The impossibility of gender 
in narratives of China’s modernity
Harriet Evans

Recent cultural histories have gone to considerable lengths to define an ‘alternative modernity’ for China, going back to the commercial developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.1 As delineated via the complex relationship between dominant Western and ‘other’ versions of modernity, its general form has been indicated by, for example, Dorothy Hodgson, who notes that ‘the “Modernity” of the Eurocentric post-Enlightenment model shares with other colonial and post-colonial modernities a belief in ideologies of progress and improvement, although the meanings and objectives signified by these terms may vary.’2 Defined through conflict, struggle and cultural contestation with colonial power and its ownership of ‘Modernity’, the modernity of the ‘other’ apparently charts an erasure of the authentic ‘native’, or – more fashionably – the colonised subaltern.3 Dressed in his Zhongshan suit, the authentically ‘Chinese’ revolutionary of the early twentieth century betrays cues of both ‘tradition’ and the ‘modern’. Is the cigarette-smoking Shanghai beauty, with her bobbed hair and flapper attire, more Chinese or Western?

Narratives of femininity and masculinity across the different stages of China’s twentieth-century modernity similarly evidence the unequal negotiation between competing ideas associated with the West, the global, and the Chinese, charting a shifting political terrain that marks the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion between the past and the future, the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’. From the commercialized print culture of Shanghai of the 1920s to the ideological discipline of the Cultural Revolution revolutionary operas and ballets, through to the consumerism of contemporary urban spaces, such a terrain has confirmed familiar expectations of gender while at the same time offering new subject positions to its various explorers. Never just the cultural translation of Western terms and values, nor, on the other hand, simply the product of nativist understandings of gendered difference, how does the gendered subject of China’s modernity depart from the masculinist terms of modern global discourse?

Today, the gendered narratives of its modern history that circulate in mainstream academic and media spaces largely follow the temporalities of the Chinese Communist Party’s own historiography of the women’s movement, the different stages of which themselves correspond to the essential contours of Communist-led social transformation. According to these dominant narratives, the Communist movement successfully absorbed the liberal, individualist tendencies of earlier ‘May Fourth’ approaches to women’s emancipation into a revolutionary, collective strategy in which the women’s struggle was seen as an arm of the national struggle as a whole, and in which the eradication of gender inequalities became an integral part of social revolution. Following the 1950s’ period of national reconstruction, in which the entry of vast numbers of women into the social labour force established the basis for their ‘liberation’, the Mao years are now also commonly perceived, however, as having imposed an artificial neutralization of gender difference that operated as a kind of masculinist straitjacket, denying women agency, as women, by suppressing their essential ‘femininity’. The end of Mao’s rule and the beginning of market reform are widely heralded today as the renewed expression of essentially ‘natural’ gender differences, and hence as the rearticulation of desires, aspirations and self-identifications once denounced by the harsh strictures of Mao’s egalitarianism. If the reassertion of a naturalized gender difference offered liberatory possibilities for some women, it also, according to this narrative, necessarily led to the reassertion of gender inequalities, some artificially suppressed during the socialist era and others newly produced as a spontaneous and inevitable consequence of the demands for economic efficiency and production. Spurred on by China’s engagement with global capital and culture, and the blurring of discursive boundaries between the ‘official’, the ‘market’ and the ‘popular’, the reformist discourse of gender has supposedly substituted a diversification of femininities and masculinities for the uniform representations and expectations of the Mao era that preceded it.

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