Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics

Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics

An Introduction

Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao

The two key terms of this volume are feminisms and Chinese characteristics. Feminisms can be translated as nüquan zhuyi 女权主义 (women’s-rights-ism) or nüxing zhuyi 女性主义 (womanism) in Chinese, but the two are not interchangeable.¹ Following the conceptual framework proposed by Dai Jinhua, we view nüxing zhuyi as a broader category that can incorporate nüquan zhuyi.² It is under this umbrella term of the plural nüxing zhuyi that we set out to examine and theorize the multifarious feminisms in contemporary China.

Chinese feminisms must remain plural because those concepts represent the changing practical consciousness in response to historical and social developments. Plurality is an effective strategy for subverting the systematic oppressions that often exercise their power by creating, maintaining, and consolidating binary structures. According to Lisa Rofel, the problem faced by Chinese feminists lies in the binary divisions we utilized to forge a singular feminism: socialism versus capitalism, Chinese traditions versus Chinese socialism, and Chinese feminism versus western feminism.³ The imperative for Chinese women, as Rofel puts it, is that they need to rise above the generalizations about them to become subjects of a counterhistory.⁴ Plurality, on the other hand, does not mean replacing the critique of the systematic problems with fragmented strategies; rather, it invites pluralistic, systematic thinking. For example, Dai Jinhua has proposed a broader definition of feminism as the search for different worlds and alternative possibilities other than global capitalism; such explorations, through women’s, especially Third-World women’s thinking of nationalism, reveal the plurality of historical processes, so as to open broader space for thoughts, criticisms, and social practices.⁵

The other key term, Chinese characteristics, is a neologism invented by Westerners in the late nineteenth century, when Chineseness was racialized, oftentimes in a negative way, as a result of the colonial encounter.⁶ The New Culture reformers and the later socialist revolutionaries both set out to reform Chinese tradition, which can be regarded as another form of Chinese characteristics, following the Western model and the Marxist paradigm, respectively. Since 1984 the phrase Chinese characteristics has become the official translation of zhongguo tese 中国特色 as it appeared in the epithet zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi 中国特色社会主义 (socialism with Chinese characteristics), proposed by Deng Xiaoping.⁷ This epithet justifies China’s integration into the world capitalist system in the postsocialist period under the premise that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains the sole ruling party of China, which signals the state’s insistence on its monopoly on explaining and defining Chinese society.⁸ Whether as a racialized term or as a political guideline, Chinese characteristics presupposed a binary structure, be it East and West, traditional and modern, or socialist and capitalist. From a grand perspective, the history of twentieth-century China is a history when the binary structures and patriarchal hierarchies embedded in the epithet Chinese characteristics were challenged, dismantled, and replaced by constantly renewed feminist ideas and practices across multiple centers and peripheries.⁹ To continue the liberating potential of Chinese feminisms, therefore, we must keep identifying and problematizing multifarious contemporary figurations of patriarchal power.

Therefore, by juxtaposing the plural feminisms to Chinese characteristics, we intend to deconstruct the binary structures and patriarchal hierarchies embedded in history, language, race, culture, and politics. We propose a broader use of feminisms in this volume to contest and open up Chinese characteristics as a notion constrained by racism, traditionalism, nationalism, or hierarchical spatialization and biopoliticization in different historical periods—and at the same time, we propose to view the ensemble of Chinese feminisms as a transnational product that seeks to situate the imaginary notion of Chineseness in the global context. In this way, feminisms with Chinese characteristics can denote the circulation of feminist discourses across various kinds of difference without reinscribing national(ist) boundaries or invoking a global-to-local hierarchy.¹⁰ We argue that the strength of Chinese feminisms lies precisely in their plurality and in the plural Chinese characteristics that they simultaneously challenge and redefine.

