He Yin Zhen (1884—circa 1920) was a radical Chinese anarcha-feminist political philosopher. Her radicalness manifests itself not only in her views on such issues as women’s oppression, economic oppression, militarism, and imperialism, but also in the kind of life that she lived as a woman intellectual around the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the last of the imperial dynasties of China. Despite (and perhaps because of) her radicalness, He Yin’s work is much less well-known compared to white feminist philosophers in the Global North.
In the Chinese-speaking world, she is often introduced as “the Chinese Simone de Beauvoir” despite the fact that she advanced a social constructivist view of gender forty-two years before the publication of The Second Sex. While her writings were translated into English in 2013, there has been minimal philosophical attention paid to her work in the English-speaking world. Even when philosophers like Saran Mattice and Jana Rošker engage with her work, their essays are published in comparative or Chinese philosophy journals, rather than general or feminist philosophy journals that are considered prestigious by the Anglophone philosophy community. Granted, there can be many reasons why an article gets published in one journal rather than another. But it’s still safe to conclude that the vast majority of Anglo-European feminist political philosophers are not aware of her work.
The goal of this blog post is to (re)introduce He Yin’s work to the Anglo-European philosophy world. I argue that it’s imperative to take He Yin’s work seriously because it enriches Anglo-European feminist philosophy through a decolonial lens and, more importantly, challenges the Anglo-Eurocentric conception of philosophy.
While He Yin was writing more than a hundred years ago, many of the questions she raised are still applicable, and the level of radicalness of her work is unparalleled even by today’s standards. She wrote about the struggles of working-class women, illuminating the exploitative nature of sex work and the improbability of achieving equality for all women by letting a few hold power. She called for antimilitarism, laying out the ways in which women are harmed by military buildup and warfare. She criticized a lot of Anglo-European feminist efforts (e.g., the women’s suffrage movement) for lifting up only women who are already in a privileged position. Western liberalism, on He Yin’s account, does not promote genuine freedom or equality for marginalized communities, and justifies practices that are no more civilized than perceived “barbaric” practices in China.
Chinese male intellectuals writing during the same period were deeply affected by imperialism. While they are often perceived as the founding fathers of Chinese feminism, they were more concerned about the nation and their own masculinity as opposed to women’s liberation. They called for prohibiting footbinding, allowing women and girls to receive basic education, and other practices that would align themselves with the “civilized” in Global North countries. He Yin found these calls jarring because they advanced male intellectuals’ self-interest, self-distinction, and self-comfort in the name of women’s liberation. Promoting women’s education, for example, allowed male intellectuals to escape from family responsibilities given that women’s schools in China uniformly emphasized household management and that family education was thought to be the basis of all educational efforts. Calls like these benefited men at the expense of women.
Her analysis of social justice issues is grounded in two central tenets: nannü and shengji. Nannü is the combination of the two words for “male” and “female” in Chinese. For He Yin, the relationship between men and women represents power dynamics that permeate all historical social relations. As Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko put it, nannü is “a single conceptual mechanism, used as both noun and adjective, that lies at the foundation of all patriarchal abstractions and markings of distinction.” Nannü goes beyond what we call “gender” and “intersectionality” today. In addition to generating social identities like working-class Chinese women, the main function of the nannü distinction is to construct structures of power and domination in all social relations. One significant implication of this more totalizing concept is that nannü equality is the basis for all forms of equality.
He Yin’s critique of the political economy of gender is encapsulated in her concept of shengji. Shengji, often translated as “livelihood,” is the labor necessary for one’s survival. He Yin wrote in “On the Question of Women’s Labor” that “the system of slavery does not originate in the class system; rather, it originates in the problem of livelihood (shengji wenti).” Working-class women and other marginalized people are turned into private property as the rich accumulate their wealth under the auspices of the state. Because the legal institution of private property sustains social injustice, He Yin called for the abolition of the state to achieve nannü equality.
He Yin’s methodology differs from that of many Anglo-European philosophers who tend to focus on theory rather than action. The majority of Anglo-European philosophers writing about resistance, for example, present themselves as leaving room for different types and degrees of resistance by claiming that the duty to resist is an imperfect duty. I agree that the duty to resist oppression should be imperfect, but stating this as such is not very helpful in that it lacks action-guiding force.
In addition to developing theoretical frameworks that illustrate oppression and social justice issues, He Yin proposed practical solutions. In “The Feminist Manifesto,” she spelled out seven goals that women should strive for to help realize nannü equality: protecting monogamous but not polygamous marriage, dropping surnames, not preferring sons over daughters, securing equal education for all, legalizing relationship breakdown as a reason for divorce, ensuring that marriage only happens between people who have been married the same number of times, and prohibiting sex work. While some of these projects may be less likely to bring about social justice today, He Yin’s proposal still sheds light on the kind of work that feminist philosophers should aim to produce. If feminism is about overthrowing patriarchy, feminist work should go beyond general claims about an unspecified duty to resist to provide some action plans.
