In Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs, Xian Wang examines how dedicated female revolutionaries—women so driven by their political passion that they were willing to die for their chosen causes—have been remembered and reconstructed in various contexts in modern and contemporary Chinese history. Wang situates her book in a framework based on Aleida Assmann’s view of history and memory as two complementary modes of cultural memory and Michel de Certeau’s theory of memory as a kind of anti-museum. By examining a wide variety of literary and artistic sources, Gendered Memories conceptualizes an imaginary museum for women martyrs, displaying how they have featured in the CCP’s historical narratives and counter-memories. Wang’s analysis draws attention to the gendered dimensions of memories about these revolutionary heroines, focusing especially on how stories about them took shape under the shadow of the concept of chastity and a fascination with female sexuality.
Exhibition I, “Ding Ling: Almost a Martyr,” is about Ding Ling, who did not mind becoming a martyr. However, despite her dedication to the CCP, Ding Ling’s career was persistently plagued by her relationship with Feng Da, a man identified as a “traitor.” This association subjected her to scrutiny and humiliation, which lasted from her days in Yan’an to the 1980s, when the CCP decided to restore her reputation. Describing the ordeals that Ding Ling went through, Wang argues that Communist revolutionary culture expected a woman revolutionary to be an exemplary woman (lienü 列女), a chaste martyr (lienü 烈女), and a female revolutionary martyr (nülieshi 女烈士).
Exhibit II, “Qiu Jin: Changing Images of a Female Revolutionary Martyr,” explores Qiu Jin, the most famous woman martyr that the history of Chinese revolutions has ever produced. Wang traces the evolution of Qiu Jin’s image from the late Qing to the 1940s, showing how she was transformed from a proper and fragile lady who became a victim of great injustice into a powerful revolutionary who sacrificed her life for the future of China. The metamorphosis of Qiu Jin began immediately after the collapse of the Qing dynasty, as her good friends, Wu Zhiyin and Xu Zhihua, decided that the inscriptions on her memorial stele had to feature the term “revolution.” Subsequent writers and playwrights reshaped Qiu Jin into a symbol of patriotism, as they hoped to spark the Chinese people’s spirit of national resistance in the face of Japanese imperialism. In Yan’an, Qiu Jin became a model, a woman who moved beyond the confines of her traditional duties to take part in the nation’s struggle for survival and liberation.
Exhibit III, “Xiang Jingyu: Married to the Proletariat,” examines Xiang Jingyu, who was executed by the KMT in the late 1920s. In addition to being a capable revolutionary, Xiang was the first wife of Cai Hesen, an early CCP leader and a Communist martyr. The CCP remembers her as a self-sacrificing heroine and a woman whose bond with her partner was not only romantic but also profoundly ideological. Dubbed the “Cai-Xiang alliance,” comrades once saw their relationship as an ideal marriage, one that heralded a new marital model based on both love and shared belief. However, the CCP’s official narrative concealed Xiang Jingyu’s affair with Peng Shuzhi, another Communist leader. It also hid the fact that the Xiang-Cai alliance ended in a split. The CCP did not allow the complications of a failed marriage to tarnish the memory and legacy of Xiang and Cai.
Exhibition IV, “Zhenzhen: Chastity and Female Revolutionary Sacrifice,” discusses Zhenzhen, the protagonist of “When I Was in Xia Village.” Ding Ling created Zhenzhen during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when Chinese writers and artists prioritized women’s loyalty to the nation over their fidelity to their husbands. For instance, in one of Lao She’s plays, a widow remarries a bandit in the hope of encouraging her new husband to fight the Japanese. A woman’s politically motivated violation of chastity could be ideologically transformed into an admirable act of self-sacrifice by those who helped construct the narrative on national liberation. However, in “When I Was in Xia Village,” Zhenzhen, who worked as a military prostitute to help the CCP, is ostracized in her own village. By inventing this young heroine, Ding Ling focused on how much Zhenzhen suffers for her self-sacrifice: she is shamed by those who refused to heed the sexual violence she chose to go through for the nation.
Exhibition V, “Liu Hulan: Contested Memories of a Girl Martyr,” investigates Liu Hulan, a teenager killed by Yan Xishan’s troops in 1947. The CCP quickly incorporated her into its revolution-centered collective memory. Her image has been fluid. While Liu was deployed as a symbol to instigate the people’s hatred of the enemy during the Civil War, she was constructed as a socialist heroine after 1949 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In addition, state-sponsored treatments of Liu’s sexuality, including her romantic relationships, fluctuated during the early PRC, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era as representations of Liu were reinvented. While state-sponsored representations tended to portray Liu as an asexual or sexually uncomplicated ideal revolutionary, contemporary nonstate representations have tended to oversexualize her.
