This is an important collection of translated and annotated texts from the first generation of feminist thinkers in China at the turn of the 20th century. The six essays by He-Yin Zhen, which feature the volume, are here published in English for the first time. They are accompanied by the previously better known essay by Liang Qichao, “On women's education,” (1897) and Jin Tianhe's “The women's bell” (1903). He-Yin Zhen (1884–1920), who chose to include her mother's maiden name in her own surname in defiance of tradition, was a founding editor of Tianyi (Natural Justice), an influential anarcho-feminist journal (which also carried the earliest Chinese translation of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto in 1908). The rediscovery and introduction to a global readership of He-Yin is a scholarly commendable and politically significant achievement. Complicating the “received narrative about the origins of Chinese feminism in a borrowed male liberal worldview” (p. 47), the book amounts to a corrective reconstruction of the emergence of feminist thought in China at the eve of the country's revolutionary upheavals.

Unlike her mostly male feminist contemporaries, He-Yin's writings about women's subjugation were guided by a transnational worldview, in which imperialism and capitalism were in the background and foreground of China's modern changes. She developed an original and powerful critique of the socioeconomic and moral-ideological foundations of patriarchy in what the editors indicate as “overlapping worlds of thinking.” The two-part Introduction is a substantial analysis of He-Yin's work and time. Highlighted are two intertwining concepts in her articulation. One is nannü (literally man-woman) or “nannü class”; the other is shengji or livelihood. The former is a conceptual totality that signifies societies as an always already gendered time-space of social relations – feminists must take man and woman together as a single analytical mechanism that reiterates a hierarchical distinction produced historically as a political command. Rather than focusing on sexual or gender differences per se, for her nannü is itself a kind of class making, only more primary than any other social divisions and identities (pp. 10–20, 184). The latter is concerned with exclusive property rights and commodification of female bodies in both factory and domestic labour. Remarkably, He-Yin makes a Marxian distinction between creative work as an intrinsic human desire and exploited labour tied to poverty and subservience (p. 91). As the editors note, He-Yin's vision of “a historical potential to reground labour in a human ontology rather than in human capital” remains highly relevant today (p. 25).

Liu, Karl and Ko propose that “nannü… is a more comprehensive rubric than ‘sex-gender’, whereas shenji is a more enabling rubric than ‘class’” (p. 10). Readers can judge whether this is the case by reading He-Yin Zhen directly in her series of articles published in 1907. Essentially, “the joy of liberation lies in the development of the character of women and that this will in turn help us win rights to change society” (p. 63). Noting the limitation of parliamentary politics, she insisted that “women who seek happiness must take their aim at the roots [of social injustice].” As such “I doubt that the struggle for women's suffrage can bring about a fundamental transformation of society” (p. 65). Seeing working class women as “the slaves of capitalists” and instruments of wealth production (pp. 81–82), her advocacy was an integral one – “If you desire to realize a women's revolution, you must begin with an economic revolution… to overthrow the system of private property and to replace it with communal property” (p. 103). Against the tide of Han nationalism at the time, she argued that instead of an ethnic Han regime, “the goal of women's struggle is no more and no less than the restoration of universal justice for all” (pp.106–108). She sounded a true internationalist in her “feminist antimilitarism”: honouring imprisoned Karl Liebknecht for his anti-war agitation, she criticized the state's armed forces being “reorganized to serve and protect the government and capitalists.” As military expansion would suck public funds and destroy livelihood, “antimilitarism would be a great victory for weak nations, the common people, and women” (p. 170, 176–78). Written often comparatively in a splendid historical and intellectual context of a transnational literature, major schools of ideas, and examples inside and outside China, Euro-America functioned in her work not as a standard model but as part of a global conversation on feminism and modernity. For her, as the editors emphasize, the West/East dichotomy is false and inoperative.

The purpose of this book is not just to rescue a vital anarchist and communist voice of non-Western feminism. It is also to engage contemporary feminist theoretical discourse in broader terms than the dominant debates over gender, sex, sexuality, identity politics or intersectionality (p. 4). In so doing, the editors might find a more critical look at He-Yin Zhen's elucidations helpful, such as her “woman” as a structurally determined “tranhistorical category” (pp. 9–10), or her rejection of nationalist concerns in the face of Imperialist encroachment. To appreciate the key message from this marvelous and yet long-suppressed figure – stated in her “feminist manifesto” – that “what I am proposing is not merely a women's revolution but a complete social revolution” (p. 183) is to confront a profound paradox. Her position of privileging but not isolating women's struggles takes such struggles as “the beginning and outcome of a total social revolution that would abolish the state and private property to bring about true social equality and the end to all social hierarchies” (p. 7). However, has not this idealistic abstraction of a socioeconomic revolution without national liberation partly explained her obscurity in a revolutionary history overwhelmed by the nationalist-cum-socialist movements?