Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for Scholarly Exchange.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

Republican Lens

ASIA: LOCAL STUDIES/GLOBAL THEMES

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Kären Wigen, and Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Editors

1. Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife, by Robin M. LeBlanc

2. The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Joshua A. Fogel

3. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, by Hue-Tam Ho Tai

4. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

5. Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 , by Susan L. Glosser

6. An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) , by Geremie R. Barmé

7. Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603–1868 , by Marcia Yonemoto

8. Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, by Madeleine Yue Dong

9. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, by Ruth Rogaski

10. Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, by Andrew D. Morris

11. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, by Miyako Inoue

12. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period , by Mary Elizabeth Berry

13. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination , by Anne Allison

14. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai , by Heonik Kwon

15. Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China , by Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley

16. Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China, by Paul A. Cohen

17. A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600–1912 , by Kären Wigen

18. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China , by Thomas S. Mullaney

19. Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan, by Andrew Gordon

20. Recreating Japanese Men, edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall

21. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley

22. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 , by Gennifer Weisenfeld

23. Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion, by Shawn Bender

24. Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition, by Elizabeth J. Perry

25. Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–1950 , by Fabian Drixler

26. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village, by Henrietta Harrison

27. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo, by Ian Jared Miller

28. Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China, by Marc L. Moskowitz

29. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History, by Miriam Kingsberg

30. Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press, by Joan Judge

Republican Lens

Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press

Joan Judge

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Judge, Joan, 1958- author.

    Republican lens : gender, visuality, and experience in the early Chinese periodical press / Joan Judge.

        pages    cm. — (Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes ; 30)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-28436-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-95993-4 (e-edition)

    1. China—History—Republic, 1912–1949.    2. China—Social conditions—1912–1949.    3. Women—China—Social conditions—20th century.    4. Periodicals—Publishing—China—History—20th century.    I. Title.    II. Series: Asia—local studies/global themes ; 30.

    DS774.J83 2015

    951.04’1—dc23 2014050150

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Josh

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Color Plates

Introduction: Republican Lens

1. Text and Method

2. Republican Ladies

3. Everyday Experience

4. Public Bodies

5. Practical Talent

6. Liminal Sexualities

Conclusion: Aerial Aspirations

Appendix A: Funü shibao Issue Dates

Appendix B: Chinese and Japanese Characters for Names and Terms

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

0.1. Two girls look at an image of themselves on the cover of the first issue of Funü shibao

0.2. The alleged chasm between Chinese and Western approaches to marriage

0.3. The new-style wedding of Mr. Yan Nanzhang and Ms. Zhu Songjun

1.1. A young woman views the covers of journals in a bookshop window

1.2. The cover of Funü shibao 12 (January 10, 1914)

1.3. The cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal (February 1899)

1.4. The cover art for Funü shibao 5 (January 23, 1912)

1.5. An image by Ding Song showing a female tennis player

1.6. The cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal (July 1902)

1.7. An advertisement for Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People

1.8. Bao Tianxiao’s sons and daughters

1.9. Former prime minister Tang Shaoyi and his bride, Wu Weiqiao

1.10. A portrait of Cai E (Songpo) with his wife and his second wife

1.11. A portrait of Zhang Zhuoqun, secretary of the Women’s Military Unit

1.12. Photographs of advanced women ( nüjie xianjin )

2.1. A portrait of He Miaoling, the wife of Ambassador Wu Zhiyong (Wu Tingfang)

2.2. A portrait of Ms. Tang Youqin, wife of Provincial Military Director Tang Zaili and principal of Beijing Chongshi Girls’ School

2.3. A portrait of Ms. Yang Xueyao, winner of a speech competition organized by the Worldwide Chinese Student Association (Huanqiu Zhongguo xuesheng hui)

2.4. A portrait of He Miaoling as president of the Women’s Assistance Association (Nüjie xiezan hui)

2.5. Ms. Cheng Yili with her four medals

2.6. Shen Youqin (married name Tang Youqin), principal of the Beijing Chongshi Girls’ School

2.7. Chen Zhen’e, a teacher at a missionary school in Shanghai, promoting the Luowei Pharmacy’s Guben Medicine for the Uterus

