Qiu Jin: A Revolutionary Feminist Pioneer in Early 20th Century China

“I live in an era of transition and I take advantage of the glimmer of civilization that appears there to expand the boundaries of my universe. Not very erudite, however it is always very painful for me to think that women in my country live in a world of darkness, as if drunk or immersed in a dream, without any knowledge.” So say the first verses of The stones of the jingwei bird, a short story by Qiu Jin. The work, begun in 1905, is semi-autobiographical and in it the author traces the main lines of her life: Huang Hanxiong, the female protagonist, comes from a family of Chinese nobility. Foot binding, arranged marriage, denial of education and social isolation are common practices in the deeply chauvinistic society of the time. Inspired by the women’s emancipation movements that were then beginning to arise from that “glimmer of civilization” described in the incipit of the work, Huang Hanxiong-Qiu Jin rebels. She escapes from the segregation imposed by forced and never-evaluated marriage, she flees to Japan, joins the revolutionary party and becomes an active part of the freedom movements.

Il Dance – this is the genre of belonging to The stones of the jingwei bird, where the prose story alternates with poetic verse – remained unfinished, however: of the twenty chapters planned, only five remain and a fragment of the sixth. The author’s intention would have been to publish the story in Chinese Women’s Journal founded by her, but it had to close due to lack of funds and Qiu Jin never had the opportunity to see it published. This is because Qiu Jin’s fictional narrative and true story were brutally cut short in 1907, when her ambitions fatally clashed with Chinese patriarchy. Sentenced to death following the failure of the revolt she led against the central imperial government, on 15 July of the same year she was arrested and executed. Her death achieved the opposite effect of what the ruling Qing dynasty expected: indignation and new waves of rebellion instead of silence and fear. In 1911, four years after the fact, the imperial government was deposed, giving way to the newly created Republic of China. Reforms were initiated that Qiu Jin never experienced, but which she herself, in part, initiated and brought to life through her works, published posthumously.

Qiu Jin

Wisconsin Historical Society

Qiu Jin was different. She grew up in a wealthy family in decline – like the entire social context of the end of the century – she received an education outside the norm thanks to the support of her intellectual mother, to whom Qiu Jin was always grateful. She was introduced to literature, taught to her by instructors of the highest level, she became acquainted with poetry and learned martial arts, the use of the sword and the bow. Despite her liberal education, she had to submit to the norms imposed on young Chinese women at the time: at the age of five her feet were bound – a particularly painful aesthetic practice so that women’s feet remained small – and at twenty-one she was given married to a merchant. The dissolute life of her husband, the rigid traditionalism of his family and the aspiration for something more, for that emancipation that still had neither form nor definition, pushed Qiu Jin to abandon marriage and motherhood of children, to fire femininity and to build a new gender iconography.

Lorenzo Petrantoni, portrait of Qiu Jin, Extraordinary. Thirty female innovators of the 19th and 20th centuries (2022)

Lorenzo Petrantoni

At the age of twenty-nine she moved to Japan, began to frequent student associations of revolutionaries, definitively removed the bands that bound her feet and actively dedicated herself to political life. In 1906 she settled in the revolutionary and progressive Chinese center of Shanghai. Here she dedicated herself to the education of young women and to protest activities aimed at overthrowing the Qing dynasty. In parallel, she founded the Chinese Women’s Journal, a point of reference for the feminist culture of then and today, and entirely directed her literary production to the revolutionary cause. This and her participation in the 1907 revolt resulted in her being sentenced to death at the mere age of thirty. Her last lines composed in the isolation of her confinement were “Autumn wind, autumn rain, I die of deep sadness.”

Poster del Biopic di Qiu Jin, 1984

Courtesy of IMDb

As James Mangan points out in A martyr for modernity, Qiu Jin was an oriental Judith of the twentieth century. Like the biblical heroine who, when the city of Bethulia was at the end of its strength due to the siege of Holofernes, brought about its liberation by killing the Assyrian general by beheading, Qiu Jin represented a model of femininity in its own right from the traditionally known . Elsewhere about her, next to her name we often find that of Hua Mulan, the semi-mythical figure of her who, driven by filial piety towards her elderly father, disguised herself as a man and served for years in the Chinese army at place of the latter. Just like Mulan, she applied herself with dedication to physical education, engaging in practices such as archery, precision shooting and fencing. She drank wine in quantity, refused make-up and wore men’s clothes, went around armed and manufactured detonating devices. She tried to paint around her the image of a male heroine: she defined herself Jianhu nüxiaor “wandering knight of Lake Jian”, referring to the lake near the family home, and chose as his second name Jin Xiong, “capable of competing with men”. Although less well-known, less widespread and more recent, just like Judith, Mulan Qiu Jin contradicted the customs of her time. She was a radical force that made its way into the tunnel of concentric circles that inform such mores, and was pushed to the margins by anti-progressivism. Finally, she is a forerunner of the times that modern culture has only recently rediscovered.

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2023-11-20 13:35:30
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