Louise Edwards has published extensively in the intersecting fields of Chinese gender, culture and society spanning the period from the late Qing to the present and brings this wealth of expertise to this current book. Taking a roughly chronological approach, Edwards focuses on nine women who constitute a comprehensive representation of the different categories of women warriors and wartime spies in the Chinese cultural context and uses them to investigate the connections between gender and war, women and the militarization of society in modern China. Six of the women are real historical figures, primarily from the 20th century, while three are culturally important fictional characters.
Every chapter is meticulously researched using primary and secondary historical sources as well as drawing on contemporary scholarship in Chinese and English, thus bringing much historical material to English language readers for the first time. Each chapter begins with a historical study to establish the factual details of the women's lives, or in the case of the fictional characters, to establish the historical context of their creation and development. This is then followed by an analysis of the way in which these women have been represented in cultural mediums such as film, theatre, literary criticism, museums and textbooks, and how this has shifted over the decades as China's political and social values have changed. In many of the cases examined, Edwards shows that the “reality” of the women's lives came to be entirely eclipsed by the narratives subsequently constructed around them.
From a theoretical perspective, the book is soundly based on the work of major contemporary theorists in the field of gender and war studies. Drawing on scholars including Joshua Goldstein, Cynthia Enloe and Nicole Dombrowski, Edwards argues that Chinese society (like most Western societies) is deeply militarized, and that militarization is normalized across society by the manipulation of gendered images: war fighting is coded masculine and carried out by men, while feminine codes dominate the representation of war victims and the domestic space of home and family that the act of war nominally protects. War roles and gender roles are mutually reinforcing, and this mutuality is relied upon for the efficacy of war stories in cultural media. The woman warrior or spy, however, disrupts this war/gender binary, and hence the management of her image in cultural mediums bears particular significance.
The case studies in chapters two to ten demonstrate convincingly Edwards's argument that the images of China's women warriors and spies, who were unconventional agents of war and violence in their day, have been continuously manipulated to bring them back within normative gender paradigms as well as reshaped to support change in China's political and social environment. In the case of Qiu Jin (1875–1907), for example, Edwards's research shows that in the representation of Qiu as a national heroine, her radical feminist, anti-Patriarchal stance has been progressively diminished and distorted to deny its primacy in her political agenda, while a recent film celebrating her life portrays her as a devoted mother with a happy nuclear family. Similarly, her anti-Manchu stance and promotion of “terrorist” tactics to achieve political change were ignored during both the Republican and Communist eras as governments sought to promote multiethnic unity and stabilize their regimes. Qiu Jin, the feminist who rebelled against the patriarchy, abandoned her children and fought for the violent overthrow of the government of the day, has thus been morphed into a good Confucian mother and loyal supporter of the state.
Edwards's apposite choice of subjects is fundamental to the strength of the research in two ways. First, the variety of subjects (ranging from the legendary warrior Hua Mulan to Qiu Jin, Republican soldier Xie Bingying, Nationalist honey-trap spy Zheng Pingru, Japanese spy and Manchukuo puppet princess Aixin Gioro Xianyu, and various communist heroines) allows her to explore the commonalities and differences in the ways in which representations of the women were brought back into the fold of virtuous Confucian womanhood, often by adding attributes of the classic “good wife and mother”, or by positioning the women as victims in order to explain their “bad” behaviour. Second, the chronological arrangement of case studies allows a metanarrative to emerge of the changing nature of the woman warrior herself in modern Chinese culture, from the late Qing lone lady knight errant, to independent professional soldier of the Republican era to the servant of the Party in the Communist era. By identifying and explaining these two trends, the book makes an important contribution to scholarship in multiple fields of Chinese studies including historical biography, gender studies and cultural studies.
The book is written with great clarity and is to be commended for clear argumentation and jargon-free language, though, unexpectedly, it does contain quite a large number of typographical errors. Inevitably, there are a few minor points on which I would disagree with Edwards, but these do not relate to her major arguments and findings which are entirely sound and convincing. Because the book is written in such an accessible style, it would be suitable for tertiary students at all levels as well as specialists in the fields of Chinese or cross-cultural history, gender studies and cultural studies.
