. They were more like love poems. After her move to the south, they were closely linked with her hatred of the war against the Jurchens and her patriotism. She is credited with the first detailed critique of the metrics of Chinese poetry. She was regarded as a master of wǎnyuē pài "the delicate restraint".
Editorial comment：
A history of Chinese literature is a predominantly male-centred historiography. In the history of poetry alone, the poets who have been revered by later generations have mostly been male poets. But throughout Chinese history, there have been many great female poets who have also written immortal poems. The history of literature should not be exclusively male and male-centred, but the literary talents and profound thoughts of women should also be understood and valued.
The History of the Chinese Feminist Movement
Reporter: Yihuan Zhang
28/2/2022
Chinese women in the twentieth century have experienced the construction of subjectivity in different historical discourse systems: from women in the traditional Confucian ethics-regulated family, to women in the eroticised colonial modernity, to women in the national framework of gender equality during the Mao era, to the consciousness of female subjectivity advocated by female intellectual elites after the reform and opening up, to the desirous female subject that was rapidly exploited, adopted and regulated by the market economy and commercial culture after the 1990s. Neither the adoption of a Western feminist theoretical framework nor the insistence on a single Marxist class perspective can make sense of the complex and multifaceted juxtaposition of gender politics and culture in China today.
The Late Qing: the beginning of the Chinese feminist movement
The feminist movement in China began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with male intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Jin Tianhe advocating concepts such as gender equality, freedom of marriage and women's right to education. However, in their discourse, the women's liberation movement was part of the Enlightenment and nationalist movement, and remained male-centred.
From the end of the Qing Dynasty, a group of female revolutionaries, represented by Qiu Jin, set up women's schools and joined the revolution, and women were also involved in the later National Revolution and the Northern Expeditionary War. The women's movement of the time demanded the breaking of the feudal marriage system, the pursuit of free love and marital autonomy, and the right of men and women to participate equally in politics, inherit property, education, employment and criminal law.
In the 1920s, three types of women's movements existed in China's urban social space: the feminist movement for equal political and legal rights, the Christian women's movement featuring charity and social service, and the working women's movement for economic rights. The first two of these movements were mainly participated by urban intellectual women, while the third was mainly participated by urban women workers.
The idea of women's emancipation in the 1920s was in line with the idea of human rights advocated by the May Fourth Enlightenment. However, with the development of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial national independence movement, the idea of women's emancipation was soon overshadowed by nationalist ideas. The concept of 'women' in relation to human liberation was gradually replaced by the concept of 'women' in relation to social liberation, with women as objects of liberation joining men in opposing the feudal social system, while the issue of women themselves had to take a back seat.
Mao Zedong era: "Women can hold up half the sky"
The women's liberation movement of Mao Zedong's time advocated equality between men and women, with women having the same political and social rights as men. In socialist China, gender equality is a state-led ideology, and the government's top-down women's liberation movement has constructed the institutional conditions and social space for gender equality. Women were elevated to the status of social beings, enjoying the same political, social and legal rights as men.
Women in the Maoist era were the embodiment of a collective, a national group. Women's economic, political and personal autonomy and independence were predicated on subordination and obedience to this collective. However, the equality between men and women in the public sphere of this period did not unfold in the private sphere, i.e. the patriarchy of family relations was never shaken.
The period of reform and opening up: the liberal feminist movement
In post-socialist China, the relationship between the feminist movement and the state underwent profound changes. 1978 saw the beginning of market economy reforms and the opening up of mainland China to the outside world, and Li Xiaojiang, a scholar regarded as a representative of 'market feminism', proposed the 'sexualised man' to break with the desexualised women of the Maoist era. The translation boom of the 1980s also brought some feminist works from Western Europe, such as Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Eagleton's Feminist Theory of Literature.
The UN Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, was an important historical turning point in the development of the women's movement in China. The conference directly brought about the legalisation of NGOs in China, and concepts such as 'gender equality' and 'female empowerment' provided Chinese feminists with new discursive resources. A number of American feminist theoretical works were translated and published, such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics.
Since the 1990s, Chinese feminism has been heavily influenced by American liberal feminist theory. Mainland China began to open up to international foundations, represented by the Ford Foundation, to promote various gender-related development projects, leading to the establishment of gender-related courses and research programmes in universities and the training of a cadre of gender researchers.
In addition, through decades of government-led feminist activism, the Women's Union has built up a whole range of grassroots organisations and mobilisation structures in both rural and urban areas of mainland China. Other government departments have never been given the power to manage the Women's Union, and it has operated relatively independently. Therefore, some scholars argue that it is not nonsensical for the Women's Union to define itself as a non-governmental organisation at the 1995 World Conference on Women.
Contemporary Chinese feminist movements
Contemporary feminist thought in mainland China is characterised by a process of learning from the West or cultural globalisation. This phase of borrowing from Western feminism is to some extent in line with the requirements of a market economy - the struggle for women's individual rights and interests within the established institutional framework - but lacks vigilance and introspection towards consumerism and the market mechanism itself.
In the transition from a planned to a market economy, groups of women such as rural women left behind, urban migrant workers and women workers laid off from state enterprises have become vulnerable in the wave of reform. Liberal feminists abandoned the realm of 'class' analysis and ignored the rights of disadvantaged women in urban and rural areas and their profound dependence on the state system for survival. Some projects to help disadvantaged groups of women adopted the name of 'protecting women's rights' but failed to examine the structural problems of the capitalist system itself.
