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This chapter is concerned with the study of Chinese women using materials from South China to illuminate the junctures of history, gender subjectivities, and power play. It examines the significations and implications of women's positioning that arose from the intense commercialization that was characteristic of the region from the late imperial to the post-reform periods. It focuses on three significant historical junctures in the region's transformation: local self-fashioning in the Ming and Qing dynasties; trade, empire, emigration, and reform in colonial Hong Kong and Republican South China; and postwar decades.

The emigration of women differed greatly from that of men. Very few Chinese women went to the United States in the 19th century, and among those who did, many had been bought and sold for the highly profitable American market. Chapter six explores how a British colony, where slavery and human trafficking were theoretically illegal, could have allowed such activities to take place. It explores how Chinese merchant leaders with their largely patriarchal values played a role in shaping the movement of women through Hong Kong. Ironically, though the merchants won the day by persuading the colonial government to tolerate Chinese patriarchal practices, their actions ended up empowering American politicians in their fight against Chinese immigration, and led almost directly to the Exclusion Act.

This chapter examines the intellectual production of women's history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China and how gender and health histories relate to U.S.–China relations. In particular, it considers how modernity was conceptualized and contested by Chinese women compared with their American counterparts, as historical actors, feminists, patients, healers, and representatives of their respective nation-states. It also explains how women's conceptions of culture and their actions helped redefine understandings of power in China's relationship with the United States. Finally, it discusses ideas of women serving the Chinese nation-state and the emergence of feminism in China. It argues that Chinese women redefined modernity for China and for themselves by blending Chinese and Western cultures, for example, utilizing both Western and Chinese medicine to support the nationalist project.

This chapter explores how the notion of civilization affected historical consciousness in the U.S. and China, and was also involved in the creation of the subjectivities of the New Woman: on the U.S. side as a benevolent female emancipator by a country at the vanguard of historical progress in the world, and in China as a self-sufficient modern female in a country in imminent danger of falling into a state of wangguo. In addition, the chapter discusses the experiences of the first generation of American New Women missionaries who sailed to China to be part of the civilizing mission otherwise known as the U.S. foreign mission movement. They took issue with the direction of Chinese xin nüxing and with the radical activism among young Chinese women in the 1911 Revolution that overturned the Qing dynasty. By appropriating popularized versions of evolutionary theories, these missionaries constructed their legitimacy as teachers of Chinese women on the basis of comparisons with them, and they created educational projects and enterprises for Chinese women designed to create a more acceptable kind of New Woman that fell in line with mainstream views of American missionary women.

This chapter considers the shared ideologies embedded in Confucianism and Christianity, and how they are played out in the lives of the middle-class Straits Chinese characters that people the fiction of Shirley Lim. Confucianism is viewed as a deeply patriarchal-inflected belief system, and when a Chinese (especially woman) trades this faith for Christianity, she often finds that her position in her new religion is not unlike that of her old one, thus perpetuating her sense of helplessness and inferiority. Lim's narratives persistently reveal the ideological entrapment experienced by Chinese women in either religion, and the difficulty they face when negotiating their increasing modern outlook with belief systems that reify traditional, patriarchal values. However, this chapter concludes with a criticism of these stories, and directly Lim herself by asking two related questions: how is Lim helping modern Chinese women escape their ideological positions if her stories continuously plot them as deeply embedded in these structures without offering any alternative perspectives? And is it always the case that religion necessarily circumscribes women by reifying their sexual/gendered position as inferior; is religion not also possibly a way in which women can escape such a position?

This chapter takes up the rising tide of internationalism in the United States during the 1910s and examines how a new generation of New Women, who entertained the international spirit buoyed by burgeoning Wilsonian liberal internationalism, perceived the United States' place in the world and their own role in China. Within U.S. borders, internationalism was first conceived as a way to consolidate its increasingly culturally diverse populace under the banner of universal democracy. It was in countries such as China that this notion of the universality of U.S. ideals and values was put to the test. In China, the new generation of internationally minded New Women missionaries found a pleasing reality—the existence of a favorable image of the United States—and became even more convinced of the validity of their internationalism. The favorable image of the United States also meant that American New Women missionaries could become desirable role models for Chinese women: at their institutions, Chinese xin nüxing students earnestly responded to the expectation of their teachers, and these young Chinese women evolved into genuine New Women in line with the principle put forth by American New Women missionaries.

This chapter explores several images of a Chinese ideal wife. Female gender is defined by a series of innate and essential characteristics associated with certain responses, needs, and capacities that naturally make women wives and mothers. Wifehood, and its invariable expression in motherhood, is the relational and biological state in which women find their truest expression. A Chinese woman is constructed as the key agent of sexual and marital order, enjoined to patrol her own sexual conduct for the sake of marital and familial harmony. On the other hand, she is represented as an object for men's sexual gratification, waiting to be made whole, even given life, by the active and dominant male. However, the same biological structure that made women born to be mothers made it natural for women to continue to take on the lion's share of domestic tasks, regardless of what other responsibilities and needs they might have.