2.8. Students on their way home from school

2.9. Suzhou female students exercising with barbells in a physical education class

2.10. Student Lin Yingfei claims that Moon brand pills (Yueguang tiewan) helped cure her of exhaustion

2.11. A portrait of the young Zhang Zhaohan (Mojun) in Victorian dress

2.12. The Japanese Ms. Kinbara Murako, a teacher at the Jingzhi Girls’ School in Wuxi, posing in Chinese dress

2.13. Urban women purchasing material for clothing at a Women’s National Products Company (Nüzi guohuo gongsi)

2.14. Wang Jieliang a graduate of the Chengdong Girls’ School and a teacher at the Rugao Sha City Elementary School in Nantong

3.1. Wang Ling, a contributor to Funü shibao

3.2. A fashionable young woman asleep at a table, next to a copy of Funü shibao and a rose

3.3. A student with a new-style umbrella in her hand

3.4. A well-appointed Republican Lady removing her gloves

3.5. A young woman dressed in fashionable short tight sleeves and short pants

3.6. A fashionable beauty

3.7. A young woman recites lessons in her boudoir

3.8. A woman listlessly twists wool

3.9. Portrait of Ms. Bi Yang Fenruo of Wumen, Bi Yihong’s wife

3.10. Back view of the fashionable journalist, educator, and ci poet Lü Bicheng

3.11. Tang Xiuhui (right) with a classmate, Ms. Jiang Hanjie

4.1. Physical education specialist Tang Jianwo

4.2. Drs. Bernhardt Kronig and Karl Gauss, as pictured in Aoyagi Yūbi’s Jissen mutsūan sanpō (The practice of painless childbirth)

4.3. A page from the translation of Aoyagi’s Practice of Painless Childbirth by Qin Zong and Zhi Xin

4.4. Tang Linbao publishes his wife’s portrait and an accompanying testimonial in support of the Great World Pharmacy’s miraculous cure

4.5. Qu Suzhen recounts in a testimonial that she learned of the outstanding efficacy of Mr. Douan’s medicines from reading the newspaper

4.6. The innovation of running tapwater in Shanghai was the inspiration for the name of the Great World Pharmacy’s blood-fortifying medicine, Running Blood

4.7. A westernized woman’s face is used to promote Great World Pharmacy’s Women’s Treasure medicine

4.8. Republican Chinese Survey of Women’s Menstruation designed for Chinese women by the medical student Qu Jun

4.9. Exercises modeled by Victorian-style figures

4.10. A photograph of a Javanese wet nurse ( rufu ) showing her bare breast

5.1. Display room for drawings and handicrafts at the Zhejiang Women’s Normal School

5.2. Photograph of teachers and students at Zhang Mojun’s Shenzhou Girls’ School, 1916

5.3. Photograph of family of principal of Chengdong Girls’ School, Yang Bomin

5.4. Portrait of Yang Xueqiong, Yang Bomin’s eldest daughter, a teacher, and a contributor to Funü shibao

5.5. Photograph of cotton flower crafts made by the sisters and Minli School teachers Su Bennan and Su Benyan

5.6. Photograph of the first class to graduate from the Minli Shanghai Girls’ Middle School’s General Program, summer 1911