Not only did He Yin offered a step-by-step guide for women to attain these goals, she also acted on them herself. Consider the goal of dropping surnames:
“[A]fter a woman marries, she should not take her husband’s surname. Even if she retains her maiden name, it is still unfair because it is her father’s surname but not her mother’s. Therefore, women like us who are living in the present age should fashion our surnames from both the father’s and the mother’s [surnames]. After we overthrow the Manchus, neither men nor women should keep a surname. That would be the principle of supreme justice.”
He Yin’s birth name was He Ban, with “He” as her family name and “Ban” the first name. She was named after the Chinese historian and woman philosopher Ban Zhao. Viewing Ban Zhao’s feminist theory as oppressive to women, she later changed her first name to “Zhen” (thunderclap) and signed her published work as “He Yin Zhen” to include her mother’s maiden name in the family name. If He Yin were alive today, she would most likely drop the family name entirely and simply go by “Zhen.”
Integrity is often not a prerequisite for doing feminist work, and the ad hominem fallacy is regularly taught in intro-level logic courses. But the kind of radical life lived by He Yin prompts us to ponder the relationship between theory and practice. If justice-oriented feminist philosophizing is informed by practice, to what extent should philosophers live a feminist life to produce responsible work?
He Yin’s work also challenges the Anglo-Eurocentric conception of philosophy. Philosophy has always been a predominantly white, Eurocentric, male profession. If you type “philosopher” into an AI image generator, you will almost certainly get an image of a white man with a messy long beard. Depending on the algorithm, the man may look more like Aristotle than Plato. Even if you type “woman philosopher” into the generator, the chances of getting an image of an early twentieth century Chinese woman are like waiting for a ship at the airport. You will most likely get someone that looks like Beauvoir.
One consequence of (and perhaps also a reason for) the lack of diversity in the profession is citation injustice. Many feminist and anti-racist philosophers have criticized the fact that scholars from traditionally marginalized communities get cited far less frequently compared to scholars from dominant groups. Indeed, many philosophers are completely erased from the documented intellectual history. While feminist reclamation has gradually been done with Global North figures, much less attention has been paid to philosophers from the Global South, especially those working outside of traditional Asian/comparative philosophy. Hannah Arendt, for example, was known for her labor/work distinction, but He Yin differentiated between shengji and laodong (i.e., work) in 1907, fifty years before the publication of The Human Condition. Ten years after her work was translated into English, He Yin still has not received the recognition she deserves in the mainstream political philosophy world. An anti-imperialist future for Anglo-European academic philosophy cannot be achieved if practices of intellectual engagement stay largely colonial and undiversified.
In addition to reconceptualizing who can be a philosopher, He Yin’s work also challenges the dominant view of the kind of philosophy that marginalized individuals are capable of producing. Mainstream analytic philosophy has been criticized for being hostile to marginalized and indigenous methodologies. He Yin’s writings, however, would be considered rigorous and profound even by mainstream analytic philosophy’s own standards.
One essential feature of He Yin’s writings is her use of meticulous argumentation and extensive evidence. The premises and conclusions of her arguments are laid out clearly. Potential objections are also anticipated and responded to. The sources cited in her writings are extensive in terms of both quality and quantity. To justify the problem of livelihood as the origin of ancient China’s system of enslaving girls, He Yin contrasted slave-owners in China with those in the American South. When questioning Western liberalism’s alleged superiority, she discussed problems with specific feminist efforts in many global North countries, including but not limited to the U.S., the U.K., France, Finland, and Norway. She was also aware of the predicament of women in other Asian countries like India and Japan.
Not only did He Yin situate herself in the international debate on various social justice issues, she was also well-versed in the history of Chinese Ruist traditions and their impact on women and other marginalized groups. Her nuanced analysis avoids lapsing into cultural relativism and enables her to simultaneously criticize imperialism, capitalism, and Ruism as well as Chinese male intellectuals’ self-centered feminism. The sources that she engaged with also transcend the boundaries of genre and discipline. The basis of her theorization goes beyond scholarly articles to include sociological surveys, poems, and even novels.
The profundity of He Yin’s work cannot be fully addressed here, but there’s no denying that her writings are invaluable to Anglo-European academic philosophy. Her work provides us with a decolonial perspective on issues related to feminist social/political philosophy. Her unique standpoint may also enrich the underexplored field of Asian critical race theory, a field that theorizes about Asian as an identity rather than merely a category of philosophy. The fact that an early-twentieth-century Asian woman who got married at the age of nineteen and almost certainly had her feet bound produced radical work in such depth and breadth also challenges imperialist expectations of what such women are capable of.
Decolonizing Anglo-European academic philosophy takes a lot more effort than writing or reading a blog post, but we can do justice to indigenous thinkers only if we pay attention to their work. As more and more marginalized figures like He Yin Zhen continue to be uncovered, I am hopeful that we can go from the “Chinese Simone de Beauvoir” to the “Chinese He Yin Zhen,” and eventually appreciate their thoughts on their own terms.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Yingshihan Zhu
Yingshihan Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY, the Graduate Center. She works in feminist philosophy, social/political philosophy, moral philosophy, and social epistemology. She is also interested in Asian critical race theory. Her dissertation examines the moral complexities of privileged oppressed agents.