In the epilogue, “The Immortal Ding Ling,” Wang stresses the parallels between Ding Ling and her good friend Guan Lu, a talented woman writer who was instructed by the CCP to work as a spy during the war against Japan. In the PRC, like Ding Ling, Guan Lu found it impossible to prove her loyalty as a revolutionary and moral purity as a woman. Guan chose to end her life when her reputation was officially restored in 1982. Ding Ling passed away in 1986, and the CCP rejected her husband’s request that her body be covered by the party flag. In both life and death, Ding Ling drew attention to how sexuality complicated women revolutionaries’ ideological loyalty. Her funeral reminds readers of the competition between the state’s and nonstate actors’ memories of a woman’s dedication to a party that had caused her too much humiliation and pain.
Xian Wang has written a book that will impress readers interested in how images of women revolutionaries have been shaped and reshaped in revolutionary cultures. Her research is based on serious engagement with a panoply of sources, including, among others, fictional tales, drama, opinion pieces, memoirs, sculptures, and paintings. More importantly, Wang has made a brilliant decision to use Ding Ling as the center of her analysis. In addition to examining Ding Ling, Gendered Memories explores women who played important roles at various stages in her life: Qiu Jin, a revolutionary whose legacy sowed the seeds of activism in the young Ding Ling’s mind; Xiang Jingyu, a family friend who served as a mentor to Ding Ling as a young woman; Zhenzhen, a fictional character Ding Ling created as a revolutionary writer; and Liu Hulan, a young heroine who served as a moral foil to the impure Zhenzhen, Ding Ling’s controversial heroine. But in Wang’s analysis, these women not only helped define Ding Ling’s career. They also, to some extent, shared her fate: stories about Ding Ling and these women were always formed under the influence of China’s chastity cult. Their shared destiny underscores the deep influence of female virtues on China’s political cultures.
That said, the book could have been improved in some areas. First, I would have loved to see a more detailed examination of Assmann’s theory of the complementary modes of collusive memory and de Certeau’s discussion of the anti-museum. As major elements of the book’s conceptual foundation, they deserved more space than a couple of paragraphs.
Second, I wish the author would have reflected more on the malleability of Communist narratives of women martyrs. This is not to suggest that Xian Wang fails to recognize the multiplicity and fluidity of these narratives. By comparing Xia Yan’s Spirit of Freedom and Yan Yiyan’s Qiu Jin, she notes that the latter eliminated the former’s criticism of Qiu Jin’s sacrifices (p. 70). As noted previously, when investigating Liu Hulan, Wang describes how state-sponsored narratives on this young woman evolved at various stages in the PRC’s history (pp. 186–88, 191). But it seems to me that Wang could have examined the nonstatic nature of Communist-sponsored or -approved narratives more in other chapters. For instance, the 1984 film about Qiu Jin, directed by Xie Jin and, to some extent, based on Xia Yan’s Spirit of Freedom, portrays how Qiu Jin’s choice of martyrdom earns the deep respect of Wang Jinfa, who in Xie Jin’s 1936 play criticizes her unnecessary decision to die. I would have especially appreciated more reflections on how or to what extent party-sponsored or state-sponsored narratives about Xiang Jingyu have been reshaped. In recent decades, state-sponsored cultural products have acknowledged Xiang’s split with Cai Hesen. More attention to the ways in which the dissolution of their marriage has been portrayed in post-Mao state-approved works would have allowed readers to think about how the state reconciles history and memory, and how it weighs political dedication and chastity in the contemporary age.
Finally, the author could have deepened her already impressive analysis of chastity in the CCP’s narratives of women revolutionaries and their self-sacrifices. While reading the book, I could not help but notice that the CCP’s treatments of Ding Ling and Xiang Jingyu were vastly different. Granted, both cases indicate that the CCP regarded chastity as a defining characteristic of women revolutionaries’ character. However, whereas the party refused to trust Ding Ling due to her liaison with a traitor, it glorified Xiang Jingyu by concealing her love affair with a Trotskyist expelled by the party. The contrast between Ding and Xiang raises a number of questions. For instance, how did the CCP judge women’s violation of a traditional cardinal virtue differently based on their status, networks, and accomplishments within revolutionary circles? How did the party weigh various kinds of self-sacrifice? How did the party address a woman’s sexual impropriety in diverse ways according to its own concerns? These questions seem especially germane because throughout the Chinese Communist revolution and during the PRC, women’s sexual integrity was critiqued, brushed aside, and upheld for various reasons. These include Chinese radicals’ rejection of chastity as a feudal practice, the CCP’s accommodations in response to male desire, political benefits derived from the party’s appropriation of female sexuality, and party leaders’ efforts to discipline its members. Consideration of these factors might have further enriched Wang’s excellent book.