5.7. An association for the discussion of elementary education established by the Chengdong Girls’ School

5.8. An ad for Doan’s Kidney Pills

5.9. Photographs of Yu Shen Shou and of her embroidered portrait of the Italian queen

5.10. Zhang Mojun’s oil painting Awakened Lion (Xingshi tu)

5.11. Female visitors at a display hall for women’s handicrafts ( saizhen huichang nüzi shougong chu )

5.12. Visitors in front of a female handicrafts institute ( nüzi shougong suo )

6.1. Ms. Tang Xiuhui, normal school graduate and contributor to Funü shibao

6.2. The courtesan Yin Baochai

6.3. Advertisement for the Minying Photography Studio

6.4. Photograph of graduates of the Zhejiang Girls’ Normal School, 1916

6.5. Photograph of students in the normal class at the Beiyang Girls’ Public School

6.6. Courtesans whose status is evident in their bound feet, visible earrings, and elaborate hairstyles

6.7. Ms. Wei Shuji, wife of diplomatic attaché in England, Luo Yiyuan

6.8. A woman of the flower world wearing a tight headdress decorated with pearls

6.9. Xie Yingying, Lingxi guan, and Xue Yinxuan

6.10. Cheng Peiqing, writer for Funü shibao , poses in male attire

6.11. Suzhen lies on the grass with a book

6.12. Qin Meiyun, wearing the courtesan’s trademark tight pearl headdress, poses astride on a bicycle

6.13. The Nanjing sisters Little Four and Little Five, courtesans

6.14. Photograph of child care class at the Shanghai Institute for Poor Children, 1910

6.15. Two pictures of the four cardinal vices, wine, sex, avarice, and temper ( jiuse caiqi lu)

6.16. Two courtesans, Beijing Pengyue lou (right) and Xiao Afeng (left)

7.1. Photograph of Zhang Xiahun from an article comparing her with the American stunt flyer Katherine Stinson

7.2. Photograph of an early airship into which the figure of a Chinese woman has been painted

7.3. A series of photographs of French biplanes

7.4. The courtesan Bao Jinlian in a mock airplane

7.5. The courtesans Gao Cuiyu and Xie Lijuan in a mock airplane at the Minying Photography Studio

7.6. Photograph of China’s flier Zhang Xiahun completely recovered from her brush with danger

COLOR PLATES

1. Portrait of Zhang Hongyi, a contributor to Funü shibao

2. A Republican Lady hunts in the rolling hills in striking hybrid attire, Funü shibao 7 (July 10, 1912)

3. Portrait of Zhang Huiru and Tang Xiuhui, Funü shibao 20 (November 1916)

4. Portrait of the courtesans Lin Baobao, Chunyan Lou, and Lin Yuanyuan

5. Portrait of Ms. Wei Shuji of Fujian, daughter of the director of the Fuzhou Naval Office under the Qing dynasty

6. Portrait of Yiqing bieshu

7. China’s Female Flyer, Zhang Xiahun, Funü shibao 20 (November 1916)

8. A woman looking at a flying machine through binoculars, Funü shibao 20 (November 1916)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has been an experience in the fullest sense of the word. I want to thank Barbara Mittler and Grace Fong for initially suggesting I become part of a project on women’s journals at a time when I had thought I was ready to move in another direction. The intensive engagement with these materials, the close collaboration between an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, and the creation of a database on the periodicals have been among the most enriching experiences of my years in academia.

Reading the full materiality of periodicals as we set out to do in our project required forays into a number of disciplines from visual studies to linguistics and into a number of historical subfields from medicine to periodical studies. I have benefited enormously from the generosity of scholars with expertise in these and other fields.

The list of those I must thank for helping me bring the book to fruition is lengthy. First and foremost, Barbara Mittler, who has been the best co-investigator one could hope for. From dealing with the technical administration of the database, inviting me to give a seminar on an earlier draft of the book at Heidelberg University, and constantly providing me with excellent feedback, to preparing feasts of white asparagus and performing affecting musical interludes, she has been a thoughtful collaborator and friend.

Other members of our team who have had significant input into this research include Michel Hockx, who offered important insights from the literary angle and repeated alerts to related works that were always exactly on point. Judy Andrews helped all of us learn to read images and elevated my still limited understanding of early twentieth-century cover art and artistic techniques to a new level. The input of our research assistants has also been invaluable. We are all deeply grateful to Liying Sun and Doris Sung for doing the hard work on the guts of the database, together with our ever patient IT specialist Matthias Arnold. I am profoundly indebted to my graduate student Doris Sung for her input not only into the broader project but into the making of this book: she personally tracked down and took photos of many of the images included in the following pages, prodded me to take the advertisements in the journal more fully into account, and pointed out a number of relevant art historical sources. She is also one of the most organized and responsible graduate students one could hope for. She has expertly managed database assistants and planned workshops while continuing to do her own fine work.

The access to a range of primary sources crucial to the book would not have been possible without Liying Sun’s connections at the Shanghai Library. I am profoundly grateful to her for helping me find a research assistant in Shanghai, Jia Xuefei, who often did the impossible in digging up materials in the Shanghai Library and other libraries and archives in Shanghai that were not readily available. My greatest debt is to Professor Huang Guorong of the Modern Documents division at the Shanghai Library who went out of his way to help me find the sources I needed when I was in Shanghai and who continued to help Jia when I made requests from afar.