With this mission in mind, in this introduction we first provide a brief genealogy of the fraught history of feminisms in China since the early twentieth century, then offer a critical survey of the contested terrain of Chinese feminisms in the contemporary period, especially after the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing. After laying out the historical context, opportunities, and challenges of Chinese feminisms, we discuss different forms of feminisms with Chinese characteristics that have emerged as counterdiscourses to masculinist populism, nationalism, and neoliberalism in twenty-first-century China and beyond. Here Chinese feminisms are regarded not as ersatz counterparts of Western feminisms, but as an active component of transnational feminisms in the age of globalization.¹¹

This volume features a hybrid selection of scholarly articles, interviews, and talks from a representative group of women’s and gender studies scholars, women writers, and activists in mainland China, Hong Kong, the United States, and Europe. Their contributions to the discussion of feminisms with Chinese characteristics range from historical reflections, theoretical ruminations, and accounts of lived experiences, to cultural studies and social critiques, painting a panoramic picture of Chinese feminisms in the age of globalization. The plural Chinese feminisms negotiate and contend with one another, exhibiting the unstable and fractured terrain of feminist ideas and practices in contemporary China. This hybrid model allows us to pinpoint the multifaceted and dynamic contentions and representations of contemporary Chinese feminisms in a single volume—one that does not intend to present an authorial voice of any singular form of Chinese feminism, but instead sets a stage for multiple voices, analyses, and interpretations of contemporary Chinese feminisms, which constantly substantiate, underlie, supplement, contradict, offset, and dialogue with one another. It is our hope that these plural feminisms with Chinese characteristics can open up more possibilities of both action and imagination in history.

Genealogy of Chinese Feminisms

In order to understand the contested terrain and plurality of contemporary Chinese feminisms, it is necessary to look at the genealogy of Chinese feminisms as situated in history. The purpose of providing this genealogy is not to emphasize the particularity of Chinese feminisms, but to continually question the narratives in which Chinese feminisms are embedded, as Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid suggest:

If feminism is to be different, it must acknowledge the ideological and problematic significance of its own past. Instead of creating yet another grand tradition or a cumulative history of emancipation, neither of which can deal with our present problems, we need to be attentive to how the past enters differently into the consciousness of other historical periods and is further subdivided by a host of other factors including gender, caste, and class.¹²

The birth of Chinese feminisms can be traced back to the turn of the twentieth century, when China was plagued with a series of military defeats, foreign invasions, and economic crises. In the face of a crumbling Qing empire, Chinese elites were seeking new ways to stall China’s sinking into a backwater colony in the imperialist-capitalist world system. Lamenting the inferior position of China (and Chinese men) in a world dominated by Euro-America, some progressive Chinese male intellectuals and political activists turned to a nationalist-feminist agenda. They advocated for female education, abolition of the centuries-old foot-binding practice, free love, free marriage, a new sexual morality, and even gynocentrism in the hope that women could live a healthier and happier life and actively contribute to the birth of a modern nation-state and its younger and, ideally, stronger citizens. As Tani E. Barlow asserts, the core of progressive modern Chinese feminism was eugenics,¹³ which can be directly translated into national rejuvenation. For many early male feminists, women’s emancipation was part of a larger project of enlightenment and national self-strengthening, coded either ‘male’ or ‘patriarchal.’¹⁴ In this historical context, early Chinese feminists were not in direct opposition to the patriarchal society or to men; instead, they proved the value of their existence through negotiations with, or making concessions to, the society, the government, the nation, or even men.¹⁵

Dorothy Ko and Wang Zheng assert that Chinese feminism is always already a global discourse, and the history of its local reception is a history of the politics of translation.¹⁶ In modern China, male-authored discourse on women’s liberation and female empowerment emerged as a counterdiscourse to the Western gaze, which perpetuated the image of China as woman.¹⁷ As Ping Zhu’s study shows, modern Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century sought to challenge the naturalized view of gender hierarchy in order to alter the power structure embedded in the heterosexual dichotomy in the Western gaze, and to reject the bio-destiny of the Chinese race.¹⁸ Some women writers, activists, and revolutionaries had joined their male peers to publish feminist writings advocating women’s rights and gender equity largely within the nationalist-feminist framework, while others criticized their androcentric and often male-chauvinist views of gender, history, and modern nationhood. The booming publication industry at the time, including the rise of women’s journals, provided an essential venue for the articulation and circulation of early feminist ideas and words.¹⁹

