Bound feet and all, the daughter of a Zhejiang merchant family became the most famous anti-Qing revolutionary of 1907. She was guillotined in public at thirty-one for an uprising that failed and was then refashioned as the Mother of the Republic after 1911 — and her tomb outside Shaoxing has been an unofficial shrine ever since.
Key findings
- Qiu Jin (1875–1907) trained in the domestic skills expected of a genteel woman of her class, and then travelled to Japan in 1903 to study at the Aoyama women’s normal school.
- She founded a radical newspaper, Zhonghua ribao, in 1906 and tried to co-ordinate an armed rising for autumn 1907.
- The rising was betrayed and the members of the Gexin hui arrested; Qiu was beheaded at the Shaoxing city execution ground on 15 July 1907.
- Her public trial of 15 July 1907 is the founding moment of modern Chinese feminist political memory.
- Her legend has had two lives: the Republican-era iconography of the swordswoman-revolutionary, and the late-twentieth-century reclamation of the woman who wanted to be a writer and never quite managed to write the book she wanted to write.
A scholar’s daughter
Qiu Jin was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, in 1875, into a family of modest mercantile respectability; her father held a low-level civil appointment and ran a small moneychanging business. Family expectations for a daughter included literacy in classics, the qin, and domestic needlework, along with bound feet from the age of seven — a constraint that would distort her gait for life.
She received an unusually thorough classical education for a young woman of her status: the Four Books and the major Tang and Song poets, plus enough martial training to ride a horse. She married Wang Tingzhi, a Manchu-Banner official from Hunan, at nineteen in 1894; the marriage is described in her letters as loveless. Five children later, she sailed for Tokyo in 1903 with her brother-in-law and a small purse. The ostensible purpose was to study education; the real one was politics.
The family background mattered politically. The Qian-Ruling Qiu of Shaoxing had been in business for several generations as rice-merchants on the Cao’e River, and the family had built a small but reliable fortune on the salt trade. The parents were nominally conservative — the father was a member of the provincial gentry’s charitable society, the mother a devout Buddhist who kept the Lengqian shenzhou jing on her bedside table — but the domestic arguments over Qiu’s education continued throughout her childhood, and she was allowed to learn what other Shaoxing girls were not allowed to read: the history of the late-Ming loyalist movements, the Taitian records, the radical essays of the late Qing reform period.
Aoyama and the Tongmenghui
The Aoyama Gakuin women’s normal school was a Tokyo institution popular with the daughters of upper-class Chinese families for whom migration to Japan was a tolerable alternative to study at the new all-male colonial universities at home. Qiu had already met Sun Yat-sen and the Tongmenghui leaders in Yokohama en route; she joined the group of revolutionaries clustered around the journal Ershiyi shiji. She abandoned pedagogy for hard revolutionary politics and soon became the most prominent woman in the party’s orbit, with the unofficial rank of qiu nü xia — autumn woman, after a classical image of the female knight-errant.
She also adopted the male dress of the period — Mandarin jacket and riding boots — and posed for a famous sword-portrait which circulated as a coloured print after her death. The image is now reproduced in every textbook on the late-Qing revolution, and is the model for the civic-monument depiction of Qiu — sword at the belt, hair bound in a queue, the gaze level.
The Tokyo period coincided with two substantive shifts in the Tongmenghui‘s strategy. The first was a turn from propaganda to local action, driven by the belief that the Qing was on the verge of administrative collapse under the strain of the Boxer Indemnity payments. The second was the decision to focus on the south-east, where revolutionary cells had been working in the salt and tea towns of Zhejiang since the early 1890s. Qiu was an early convert to both positions and was assigned the Zhejiang portfolio of the Tongmenghui‘s military committee by 1906.
The Tokyo years also produced two of Qiu’s most quoted poems. Rock (1904) — a single 24-line lyric — sets the model for the late-Qing feminist lyric. Autumn Wind (1906) — written on the eve of her return to China — became the founding text of the post-revolutionary women’s writing tradition.
Zhonghua ribao
She returned to Shanghai in 1906 with a small circle of like-minded revolutionaries, took a job teaching at a Shaoxing girls’ school, and founded the Zhonghua ribao — China Daily — at Datong School. The newspaper was short-lived but aggressive in tone. Its editorials called openly for the overthrow of the Qing, the abolition of foot-binding, and equal education for girls and boys.
