Qiliang He is Associate Professor in History at Illinois State University, USA. He is the author of Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta Since 1949 (2012) and numerous articles on cultural history in twentieth-century China. He has also translated three books on Chinese history.

CONTENTS

0. Introduction

0.1 The Elopement

0.2 May Fourth Feminisms

0.3 Women's Agency

0.4 Vernacularization of May Fourth Feminisms

0.5 Public

0.6 Conservatisms

0.7 Chapter Design

1. Chapter 1: In Search of Women's Agency in Everyday Life: The Construction of the Huang-Lu Love Affair in the Press

1.2 The Spectacularity and Performativity of the Trials

1.3 From Rural to Urban: Huang's Interactions with the Press

1.4 Closing the Social Drama: Birth and Death

1.5 One Man's Fight: the Making of a Personal Identity

2. Chapter 2: The Trials of Lu Genrong: The Criminal Law Reform and Women's Agency in Late 1920s China

2.1 The Criminal Law Reform and Women's Agency in Late 1920s China

2.3 Women's Sexuality in Criminal Law Reforms in Twentieth-century China

2.4 Heyou or Lüeyou: The Trials of Lu Genrong

2.5 Punishing Lu Genrong

2.6 Legal Practice in Republican China Reconsidered

3. Chapter 3: Polysemy: Discussions and Debates on the Huang-Lu Love Affair

3.1 Love and Revolution

3.2 Debates: Anarcho-feminism

3.3 Debates: Sexual Anarchism

3.4 Debates: the "Doctrine of the Woman's Return to Home"

3.5 Zou Taofen's "Unconventional" Solution

4. Chapter 4: Polyphony: Vernacularized Feminisms and the Urban Network of Communication

4.1 The News Industry in the Late 1920s

4.2 The News Network

4.3 Elite Intellectuals' Scandalization of the Huang-Lu Affair

5. Chapter 5: Vernacularization as Global and Local Experiences: The Huang-Lu Affair in Film and Literature

5.1 Way Down East in the Chinese Market

5.2 Tears and Flowers: Griffith-inspired Melodrama Films

5.3 Living Hell in Shanghai: The Modern Girl in a Popular Novel

Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China's patriarchal system. Qiliang He's text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women's history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.