From its very origination Chinese feminism could not be understood as singular. Under the umbrella term of nüquan (women’s rights), anarchist, socialist, liberal, evolutionary, eugenic, and nationalist positions shaped various feminist articulations and cultural imaginations for a modern China.²⁰ From the first Chinese feminist martyr Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907) to the first Chinese feminist theorist He-Yin Zhen (1884–ca. 1920)²¹, from the new woman (xin nüxing 新女性) to the modern girl (modeng nülang 摩登女郎), from mothers of national citizens (guomin zhimu 国民之母) to avatars of sexual love, Chinese women were endowed with different identities and agencies despite the overarching nationalist agenda and the persisting patriarchal system.²² A cohort of women writers, including Ding Ling 丁玲, Lu Yin 庐隐, Xiao Hong 萧红, Zhang Ailing 张爱玲 (aka Eileen Chang), Ling Shuhua 凌叔华, and Xie Bingying 谢冰莹, also contributed to literary feminisms in the early twentieth century by composing numerous narratives portraying Chinese women’s everyday lives, dilemmas, struggles, and revolutionary aspirations and practices.²³ Many radical May Fourth feminists, such as Ding Ling and Chen Xuezhao 陈学昭, later joined the CCP during the Yan’an Period (1935–48) and brought their feminist agenda into the core of the Party.

Women’s liberation was a significant part of the Chinese socialist revolution after the Yan’an period. As Wang Zheng has observed, the term feminism (nüquan zhuyi) was deemed bourgeois during this period.²⁴ Hence the slogans funü jiefang 妇女解放 (women’s liberation) and nannü pingdeng 男女平等 (equality between men and women) were more favored by the CCP and were listed on the official political agenda. The subject of the socialist women’s policies was funü, a national woman who was intertwined directly in state processes over the period of social revolution and socialist modernization who, because of her achievements as a state subject, would modernize family practices.²⁵ Socialist state feminism aimed to situate women first in the state and then in the family. As Cai Xiang points out, socialist state feminists did not adopt a radical stance by breaking with men; instead, liberation meant reconciliation between sexes on the premise that sexism was no longer in the way, so men and women could be equal socialist subjects.²⁶

As early as 1939, the Yan’an government passed the first marriage law that endowed women with the freedom of free marriage and certain financial support after divorce.²⁷ According to Dong Limin, women’s work during the Yan’an period was led by the government and carried out by women, and showed a conspicuous pro-women tendency.²⁸ In 1949 the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation (renamed in 1957 the All-China Women’s Federation, Zhonghua quanguo funü lianhe hui 中华全国妇女联合会, or fulian 妇联) was established. With its local branches reaching all the way to the neighborhood level all over China, fulian, under the leadership of senior women cadres within the CCP, promoted a series of national policies aiming for gender equity.²⁹ Between 1949 and 1978, fulian was the biggest and the sole legalized women’s organization in China.³⁰

As a result of the state feminism that was spearheaded as a formally institutionalized top-down campaign, women’s social status, literacy rate, educational level, and workforce participation have all been enormously improved. The employment rate among Chinese women age sixteen to sixty-four is not only the highest in East Asia but stays in the top tier of employment rates for women in the entire world.³¹ Although women in the workplace still face the challenges of sexist discrimination in its various forms, China’s gender pay gap (the percentage by which average male pay exceeds average female pay) is, at 7.5 percent in 2009, the narrowest in East Asia and smaller than that of some developed countries, including the United States (19.8 percent in 2009).³²

