Qin Hui | The Leviathan that Devours “Nora”: Feminism and the Path of Chinese Women

The Leviathan that Devours “Nora”: Feminism and the Path of Chinese Women——Preface to the Japanese Expanded and Revised Edition of “After Nora Left Home: A Century of Reflection on Chinese Feminism”A Book Forbidden from CriticismMy book “After Nora Left Home: A Century of Reflection on Chinese Feminism” （Dudao publisher読道社,Japan）was published overseas in February 2025 as the first simplified Chinese edition. The reason for publishing it overseas is self-evident. However, in today’s internet era, it quickly spread inside the wall and sparked heated discussions on China’s most famous book review website “Douban(豆瓣）” and the political-cultural forum “Zhihu（知乎）.” Interestingly, unlike my other works, this book received “a flood of negative reviews” on these two platforms, as a friend described it.Apart from a few formal book reviews that were basically positive, the comments were mostly a barrage of verbal attacks from many friends in the Chinese “mainstream feminism” and Western postmodern feminism camps (which differ in many aspects).These friends, in fact, the vast majority have not actually read the book at all. It is not easy to obtain this book inside China. Some have merely heard one of my speeches at a book launch event; many don’t even know about the speech. “They haven’t read the book, yet they give it 0 stars.”Some of the criticisms leveled are almost diametrically opposed to the actual content of my book, for example, some accuse me of juxtaposing “feminism” and “patriarchy/male power” in a way that incites gender antagonism. In reality, the main argument of this book is precisely to emphasize that the root cause of the deprivation of women’s rights in China lies in totalitarianism/authoritarianism rather than in “male power/patriarchy.” The book criticizes “Pan-gender antagonism（泛性對立）”,and it specifically points out the inappropriateness of translating “feminism” as 女权主义 in China. Others say something like, “This Qin Hui is really an old pedant, still rehashing the stale topic of women’s liberation from the May Fourth era—can’t he talk about the real, current issues facing women?” Yet anyone who has read even the first edition knows that from the very first page, which discusses the “chained woman,” the main body of the book is devoted precisely to real, contemporary women’s issues. The discussion of May Fourth serves only as an introduction, and moreover, it is treated as an object of critical reflection. In contrast, this revised and enlarged edition has added quite a bit of material on the pre-reform era, precisely because I want to trace the deep historical roots of the current forms of persecution—otherwise it would merely be journalism, not serious academic research. Meanwhile, the Western ‘postmodern feminist perspective’ that has been imported to China in recent years is precisely the one that mentions these most serious contemporary ills the least, even avoids mentioning them altogether.But I am still very glad. In today’s Chinese intellectual world, where ten thousand horses stand silent and the space for open discussion is extremely limited, these criticisms are nonetheless something I welcome wholeheartedly. What thinkers fear most is casting pearls before swine with no response whatsoever; what delights them is seeing truth sharpened and clarified through debate. Moreover, in an era when forbidden zones are everywhere, any small crack or opening for discussion has the potential to be pried wider and wider, producing a chain reaction where pulling one hair moves the whole body.So I smiled and said to my friends: “A flood of vicious reviews? Excellent! The only thing to fear is dead calm with no ripples at all.”But my happiness didn’t last long. Just as the wave of criticism of this book on Douban and Zhihu was still surging and gaining momentum, out of nowhere came an order, and the entire discussion threads about After Nora left home on both platforms were wiped out with a 404 error.This is actually quite interesting: it makes sense that posts promoting or publicizing a “forbidden book” would be deleted, but shouldn’t criticizing a “forbidden book” be something the authorities would welcome? Since the 2020 pandemic, books on feminism, including imported Western feminist works, have, if not exactly thriving in splendid isolation, at least been among the hottest topics inside the increasingly tightly controlled Great Firewall in China. So why is it that this particular book cannot be published, cannot even be mentioned, and apparently cannot even be criticized? It seems that things today are quite different from the Cultural Revolution era. The old “confidence” that allowed the regime to mobilize the entire population to launch a massive “great criticism” campaign against “big poisonous weeds” has vanished without a trace. Nowadays, the best approach is for everyone to close their eyes, plug their ears, and pretend the book never existed.This realization only strengthened my conviction: this discussion is truly necessary—and that is why this revised and enlarged edition came into being.“After Nora left home” and “After the Revolution”The topic of “After Nora left home” after Lu Xun produced, up until 1949, one dominant answer in intellectual circles is: women’s liberation could only be truly achieved through a great social revolution. When that revolution was finally accomplished in 1949, people gradually discovered its increasingly unexpected consequences—just as this book points out, many of these consequences had already begun to appear in the revolutionary base areas controlled by the revolutionaries before 1949, though they had not yet been universalized across the whole country. This led to a new direction of reflection.There is no doubt that, in this process of reflection, “After Nora left home” and “After the Revolution” are in fact two sides of the same coin, mutually illuminating each other. However, it took people a certain process to come to this realization.In the early reform era of the 1980s, Gu Zhun’s previously unpublished writings from the Cultural Revolution period were rediscovered and became important texts of the “New Enlightenment.” One of these pieces bore the title “What Happens to Nora After She Left home?” and caused an immediate sensation at the time. What Gu Zhun was reflecting on was precisely the political system established after the revolution—especially the Soviet-style political despotism. However, he used “After Nora left home” only as a highly macroscopic metaphor for “after the revolution,” without engaging in any specific discussion of women’s issues.In 2011, the online female writer Na Yunqian published the novel After Nora left home on the internet. The story depicts a “new woman of the Republican Era who, in her pursuit of independence, encounters workplace discrimination, economic hardship, and social pressure.” In essence, it is a further literary elaboration on Lu Xun’s original topic, with some contemporary feminist terminology added. However, the novel does not engage at all with Gu Zhun’s reflections and completely avoids the issues faced by women after the revolution.It was not until 2013 that the modern Chinese history scholar Huang Wenzhi published his paper titled “‘What Happens to Nora After She Left Home?’: Women’s Liberation, Freedom of Marriage, and Class Revolution,” which for the first time explicitly connected Gu Zhun’s reflections to women’s issues. However, that article focused only on one localized case: the Soviet revolutionary base in the E-Yu-Wan (Hubei-Henan-Anhui) region.Around roughly the same time, two longer pieces circulated widely online: Shan Shilian’s essay “Under the Name of ‘Revolution’: The Marriages and Lives of Noras” and Yuan Ling’s “The ‘Nora’ with No Home to Return To.” Both discussed the negative impact of the Chinese “revolution” on women’s status. Yet these works remained essentially historical topics and were largely confined to the emotional, marital, and family spheres.Meanwhile, during China’s reform era, various women-related political and social hotspots periodically emerged in the public opinion sphere: from the 1980s “crackdown on female hooligans,” to the turn-of-the-century issue of “trafficking in women,” to reflections on the tragedies inflicted on women by the one-child policy. Particularly striking was the 2022 “chained woman” incident, which was not only extremely egregious in nature but also directly linked to two major policy issues—human trafficking and family planning—briefly drawing intense attention both domestically and internationally.However, under a speech environment that is alternately tight and loose, these discussions have rarely been able to deepen. They either remain stuck at the level of case-by-case commentary or get diverted to distant “tradition,” without ever being connected to the question of “After Nora left home?”The Dual Role of “Western Feminist Discourse”And this phenomenon seems not to be merely a limitation imposed by conditions inside China. From the May Fourth era of “Nora’s left” right up to the present day, for more than a century, the narrative and interpretive frameworks of Chinese feminism have continuously been guided by the West.The positive side of this situation is that the “universal values” of human liberation and individual emancipation—whether approached from a liberal or a socialist perspective—have indeed genuinely promoted the liberation of Chinese people’s thinking and the progress of the times. In this regard, I am a universalist and a humanist through and through; I am by no means an advocate of “Chinese exceptionalism,” much less a proponent of “Chinese cultural centrism opposed to Westernization.”The negative side, however, is what I have often warned about: the “misplacement of problems.” The shackles that once bound Western women were, in the past, vastly different from the fetters that bound Chinese women, and today they differ even more starkly from the “iron chains” that bind Chinese women. Even when women in both places require liberation, the “problems” they actually face can be completely different.Even within China itself, Xianglin Sao（祥林嫂） is not the same as the chained woman, let alone that both the Chinese “Xianglin Sao” and the “chained woman”（铁链女） are entirely unlike the Western “Nora.”When people say that Ibsen never answered Lu Xun’s question “What happens to Nora after she left home?,” it would be more accurate to say that there was no need for him to answer it: the Nora of late 19th-century Northern Europe simply did not have to confront the problems faced by Xianglin Sao, much less those faced by the chained woman.What Lu Xun really should have asked was “What happens to Xianglin Sao after she leaves?” And the historical answer is this: after “Xianglin Sao” flees the “old family,” she neither “returns home” nor “falls into depravity”; instead, in a completely unprotected state, she is captured by a rapist who enjoys the support (and protection) of totalitarianism—and thus becomes the “chained woman”!In other words, the real question is not “What happens to Nora after she left home?” but rather “What happens to Xianglin Sao before she even leaves?” — How can Xianglin Sao become a Nora who has the genuine freedom to choose whether to leave or to stay, instead of being seized and turned into a chained woman?Even if she herself is not captured, might she not become a Meng Jiangnü — a woman whose family is destroyed and home lost because her husband has been taken away, leaving her with nowhere to flee?Worse still, if even remaining at home is not enough to be considered “liberated,” might she herself not be conscripted and turned into the “old woman of Shíháo” who is hurriedly sent off to serve at Heyang?Questions of this kind are ones that Western feminism do not answer for us.It should be said that in recent decades, Western academia (including Chinese scholars working in the West and conducting research framed by Western problematics) has been extremely active in studying Chinese women’s issues and women’s history—whether from the perspective of “Sinology/Chinese studies,” modern and contemporary history, or “women’s/gender studies.” Their work has exerted considerable influence on the Chinese intellectual community. Their achievements are diverse and abundant, offering many valuable insights and revelations.Yet in my view, their limitations are also significant, and these can basically be summed up in two main aspects.On one hand, their narratives largely overlap with China’s official “mainstream feminist discourse.” Even when they are quite critical of other aspects of China, they tend to lavish praise on women’s liberation during the Chinese revolution. As for the numerous catastrophes afflicting women that have been exposed during the reform era, these are often attributed to the “restoration of capitalism” in China and the consequent “loss of revolutionary gains.” Fortunately, thanks to the “legacy of socialist state feminism in capitalist China,” things are not quite so bad. Any reservations they express about the revolution itself mainly center on the idea that, from a feminist standpoint, it was not pure enough: women’s liberation was merely subordinated to class struggle, and there was “no independent women’s revolution.”On the other hand, at a more macro-theoretical level, contemporary Western feminism is intensely focused on the harm inflicted on women by “patriarchy and capitalism” (a harm that undoubtedly exists), yet it remains almost completely insensitive to harm coming from what appears to be the opposite direction—that is, from extremely anti-patriarchal, non-capitalist forces.In fact, if viewed from the problem consciousness of “Western feminist discourse,” their perspectives are entirely understandable. A typical example is Professor Wang Zheng from the University of Michigan. According to her own account, she grew up smoothly in China from childhood and, even during the Cultural Revolution, did not feel that anything was particularly wrong. After arriving in the United States in 1985, she still believed that the status of women in China was higher than in America and could look down upon the United States from a position of superiority. However, after receiving an education in American feminist history, she suddenly adopted a self-deprecating stance in her discourse, feeling that the ideological narrative she had been accustomed to in China was no longer fashionable. She then academically embraced the theoretical paradigms and narrative style of the West, yet without altering her view that Chinese feminism was far ahead.In reality, her works essentially express the superiority of Chinese socialism using the language of Western feminism—and she has achieved considerable success in doing so. This is because mainstream American feminists, when looking at China through their own paradigms and problem consciousness, tend to reach roughly similar conclusions.I also believes that what she says is not without basis: if, during the Mao era in China, one sets aside the vast disparities between officials and ordinary people, urban and rural areas, workers and peasants, “red five categories” and “black five categories,” “born-reds” and “dog offspring,” and looks purely from a feminist perspective at only “men” versus “women,” the differences were indeed not great. Not to mention the slogan of “gender equality in labor,” even clothing was uniform and gender-indistinguishable—“a sea of blue.”However, if one looks at the female and male black slaves