In 1907, in a rented room in Tokyo, a woman signed her work with a name she built herself, inserting her mother's maiden name where nobody had asked her to put anything. He-Yin Zhen argued for the total abolition of family, state, and property together, a generation before that argument became fashionable anywhere in the world. The record filed her writing under her husband's byline for most of a century afterward.
Her essays run from "On the Revenge of Women," which took apart the Confucian classics used to justify male rule, through "On the Question of Women's Labor," tracing exploitation back through the ancient well-field system, concubinage, and female infanticide. Her framework, nannü and shengji, treats gender and economics as one question rather than two, arriving at something close to intersectional theory a century before the term existed, out of Tokyo's exile politics rather than any Western tradition.
Her husband, Liu Shipei, later defected to the Qing government they'd both fled, and she is recorded in the Chouan Hui, the organisation that backed a later attempt to restore the monarchy. Historians disagree, sometimes sharply, about how much of that was her conviction and how much was her circumstance.
Further reading: Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia University Press, 2013) Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (Columbia University Press, 1990) He-Yin Zhen, "On the Question of Women's Liberation," 1907 — translated in The Birth of Chinese Feminism He-Yin Zhen, "On the Revenge of Women," 1907 — translated in The Birth of Chinese Feminism
Tags: He-Yin Zhen, Chinese anarchism, anarcha-feminism, Tianyi bao, nannü, shengji, Liu Shipei, Tokyo exiles, intersectionality, women's history, erasure, anarchism
Show notes: He Zhen A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 10
A Chinese anarchist-feminist who argued for the total abolition of family, state, and property together in 1907, filed for most of a century under her husband's name — her theory, her later entanglement in a monarchist restoration movement, and what it takes for a record to finally correct itself.
In this episode:
- The byline He-Yin Zhen built by inserting her mother's maiden name
- Tianyi bao, founded in Tokyo in 1907, considered the first Chinese-language anarchist journal
- The Society for the Restoration of Women's Rights and its mutual aid work
- "On the Revenge of Women" and the critique of yin-yang cosmology
- "On the Question of Women's Labor" and the well-field system
- Nannü and shengji, her framework linking gender to economics
- Liu Shipei's 1909 defection to the Qing government
- He-Yin Zhen's recorded presence in the Chouan Hui monarchist movement
- The 2013 translation project that finally recovered her authorship
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