The remarkable practices and ideas of socialist feminism were gradually encroached on, however, when China embraced a market economy in the postsocialist period. The nascent yet robust women’s studies (funü yanjiu 妇女研究) that emerged in the 1980s in China tacitly participated in and advocated the drastic economic and ideological turn toward markets and globalization.³³ The first generation of women’s studies scholars in postsocialist China, such as Li Xiaojiang and Du Fangqin, bid farewell to the era of revolutions in their own ways. Li advocated restoring the sex gap (xinggou 性沟) between men and women so women could reclaim their feminine space and feminine nature.³⁴ She argues that her proposition is not to go back to presocialist gender relations, but to awaken women’s consciousness to supplement the already achieved socialist style of gender equality. Du, by contrast, is more interested in the notion of gender (shehui xingbie 社会性别) as a social construct and promotes Asian women’s studies (Yazhou funü yanjiu 亚洲妇女研究) as a way of connecting the regional with the global.³⁵

Overall, postsocialist Chinese feminist discourse deliberately kept its distance from socialist feminism and Marxist social theories that upheld the ideal of gender equity. As Rofel puts it, renaturalized gender is regarded as part of an emancipatory story, holding out the promise that people can unshackle their innate human selves by emancipating themselves from the socialist state.³⁶ Intellectuals in the postsocialist period emphasize rediscovering and restoring women’s real, natural, feminine, singularity, which is often materialized through market-oriented consumer practices and commodified ways of self-expression in post-Mao China.³⁷ Along these lines the socialist party-state’s emancipatory discourse has often been criticized for subsuming women under a nationalist agenda and proletarian class revolution.³⁸ Further appropriating a market-individualism discourse, a backlash of patriarchal conservatism devalued the socialist feminist legacy by condemning Chinese women who grew up in the Maoist era as over-liberated and thus unfeminine according to the new gender norms, which place great value on the formulation of an expressive personal lifestyle and the ability to select the right commodities to attain it.³⁹ This was a period when masculinity and power came together because, on the one hand, the criticism of Maoism was from a masculinist perspective,⁴⁰ and, on the other hand, issues concerning gendered division of labor, women’s decreasing level of political participation, and structural inequalities were considered trivial personal matters and thus systematically neglected.

A similar trend can also be found in the development of women’s literature and cinema that have responded to the marketization of cultural production in postsocialist China. Since the 1980s multiple series of women literature were published all over China.⁴¹ Women writers of different generations have profusely published literary works to continue and expand the female literary tradition. In comparison to pioneering figures such as He-Yin Zhen, Qiu Jin, and Ding Ling, post-Mao women writers in general appear to be less committed to master narratives such as nationalism, revolution, modernization, class struggle, and socialist women’s liberation, but are more concerned about women’s individual problems and existential angst in their everyday lives, particularly in the domestic realm, as well as about their awakening gender consciousness, sexual desire, and norm-bending self-expressions. While the older generations of women writers, such as Wang Anyi 王安忆, Zhang Jie 张洁, and Zhang Xinxin 张辛欣 paid more critical attention to gendered inequality in family, sexuality, and reproduction, the publication of younger writers’ works marked the rising new trend of private writing (si xiezuo 私写作) in the 1990s.⁴²

The literary essentialization of gender differences based on a physiological foundation has been further amplified and capitalized by the accelerating commercialization of women’s literature and the marketization of China’s publication industry. In a dialogue with Dai Jinhua, Wang Gan, a literary critic, even laments that the only unique contribution women writers can make to Chinese literature is candid descriptions and confessions of their own private lives because women are always positioned as the object of the male gaze.⁴³ The Cloth Tiger (布老虎 Bu laohu) series repackaged women writers’ literary explorations of gender consciousness as sensational bestsellers catering to the voyeuristic gaze at woman’s body and sexuality on the book market. A series of women writers’ body writing (shenti xiezuo 身体写作), the most (in)famous of which is Zhou Weihui’s banned novel Shanghai Baby (Shanghai Baobei 上海宝贝, 1999), is another salient example of the commodification of woman’s body, as well as the blatant exploitation of female authors’ creative writings about women’s private lives and intimate relationships.