I am also grateful to Professor Xia Xiaohong for facilitating my access to sources at the Peking University Library and to Yu Chien-ming at the Institute of Modern History at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, who gave me several opportunities to share my work and learn from audiences in Taipei. Chien-ming also helped me secure invaluable sources, including my own bound copy of Funü shibao, which has been a permanent fixture on or near my desk over the last seven years. Finally, Xiong Yuezhi at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences has welcomed me and my many questions on my frequent visits to his institute in Shanghai over the years.

Many have read the many iterations of this book, and their comments have helped make it a stronger work. Gail Hershatter had the courage to tell me what wasn’t working and forced a radical and necessary rethinking at a crucial stage. Then, a true labor model, she volunteered to endure a second read. Hu Ying read thoughtfully and critically, gently nudging me to nuance certain arguments, asking probing questions, and making astute literary and historical connections. David Strand offered a metainterpretation of key aspects of the argument that I have tried to incorporate into its reformulation. Yi-li Wu, whom I asked to read the chapter on medicine, offered insights well beyond it that have marked the book’s reconceptualization. Louise Edwards provided enthusiastic support for the project from an early stage, and Ted Huters posed challenging questions from the outset that continue to haunt the finished book. My father-in-law, David Fogel, read the entire manuscript, raised important questions, and offered encouragement.

Many others have read parts of the manuscript or shared their ideas at conferences and their own work on related topics. I am extremely grateful to Paul Bailey, Weihong Bao, Robert Bickers, Madeleine Yue Dong, Chen Jianhua, Nan Da, Christian Henriot, Hu Siao-chen, Huang Ke-wu, Huang Jin-zhu, Elizabeth Kaske, Sean Lei, Lien Ling-ling, Susan Mann, Nanxiu Qian, Kuiyi Shen, Wang Zheng, Sasha Welland, Ellen Widmer, Roberta Wue, Xia Xiaohong, Catherine Yeh, Wen-hsin Yeh, Yu Chien-ming, Paola Zamperini, Zhang Zhongmin, and Zheng Wen-hui.

I am also grateful to members of the Critical China Studies Workshop, which I co-host in Toronto, for the opportunity to share this work in progress over the past few years. I am particularly grateful to Yiching Wu and Mark McConaghy for their always probing questions and suggestions, and to Ping-chun Huang, Tong Lam, Elizabeth Park, Gary Wang, and Meng Yue. Yi (Evie) Gu, and Jenny Purtle offered much-needed art historical sanction as I thought through my analysis of the cover art. Thanks also to Yueran Feng, who helped me located a number of sources in China that I urgently needed in the latter stages of the project.

I owe deep-felt thanks to my reading partner, Xiaoning Shi, with whom I read through countless entries in the journal and whose literary training was invaluable in helping me parse dense allusions, poems, and short stories. Her friendship and enthusiasm for the project have been a tremendous gift.

I have also incurred many institutional debts. First and foremost to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, which first funded the project with a Standard Research Grant in 2008. This grant enabled the German side to receive funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s TransCoop Programme. These grants not only funded our individual research but also made it possible to launch our digital humanities program. Our final international conference on the first phase of the women’s journal project was generously funded by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

I have also benefited tremendously from York University’s support. This included financial and administrative assistance from the Office of the Vice President of Research and Innovation as we negotiated with the Humboldt Foundation in the early stages of the project, and a crucial subsidy from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Book Publication Subvention Fund for producing the images at the end of it. Both I and California University Press are extremely grateful to the faculty and to Associate Dean of Research Naomi Adelson for this support. I am also grateful to Alex Neumann, Web Coordinator of the eServices Office of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, and to Aleksey Antonov of the eServices Web Team, who helped prepare the ninety-some images in the book for publication. Finally, I thank the faculty for a Leave Fellowship and a Minor Research Grant as the book was in progress.

In addition to financial support, York has provided critical administrative assistance. My research officer Janet Friskney, who shares my love of print culture and who thoughtfully shepherded me into the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture, has been a blessing and instrumental in helping me secure funds from both SSHRC and the university. I am further indebted to the York Center for Asian Research, which has provided support for workshops and lectures related to the project. Alicia Filipowich has efficiently managed the budget for the project and enthusiastically offered her expert assistance with everything from planning an international conference in London to finding assistants to photocopy materials. The History Department has been a supportive home, signing off on applications of various kinds, offering the opportunity to share research, and providing collegiality and stimulation.

