The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (review)

Judge, author of a solid monograph on the first years of the Shanghai newspaper Shibao—Print and Politics: “Shibao” and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, 1997)—turns her attention yet again to the decade leading up to the republican revolution of 1911, a period that she contends was “a key moment in the unfolding of Chinese modernity” (2). (The title suggests a much broader temporal scope than is justified by the content.) In this study, she analyzes a wide range of late Qing writings on women, focusing on definitions of female virtue, talent, and heroism particularly as presented in collections of biographies of women. Most of the writings were by men, though some were by women. Their biographical subjects included Chinese and foreign women, both ancient and modern—for example, Ban Zhao, Qiu Jin, Joan of Arc, and Florence Nightingale. The author of one such biographical collection urged his (women) readers to use it in the same way that Buddhist scriptures had been used, as a “precious raft,” so Judge explains, to “transport individuals to the shores of enlightenment” (250). Hence the title of her book.

This study is primarily an intellectual history that draws liberally from the work of Western critical theorists. It analyzes the relevant late Qing writings within the framework of four “chronotypes,” a concept taken from the titled work of Bender and Wellbery, which Judge claims to constitute “a new hermeneutics of historical change” (12).¹ The four chronotypes are arranged along a spectrum from eternalists through meliorists and archeomodernists to presentists. Eternalists, simply put, sought to maintain traditional values and rejected any accommodation with modernity; presentists, at the other end of the spectrum, rejected traditional values and sought guidance from the outside world. In between, meliorists and archeomodernists both accepted and advocated modernity but differed regarding the extent to which they were willing to preserve tradition; archeomodernists (a term attributed to Walter Benjamin) were more willing to jettison the past, especially the recent past, than meliorists.

What these clumsy-sounding labels mean, in practice, is that, for example, the Qing official Zhang Zhidong was an eternalist; Wei Xiyuan, the author of the Illustrated Biographies of Resourceful Women, Past and Present, a meliorist; Liang Qichao, the constitutional monarchist, an archeomodernist; and Qiu Jin, the revolutionary martyr, a presentist. Judge’s well-supported conclusion is that the turn of the twentieth century was “a period of pluralistic modernities and heterogeneous temporalities,” when “[i]ndividuals staked out their political positions by resignifying the past, invoking Chinese or Western icons, and establishing divergent hierarchies of heroism” (231).

The book, arranged topically, is divided into three roughly equal parts, one on female virtue, one on female talent, and one on female heroism. It is thoroughly researched. Its more than fifty black-and-white illustrations are well integrated into the text. However, among its few shortcomings are a misspelling or two and mistakes in rendering the Western name of the Tianjin newspaper Dagong bao (L’Impartial).