Compared to a blossoming women’s literature, women’s cinema in the 1990s fell into a lull. Back in the 1980s China still had a large army of women filmmakers who were working in state film studios, thanks to the political legacy of women’s liberation during the socialist era. According to official statistics, fifty-nine women directors produced 182 feature films between 1980 and 1989, which was a rare accomplishment for female filmmakers not only in Chinese film history but in world cinema.⁴⁴ This trend did not continue into the 1990s. Due to the domination of imported Hollywood blockbusters in the Chinese film market, as well as the rapid expansion and proliferation of other entertainment venues and platforms, the market for domestic Chinese films was drastically shrinking. Moreover, since the 1990s the cultural system reform (wenhua tizhi gaige 文化体制改革) has applied market logic to cultural production and distribution. The state subsidy to film studios was radically cut, and as a result the Chinese film industry was hurled into a crisis. In particular, the marketization of the cultural industry and mass media posed serious challenges for women’s cinema, as films concerning gender consciousness and gender-specific social issues were hardly competitive with lucrative genre films that emphasized audiovisual spectacles and star images to cater to the mainstream market.

The number of Chinese women filmmakers was dramatically reduced in the 1990s. Ning Ying 宁瀛, Hu Mei 胡玫, Li Shaohong 李少红, Huang Shuqin 黄蜀芹, and Liu Miaomiao 刘苗苗 were a handful of women directors who were still struggling to produce films for the mainstream market. Their works produced in this period were often criticized as either lacking a gendered perspective or falling into the old trap of displaying an overly sexualized female body to appeal to a voyeuristic audience. In other words, these works were shaped more by the combined forces of market rationale and the dominant discourse of male desire than by the critical tradition of feminist women’s cinema, both thematically and formalistically.

This shifting trend in postsocialist cultural production and intellectual discourse on gender can be better understood if we consider that the development of postsocialist market feminism, as Barlow renders it, is an indispensable part of the capitalization and marketization of post-Mao China. In a market-oriented masculinist discourse, the Maoist image of strong, heroic women was ridiculed as a symbol of backward obstacles to China’s modernization and lent a ready excuse to the massive layoffs of women workers.⁴⁵ Discrediting Maoist mass politics and revolutionary modernity, postsocialist Chinese intellectuals engaged in heated debates about individual subjectivity, which complements the reform ideology of promoting personal responsibility and freeing individuals for the market. As a part of the intellectual discourse centered on market individualism, postsocialist Chinese market feminism criticizes allegedly gender-erasing and desexualizing state feminism and affirms the value of asserting individual gendered identity based on anatomical features, which leads to biological determinism and the objectification of the female body and female labor as ready commodities in a new roaring market economy.

Postsocialism, in Xudong Zhang’s words, does not suggest a more advanced, superior—or, for that matter, more backward and inferior—form of socioeconomic and political development. Rather, it is an experimental way to address a bewildering overlap of modes of production, social systems, and symbolic orders, all of which lay claim to a fledging world of life.⁴⁶ The revival of new Confucianism in China since the 1990s attests to the postsocialist market’s astonishing power to revamp and reintegrate different ideologies and resources, creating new figurations of patriarchal power from the specter of history. Dai’s interview The Specter of Polygamy in Contemporary Chinese Gender Imaginations, presented in the first section of this volume, provides a sobering discussion of the collusion of traditional culture and the capitalist narrative. What Chinese feminists currently face is a postmodern landscape where new Confucianism exists side by side with neoliberalism, where socialist aspirations merge with capitalist expansion, and where politics and culture join hands to cement the traditional gender hierarchy.⁴⁷