Reed Malcolm, my editor, greeted this project with enthusiasm from the time I first launched the idea of doing this book with him several years ago. Undaunted by the prospect of a work with so many images, he remained committed to it even when the logistics and finances seemed impossible. Stacy Eisenstark has been responsive, efficient—and patient—as I’ve gone through the final stages of this process. Kate Warne, the production manager for the book, and Elisabeth Magnus, my careful and thoughtful copyeditor, have been patient, responsive, and committed to making this book the best it could be.

Books take a toll on the everyday. The debt that transcends all of these is the one I owe to family; my daughters Antigone and Avital, who have grown over the course of this book’s writing into two of my most treasured interlocutors, and my husband and colleague, Josh Fogel. Never questioning why it takes me twelve times longer than it takes him to write a book, he is always ready to help find a source, parse the meaning of a term, and discuss an idea. His careful, intensive read of the final version of the manuscript has made it clearer and cleaner. This book is dedicated to him.

PLATE 1. Portrait of Zhang Hongyi, a contributor to Funü shibao . The journal’s pictorial editors heightened the portrait’s allure by inserting it in a floral art nouveau background. At the same time, they confirmed Zhang’s respectability in the caption by indicating that she was a Beiyang Women’s Normal School student. Funü shibao 13 (April 1, 1914): front matter.

PLATE 2. A woman hunts in the rolling hills in striking hybrid attire. Cover, Funü shibao 7 (July 10, 1912).

PLATE 3. Portrait of Zhang Huiru (top) and Tang Xiuhui (bottom). Funü shibao 20 (November 1916): front matter. The composition of this montage and the art nouveau decoration evoke the portrait of three women from a courtesan album shown in plate 4.

PLATE 4. Portrait of the courtesans Lin Baobao, Chunyan Lou, and Lin Yuanyuan. Features that suggest the women are courtesans include Lin and Chunyan Lou’s intimate pose in the top photograph. Xin jinghong ying (Shanghai: Youzheng shuju, 1914), n.p. [50].

PLATE 5. Portrait of Ms. Wei Shuji of Fujian, daughter of the director of the Fuzhou Naval Office under the Qing dynasty. The red dot in the middle of Wei’s lower lip is redolent of images published in courtesan albums (such as the one in plate 6). Funü shibao 7 (July 10, 1912): front matter.

PLATE 6. Portrait of Yiqing bieshu. The height of her collar, the red dot on her lip, and the pearl flower brooch on her chest are classic marks of the courtesan. The characters on the left of the portrait indicate that Yiqing bieshu was photographed at the Minying Studio and that the five-colored collotype portrait was produced at the Youzheng Book Company print studio. Xin jinghong ying (Shanghai: Youzheng shuju, 1914). n.p.

PLATE 7. China’s Female Flyer, Zhang Xiahun pictured in both the central, slightly masculinized beauty-style portrait and in the smaller oval-shaped photograph that shows her in the cockpit of an airplane. These two photographs of Zhang are set against a backdrop of Allied planes poised for battle in the Great War. Funü shibao 20 (November 1916): front matter.

PLATE 8. A woman looking at a flying machine through binoculars. Cover, Funü shibao 20 (November 1916).

Introduction

Republican Lens

Two girls on the cover of the first issue of Funü shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times) look at an image of themselves on the cover of the first issue of Funü shibao (figure 0.1). This self-reflexive portrait signals a new subject position for women as viewers rather than viewed, as knowers rather than known. It also heralds a new epistemology and a new politics grounded in everyday experience. This emphasis on practical quotidian experience would define China’s early Republican commercial print culture and fold into its revolutionary twentieth-century history. Some four months after this image was published, the climax of the first chapter in this history, the 1911 Revolution, was launched. While neither begetting a strong state nor delivering on its promise of increased political participation, the Revolution did usher in an era of dramatic social change: of greater social transparency, new modes of social interaction, and the naturalization of women’s presence in public life.¹ The new Republic declared in January of 1912 thus sustained and deepened the aspirations expressed in this simple image: Funü shibao would be a journal for us, by us, and about us.