This chapter explores the representation of women in modern Chinese nationalist discourse and the subversion of such discourse by the women themselves. It describes the two very different nationalistic representations of women. One is the May Fourth representation of the radically anti-Confucian, anti-familial, nationalist woman and the varieties of more conservative constructions of woman as the representative of the soul of the tradition. It suggests that the way Chinese women were supposed to personify the essence of national tradition was a matter of many pragmatic possibilities and diverse political ramifications.

This chapter shows how the notion of modern science brought to China by American New Women missionaries in the form of medicine and nursing generated concrete responses from their Chinese counterparts. The notion of science as a universally applicable and fundamentally egalitarian element for the development of a modern society and its constituents was increasingly influential in both the United States and China during the early twentieth century. Consequently, American New Women missionaries were able to establish their status as scientific professionals whose expertise could contribute to China's modernization process. At the same time, however, their faith in the new notion of science brought with it the idea of “separate but equal” gender roles, which brought them into conflict with many of their male counterparts from the United States who wanted to compete with other imperial powers to gain influence in China.

This chapter explores the social organization of the Chinese sex business in the ten research sites studied: Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei (Taiwan), Bangkok (Thailand), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Singapore, Jakarta (Indonesia), New York (United States), Los Angeles (United States), and Shenzhen (China). It asks: What is the particular character of these overseas sites that seems to have made them magnets for women from China? What can we learn from looking closely at one prominent site (Shenzhen) in China? What is the nature of the culture of tolerance for commercial sex in each of these cities? Most importantly, is there anything about the sites' character and nature that help us to better understand how transnational human smuggling and trafficking work?

This chapter proposes an approach called “transcultural feminist solidarity” in order to address the issue of women's solidarity in the context of cultural differences and globalization. It specifies what this approach is through assessing various feminist approaches to women's solidarity and by using the example of how this approach can help to forge friendship and solidarity between Chinese and U.S. women. To demonstrate how a new solidarity can emerge from this transcultural approach, the chapter shows how the approach is needed to conceptualize collaboration among women in different cultures; for instance, it can help us to understand the relationship between U.S. feminism and Chinese feminism.

This chapter discusses the depiction of Chinese women and Chinese mulattas as exotica in several novels. The novels examined in this chapter include The Messenger, Monkey Hunting, and I Gave You All I Had, along with Severo Sarduy's opus.

This chapter tells the dual story of how rural Chinese women became responsible for cotton cultivation and how a handful of nationally and regionally famous women labor models emerged into the public view. It explains how state authorities chose the labor models and describes how their activities were presented for emulation by a wider public. It investigates to what extent women labor models came to understand themselves in the terms provided by the state.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, American New Women became more aware of the widening psychological gap between them and their Chinese counterparts. This chapter explores the transformation that occurred among these women regarding their understanding of historical progress, perceptions of their country, and ideas about their own role in China. It was also during this same period, one of national revolution, that the Great Depression exposed the failure of the capitalist economic system (strongly associated with the United States) to the entire world and triggered a change in American New Women missionaries' views toward the place their country occupied in the historical progress of the world. As a result, Chinese xin nüxing began turning their interest away from becoming like American New Women missionaries—urban middle-class professionals. Instead, they became increasingly sympathetic to the plight of the poor, especially those in the countryside, and to the idea of socialism.

In the late nineteenth century after schooling in England, three sisters returned to their birthplace, Fuzhou, China to become CMS missionaries. They were the daughters of the “Fukien Moses,” Archdeacon J. R. Wolfe and his wife Mary, and cousins of the author’s maternal grandfather. Letters written by Minnie, Annie and Amy Wolfe to CMS Headquarters in London, for the first time, tell the story of the scope and nature of their interaction with Chinese women and girls in a significant cultural exchange. This particularly occurred through CMS schools, which, using Fujian dialects, provided grounding in Christianity, reading and writing. In addition, the sisters acknowledge their personal dependence upon, and valuing of Chinese Christian women with whom they worked. Born to evangelise, Annie once wrote “In spite of anxieties and disappointments this is the happiest work anyone could wish for.”

This chapter explores how Chinese cultural expressions of charity, based on interpersonal relationships (guanxi) and native place (tongxiang) ties, came to mix and interact with contrasting traditions of Christian charity practiced in a predominantly British milieu in colonial and federation Australia over the late 19th century and 20th centuries. We employ the term “philanthropic sociability” to capture the spirit of innovation that came to characterize a number of voluntary organizations in which Chinese Australian women were active organizers and innovators. By analyzing male-dominated writings and records of charitable fairs and public celebrations, the chapter argues that women undertook “invisible work” in voluntary organizations and built a variety of informal networks among them. Although their social impact was limited, women contextualized their participation in male-dominated activities in ways that cannot be explained in terms of patriarchal values. We find that the impact of women in Chinese- Australian voluntary organizations was not just about the feminizing of community formations but also about promoting philanthropic sociability in ways that traditional organizations could not match.