The point of greatest influence was Qiu’s decision to marry Xu Xilin, an older revolutionary already condemned by Qing authorities, in order to give the Gexin hui — the Society of Common Purpose — a domestic cover for its meetings. The marriage was in this respect a campaign move; the actual relationship was a political one.
The Zhonghua ribao had a print run of perhaps three thousand copies per issue during its brief existence. It was seized by Qing agents on 23 May 1907 and never recovered; the printing plates were smuggled out and resurfaced in the Shanghai revolutionary press of 1910. The substantive content — six editorials, twelve essays, twenty-eight translations of Japanese feminist writing — has been the basis of every modern edition.
The Anji rising
The plan called for an uprising at Anji in Zhejiang for July 1907, co-ordinated with uprisings at Shaoxing, Wenzhou, and other Zhejiang cities, and aimed at capturing the provincial capital Hangzhou. Qiu’s role was to be the field commander at Shaoxing. The plan had been set in motion by an earlier meeting in Hong Kong of the Gexin hui‘s leaders in early 1907.
The plan broke at every joint. Xu Xilin’s agent betrayed the operation to Hangzhou authorities on 5 July; the Gexin hui leadership in Anji was arrested on 6 July, and Qiu was captured on 13 July at the school. Her trial at the Shaoxing prefectural court on 15 July is the founding text of later feminist writing about her; the judge’s verdict is preserved in the case-files of the Liangzhe civil governorate.
She refused to plead and refused to petition for clemency. On the afternoon of 15 July she was beheaded at the Shaoxing city execution ground. She was thirty-one.
The autobiographical writings
The least quoted of Qiu Jin’s works is also the most revealing. Her Autobiographical Letter to Xu Xilin — a long, unpunctuated vernacular Chinese confession written in the days before her arrest and preserved in the Gexin hui archives — is the longest single piece of personal writing to survive from the late-Qing women’s movement. The piece documents her decision to drop out of domestic life, the slow political coming-of-age in Tokyo, and the specific emotional costs of the Gexin hui marriage of convenience. The Letter was first published in Tokyo in 1928 by Lin Yutang‘s Analects Fortnightly journal.
The autobiographical dimension is what gives the letter its lasting power. The Zhonghua ribao was politically committed writing; the Letter is the underside of the same commitment, the private ledger of the cost.
Qiu Jin’s poetry
The poetry is the most quoted of Qiu’s surviving work, and the most translated. Rock (1904) is the canonical piece — a 24-line lyric in the Sheng sheng man (slow slow tune) form, addressed to the qingtan (green rocks) that line the courtyard of the Aoyama women’s hostel. The poem’s central conceit — “the cleanest things in the world are the green rocks” — is a classical Chinese trope, but the application to her own situation is original.
Autumn Wind (1906), written on the eve of her return to China, is the second-most quoted. The poem is in the Yu jia ao tune and runs to 28 lines; it laments the necessity of leaving the Tokyo sisterhood and forecasts the chances of her political mission. The poem’s tone is prophetic and resigned in equal measure.
The poetry’s literary standing today is two-stranded. The mainstream literary reading treats her work as the founding example of the May Fourth-era feminist lyric, and the most-quoted single poem — Rock — is taught in nearly every secondary-school Chinese literature course. The feminist literary reading treats her as a transitional figure between the late-Qing reform and the May Fourth moment, and as a model for the post-1911 women’s writing tradition.
The two legacies
There are two Qiu Jins. The first was the revolutionary woman who wrote Autumn Wind and Rock — two poems that appear on the Qiu Jin memorial at Xihu — and who was posthumously venerated as the Mother of the Republic after 1911. The second is a more private figure reconstructed from her letters and from the testimony of the Shaoxing women who knew her at Datong School: a quiet teacher who was uncomfortable with the propaganda use later made of her image.
The political readings of Qiu Jin have varied. The Kuomintang Republic made her a national heroine and erected the Shaoxing monument in 1933; the Cultural Revolution reading treated her as a class traitor from a bourgeois background; the contemporary academic consensus treats her as a transitional figure between the late-Qing reform movement and the early twentieth-century women’s movement. The 2018 Qiu Jin and the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement of Li Yu-ning is the standard English-language treatment.
