The Woman Question and the Agrarian Question: The Feminist and Political-Economic Writings of Wu Juenong, 1921–1927

This article explores connections between two sets of writings by the twentieth-century Chinese intellectual Wu Juenong (1897–1989). One was devoted to the "woman question" (funü wenti); the other focused on the "agrarian question" (nongmin wenti) of China. During the 1920s, Wu wrote or translated over 50 articles related to feminism, but he published them under the pseudonym "Y.D." This shared identity has only recently been discovered through evidentiary research, and this article explores how these two major research interests were connected in conceptual and theoretical terms. Wu's intellectual trajectory highlights that an early interest in ostensibly cultural gender questions could have been generative of later concerns with political economy. The pivot between the two debates was his larger concern with "social organization" and the feminist critique of reification. His story provides a crucial reminder of the shared historical origins of the "woman" and "agrarian" questions in modern and contemporary China.