Not only does postsocialism prove to be heterogeneous terrain that makes the pluralistic mode of thinking and practice imperative, Chinese women in the postsocialist period cannot form a singular and monolithic feminist subject. Catherine Rottenberg has warned us that the emergent neoliberal order is slowly expunging gender and even sexual differences among a certain strata of subjects while it simultaneously produces new forms of racialized and class-stratified gender exploitation.⁴⁸ Marshaled by neoliberal discourse, market feminism in post-Mao China has dismantled the egalitarian legacy of state feminism but fails to address the increasing inequalities between men and women, and between women of different regions, classes, ethnicities, educational levels, and age groups, let alone the differences between Chinese women and women in the First World countries. The return of Hong Kong and Macao to mainland China in 1997 and 1999, respectively, has further diversified this already dynamic and complex terrain of Chinese feminist practices and ideas.⁴⁹ Ya-chen Chen proposes in The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism that we should expand the scope of Chinese feminism to include all histories and realities of all Chinese-speaking areas.⁵⁰ While this volume cannot be so exhaustive, it uses the plural feminisms with Chinese characteristics as a way to summon feminist practices and imaginations from these overlapping modes and intersectional discourses, and to address the heterogeneous feminist subjects in contemporary China.

The 1995 World Conference on Women and the Rise of NGOs in China

The difference between Chinese women and women in First World countries, or the difference between the local and the global, has been at stake in the development of NGOs in China since 1995. In September 1995 the Fourth World Conference on Women, attended by more than 17,000 participants, was held in Beijing.⁵¹ In addition, a parallel NGO forum was opened in Huairou, in the northern suburbs of Beijing. It hosted sixty symposiums and thirty-five exhibitions, and drew over 30,000 attendees.⁵² The 1995 conference ushered in a new age for the globalization of Chinese feminisms by bringing transnational capital into Chinese women’s studies and Chinese feminist practices both in China and overseas. Thereafter, women’s studies projects and feminist NGOs, funded by transnational corporations and organizations such as the Ford Foundation, flourished in China and among expatriate Chinese, fundamentally changing the outlook, agents, and concerns of Chinese feminisms, and further fracturing the already contested terrain.

On the eve of the 1995 World Conference on Women, the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) characterized itself as an NGO so as to connect the tracks with women’s movements around the world.⁵³ In November 1993, a Chinese delegation of forty-three participants attended the Asia-Pacific Women’s NGO Forum, held in Manila, which constituted China’s first official encounter with the global NGO movement. At the Manila Forum, Huang Qizao, vice chair of the ACWF and director of the NGO subcommittee, called Women’s Federation as the biggest NGO in China, which invited questions and debates in the international community. This controversy revolving around the nature and organization of the ACWF reveals the Chinese characteristics of women’s NGOs: while functioning largely outside of the government, they are expected to follow the model of the Women’s Federation to play supplementary rather than oppositional roles to governmental agencies. In many cases, NGOs and the ACWF have developed a collaborative relationship to pool resources and carry out their advocacy projects, which must be aligned with national policy and official ideology, as Li Jun points out in chapter 6.

This collaboration between NGOs with the Women’s Federation has become a distinctive mode of contemporary Chinese feminisms.⁵⁴ The first-generation organizers of women’s NGOs took advantage of their positions within the Women’s Federation or its affiliated institutions and agencies to secure social and financial resources. Their careful self-positioning as nonpolitical and nonoppositional civic organizations was determined to be the foremost precondition for the survival and development of Chinese NGOs, which have been struggling with limited resources and a heavily constrained public space since their birth.⁵⁵

Following the 1995 World Conference on Women, some of the earliest women’s NGOs got further development through the support of transnational funding and increased media visibility.⁵⁶ Going along with the global associational revolution, an increasing number of NGOs have been registered all over China to provide institutional support for women’s development and gender equity.⁵⁷ These NGOs have propagated feminist ideas in China, linked some Chinese women with the world, and at the same time greatly transformed the programs, organizations, languages, and practices of Chinese feminisms. Meanwhile, their unprecedented publicity and transnational networks also alerted the state that the Chinese feminist program might have grown to an extent that exceeded the capacity of the government to control its agenda or interests.⁵⁸