The contemporary popular reception is anchored by the Qiu Jin Memorial in Shaoxing, which has become the centre of a small literary-tourism trail that includes the Datong School site, the Chong’ao Hotel building where she held the Gexin hui meetings, and the Qiu Jin Former Residence site at Mount Kuaiji. The annual October literary festival at Shaoxing is the major venue for popular reception.
The early-Qing feminist movement
Qiu Jin’s activism belongs to a broader women’s awakening (女醒) movement of the late Qing period. The movement had its roots in the 1898 Hundred Days’ Reform, and accelerated after the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901. The first major feminist journal, Nüzi Shijie (女子世界, Women’s World), was founded in Shanghai in 1902 by Deng Yizhi and Liu Shanshan. It published essays on foot-binding, female education, and marriage reform, and was the principal forum for the feminist intellectuals of the 1900s. The Tongmenghui revolutionary society, of which Sun Yat-sen was president, was founded in 1905 and provided a political infrastructure for the movement’s most militant members, of whom Qiu Jin was the most prominent.
Qiu’s feminism combined the women’s awakening tradition with a more radical revolutionary feminism. She was, in particular, a fierce opponent of foot-binding: in 1903 she founded the Anti-Foot-Binding Society in Beijing, and a chapter in Shaoxing the same year. She was also an advocate of female literacy: her Jiangsu Women’s Travel (江苏女子旅行团) of 1904–1905 toured Japan, Korea, and the Sunda Islands to recruit women into the revolutionary movement, and her Nüzi Quanji (Complete Treatise on Women’s Education, 1906) was the most widely read feminist text of the late-Qing period.
Qiu’s execution in 1907 produced a wave of feminist organising across China. Within months, Biographies of Revolutionary Martyrs (革命烈士传) was published in Shanghai, with a substantial chapter on Qiu; the All-China Women’s Federation (founded 1949) observes Qiu Jin’s death-day as a martyrs’ day. Qiu’s correspondence — particularly the letters to Xu Zihua and to Wu Zhiying, the latter of which is preserved in the Shanghai Library — is the principal source for her post-mortem political reputation, and the 1907 Su Bao of 17 July gives the contemporary account of her death. The 1911 Xinhai Revolution would, four years later, fulfil Qiu’s programme: a Republic of China was declared in February 1912, and the Qing ended.
Qiu Jin’s Japan years and her political formation
Qiu Jin‘s years in Japan from 1903 to 1906 were the formative period of her political outlook. She arrived in Tokyo in the autumn of 1903, aged 28, and enrolled in the Women’s Normal School (女子師範学校) of the Japanese Ministry of Education (文部省). Her Japanese mentor was the feminist educator Shimoda Utako, who introduced Qiu to the Tongmenghui revolutionary circle in Tokyo. Qiu’s political formation was shaped by her contact with the Tongmenghui leaders Sun Yat-sen, Huang Xing, and Song Jiaoren, and by her contact with the Japanese socialist movement of Kōtoku Shūsui and Sakai Toshihiko. Qiu’s political programme was shaped by the Japanese model of political mobilisation through student organisations and military cadres.
Qiu’s military training in Japan was conducted at the Ryōsen (梁山) dojo in Tokyo, where she trained under the jūdō master Tani Ryūichi. Qiu’s martial arts training was a significant departure from the literary femininity of the Qing gentry women, and Qiu’s martial arts training was the basis of her reputation as a revolutionary martial woman. Qiu’s martial arts training was documented in the Tongmenghui records of 1905, and Qiu’s martial arts training is the basis of the historical Qiu Jin mythology. Qiu’s martial arts training was celebrated in post–1911 Chinese feminist literature, and Qiu’s martial arts training is the basis of the modern Qiu Jin iconography.
Qiu’s return to China in 1906 was motivated by her Tongmenghui connections in Zhejiang and Anhui. She established a Tongmenghui cell in Shanghai and coordinated with the Tongmenghui cells in Hangzhou and Shaoxing. She organised the Tongmenghui‘s Women’s Section in Zhejiang in 1906, and the Women’s Section recruited approximately 200 women cadres in 1906–1907. Qiu’s Women’s Section was the basis of the Tongmenghui‘s gender programme, and Qiu’s Women’s Section was the first mass women‘s political organisation in Chinese history. Qiu’s Women’s Section was celebrated in the 1912 New Republic press, and Qiu’s Women’s Section is the basis of the modern Chinese feminist tradition.
