ABSTRACT
In 1900, the small cohort ofwomen andmen inChina seeking to improve the status of women thought it natural to engage with like-minded people in organizations the world over. Their connections were naturally global, their collaborations inherently international. Half a century later, with the formation of the People’s Republic of China, these transnational connections were fragmenting, as women’s rights advocates were limited to briefly collaborating with a handful of socialist nations. In the 2000s, Chinese conceptions of ‘women’s issues’ have returned to an internationalist perspective as fresh links are now forged at governmentto-government and people-to-people levels around a host of new and old issues. These dramatic shifts in international engagement have influenced the shape and form of the women’s movement in China. While the women’s movement is inherently transnational and implicitly global in the PRC, there have been decades in which these links were impossible to maintain and nationalism incapacitated the movement.