The tension between feminist NGOs and the state rapidly deepened when the older generation who had worked simultaneously in NGOs and the Women’s Federation retired from their positions within the governmental bureaucracy and the younger generation endeavored to push forward the feminist cause outside of the statist model. With the rise of masculinist nationalism in China in recent years, the feminist NGOs have become targets of state surveillance due to their transnational theoretical framework and activist program. That surveillance led to the detention of the Feminist Five in 2015⁵⁹ and the permanent ban on Feminist Voice (nüquan zhisheng 女权之声), a prominent feminist NGO, on March 8, 2018.⁶⁰ Having lost the state’s full support and even acquiescent tolerance, the NGO feminists are in urgent need of new strategies of negotiation and new ways of advocacy.

To discuss the transformation of feminist NGOs in the twenty-first century, another paradigm of Chinese characteristics should also be considered and tackled: neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics. In his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey portrays the outcome of China’s neoliberalization in the postsocialist era as the construction of a particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control.⁶¹ This shift to neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics represents the latest alliance of economic neoliberalism and ideological neoconservatism: while a neoliberal market rationale shapes the reconfiguration of the economic realm and social institutions, including marriage and family, centralized authoritarian management and containment of public spaces have also been reconsolidated. Along a similar line, Li Jun’s chapter in this volume characterizes China’s escalating privatization, marketization, and neoliberalization as the recent local manifestation of a global patriarchal capitalism that has exerted enormous influence on Chinese women. Hui Faye Xiao’s chapter also examines how China’s radical turn to postsocialist patriarchy creates and consolidates various forms and intersections of gender, age, and class-based inequalities in social, economic, and cultural realms. In the wake of the paradigmatic transformation of the state’s agenda from equity-centered socialist revolution (including egalitarian women’s liberation) toward an efficiency-driven marketization and privatization, women of younger generations found themselves faced with a different set of gender-specific issues and problems.

Like women writers and filmmakers, younger feminist activists now also live with the dilemma of struggling to survive while keeping the feminist cause afloat under adverse sociopolitical conditions. In recent years the radical reduction in state support and social resources allocated to gender programs has led to Chinese feminist NGOs’ increasing dependence on international, mainly Western, funds. Further restraints imposed on NGO registration and activities by the 2017 Foreign NGO Law have made it even more challenging for feminists to acquire necessary funds and resources. Hence it has become a new norm for many feminist activists to resort to individual economic capital, media literacy, and social networking for organizing activities and campaigns.⁶² Such a binding situation makes massive mobilization and collective action in heavily censored real-life and virtual public spaces difficult to achieve and also causes a highly skewed demographic constitution: younger cohorts of Chinese feminists consist mainly of well-educated and urban-based college students and professionals who have relatively more economic, cultural, technological, and social capital to invest in feminist NGO activism.

As a result, the gender programs championed by these younger feminists are often preoccupied with concerns mainly pertaining to young urban professional women and appear to be less resonant with other women’s everyday struggles and problems. Although a growing number of feminists have started paying more attention to the intersection of class and gender, not all transnational NGOs are committed to or successful in connecting with women of lower classes, from different age groups, and in the rural areas, for many of whom the socialist legacy is still at work in their conceptualization of gender, equity, and rights. Hence this younger cohort’s NGO-sponsored feminist activities and studies have drifted farther from the legacy of socialist feminism in China, as the latter not only followed a different, Marxist paradigm, but also relied heavily on nuanced negotiations within the state to achieve its feminist agenda and on locally rooted practices to mobilize women.

As Wang Zheng and Ying Zhang point out, the younger and more urban-educated cohort of Chinese feminists in the age of NGOization are more interested in gender equality (shehui xingbie pingdeng) than in equality between men and women (nannü pingdeng).⁶³ The term nannü pingdeng is associated with the socialist state agenda, while shehui xingbie pingdeng suggests that women can claim their rights without subjecting themselves to the patriarchal state.⁶⁴ The rights these feminists pursue are deployed to demand citizens’ rights against an authoritarian state,⁶⁵ and thus differ drastically from those pursued by the earlier nationalist-feminists or socialist state feminists. Therefore they are not the most effective in addressing the questions that Dai Jinhua asks: How to correct this ‘visionary error’ without losing a female and feminist perspective? How to think about the tension between contemporary China’s historical context and Western theories? How to evaluate the influences of socialist history and practice on today’s culture and notion of gender?⁶⁶ The tension between the local and the global, between the rural and the urban, between history and the present, and between academia and activists calls for new theorization of feminisms with Chinese characteristics beyond those binaries.