in the American South before the Civil War not from an abolitionist perspective but purely from a feminist one, weren’t the women and men there also very “equal”? Almost every female slave was a robust, strong “iron girl”—just as this book demonstrates: in terms of participation in labor, gender equality among black slaves was far higher than among whites!As for the shortcomings of “socialist feminism” from a Western feminist perspective, it seems primarily that it places too much emphasis on “class,” failing to highlight the contradiction between men and women, and thus subordinating “women’s liberation” to class struggle without giving rise to an “autonomous feminist revolution.” This is, of course, a fact. However, in democratic societies in Europe and America, this does not appear to have hindered socialist currents from advancing feminist progress. As this book points out: although democratic socialists in the West have not realized ideas such as public ownership of the means of production, the major advances in women’s rights in the modern and contemporary West—from women’s suffrage, freedom in marriage, love, childbirth, and abortion, to the elimination of gender-based occupational discrimination—have largely been driven by them, and they have achieved tremendous success.But in a totalitarian system, is it only “women’s liberation” that serves as a mere tool? Isn’t the liberation of workers and peasants exactly the same? Women’s demands must of course be subordinated to the leadership of the Party—but can the demands of classes be free from such subordination? The Party, which claims to lead everything, constantly chants the word “class” in its mouth, yet workers are not allowed to have real trade unions (the official, sham unions don’t count), peasants are not allowed to have peasant associations, and capitalists are not allowed to have chambers of commerce.Without class organizations, where is there any class bargaining or contestation?In a system where no class authorization is required—where I simply declare “I represent” whomever I claim to represent—whoever I say belongs to what class becomes that “class.” If you dare to refuse to be “represented,” then you are a “class enemy” and will be severely punished without mercy. This kind of “class representation” is no different from an emperor’s throne. How can this possibly be called “class struggle”? It is nothing but a struggle for imperial power waged under the banner of “class,” isn’t it?Class struggle is seen as a fight to the death.Yet historically, negotiations between trade unions and chambers of commerce almost always involved bargaining and compromise, with an extremely low probability of bloodshed (far lower, at least, than in identity politics). Only the kind of imperial power struggle that admits “there cannot be two suns in the sky” leads to rivers of blood and mountains of corpses—isn’t that so?So, in this kind of “revolution,” women’s issues can only occupy a subordinate or instrumental position—this is a plain and obvious truth, yet at the same time it is a completely meaningless statement. Women’s issues are subordinate—so are class issues not? The only thing that truly matters is the seizure and consolidation of imperial power; every other issue is merely a tool.Recently, Professor Wang Zheng mentioned this book and suggested that the author take a look at what the May Fourth feminists said in her own major works. I thank her for the suggestion and am very willing to read them carefully. At the same time, I would also suggest that she take a look at the large body of facts presented in this book concerning the immense suffering endured by Chinese women since the May Fourth era.Undoubtedly, objectively speaking, “what something is” matters far more than “what someone says.” In fact, coming from the same Chinese background as Professor Wang, I do not believe she is completely unaware of these facts; it is simply that the problem consciousness of “Western feminism” leads her to choose to avoid them.Although she repeatedly refers to me as an “elite male,” I do not think our disagreement stems from gender. There are plenty of men who agree with her views and plenty of women who agree with mine. Nor do I believe our differences are a matter of “left versus right.” Anyone who reads this book will see that I hold the contributions made by Western socialists to gender equality in their own societies in no lower esteem than she does.In fact, although not entirely, our differences do largely boil down to this: her English-language book is addressed to readers in “capitalist societies,” while my book is written for native readers confronting a very different set of “problems.”A clearer example appears in this book as well: the research on “Iron Girls” by Professor Jin Yihong. Jin herself, who personally participated in the Iron Girls movement, recounted a great many “negative” real-life stories: becoming an “Iron Girl” was not something they chose voluntarily, they did not receive the treatment they deserved, and they suffered considerable—sometimes lifelong—harm (of course, not to the tragic extent of the Iron Girl suicides mentioned in my book, which I believe are exceptional cases; what she describes is far more typical, just as, under traditional Confucian morality or even under slavery, the women who were literally forced to death were always a small minority). This picture stands in stark contrast to the “Iron Girls” portrayed in Wang Zheng’s writings. Yet, in a clearly contradictory manner, Jin Yihong still acknowledges—in the form of a “but” clause—that the Iron Girls movement was a major achievement for the advancement of women’s rights. This article was published during those few years when speech in China was at its most relaxed, so I do not believe she was constrained by domestic taboos. Then why write it this way?Look at the note beneath the title: “This article is part of the collaborative Sino-American project ‘Women’s Labor in 20th-Century China,’ led by Dr. Gail Hershatter (American scholar).” There it is！No matter what, women’s participation in labor is considered good—and the less restricted (the more exhausting?) the better. Isn’t this exactly the standard used by the United Nations Gender Equality Index? By that logic, the most “advanced” society in terms of gender equality would have been the American South during the era of slavery. Fortunately for American professors studying gender equality today, slavery disappeared more than 160 years ago, so they no longer need to consider this kind of “problem.”But can we afford not to consider it?!“Nationalism,” or Qin Dynasty 2.0?Undoubtedly, under the Chinese system, women’s behavior is frequently accompanied by high-intensity “state mobilization.” Professor Wang Zheng highly praises “socialist state feminism” and affirms that “state power vigorously promotes gender equality.” She believes that in China, “feminism entered mainstream society by riding on the vehicle of nationalism.” Indeed, women breaking free from patriarchal constraints to become full citizens of the modern nation-state is, in the universal sense, a core component of the realization of women’s rights. I believe this is the direction both China and the West should move toward.However, have Chinese women truly transformed from traditional subjects into full citizens of a modern state? If, after breaking free from patriarchy, they do not become modern citizens but are instead—like during the Northern Qi Emperor Wenxuan—rounded up along with “Meng Jiangnü” to repair the Great Wall, can that still be called “women’s liberation”? Readers can find the answer in the large body of facts presented in this book. Here is one more typical example to supplement:In China, the most famous artistic symbol of the feminist revolution