No Human Rights, No Women’s Rights

没有人权何谈女权

By Qin Hui (秦晖)

【Editor’s Note: Qin Hui argues that without human rights, discussing women's rights is futile. He critiques misapplying Japan’s Meiji-era "individual liberation" to China, noting Japan's feudal lords hindered personal freedom, unlike China's imperial autocracy. In Japan, breaking from communal ties was logical; in China, central imperial authority was the primary oppressor. Qin highlights the paradox of "equality" under totalitarian rule, where men and women become tools of absolute power. He critiques the New Culture Movement's advocacy for "Nora's departure" without addressing state oppression, noting that in totalitarianism, women's "liberation" often serves state interests. Qin compares familial patriarchy with imperial power, arguing that the latter’s dominance leaves little room for the former. He debunks narratives blaming China's patriarchal tradition for women’s suffering, emphasizing the state’s role in violence during events like the Cultural Revolution. True women's liberation, Qin asserts, must begin with the broader pursuit of human rights and democracy.】

Tolstoy once said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Paraphrasing this, I would say that free people are alike, while people who lack freedom each have their own particular unfreedom. The first half of my statement refers to the concept of “universal values,” while the second half speaks to a “problem-consciousness” that must adapt to time and place.

During the May Fourth era, Chinese students in Japan were inspired by Japanese notions of individual emancipation. There was nothing problematic about their values per se. Yet Japan’s path to individual freedom began by breaking away from small communal bonds, a course shaped by that society’s own problem-consciousness in pursuit of freedom. Before the Meiji period, Japan was a feudal lordship system, with no “abolition of domains and establishment of prefectures” (废藩置县) and certainly no “Qin Shi Huang.” At that time, what stifled their “individualism” was, first and foremost, each person’s own feudal lord. Thus, to achieve the “freedom” and personal “independence” advocated by Fukuzawa Yukichi (福泽谕吉), one had to first escape one’s immediate master. In order to realize this step, what Marx called an “alliance between the bourgeoisie and royal power” emerged. Strengthening the central authority of the emperor’s government was logically consistent at that historical juncture. One reason the Meiji Restoration succeeded so well in Japan is that their problem-consciousness was relatively accurate.

Of course, it was only “relatively” accurate. After the Meiji era, when the emperor–military regime’s despotism became the primary obstacle to human rights in Japan, attacking only small communities and ignoring the larger autocracy turned counterproductive. Let’s not forget the extremist “Imperial Way” young officers who launched the May 15 and February 26 incidents. These men viewed themselves as peasant sons, calling for the downfall of “aristocrats and plutocrats,” a “unity of soldiers and farmers” to serve the emperor. During wartime, Japan’s “Nora walking out” and abandoning home for country reached an extreme: men became kamikaze pilots, and women were conscripted as “comfort women” (referring to those recruited from within Japan). Under the Leviathan’s coercion and seduction, the brazen “fearlessness of death” and “chastity in prostitution” that they displayed exceeded even the “spirit of sacrifice” of China’s Xiang River women, the “model laborers” among Hui’an women, or the “glorious Party membership” of trafficked women. Weren’t their extremes even more shocking?

Regardless, at the time of the Meiji Restoration, it was correct for the Japanese to first free themselves from small communal constraints. However, transplanting this problem-consciousness to China created much bigger problems. China was not a feudal lordship state. It had a long history of centralized imperial despotism that the 1911 Revolution (辛亥革命) never truly resolved. In ancient China, patriarchal authority, compared to imperial power, was never that formidable. As mentioned before, in medieval Europe, paternal authority and ecclesiastical power could curb a lord’s lust, reducing the so-called “right of the first night” to a “myth,” and a king holding three thousand beauties was never even a myth. Could China’s patriarchal authority ever restrain the imperial power so that a grand selection of beauties in the imperial harem would become a mere myth?

Without human rights, what talk can there be of women’s rights? If one undertakes a “Nora walks out” movement before achieving national democratization, the probability that these “departing Noras” become tools of imperial power is not small—at the very least, this risk is no less than what Lu Xun (鲁迅) described as “degenerating” or “returning” home.

Of course, by the New Culture Movement era, China had, at least formally, abandoned the imperial system after the 1911 Revolution. The May Fourth elites might have believed the mission of opposing despotism was complete and that it was time to rebel against fathers and mothers. Yet after the “Red Sun” rose, persisting endlessly with “democratically choosing a father” and “Nora’s departure” could more easily become a ploy with ulterior motives. Even if one did not forget one’s original intent and genuinely sought to break free from small communal bonds to assert individuality, “enlightenment gone awry” under the Leviathan’s shadow was entirely possible—indeed, quite likely.

Historically speaking, the opposition between “women’s rights” and “men’s rights” did indeed have a “primitive” expression within the traditional family. Whether in China, the West, India, Japan, or the Muslim world, the father’s dominance over children and the husband’s dominance over the wife is an age-old tradition. Except for rare ethnic groups where the husband takes the wife’s residence or name, since the dawn of “civilizations of domination,” most societies have practiced patrilocal, patrilineal traditions. In those times, “male-dominated families” already existed.