Young female students like the two who appear on this first cover were not the only ones for whom Funü shibao served as a medium for self-expression and a lens onto local, global, and embodied womanhood. Their teachers also saw themselves reflected, and had their own say, in its pages. So did their mothers if they were among the more literate and forward-looking members of this older demographic. The men behind the journal—the publisher who financed it, the editor who ran it—also used the journal as an ethnographic lens. A tool for examining and displaying the myriad variations among Chinese women—cloistered and newly public, rural and urban, unlettered and cosmopolitan—it also served as a device for assessing the possibilities of integrating women into their larger political project.

FIGURE 0.1. Two girls on the cover of the first issue of Funü shibao look at an image of themselves on the cover of the first issue of Funü shibao . Cover, Funü shibao 1 (June 11, 1911).

Funü shibao is an invaluable historical lens for the early twenty-first-century reader as well. As scholars are increasingly recognizing, the periodical press provides unparalleled access to the complexities of the past.² No longer dismissed as ephemeral, it is now considered the key global medium for disseminating ideas and information from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century.³ Characteristic of this dynamic medium, Funü shibao is a unique archive of texts and images that greatly enhance historical understanding. A repository of the thoughts, sentiments, and opinions of countless women and men, many of whom have left no other historical traces, it offers insights into the state of social, political, and scientific knowledge among the middling early Republican elite. A gallery of stunning cover art and photographic portraits otherwise lost to history, it visually captures the look and feel of the early Republic in ways that written texts cannot. One node of an extensive web of medical experts, educators, and cultural entrepreneurs active in this period, it conjoins profound and interrelated shifts in China’s epistemic, print, and commercial cultures in the early twentieth century.

Funü shibao also documents a lively repertory of social practices. Because periodicals function more as unbounded communities than as bounded texts, they create unique spaces where discourse and social practice meet, where the logic of utterances collides or coincides with the logic of behavior.⁴ Less declarative publishing media than interactive communication media—more Web 2.0 than Web 1.0, in today’s parlance—they encourage constant trafficking between editors, readers, and authors.⁵ Ideas, opinions, critiques, and testimonials flowed across Funü shibao’s porous borders. Solicited and unsolicited contributions to the journal in various media merged and interacted with one another in editorial and readers’ columns, literary and photography sections, essay contests, social surveys, diaries, and advertisements. They were also expressed in a new narrative form that was foregrounded in Funü shibao and central to its epistemology, the account of experience (shiyantan).

THE COMMERCIAL PERIODICAL PRESS

This close adherence to the experience, aspirations, and expectations of the reader/consumer defines the genre of Chinese periodicals of which Funü shibao is a striking representative.⁶ No one term in either Chinese or English fully captures the nature of this genre.

Publications like Funü shibao are often characterized as popular or common (tongsu), a term scholars generally use to describe early twentieth-century fiction (tongsu wenxue) that was published serially in literary journals with many generic similarities to Funü shibao. These materials are, however, neither popular nor common. They are not mass publications in terms of circulation or audience, nor do they merely proffer escapist entertainment. Their language register is generally high, as is their relative cost. The label middlebrow, which connotes sentimentality and a lack of innovation, is also not apposite.⁷ Although occasionally sentimental, Funü shibao was highly innovative. Its prime mandate was to bridge high, middle, and low levels of cultural, scientific, and literary knowledge and to get issues related to political, social, and medical reform onto a broad public agenda.

Funü shibao has been hailed as China’s first commercial women’s journal.⁸ It was, however, neither fully commercial nor exclusively a women’s journal. The publisher did sell space to advertisers, but the journal was not entirely financed by, and thus not solely beholden to, advertising and sales. Nor was it a politically controlled mass commercial product. There was no sufficiently stable political regime—warlord, colonialist, or capitalist—for a publication to serve in this period.⁹ The majority of Funü shibao’s financing was provided by the large conglomerate, the Shibao guan (Shibao Office), that published the journal.

