ABSTRACT
Bing Xin and other women actualized themselves into unprecedented social existences with their writings, and thereby bodied forth a revolutionary tradition that was a radical invention. If revolution in society is always also a revolution in cognitive imagination, openings of cognitive horizons are always indications of revolutionizing moments or are themselves revolutions in life. Indeed, the cognitive mapping of human mutuality that evokes feelings of social equality was among the driving energies in one of the most significant turns of events in modern Chinese history – the First National Revolution (1924-1927). This is a revolution of multiple movements involving an entire society and aimed to end, in the theoretical terms of its programs, the competition among and reign by rural landowners turned local despots, armed officials turned regional warlords, and the intensifying encroachments by the great foreign powers across the Chinese lands. The Great Northern Expedition, jointly launched by the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party from the South, was rapidly gaining victories.3 As in all revolutions, the battles were not confined to the military theaters. Workers’, peasants’, and students’ movements were mounted, and women’s movements flourished. A Women’s Bureau in the Nationalist Party was founded as a project coordinated with the Chinese Communist Party; organizations agitating for women’s rights grew in size and influence across the nation. A substantial number of educated women joined the Northern Expedition while producing writings.4 The coup d’état orchestrated by Jiang Jieshi and the Nationalist Party in the spring of 1927 put a sudden end to those movements
and their aspirations, while launching what has been aptly described as “an orgy of counter-revolutionary violence which in scope, scale, and brutality was unprecedented and is as yet unmatched in twentieth century revolutionary history.”5 The casualties included the workers and peasants in the movements,6
and real or perceived women activists.7 Drawing on carefully researched empirical materials,8 historian Christina Gilmartin points up a particular feature of such brutality as fundamentally gendered:
Though female casualties were considerably fewer than the male casualties, intense political symbolism was associated with the women’s deaths. Women’s bodies were subject to mutilation as a statement against female activism, which had come to be viewed as a disturbing indicator of a world turned upside down. When the Nationalist Commander Xia Douyin, for instance, ordered his troops to put down the peasant associations in Hebei, they reportedly “cut open the breasts of the women comrades, pierced their bodies perpendicularly with iron wires, and paraded them naked through the streets.” Cai Chang (a leading woman in the CCP) estimated in her discussion with Helen Snow (an American journalist) that the Nationalist troops killed more than one thousand Communist women organizers and leaders during the first year of the White Terror.9