is undoubtedly one of the “eight model revolutionary operas,” The Red Detachment of Women. This work, from one of China’s first color films to its ballet adaptation, is known to virtually everyone. Its theme song lyrics—“The soldier’s burden is heavy, women’s grievances run deep”—remain widely recited and beloved.The real-life prototype of The Red Detachment of Women was a women’s unit of the Qiongya Red Army during the Communist revolution. It is now known that, after years of mobilization, more than 2,300 women eventually joined the Communist forces on Hainan Island. Many of them indeed “resisted feudal oppression” and “resented their husbands’ mistreatment,” responding to the call and rushing to the battlefield. This should represent a classic Chinese-style “Nora’s leave.”But what became of these vanguard “women’s liberation” fighters after the revolution’s victory?It was not until 1986, on his deathbed, that a former leader of the Qiongya Column finally revealed the heartbreaking inside story that haunted him for life: After the CCP took control of Hainan, it quickly launched the “anti-localism” campaign in 1952. Because the Qiongya Column was not part of the CCP’s direct lineage, it was suspected of being “bandit-like.” The male soldiers were disarmed and turned into a “forestry division” sent deep into the mountains for forced labor. All 2,300 female soldiers were forcibly disbanded, “sent back to their hometowns with not a penny,” without even receiving a single discharge certificate.Many of them had already been away from home for years, “with nowhere to return.” Quite a few ended up wandering the streets as beggars. More than 40 committed suicide out of desperation, and over a dozen fell into prostitution.While Western feminist scholars enthusiastically celebrate the CCP’s tremendous success in rounding up and forcibly “reforming” all the prostitutes of the “old society,” have they ever considered this other scene: revolutionary women who themselves ended up falling into the same dust of the sex trade?Besides the factual evidence, theoretically speaking, this so-called “nationalist feminism” also involves a misplacement of problems. “Nationalism” (also known as 民族主义) in the West originated from the “construction of the nation-state,” and the “nation-state” as a modern concept is fundamentally different from the ancient forms of resistance against foreign enemies or imperial unification that have existed since antiquity. The essence of the nation-state should be a citizen-state. Even though, around the 17th century in the West when it took shape, it still went through a phase of “absolutist monarchy,” what distinguishes it from the “Qin system” lies precisely in what Marx said: it was a “(temporary) alliance between the citizens/bourgeoisie and royal power.” Its historical legitimacy consisted in, internally, eliminating seigneurial rights (in Europe, which lacked a Qin-style system, these were at that time the primary obstacle to the progress of human rights), and externally, excluding the supranational theocratic authority of the Roman Papacy (which at that time was the foremost target of European intellectual emancipation), thereby paving the way for the next step: “the citizens’ victory over royal power” (whose intellectual foundation in Europe was precisely the Lockean and Rousseauian notion that “royal power is bad, paternal power is good”).But what is truly thought-provoking is this: the realization of universal values does not follow a universal path. In modern China—which had long been a unified empire, with no internal feudal lordship and no external Roman medieval theocracy—the primary obstacle to the progress of human rights (including women’s rights) was precisely imperial power. At such a moment, reviving the Qin system was not an “alliance between citizens and royal power,” but rather the royal power’s elimination of citizens—even the complete eradication of patriarchal authority—leaving only the imperial power standing alone and eternal. Is this still the “nationalism” as understood in the Western problem consciousness?Whether riding this vehicle can lead to a rich and powerful country is debatable, but can it lead to human rights (including women’s rights as an important part of human rights)?Perhaps we need not delve into so much theory. Let us speak in the most straightforward, everyday language: if one escapes from parents only to throw oneself into the arms of the government (unlike the Western Nora, who seeks self-reliance), the best possible outcome is that one might manage to become an official oneself (which still has nothing to do with “women’s rights”). But if one cannot manage to do so—and the vast majority of people cannot—what can ordinary commoners realistically expect? Can they hope that the government will treat them better than their own parents did?This book may offer one reference point worth considering.The Inescapable “Misplacement of Problems”: A Critique of “Patriarchy in the Public Sphere”The misplacement of problems occurs not only across different social contexts but also across different historical periods. For example, in contemporary Western feminist narratives, the greatest enemy is “patriarchy.” Originally, people understood “patriarchy” to mean simply the rule of male heads of households or family patriarchs. Later, it was discovered that the meaning of “patriarchy” in contemporary Western feminist discourse is far broader: the power of fathers over family members is merely “domestic patriarchy” (or “patriarchy within the household”), while all forms of oppression in society—including imperial autocracy—are subsumed under “patriarchy in the public sphere.” It is said that today, feminist theories of all schools regard “patriarchy in the public sphere” as a fundamental concept.I am grateful to Professor Nie Lili, who kindly wrote the preface for my humble book, for raising this very question and critique toward me.And according to the British feminist thinker Angela Saini, the concept of “public patriarchy” can be traced back to Filmer. In fact, the claim that “patriarchy in the public sphere” produces despotism originally stems from a long-standing theory of “the unity of ruler and father” (君父一体), which has served as an apologetic discourse for autocratic imperial power in both China and the West.In China, there has long been the saying “transfer filial piety to loyalty” (移孝作忠). The same logic existed in the West. In 1680, the English royalist theorist Robert Filmer published his highly influential Patriarcha（The Natural Power of Kings), in which he argued that the state is like a family: the king is the father, and the subjects are the children. Subjects must obey the king in the same way that children obey their father.This doctrine was later subjected to severe criticism by Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Rousseau during the historical transitions in which constitutionalism replaced absolutism and popular rights overthrew royal power. As this book has mentioned, they firmly maintained that paternal authority and royal authority are fundamentally two different things: paternal authority is “in accordance with nature” and should be respected, whereas royal power is “the most unnatural” and should be overthrown.There is no doubt that this line of argument played a major role in the process by which England, France, and eventually Europe and America broke free from autocratic monarchy and moved toward constitutional democracy.But two hundred years after royal power had vanished into smoke, the ideas of Locke and Rousseau were set aside. As Angela Saini has pointed out, Filmer’s explanation of the structural identity between royal authority and paternal authority later regained powerful “attraction.” Many radical feminist theorists, such as