How to critically inherit the historical legacy of the socialist women's liberation movement, and how to reflect on the imbalance of the current feminist movement's agenda and find a pluralistic subject of the feminist movement in terms of political action? Only by rediscovering the historical resources of the Chinese feminist movement and feminist thought, by analysing women's issues from multiple political, economic, social and geographical dimensions, and by establishing extensive links with labour groups, will feminism in China not be the exclusive domain of the urban middle class alone, but will benefit a wider range of Chinese women.
China in Data - A Survey of Rural Women
Reporter: Luyao Liu, Shanshan Liu
Editor: Haoxian Zhu, Yihuan Zhang
26/2/2022
What are your impressions of rural women in China? Have you tried to imagine what their living conditions are in China? They include 240 million people or 18% of the country's population. However, their voices are rarely heard. How do they live? Do you have any idea of what social problems they encounter? This article will present data on the survival of rural women in China, using nine different perspectives as an entry point.
Poverty
There is a massive gap between the income levels of men and women in China, and this gap is particularly pronounced in rural areas.
According to the 2010 data survey, the proportion of high-income rural women was only 24.4%, while high-income men were as high as 75.6%. In addition, the proportion of rural women increases as their income decreases across the five different levels of the income distribution.
Meanwhile, urban women earn 67.3 percent of men's income compared to 56.0 percent of rural women. The poverty of rural women in China has led to many problems such as high fertility rates, high mortality rates, and low levels of education.
Education
There is also a significant gap in the level of education of Chinese women in rural areas compared to urban areas.
The survey found that of the percentage of women admitted to the university in 2017, 40.7% of them were from rural areas, while 59.3% were from urban areas. However, rural women are less likely to be admitted to excellent universities due to the limited educational resources available in rural areas. They are also less likely to access public universities with higher tuition fees due to economic constraints.
The level of education in China has improved significantly in recent years, but there has been no significant increase in university options and opportunities for rural Chinese women
Domestic violence
Mental and physical violence is widespread in rural areas of China.
According to the 2014 questionnaire survey, 58.1% and 29.7% of rural women have experienced mental and physical violence, respectively. In addition, one-third of rural women had experienced 2-3 types of domestic violence. A more critical finding was that 75.2% of women did not understand domestic violence well. Even if they had experienced it, they did not realize their rights were being violated. Finally, another data survey showed that 6.4% of all rural women had been injured by domestic violence. The survey clearly shows that rural women are not aware of their rights when they experience either physical or emotional violence. They may be subconsciously unaware of where their right to self-protection lies.
Homicide and suicide
According to 2018 data from the China Women's Federation, the murder rate for rural women in China is 0.33 per 100,000, higher than the 0.19 per 100,000 for urban women. The survey found that more than 40% of these deaths were among rural women due to domestic violence.
At the end of the 20th century, the suicide rate among rural Chinese women was much higher than that of men and urban women. The majority of rural women committed suicide due to family conflicts and marital problems. In the 21st century, the suicide rate among rural women in China has declined year on year. The main reason for this is that many women choose to work in the cities, taking them away from their rural family of origin disputes. What is not difficult to ponder in this survey is whether the social environment and atmosphere in rural areas may make it challenging to guarantee women's survival security and rights.
Left Behind
Sexual abuse and mistreatment of girls left behind in rural areas: is the tragedy of rural women repeating itself?
The social concerns raised by rural girls being left behind in the countryside can be even more significant due to the patriarchal culture of the countryside. Firstly, according to data from China's sixth census sample in 2010, an estimated 61,022,000 children are left behind in rural areas. Of the sample data, 54.08% were boys, and 45.92% were girls. Therefore, there are nearly 28 million girls left behind in rural areas. However, of the 778 publicly reported cases of sexual abuse of children in rural areas, girls were sexually abused 92.42% of the time. This survey shows that most girls are neglected and unprotected in rural life under the influence of this patriarchal social culture.
In contrast, children left behind are more dangerous for girls than for boys in rural areas. Left behind in rural areas, these girls are vulnerable to sexual assault and abuse due to the lack of proper sexual education and protection from their parents. These girls are victims when their value systems and concepts of life are not yet mature. They are unaware that they are being violated during their abuse. These left-behind girls grow up to be rural women. The experiences of these rural girls in their early years directly impact their numbness and ignorance of abuse when they grow up and are genuinely unaware that their rights are being violated.
Abortion
According to the academic journal The Current Situation and Factors Influencing the Sexual Health of Rural Women in China, the incidence of abortion among rural women in the survey area was 37.5%, with 10.3% of them having more than or equal to two abortions, or even more than eight. The patriarchal family in rural society controls the reproductive rights of rural women. They have been defined as a reproductive tool within their social status in rural areas, and they do not have access to reproductive rights. Moreover, abortion causes irreversible damage to a woman's body. This damage is not cared for or understood. And then, most, unfortunately, this is taken for granted and acquiesced to as the norm in rural society.
Trafficking
The countryside was a more frequent location for trafficking in women and children than the towns, particularly from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s.
In general, women and children were sold in the poor mountainous areas of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces and then traveled east along the railway. Most of these "buyers" also came from poor rural areas in the more economically developed regions. It is violence that "kidnaps" women and the more complex economic and cultural forces behind it.
Editorial comment：
In hundreds of survey reports, we have seen a decline in the suicide rate among rural women, an increase in education levels, and more and more rural women escaping poverty on their own. However, we have also seen the problematic situation of girls left behind and the ignorance of rural women about domestic violence.
We hope that this report will be the spark that ignites more people's continued concern for rural women. In the long wait for the truth, may we all remain angry, hopeful, and take action.