Toward a Feminist Politics with Chinese Characteristics

Nearly one century ago, He-Yin Zhen conceptualized gender not simply as a form of social identity determined by sexual distinction, but also as a mechanism to create forms of power and domination based on that distinction in a structurally unequal society.⁶⁷ He-Yin’s groundbreaking feminist vision suggests that it is far from enough if women focus only on discovering their female consciousness, writing about their bodies or narrating their personal histories, because women’s consciousness, bodies, or histories are always already defined by masculinist visions and patriarchal power. However, this problematic gender consciousness or female body has become the selling point for women’s literature and women’s cinema in mainstream discourse. This has led to the denunciation of the feminist label by some women writers, filmmakers, and scholars in contemporary China. Feminists must develop different forms of representation to challenge the social institutions and historical narrative that define men and women unequally. Ding Ling, for examples, had to become a misogynist to overcome the feminist impasse in a patriarchal society.⁶⁸

One of the biggest achievements of the socialist state feminists was their redefinition of women and femininity, which allowed women to claim equal status with men. It is disheartening that the old gender hierarchy has been restored in the postsocialist period and that the achievements of earlier generations of Chinese feminists have been thrown on the dustheap of history. This is why Dai laments that in the contemporary period while women’s writers are starting to move to the cultural center, women in real life are continuously being marginalized.⁶⁹ The developments, amnesias, contradictions, and limitations of post-1995 Chinese feminist practices and representations compel us to revisit the ramifications and reinventions of feminist legacies that are firmly grounded in changing historical and social conditions, in order to articulate different forms of feminisms with Chinese characteristics beyond the binary of the local and the global.

To be clear, neither Chinese history nor the 1995 World Conference on Women and the subsequent NGOization of Chinese feminism can serve as a sufficient frame of reference for present-day Chinese feminisms. To understand the contested terrain of Chinese feminisms, we must look at other Chinese feminist imaginations and practices in the age of globalization. Early Chinese feminisms, socialist state feminisms, and new-period feminist recuperations all emerged against a global background; some prominent contentions of post-1995 Chinese feminisms, in particular, register overlapping or contradictory imaginations and practices around the problem of situating Chineseness in the global context.

Nicola Spakowski’s 2018 study shows that since around 2010 a new theoretical strand within Chinese feminism has been forming, which she labels socialist feminism or critical socialist feminism.⁷⁰ She writes, Socialism as a historical legacy and memory is indicative of China’s postsocialist situation, which . . . has a deep impact on the epistemological, theoretical, and political outlook as well as the identity of socialist feminists in today’s China.⁷¹ The roots of so-called socialist feminism can be dated back to the New Left thought that emerged in China in the mid-1990s,⁷² which coincided with the systematic importation of neoliberal feminisms into China. While socialist feminism is just one of the many feminisms in contemporary China, the rise of socialist feminism indicates the crucial importance of preserving critiques of systemic problems, such as the inequalities perpetuated by the neoliberal world order formed in the post–Cold War era and the specter of patriarchy revived by the victory of capital in various social sectors.

A leading figure of Chinese socialist feminism, Song Shaopeng, writes, it is possible that the ‘female consciousness’ released by the enlightenment movement in the 1980s unwittingly matches the neoliberal capitalist ideology in the 1990s.⁷³ Quite a few socialist feminists, both in the West and in China, have gone one step farther to bombard the complicity between neoliberalism and second-wave feminism. In 2009 the US feminist Nancy Fraser published the