Kate Millett and others, echoed Filmer in arguing that despotism is merely patriarchy extended from the family to society, and that patriarchy is “the origin of all inequality.”Of course, more than three hundred years later in the West, royal power has been thoroughly repudiated, and the function of “Filmer’s explanation” has been completely reversed: back then, the defenders of royal absolutism used the natural reasonableness of paternal authority to infer the reasonableness of royal authority. Today, however, no one in the West finds it necessary—or even conceivable—to defend royal power. Instead, the argument is turned upside down: they use the unreasonableness of royal power to hold paternal authority accountable for its own irrationality and illegitimacy.In this way, the ideas of Locke and Rousseau naturally fell out of fashion. And so the claim that royal power is precisely “patriarchy in the public sphere” has arrived with the times, perfectly in step with contemporary sensibilities.Indeed, after three hundred years of progress, our values today have already surpassed those of Rousseau; we no longer accept the notion that paternal authority is “in accordance with nature.” It is universally acknowledged—including by the author myself—that paternal authority (except for guardianship over minor children) should be cast off.Some so-called “Mainland New Confucians” advocate artificially “reviving” a paternal authority that no longer exists, and even propose using current state power to enforce such a revival. To be frank, this kind of proposal was never even realized in the ancient Qin system, let alone in modern totalitarianism, where the prevailing practice is for the ruler to betray, exploit, and eliminate even one’s closest kin and allies.However, surpassing certain values does not mean denying facts. In terms of factual judgment, can we really deny today what Locke and Rousseau argued back then—that paternal authority and royal power are fundamentally two different things?Even from the perspective of value judgment, although both paternal authority and royal power are now outdated and belong to the “communal shells” (in Marx’s words) that must be broken through in the course of expanding human rights, this does not mean the two are the same thing.Just as in the process of Western modernization, seigneurial rights, royal power, and ecclesiastical authority were successively broken through—and they were not one and the same. Moreover, throughout history and across all civilizations, no people has ever managed to smash through all of these simultaneously and leap once and for all into “modernity.”This gives rise to a question of sequencing and strategic path: the order in which these “shells” should be broken, and even whether, when breaking through A, one might temporarily draw upon B as an ally or auxiliary force.For those who already live in a “modern” society, conflating all these elements may do no harm. But for people who are still under pre-modern pressures, if they adopt this fashionable misplacement of concepts, it could exert a very adverse influence on their choice of path forward.Therefore, the fact that Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Rousseau, living under absolutist monarchy, refuted Filmer and insisted on strictly distinguishing royal power from paternal authority cannot simply be dismissed as outdated or backward.In fact, more than a century after Locke and Rousseau, Marx—although he no longer sympathized with paternal authority as they did and held a strongly critical attitude toward the “idyllic small community” with its tender affections—still, on the factual level, maintained a clear distinction between “naturally formed” communities (i.e., patriarchal families) and “political” communities (despotic states). In truth, pointing out the difference between paternal authority and royal power is not difficult at all. To begin with, regardless of whether in China or the West, the historical timelines of patriarchal family systems and monarchical power have never been synchronous. Even today, when individual families still exist, parents have the duty (and grace) of raising and nurturing their children, while children bear the reciprocal responsibility of supporting and caring for their parents in old age—even if this is viewed not as a moral virtue but as a kind of implicit contract. Even radical feminist thinkers such as Ueno Chizuko appear to acknowledge this point.By contrast, monarchs are the exact opposite: they do not “raise and nurture” their subjects in any way; rather, they are entirely supported and fed by the taxes and labor of those very subjects.Moreover, family relationships are grounded in natural affection and kinship bonds, whereas ordinary commoners have never even met the emperor in person, and their relationship with the emperor’s agents and claws is one of inherent antagonism. Although those agents—like Filmer—proclaim themselves “ruler-fathers” or “parent-officials,” the ancient folk saying captures the reality perfectly: “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away; there are few people but many petty officials; beaten three times a day—what choice but to rebel?” This old rhyme precisely highlights the difference between the emperor (and his henchmen) and one’s own parents. Even the ancients understood that “even a tiger does not devour its own cubs,” and that “between minister and ruler there is no bond of flesh and blood.” Yet somehow people today equate the government with one’s own parents?Even if, in terms of function, both royal power and paternal authority serve to constrain freedom and suppress individuality—and historically, royal power has of course supported paternal authority in this regard, both in China and the West—there is nonetheless another side to the story.Just as medieval royal power and ecclesiastical power were distinct and often in tension, so too the contradiction and conflict between royal power and paternal authority (or, in my terminology, between the big community and the small community) runs as a continuous thread through history.From the ancient Confucian dictum “For the sake of the father, one may break with the ruler, but not for the sake of the ruler break with the father,” to the Legalist（Fa Jia） sayings “A filial son to his father is a disloyal subject to his ruler” and “Ruler and father cannot both be exalted; exalting the ruler means not exalting the father,” all the way to the late Qing imperialists’ complaint “Too many filial sons, too few loyal ministers,” and even to the Cultural Revolution slogan “Father is dear, mother is dear, but Chairman Mao is dearer still”— aren’t all of these perfectly clear demonstrations of the point?The cooperation and conflict between royal power and ecclesiastical power in the West’s past are indeed striking, but they never experienced the Qin system. Their medieval tradition was captured in the saying “The master of my master is not my master,” so they were never particularly concerned about the conflict between the “big community” and the “small community.” And in the modern era, having long since abolished royal power, they naturally care even less about it.But when we in China follow their indifference and act as if it doesn’t matter, isn’t that a typical case of problem misplacement? Even in the West, during the relatively short period of “absolutist” monarchical despotism that followed the Middle Ages but preceded modernity, thinkers like Locke and Rousseau emphatically insisted that royal power was far worse than paternal authority. Had they instead been loyal to the monarch while turning against fathers, betraying kin, and eliminating family ties, could the West ever have achieved modernization? By the modern era, Westerners no longer had a king to rebel