This conglomerate named Funü shibao a women’s journal, but its editor more accurately labeled it a general interest (zonghe xing) journal.¹⁰ While women were certainly a topic of general interest, Funü shibao defied the commonly held view of commercial women’s magazines. Preoccupied with neither fashion, childrearing, nor gossip, it focused on women’s educational, professional, and medical concerns. One of its most significant—and, ironically, as yet unrecognized—innovations was the direct engagement of women, who contributed poetry, accounts of experience, essays, and photographs to the journal and who ultimately penned up to half of its content. Funü shibao was not, however, a feminist women’s journal in the sense of a publication that offered a radical alternative to masculine cultural norms.¹¹ While many women authors discreetly challenged these norms, the journal’s agenda was largely set by its male editor, male publisher, and many male contributing authors. Funü shibao is thus better understood as a gendered journal in which masculine norms determined the contours for a textual and visual encounter with things feminine—contours that women authors accepted, negotiated, occasionally defied, and often modified. It was also a venue where new gendered practices—most notably the circulation of the words, images, and bodies of respectable women in public—were encouraged, decried, and refined.

These new practices were largely an urban phenomenon, as was the journal itself: it was a product of the commercial energy, progressive pedagogy, cosmopolitan cultural authority, and thriving print industry of the treaty port city of Shanghai.¹² The journal’s readers, writers, and topics of inquiry extended well beyond the city, however. More than merely a lens onto the singular metropolis of Shanghai, it is a lens onto the Republic from the vantage point of that metropolis.

Funü shibao is thus best described as a Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was closely attuned to the concerns of its readers, the rhythm of everyday life, and the shifting global conjuncture. This rather convoluted formulation speaks to one of the prime objectives of this book: to engage the complexities of a journal and a demographic of women that do not neatly map onto our existing social and cultural categories.

Early Republican commercial journals like Funü shibao have only recently been retrieved from the margins of historical inquiry. They were banished to these margins by intellectual activists associated with the New Culture (xin wenhua) movement from the mid- to late 1910s.¹³ These New Culture intellectuals attempted to secure their own cultural position by negating the value of recent cultural production. Derisively labeling the writings of their immediate predecessors as Mandarin Duck and Butterfly (yuanyang hudie pai) works, they characterized these texts as trivial, commercial, provincial, and reactionary.¹⁴ This competition for public attention and cultural authority was not a low-stakes struggle. Rather, it was integral to the genealogy of one of the most enduring dialectical tensions in China’s twentieth-century history: a tension between prosaic everydayness and high-minded ideology, between quotidian commercial culture and heroic political culture.¹⁵ Elements of New Culture morphed into communist culture and the highly ideological cultural politics of the People’s Republic of China. When the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, the commercial ethos and authors were driven into exile in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They were not rehabilitated in mainland China until the fall of high communism in the late 1970s, and they are just beginning to receive the scholarly attention they deserve in the West.¹⁶

Unlike a number of literary journals, Funü shibao has not yet received this renewed academic attention. In contrast, it continues to be misrepresented in recent scholarship in both mainland China and the West, including scholarship that asserts the cultural importance of popular literature.¹⁷ A close reading—even a cursory reading—of Funü shibao defies its often schizophrenic characterization as frivolous and didactic, conservative and salacious. This is evident in the caliber of a number of its contributors, the seriousness of its (often strategically concealed) political agenda, and its illumination of the ways the structuring dichotomies and reform initiatives of the era were lived and understood in their own day.

Funü shibao stands out even among other remarkable examples of the early twentieth-century periodical press. Its activist editor successfully promoted a democratic mode of cultural production that encouraged multivocal conversations. Its publisher’s investment in the latest photographic technologies produced exceptional visual images. The journal’s focus on women and its relentless efforts to publish women’s writings make it a rare window onto quotidian gender politics. The timely articles by well-known, soon-to-be-well-known, and unknown female and male contributors offer often unexpected perspectives on issues of the day such as global biomedicine, women’s suffrage, and prostitution. The generic richness of the journal—from topical essays to readers’ columns, from ancient-style poetry to translated fiction, from how-to articles to accounts of experience—offers a multiregistered response to the early Republic.

