Seeking Justice in Gender Revolution: He-Yin Zhen's Contributions to Chinese Political Thought

This dissertation studies the life, significance, and theoretical contributions of the Chinese anarcha-feminist He-Yin Zhen, a consequential yet under-studied figure. He-Yin’s journal, Natural Justice, introduced canonical socialist works to China, making her China’s first socialist feminist. An early intersectional thinker, He-Yin’s writings are indispensable for understanding the history of Chinese feminism and socialism, the relationship between feminism and socialism in Chinese political thought, and the international interchange of feminist and anarchist thought. Employing an ideas-in-context methodology, I examine He-Yin’s writings, some of which I translate for the first time, to show that she is an innovative thinker whose transvaluative use of language makes a number of theoretical contributions to late Qing political thought. First, I provide the first English-language biography of He-Yin to document her intellectual development, demonstrate how she has been intellectual suppressed, and defend the theoretical significance of her writings. Second, I argue that whereas the broader Chinese anarchist movement was inconsistent in its advocacy of feminism, He-Yin uniquely synthesized feminism with the anarchist commitments to social revolution and anti-imperialism. Third, I argue that He-Yin’s anarchist commitment to equality leads her, for the first time in Chinese history, to argue for women’s equality as an intrinsic good, thereby rejecting the paradigmatic subsumption of feminism to nationalism in early Chinese feminist debates. Fourth, I argue that He-Yin advances a novel conception of women’s subordination that traces the history and mechanisms of women’s oppression through language, social institutions, and China’s intellectual history. In so doing, He-Yin supplied Chinese feminism with a more comprehensive conception of women’s subordination and a more rigorous model of women’s liberation. In an era intellectually dominated by the realist search for wealth and power, He-Yin stands out for her participation in modern China’s first egalitarian social movement, as a moral-political critic calling attention to the injustices of China’s modernization project, and as China’s foremost theoretician of egalitarian feminism. Studying He-Yin’s political thought deepens our understanding of the depth and diversity of early Chinese feminism and testifies to the transnationality of anarchism and feminism in an era of emerging modernity.

Department dc:contributor.department

Political Science

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ouellette, Devin

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Williams, Melissa S
• Walton, Matthew J

• Chinese Political Thought
• Feminism
• He-Yin Zhen
• History of Political Thought
• Political Theory
• Socialism

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/150789

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/150789