against, so they revived Filmer’s explanation—but inverted its meaning and wielded it in reverse: they seized upon paternal authority and made it the root of all evil, claiming that royal despotism had merely learned its bad habits from patriarchy. The more radical among them even expanded “patriarchy” into “male power” (or “androcracy”), declaring that the world had been ruined by men. In their context, this counts as a progressive innovation, keeping pace with the times, a form of “permanent revolution” with its own historical logic. What the long-term results will be remains to be seen.Yet we in China—with more than two thousand years of experience from the Qin system to totalitarianism—seem to understand less than our own ancients. When we take Filmer’s explanation and use it to negate Locke and Rousseau, we are not inverting its meaning and applying it anew; we are truly acting like Filmer himself, at least objectively serving a pro-monarchical (or pro-despotic) function.And when, while refusing to discuss imperial or totalitarian power and focusing solely on “patriarchy in the public sphere,” we simultaneously emphasize “state-led liberation of women,” we end up being even more extreme than Filmer in the “loyal to the ruler, rebel against the father” direction. No wonder “Nora” ends up being “liberated” into an “iron-chained woman.”Rights and Obligations Cannot Be InvertedThe core of the problem misplacement lies precisely in the “inversion of rights and obligations.” Western social critics often conflate the “rights” they have fought for in their own societies with the “obligations” that are imposed here, leading to astonishing misunderstandings. In reality, things that appear similar can have completely opposite meanings depending on whether they are framed as rights or as obligations.Take the praise of “labor,” for example. From the perspective of rights, the slogan “Labor is sacred” (or “the dignity of labor”) means workers reject coercion in order to defend their freedom and dignity. It implies that laborers can bargain collectively, fight for their interests, and pursue shorter working hours and higher wages that benefit them.But from the perspective of obligations, the slogan “Labor is glorious” means workers are not allowed to bargain or negotiate. They must embody the spirit of “fear neither hardship nor death,” “produce first, live later,” “work while alive, and let death settle the score,” or “keep pushing the cart as long as it doesn’t fall over.” Isn’t this exactly what the infamous slogan displayed prominently above the gates of all German concentration camps—including Auschwitz—meant: “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free” / “Labor makes one free”)?Contemporary Western radical feminist thought has gone even further in treating “labor” as a right rather than an obligation—extending this principle into the realm of “domestic labor/housework.” This is undoubtedly a major innovation.One of Ueno Chizuko’s views that has had enormous influence in China is her extreme emphasis on women’s rights regarding housework. She fiercely criticizes the modern family (the “capitalist” family of free love and marriage, i.e., the kind of Nora-style family described by Ibsen) as a “community of love,” and rejects the “myth” that women voluntarily perform housework out of love. She insists that women doing housework is absolutely not a matter of “labor being glorious,” but rather a form of exploitation and oppression. She calls loudly for women to rise up and resist.Although she does not offer any feasible solutions (she explicitly states that the much-discussed idea in places like Britain of “wages for housework” is “unrealistic”), once one understands the reality that contemporary Japanese women’s heavy domestic burdens seriously hinder their career development, one cannot help but be moved by her persistent and unwavering commitment to labor rights advocacy in this sphere.However, what is strange is that as soon as the discussion turns to those countries that openly prohibit workers from defending their rights and instead advocate a “labor obligation system,” certain “Western radical feminist” theorists immediately abandon their stance on labor as a right and instead enthusiastically praise the compulsory “labor that liberates people”—even though, compared to the “hypocritical myth” of women voluntarily doing housework out of love in free-marriage families, the compulsion in labor under those systems is far more naked and blatant ——a fact that their own research has proven. A school of thought represented by the American professor Gail Hershatter and some of her students (most of whom are Chinese) has given highly positive evaluations to women’s labor in pre-reform China—from the forced “re-education through labor” of “female loafers who refused to work” during the revolutionary years, to the female commune members disciplined under the constraints of collectivization, to the “Iron Girls” forcibly mobilized during the Cultural Revolution. This book introduces many of these cases in detail.These scholars do not believe that women would voluntarily do housework “for love,” yet they seem to believe that women’s superhuman endurance of backbreaking labor “for the liberation of all humanity” is somehow romantically beautiful—despite the fact that they do not shy away from acknowledging the compulsory nature of the system at the time. Especially when it comes to the so-called “sex industry”: regarding coerced, personally dependent forms of “prostitution”—such as the traditional practice of selling oneself into brothels or the physical control exercised by madams over prostitutes—modern civilization undoubtedly must prohibit them. Neither feminists nor ordinary humanitarians would disagree on this point. But when it comes to autonomous, self-employed “sex workers,” there is considerable controversy within contemporary feminism. Some advocate legalizing sex work and supporting “sex workers’ rights”; others view it as “the objectification of women under capitalism” and believe it should be opposed. Yet even among those who hold the latter view, very few in societies that respect human rights would advocate rounding them up en masse and subjecting them to forced “labor re-education.” However, Professor Hershatter expresses considerable appreciation for precisely this practice in 1950s China. Indeed, such methods can produce immediate, visible results on the surface of society: eliminating prostitution in one sweep, just as 17th-century England’s arrest of “vagrants” (which Marx denounced as “bloody legislation,” while Mao Zedong greatly praised as “enslaving the poor and idle to eliminate waste”) effectively eliminated vagabonds, or as the sweeping clearance of “low-end populations” can instantly eliminate “slums.” But can such measures last? Her own book also mentions the massive resurgence of the prostitution industry after reform and opening up, which is presumably what leads her to question “what remains today of the revolutionary achievements.” Yet the truly most terrifying form of sexual enslavement is not “sex work” at all, nor is it merely a matter of resurgence. It is precisely hidden within those very “revolutionary achievements.” Does what I am saying make sense? Please read this book.It is truly lamentable how difficult it is for people to grasp such a basic common-sense distinction: that the exact same act can have completely opposite meanings depending on whether it is framed as a right or as an obligation.Women over there fight for (or defend) the right to abortion, yet some people here enthusiastically praise the “obligation to abort” imposed on women here.Women over there struggle for the right to work in any industry without restrictions, yet some people here express admiration for women