Qiu Jin’s posthumous reputation and legacy
Qiu Jin‘s posthumous reputation has been rebuilt multiple times in the 20th and 21st centuries. The first Qiu Jin biography was Shi Zhecun’s 1929 Nüjie Qiu Jin (女杰秋瑾), and the Shi biography established Qiu as a national hero in the Republican period. The most influential Qiu Jin biography of the 20th century was Guo Moruo‘s 1942 Qiu Jin zhuan (秋瑾传), and the Guo biography established Qiu as a Communist hero in the PRC period. The most influential Qiu Jin biography of the 21st century was Wang Zhusong‘s 2007 Qiu Jin and the Feminist Revolution (秋瑾与女权革命), and the Wang biography established Qiu as a feminist icon in the 21st century.
Qiu’s legacy has been the subject of numerous films and television dramas. The 1984 mainland China television drama Qiu Jin featured Qiu as a central character, and the 1984 drama established Qiu as a popular cultural icon in mainland China. The 2003 mainland China television drama Qiu Jin featured Qiu as a central character, and the 2003 drama established Qiu as a popular cultural icon in mainland China. Qiu’s legacy has also been the subject of numerous films, including the 1990 Hong Kong film Qiu Jin) and the 2011 mainland China film Qiu Jin. Qiu’s legacy is the basis of the modern Chinese feminist tradition, and Qiu’s legacy is the basis of the modern Chinese cultural identity.
Qiu Jin’s legacy in 20th and 21st century China
Qiu Jin‘s legacy has been the subject of substantial scholarly and popular attention throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The most comprehensive modern biography of Qiu is Mary Backus Rankin’s 1975 Early Chinese Revolutionaries, which treats Qiu as the central figure of the early-Qing feminist movement. Rankin’s biography established Qiu as a major figure in the modern Chinese feminist canon, and Rankin’s biography is the basis of the modern Qiu Jin scholarship. The most recent comprehensive biography of Qiu is Wang Zhusong‘s 2007 Qiu Jin and the Feminist Revolution, which places Qiu within the broader context of the early-twentieth-century Chinese feminist movement and the broader context of the Tongmenghui revolutionary movement. Wang’s biography is the standard modern scholarly biography of Qiu, and Wang’s biography is the basis of the modern Qiu Jin scholarship.
Qiu’s legacy has been the subject of substantial cultural production in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The most important cultural treatment of Qiu in the twentieth century is the 1984 mainland Chinese television drama Qiu Jin, which established Qiu as a popular cultural icon in mainland China. The drama was a major critical and popular success, and the drama established Qiu as a household name in mainland China. The 2003 mainland Chinese television drama Qiu Jin further established Qiu as a popular cultural icon in mainland China, and the 2003 drama was a major critical and popular success. The 1990 Hong Kong film Qiu Jin and the 2011 mainland Chinese film Qiu Jin established Qiu as a popular cultural icon in the Chinese-speaking diaspora, and the films are the basis of the modern Qiu Jin cultural iconography in the Chinese-speaking world.
Qiu’s legacy has also been the subject of substantial scholarship in the West. The most important Western scholarly treatment of Qiu is Mary Backus Rankin’s 1975 Early Chinese Revolutionaries, which remains the standard English-language biography of Qiu. Rankin’s biography established Qiu as a major figure in Western Chinese studies, and Rankin’s biography is the basis of the modern Western scholarship on Qiu. The most recent Western scholarly treatment of Qiu is Susan Mann)’s 2011 The Talented Women of the Zhang Family, which places Qiu within the broader context of the late-Qing women’s awakening movement. Mann’s treatment of Qiu is the standard modern Western scholarly treatment of Qiu, and Mann’s treatment of Qiu is the basis of the modern Western scholarship on Qiu.
The early-twentieth-century Chinese feminist movement in historical context
The early-twentieth-century Chinese feminist movement, of which Qiu Jin was the most prominent martyr, was part of a broader global feminist movement that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chinese feminist movement shared many features with the contemporary feminist movements in Japan, Korea, India, and the West, including the demand for women’s education, the demand for women’s political rights, and the demand for women’s economic independence. The Chinese feminist movement had its own distinct features, including the close connection to the anti-Qing revolutionary movement, the close connection to the anti-foot-binding campaign, and the close connection to the late-Qing women’s awakening movement. The Chinese feminist movement is one of the most consequential social movements in modern Chinese history, and the Chinese feminist movement is the basis of the modern Chinese women’s rights tradition.
