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The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory . Edited by LYDIA H. LIU , REBECCA E. KARL and DOROTHY KO . Columbia University Press , 2013. xii + 328 pp. £20.50; $29.50. ISBN 978-0-231-16291-3
Book Reviews
This is an important collection of translated and annotated texts from the first generation of feminist thinkers in China at the turn of the 20th century. The six essays by He-Yin Zhen, which feature the volume, are here published in English for the first time. They are accompanied by the previously better known essay by Liang Qichao, "On women's education," (1897) and Jin Tianhe's "The women's bell" (1903). He-Yin Zhen (1884-1920), who chose to include her mother's maiden name in her own surname in defiance of tradition, was a founding editor of Tianyi (Natural Justice), an influential anarcho-feminist journal (which also carried the earliest Chinese translation of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto in 1908). The rediscovery and introduction to a global readership of He-Yin is a scholarly commendable and politically significant achievement. Complicating the "received narrative about the origins of Chinese feminism in a borrowed male liberal worldview" (p. 47), the book amounts to a corrective reconstruction of the emergence of feminist thought in China at the eve of the country's revolutionary upheavals.
Unlike her mostly male feminist contemporaries, He-Yin's writings about women's subjugation were guided by a transnational worldview, in which imperialism and capitalism were in the background...