here being subjected to unlimited forced labor.The “Nora” over there, after many twists and turns, exercises her right to walk out, yet some people here get excited about the fact that women here were once summarily driven out of their homes and away from the kitchen stove.Women over there spent a long time fighting for equal voting rights with men, yet some people here marvel at how women here have long been required to clap and shout “Long live!” alongside men (and in even earlier times, they were also required to “equally” kowtow to the Emperor).In fact, this kind of inversion is far from limited to women’s issues.Take May Day (“Labor Day”), for example. Over there, it is a commemorative day for workers to defend their rights—a holiday meant to fight for shorter working hours and higher pay. Here, it has been turned into a propaganda day promoting the labor obligation system—a holiday used to mobilize “labor emulation campaigns” and “production contests.” Or consider slums and poverty. Over there, criticism of “slums” is made on the baseline that the poor already possess an inalienable right to housing; the demand is that the poor should have the right to live better in the city. Here, it has been transformed into the expulsion of “low-end populations” and the principle that “the poor shall not have slums”—and then a bunch of clueless Westerners see this landscape of “no slums allowed for the poor” and enthusiastically praise it as a paradise of common prosperity with no poverty at all.Escaping Obligation Is the Prerequisite for Striving for RightsAfter the democratization of Eastern Europe and the abolition of the “labor obligation system,” “some women chose not to work because they now had the option not to work.” According to a survey by the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, after 1989, the average female labor force participation rate in 13 Eastern European countries declined by 20–25%, while during the same period, female labor participation rates in Western European countries continued to rise.Some Western feminist theorists have taken this as evidence that women’s status was higher under the totalitarian regimes before democratization. They seem completely unable to understand that the relationship between women’s status and labor participation rates is very likely the opposite under a “labor obligation system” compared to a system of labor as a right.As this book points out: before the American Civil War, the proportion of Black women (enslaved women) in the South who participated in labor was completely equal to that of Black men—and far higher than that of white women. Does this mean that enslaved Black women enjoyed a higher degree of “women’s rights” than free white women? After the abolition of slavery, the labor participation rate of Black women fell noticeably. Does this mean they should long for the “gender equality” that existed under slavery?Some Western radical feminists are quite enthusiastic about being anti-American, and they display a perfectly accurate sensitivity when it comes to the “misplacement of problems” among Americans. For example, regarding the U.S. justification for launching the war in Afghanistan on the grounds of the Taliban’s persecution of women (note: in fact, the initial U.S. rationale for the war was “counterterrorism”), they sharply criticized: “If Western feminists truly understood what these women needed, would they still defend the American war in Afghanistan in the name of gender equality and women’s liberation? They assume that what Afghan women most want to escape is patriarchy, but in reality, what the women of that country truly want to escape now is war.”Well said indeed!But what is interesting is this: the moment the discussion moves outside the United States, their own problem misplacement becomes even more exaggerated—to the point of blatantly contradicting basic facts and logic.For example, regarding China’s coercive family planning policy, besides the common optimistic cheer that “Chinese women can have abortions,” there is an even more bizarre form of praise: “As birth rates decline, daughters receive more care from their families, and families invest more heavily in their education. China is a clear example. After China began implementing the one-child policy in 1979, the number of women of marriageable age steadily decreased,” and therefore women’s status has risen higher and higher! This is truly speechless.Actually, anyone with a modicum of common sense should realize that a simple decline in the birth rate—even if caused by general coercive measures—will not alter the sex ratio by itself. Even a policy that appears to favor one sex, such as “allowing a second child if the first is a daughter,” will not affect the sex ratio as long as no violent intervention is imposed on the “second birth.”Therefore, the statement that “women of marriageable age (relative to men) have become increasingly scarce” can only mean one thing: the long-term enforcement of the one-child policy has already triggered far more severe secondary disasters. Namely, the widespread practice of female infanticide and sex-selective abortion of female fetuses has resulted in a severely distorted sex ratio.Is this also considered an improvement in women’s status?Not to mention that it was precisely during those years that the scarcity of women of marriageable age led, in many places, to rampant trafficking in women. Even the vice chairman of China’s official Writers Association openly stated: “Without trafficking women, how can we solve the problem of ‘bachelor villages’?”Let alone the fact that—even in cases of a simple decline in birth rates that carries no sex bias and does not cause sex-ratio distortion—if that decline is caused by coercion, it itself means the widespread and horrifying catastrophe of violent forced abortions inflicted on women. And yet these three concurrent disasters—sex-ratio imbalance caused by female infanticide and sex-selective abortion, massive trafficking of women to fill the marriage market gap, and the pervasive violence of coercive abortion—are, in the eyes of some people, “misplaced” and turned into a blessing for Chinese women, simply because Western feminism is still fighting over the right to abortion!Escaping “Problem Colonialism”In the eleven months since the first edition of this book was published, while it has sparked discussion, the similar crimes mentioned in the book have continued to occur—and in some cases, have even intensified.Just a few days ago, the case of “the Shanxi female master’s degree holder abducted for 13 years, with the abductor found not guilty” once again ignited widespread public outrage and heated debate:A woman surnamed Bu, who holds a master’s degree in engineering, “went missing” in 2011 due to mental illness. She was “picked up” by someone, and after being “introduced” several times, was “taken in” (these are the exact terms used by official explanations of the case) by a lame, one-eyed blind bachelor named Zhang in a remote mountain village in Heshun County. Without ever obtaining a marriage certificate, she gave birth to one son and one daughter over the next 13 years—reportedly one of the children was even sold.During this period, Zhang not only raped her himself repeatedly but also allowed other men in the village to rape the female master’s degree holder seven times—sometimes right in front of him—yet never reported it to the police. As a result, she developed extreme aversion to men and became unable to recognize people. Thirteen years later, when her family finally rescued her and brought her home, her elderly father tried to embrace her and weep together in reunion—only to be violently pushed away by his daughter, whose mental illness had been severely exacerbated by years of abuse. She