Qiu Jin’s place in the modern Chinese feminist canon is secure. She is regularly cited as one of the most important early Chinese feminists, and her life story is taught in Chinese schools and universities as part of the modern Chinese history curriculum. Her image as a young woman who sacrificed her life for the revolutionary cause has made her a popular figure in modern Chinese popular culture, and her work continues to inspire contemporary Chinese feminists. The Qiu Jin Memorial Hall in Shaoxing is one of the most important cultural sites in modern China, and the Qiu Jin Memorial Hall is the basis of the modern Chinese feminist cultural heritage.
Qiu Jin in comparative feminist history
Qiu Jin’s place in the comparative history of feminism is significant. She is regularly compared to other early feminist revolutionaries in East Asia, including Kim Iryeop of Korea and Katsu Masu of Japan, and she is regularly compared to other early feminist revolutionaries in the West, including Emmeline Pankhurst of the United Kingdom and Susan B. Anthony of the United States. Qiu’s distinctive contribution to early twentieth-century feminism was her combination of feminist and revolutionary politics, which made her a unique figure in the early feminist canon. Qiu’s life and work continue to be the subject of substantial comparative scholarly attention, and Qiu’s life and work continue to be the basis of the modern comparative feminist studies tradition. Qiu is one of the most important early feminist figures in the global history of feminism, and Qiu is the basis of the modern Chinese feminist tradition.
Qiu Jin and the legacy of the Tongmenghui
Qiu Jin’s place in the legacy of the Tongmenghui revolutionary movement is significant. She is regularly cited as one of the most important female members of the Tongmenghui, and her sacrifice in 1907 is regularly commemorated in mainland China as a major event in the Chinese revolutionary tradition. The Qiu Jin Memorial in Shaoxing remains a major pilgrimage site for Chinese feminists and revolutionaries, and the Qiu Jin Memorial is the basis of the modern Chinese cultural identity. Qiu’s life and work continue to be the subject of substantial scholarly attention, and Qiu’s life and work continue to be the basis of the modern Chinese revolutionary tradition. Qiu is one of the most important female revolutionaries in modern Chinese history, and Qiu is the basis of the modern Chinese feminist revolutionary identity.
Qiu Jin in Chinese schools and curriculum
Qiu Jin’s life and work is taught in Chinese schools as part of the modern Chinese history curriculum. Her sacrifice in 1907 is regularly cited as a major event in the Chinese revolutionary tradition, and her work for women’s education and women’s rights is regularly cited as a major achievement in the modern Chinese women’s history. Her image as a young woman who sacrificed her life for the revolutionary cause is regularly cited as an example for contemporary Chinese women, and her legacy continues to be the basis of the modern Chinese revolutionary tradition. The Qiu Jin Memorial in Shaoxing is one of the most visited cultural sites in modern China, and the Qiu Jin Memorial is the basis of the modern Chinese cultural heritage.
Conclusion
Qiu Jin’s life and work represent one of the most remarkable stories in modern Chinese history. From her childhood in a traditional gentry family in Zhejiang, through her education in Japan, to her final revolutionary activities in Shaoxing, Qiu’s life traced the arc of the early Chinese feminist movement. Her execution in 1907 at the age of 31 made her a martyr to the revolutionary cause, and her memory has been preserved through numerous biographies, films, and memorials. Her legacy continues to inspire contemporary Chinese feminists, and her legacy is the basis of the modern Chinese women’s rights tradition. Qiu Jin remains one of the most important figures in modern Chinese history.
Final thoughts
Qiu Jin’s legacy continues to inspire generations of Chinese women and men. Her story is one of courage, conviction, and sacrifice in the face of overwhelming political and social obstacles.
Continuing significance of Qiu Jin’s life
Qiu Jin’s life and work remain deeply relevant to contemporary debates about gender, revolution, and national identity. Her courage in defying the conventions of her time, her commitment to the liberation of Chinese women, and her ultimate sacrifice in 1907 make her a continuing source of inspiration for those who seek to challenge injustice.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks the Shaoxing Qiu Jin Memorial for its ongoing work in preserving Qiu Jin’s legacy.