But unlike today’s West, China’s traditional family existed under a Qin-style totalitarian regime (“秦制-极权”) that “equally” deprived both men and women of their human rights. Failing to understand this leads to a deadly “misplacement of the issue.”

From the perspective of the grand communal imperial power, the basic logic was to revere only the emperor (even if the emperor was a female autocrat like Wu Zetian (武则天) or a Western queen) and to regard all subjects as tools, with no distinction of gender. In other words, totalitarian–imperial power is essentially “gender-equal”: be they male or female, they are all slaves to imperial authority.

Consider the Forbidden City in Beijing. The emperor’s harem comprised thousands of beauties serving only one man’s lust. They were caged birds, wholly without freedom. But men serving in the palace—eunuchs, who were castrated into servitude—were no fewer in number. Did these eunuchs hold a higher status than the women? At least their loss of sexual and reproductive rights was even more complete. If one does not overthrow imperial power, what would “gender equality” in the palace mean? Would it mean castrating the women of the harem as well so that they become “equal” like eunuchs?

Of course, outside the palace, the world remained male-dominated. This is because imperial and paternal powers, as well as large and small communal systems alike, were aligned in suppressing individuality and personal rights. In essence, imperial power has no incentive to liberate the individual, and if it does not conflict with imperial authority, imperial power will affirm paternal authority. Even the Qin system encouraged wives to inform their husbands: “If the husband is guilty and the wife reports him first, his property is not confiscated,” but the reverse scenario was even more encouraged: “If the wife is guilty and the husband reports her first, her property goes to him.” A wife’s reward for reporting her husband was merely that her own half of the property would not be seized. But if a husband reported his wife, not only could he keep his own half, but he might also gain her half. In that sense, the husband still had the advantage.

Yet, in reality, the imperial support for paternal authority still hinged on benefiting imperial power. Confucians who submitted to the Qin system accepted Han Fei’s (韩非) notion: “The minister serves the ruler, the son serves the father, the wife serves the husband—this is the constant way of the world.” These are the so-called “Three Bonds” (三纲). However, under the Qin system, among these three, only “the ruler is the bond of the minister” was absolute. As long as the emperor commanded it, one could bury one’s kin alive, murder one’s father, or inform on one’s husband. This is what “a loyal minister to the ruler, a violent son to his father” and “if the husband is guilty and the wife reports first” signifies—it’s essentially “righteousness that surpasses family ties.”

In that era, “If the ruler wants a subject dead, the subject cannot but die” was real. But “if the father wants a child dead, the child cannot but die” was mere rhetoric. In which post-Qin dynasty’s laws was a father allowed to kill his child at will? As for tales of clan ancestral halls drowning people at a whim, that was propaganda from revolutionary times. It’s not that private lynching never occurred in historical societies. Individuals could be murderers; groups (including kin groups) could also kill. Even in developed countries, mafia killings have never disappeared. But can these be compared to court suppression or killings by imperial henchmen? The imperial henchmen “outnumber the people” and “they beat you three times a day.” First, because these henchmen have legal authority to repress; second, because these henchmen have no personal connection to you. They are not even your masters—they heed only imperial favor, serve a three-year term, and move on. Why would they care about you? Consider that former Party secretary in Shandong who could kill like slaughtering a lamb. Could a family clan member do the same? As for clan organizations, they have no legal power to repress. They certainly cannot control outsiders. Moreover, they rely on permanent kinship ties. Which ancestral hall could survive solely by terrorizing its kin without kinship and camaraderie?

In democratic states governed by the rule of law, where power is strictly limited, the mafia may pose a greater threat to people’s safety. Under the “Qin system,” for a foreign observer to claim that parents or relatives were more terrifying than the yamen’s officials is a “misplacement of the issue.” For a Chinese person to say so is either foolish or malicious. As for times of chaos, when private violence was widespread—did we not see this during Land Reform and the Cultural Revolution? The difference is that traditional upheaval meant imperial power had truly collapsed, while during Land Reform and the Cultural Revolution, the “emperor” instigated it. As official propaganda then put it, “mobilize the masses to struggle against the masses.” The degree of private terror in those times could rival genuine anarchic disorder. The disasters women suffered were no different. As noted previously, sexual violence and abuse against women reached unprecedented heights in post-1949 “peaceful” times. But did “male power” perpetrate those atrocities? Let’s not forget the other side of that era: the “Red August” of 1966, when a large group of female Red Guards from the Girls’ High School Affiliated to Beijing Normal University—these fierce “Iron Girls,” mostly daughters of high-ranking officials—brutally beat their principal to death in broad daylight. These “Iron Girls” certainly did not represent women’s rights. Then how could those rapists represent “male rights”?

This translation is authorized by the original author and undertaken by the China Thought Express editorial team. The original text can be found: After Nora Walks Out—A Century of Reflection on Chinese Feminism《娜拉出走以后---中国女权的世纪反思》 2024 博登书屋出版

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