UBC Press Blog

Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation

Norman Smith, 2007, Introduction, p. xii-xiv

Canadian Women’s Studies Association /L’association canadienne des études sur les femmes
has awarded Resisting Manchukuo their 2008 Book Prize.

In early November 1944, Mei Niang (b.1920), the pre-eminent woman writer in north China, travelled from her home in Beijing to Nanjing, the capital of Japan’s conquests in south China and the site of notorious wartime atrocities, to attend the third and final Greater East Asia Writers’ Congress (Dadongya wenxuezhe dahui/Daitōa bungakusha taikai ). At the congress, one of Japan’s most prominent colonial institutions, Mei Niang’s novella Xie (Crabs) was acclaimed novel of the year, and she was feted for her achievements as a writer, editor, and translator. Her work attracted audiences across East Asia: just the previous year, in the fall of 1943, her fame was celebrated as bookstores in Beijing and Shanghai, both occupied by the Japanese, conducted polls to determine the most beloved contemporary Chinese woman writer. The results linked her name with that of Shanghai’s Zhang Ailing (1920 -95) in the catch- phrase, “nan Ling, bei Mei” ((the south has Zhang Ailing, the north has Mei Niang).The two women were widely acclaimed for career accomplishments in territories under Japanese domination, contexts radically different from the post-occupation period, which subsequently spawned highly politicized evaluations of their legacies.

Mei Niang solidified her position as a critic of patriarchy in China’s literary world of the late 1930s, in the Japanese colonial state of Manchukuo (1932 -45 ). Continue reading…

Shahnaz Khan 2007, Chapter 1: Native Informing on the Zina
Ordinance, p. 15-17

Transnational Feminism and the Moral Regulation of Pakistani Women

In a recent article entitled “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Chandra Mohanty (2003b) revisits her earlier critique (1991) of liberal feminism and its tendency to produce sensational accounts about third-world women as the oppressed other. Mohanty once again argues for a reading of women’s oppression in ways that show the local and global not only as simultaneous, but also as constitutive of each other. Mohanty’s analysis contributes to an examination of my location as a native who informs on the Zina Ordinance for a Western audience. In so doing, I reconfigure conversations about the native so that she is positioned to inform not only on the Zina Ordinance in Pakistan but also on its reading in the West.

The Zina Ordinance is an extremely oppressive, controversial, and contested piece of legislation in Pakistan. I am able to voice my criticism to Pakistani government officials who frequently agree with me and to activists there who are working to secure the release of women imprisoned for zina. Continue reading…

Globalization, Postcolonialism and Chinese Patriarchy

Eliza W.Y. Lee, ed. 2003, Chapter 2: Engendering a Legal System: The Unique Challenge of Postcolonial Hong Kong by Carole J. Petersen, p. 23-26.

Gender and Change in Hong Kong

As recently as 1990, the concept of gender equality did not really exist in Hong Kong’s legal system. There was no legal right to equality in the colonial constitution and no laws prohibiting sex discrimination or sexual harassment. Although the British government had already ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), it had not extended CEDAW to Hong Kong because the Hong Kong government did not want to be bound by it (Byrnes and Chan 1993). Certain other international human rights conventions that applied to Hong Kong included a right to equality, but they were not directly enforceable in the Hong Kong courts (Byrnes 1992). As a result, sex discrimination was openly practised and widely accepted as the norm. For example, women were legally barred from inheriting much of the land in the New Territories, there were discriminatory laws and employment regulations, and virtually every newspaper contained sex-specific job advertisements (Jones 1994; Petersen 1996; Samuels 1993). Since the colonial government, traditionalists, and the business community strongly opposed sex-discrimination legislation, there seemed little hope of meaningful law reform.

Continue reading…