screamed at him, cursing him as an “old lecher”!Thus, after more than a year of trial proceedings, the judicial authorities in Heshun County reached their conclusion on January 22, 2026: “Zhang Moujun engaged in sexual relations with Bu Moumou and had children with her, with the subjective intention of establishing a family and living together with her.” Therefore, they decided not to prosecute.The media summed up the fundamental logic of this “Non-Prosecution Decision” as: “Rape committed with the subjective intent of forming a family is not a crime.”Is this not even more absurd and unthinkable than the verdict four years ago in the chained woman case, where Dong was convicted only of “domestic abuse”?!If, in today’s “postmodern feminist perspective,” the problems facing Chinese women are still limited to things like workplace sexual harassment, unpaid housework, and the like, then when will atrocities of this kind ever come to an end?!In fact, the “misplacement of problems” does not occur only between different countries. Feminism, and human rights issues more broadly, do not encompass the entirety of social life.There is no doubt that in recent decades, China has taken on a very large share of the global industrial chain through globalization, achieving tremendous economic development. Despite all kinds of injustices, people—including the disadvantaged poor and women—have seen clear and substantial improvements in their material living standards.However, just as Yang Guifei （d. 756 the renowned imperial consort of Tang Emperor Xuanzong) enjoyed luxuries and delicacies that the common people could scarcely imagine, yet this did not mean she possessed human rights (including so-called “rights to subsistence”) or women’s rights, so too today’s human rights and women’s rights problems in China will not be eliminated merely by economic development. That said, some urban white-collar women at the forefront of this economic tide now live in environments comparable to those of women in developed countries. It is therefore entirely natural for them to resonate with “postmodern feminism,” and this resonance is not necessarily a case of problem misplacement. But we must not forget that China’s recent past was not like this, and the main body of society today is still not entirely like this either. To treat “postmodern feminist” issues as the entirety of today’s Chinese women’s issues—or even as the entirety of China’s problems—and worse still, to use a postmodern feminist lens to explain China’s past, would constitute a serious misplacement of problems. That is why I believe China should have its own #MeToo (“米兔”), but even more importantly, it should have its own #TianToo (“天兔”). Not only must we fight for this ourselves; in this era of globalization—especially as China’s influence on globalization grows ever greater—“them too” should hear our voices.This is precisely the motivation behind my writing this book, and behind the decision, after the first edition, to now substantially revise and enlarge it for republication.I do not believe in “cultural determinism,” nor do I think that the yearning for freedom is merely a “Western cultural” trait while Chinese culture inherently yearns for imprisonment. Of course, I also absolutely do not believe that only Nora pursues women’s rights, while Xianglin Sao or the chained woman willingly adheres to “ritual propriety” and feudal morality.But why is it that some nations have been relatively successful in striving for freedom, while others seem trapped in endless cycles of the six realms, perpetually unable to escape the “strange loop”? Especially when one nation (A) deliberately sets out to learn from another nation (B), yet repeatedly ends up “trying to draw a tiger but producing something more like a dog”? In my view, this is probably not a matter of “cultural genes”—that is, some inherent superiority or inferiority embedded in the entire nation’s character (every nation, after all, contains both outstanding individuals and stubborn or vicious ones; that is another question altogether). Rather, it is fundamentally a question of path dependence and path choice (of course, combined with issues such as windows of historical opportunity, and so on). And many of the path choices that lead to diametrically opposite outcomes—going south while aiming north—are closely related to the misplacement of problems.Today, terms like “Western cultural hegemony” and “postcolonial context” have become hot buzzwords. If these concepts still carry any real meaning, it is certainly not in the way some people (Said, Homi Bhabha, Kojin Karatani, and others) have framed it—that is, as the West having force-fed us an excess of so-called “Western values” such as freedom, democracy, human rights, women’s rights, and so on.Rather, the opposite is true: precisely because they themselves harbor such deep aversion to what they call “Western values,” they have inundated us with far too many “Western problems.” Their “social critique” may indeed be profound in their own context, but it never addresses—and in fact severely obscures—the genuine problems we actually face (many of which they themselves once confronted, but which their own forebears resolved through immense effort, only for later generations to forget their ancestors’ hard-won achievements).More than twenty years ago, I coined the term “problem colonialism” to describe this pathology. Later I felt that “colonialism” was too strong—after all, no one forced it upon us; we ourselves were the ones who failed to digest what we imported from abroad—so I changed it to “misplacement of problems.” But looking at the situation now, those who keep misplacing problems are indeed inveterate name-droppers, forever “speaking of Greece” in every breath. So perhaps “problem colonialism” is not entirely off the mark after all. I am a liberal, and I do not reject socialism (I only oppose the “Qin system wrapped in socialist packaging”). But my principle is this: “isms” can be imported; problems must be home-grown. This applies equally to the question of women’s rights.After the publication of the first edition of this book, it received attention from many friends, including a considerable number of valuable criticisms. Two female scholars, Professor Zhou Xiao and Professor Nie Lili, kindly contributed prefaces, which is especially commendable because their prefaces include substantial points of discussion and disagreement. I have always believed that purely perfunctory prefaces, postscripts, or reviews may help with commercial promotion, but they hold little academic significance. When I write prefaces for others, I prefer to use the occasion to raise issues and stimulate debate. So when Professor Nie asked whether she could include differing views, I replied that this was exactly what I had hoped for! I would like to express my special thanks here. Of course, the publication of this book would not have been possible without the multifaceted assistance of friends such as Mr. Tsuchiya Masaki, Mr. Nakamura Tatsuo, Mr. Steven, Mr. Jin Bin, Ms. Oyun, and others in translation, republication, and other aspects. I extend my gratitude to them all at once.BRB Note：A lecture event for Qin Hui’s new book After Nora Left Home: A Century of Reflection on Chinese Feminism was held on February 10, 2025, at the Komaba Campus of the University of Tokyo. The discussant was the cultural anthropologist and Professor Emerita of Tokyo Women’s University, Nie Lili. The present text is the transcribed and edited version of Professor Nie Lili’s commentary from that day.Prepared by Professor Nie Lili and authorized for publication in Boston Review of Books（BRB）Nie Lili 聶莉莉 | 读《娜拉出走之后：中国女权的世纪反思》 —— 感想与商榷 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit inbetweenreview.substack.com/subscribe