In bringing Funü shibao back into circulation, this book is an act of retrieval, redemption, and revalorization. It uses Funü shibao as a lens to capture something of the politics, the materiality, the ingenuity, and the look of one of the most neglected periods in modern Chinese history: the early Republic (1911–17). Bracketed by and overlapping with the richly documented late Qing era (1890–1911) and the iconic May Fourth period (1915–25), the early Republic largely remains a historiographic black hole.¹⁸ The book seeks to begin filling in this hole by distilling elements of Funü shibao’s underlying philosophical and political agendas from its cacophonous content. These agendas, which aimed to uncover, publicize, and shape embodied everyday experience, were distinct from the agendas of previous late Qing reformers who called for a New Citizenry or of later New Culture activists who hailed a New Literature. While early Republican publicists and their late Qing and May Fourth counterparts shared the same desired end point—a nation strengthened through the efforts of its men and women—their starting points radically diverged. Funü shibao’s writers were less concerned with the abstract retheorization of culture than with the more concrete valorization, politicization, and scientization of the quotidian.

A REPUBLICAN LENS

Funü shibao is a multiply refracting historical lens. When the journal is approached in its full materiality—including illustrations, advertisements, and its broad range of columns—it projects not simple truths but complex dialectics that reflect tensions both within and beyond the pages of the journal. Many of these tensions are related to the concept of experience. Never a simple notion, experience is as multivalenced as it is pervasive in Funü shibao.¹⁹ It is the basis of the bottom-up reform the journal’s editor tended to favor but also—particularly in its feminine form—a novel commodity that readers of the journal were eager to consume. It is focused on the everyday, but according to editorial dictate it had to transcend the repetitive patterns of daily life and be linked to a higher order of political or historical meaning. It was to be expressed in the form of discursive accounts of experience that the editor directly solicited, yet the women whose experience he most coveted preferred to write in verse about both the personal and the political. These tensions surrounding the notion of experience reflect prime tensions in the journal: between reformist and commercial objectives, everyday and epic agendas, male editorial strategies and female authorial tactics. Nothing has one meaning in the journal, least of all women’s experience.

Reformist and Commercial

The first tension is evident in Funü shibao’s attention to the new, a value that can bespeak both a reformist commitment to cultural renewal and the commercial demand for novelty. This emphasis on the new continued the late Qing reformist promotion of new people (xinmin) and anticipated the New Culture with its focus on new youth (xin qingnian). While the concept was less theorized and omnipresent in Funü shibao, it was nonetheless prevalent. Authors who wrote or translated for the journal used such pen names as Xin Hua (New China) and Zhi Xin (One Who Knows the New). The journal included articles on new families, new dreams, and the new splendor of women, together with illustrations of new weddings and new fashions, and advertisements for new medicines, new machines, and new books. This embrace of the new was also announced—if not explicitly trumpeted—in the journal’s Fakanci (Inaugural statement).

Although unsigned, the statement was written by the journal’s editor, Bao Tianxiao (Gongyi, Langsun, 1876–1973). Bao declares that the journal is doing something radically new by presenting women as allies in the urgent task of securing China’s salvation. Marking an important departure from the inaugural statements to previous women’s journals, he liberates women from prevailing biological imperatives and temporal trajectories. He makes no references to motherhood—neither Daoist mothers of all things, Confucian model mothers, nor reformist mothers of citizens (guomin zhi mu). He also unequivocally locates women in the present, making no allusions to classical texts, ritual principles, or past female historical exemplars.²⁰ Nor does he represent women as beings whose latent potential can be understood only in the future tense.²¹

Bao appeals to women as partners in a historic political intervention rather than representing them as a passive field in need of intervention. This is most evident in his striking use of the inclusive possessive pronoun wu in referring to women as our women (wu nüjie), a phrase he repeats several times in his Inaugural Statement. He writes:

In recent times, European and American forces have shaken our sacred land [shen’gao]. Our women are [among those who are] frightened by our increasingly desperate national situation. Witnessing the continuous decline in social morals, they want to offer their assistance. Although women’s formal education has brilliant prospects, it admits only a sliver of light into this pitch-black haze. There are, however, refined, quick-witted, and reasonable [yabufa mingmin tongda] ladies [guiyan], [together with] patriotic women scholars [nüshi], who worry about the times as men do. These women occasionally offer outstanding essays [xi weilun] in an effort to awaken their compatriots from their unfounded dreams.²²

The task of the journal is, therefore, not to enlighten women but to create a space where they can advance the project of reform by sharing their knowledge and enlightening others. Casting himself as a comrade rather