Women Journalists and Feminism in China, 1898–1937 By Yuxin Ma

that feminism and nationalism were inseparable—national strengthening required women's equal participation in all spheres, but she nonetheless reifies a static conception of both feminism and nationalism.¹⁹

Benefiting from the new approach of gender studies, Hu Ying argued in 2000 that in China, what we conventionally call the “May Fourth” story of oppression, liberation, tradition, and modernity actually took place in the late Qing, and the cross-cultural borrowing and references were crucial for the discursive construction of “new woman” and feminism.²⁰ Joan Judge finds overseas Chinese women students in Japan in the early twentieth century constructed new subject positions for Chinese women in their writings and practices by modifying the Chinese female legacy and learning from exemplary Western women; they negotiated with Japanese educators and Chinese male nationalists in defending Chinese women's participation in nationalist movements.²¹ Qian Nanxiu has studied the life and writing of a late Qing elite woman, Xue Shaohui, and finds the stories of traditional Chinese heroines could be reinterpreted for a modern purpose and Western heroines’ biographies could be appropriated to promote new feminine ideals in China.²² Rebecca Karl argues that in China, male intellectuals discussed Chinese women through a language of national crisis—if the factors that drove women into prostitution were not ameliorated, the nation would perish. If Chinese women were liberated, the Chinese nation would be strong, leaving both feudalism and the precarious sovereignty of semicolonialism behind.²³ Sarah E. Stevens compares the “new woman” with the “modern girl” in republican China and finds the former represented a positive view of modernity and hopes for a strong future China, while the latter was manifested in two distinct ways: as a self-absorbed woman in search of subjectivity, and as a dangerous femme fatale who devoured the urban male.²⁴

Most recently, feminist scholars Yan Haiping, Aijun Zhu, and Louise Edwards have explored the flexible and plural meanings of nationalism and feminism in China.²⁵ They find nationalism has homogenized a diverse range of positions, beliefs, expectations, and actions and the contradictory meanings of nativism and internationalism. At different historical moments, nationalism in China could mean anti-Manchu