Qiu Jin

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Qiū Jǐn

Qiū Jǐn ( Chinese  秋瑾 ; born November 8, 1875 in Xiamen , Minhou District , Fujian Province ; † July 15, 1907 in Shaoxing , Zhejiang Province ) was an icon of the Chinese Revolution at the end of the Qing period , a poet and early feminist . She was executed after a failed uprising . She is considered a martyr by many and is known as the "Chinese Joan of Arc ".

Life

  • Childhood name: Yùgū ( 玉 姑 )
  • Honorary names: Xuánqīng ( 璿 卿 ) and Jìngxióng ( 競 雄 )
  • Nickname: Jiànhú Nǚxiá ( 鑑湖 女俠 )

Adolescent years

Qiu Guijin was born in the southern port city of Xiamen on November 8, 1875, into a respected but declining aristocratic family (some researchers assume 1877). She was the youngest child and only daughter of a family of civil servants from Shaoxing ( Zhejiang ). When her grandfather Qiū Jiā Hé got a high official ( 長官 ) post in Xiamen, the entire family moved. Since Xiamen was a British contract port at the time , her grandfather had constant dealings with the British and was subjected to their humiliation. His bitterness spread to the young Qiu Jin. Her father, Qiu Shounan, was a government official. Her mother, surnamed Shan, also came from a respected literary family close to the government. Qiu grew up with her older brother and younger sister in Xiamen and her family in Shaoxing, eastern Zhejiang Province. According to all reports, she had a sheltered childhood.

At the time of her childhood, China was shaped by a deeply rooted patriarchal society that set a woman's place on the house. She was forced to tie her feet, learn sewing, and worst of all in Qiu's eyes, submit to an arranged marriage. Her mother Dāntài ( 單 太 ), a wealthy and educated woman, taught her to read and write. As a girl, she wrote poetry and studied Chinese fighting heroines like Hua Mulan , dreaming of one day finding her own name in the history books. At the age of eleven she got to know the classical poets and was particularly fascinated by Du Fu . She also trained horse riding, sword fighting, high and long jump in her mother's home. She liked to be shown in photos with a Japanese sword . She was deeply grateful to her mother all her life and after her death at the age of 62 had a painter make a picture of her.

Marriage and move to Beijing

At the age of 21 she was married to Wang Tíngjūn. He was chosen for her by Qiu's father and was the son of a wealthy merchant from Hunan Province . In 1903, seven years after the wedding, the young couple and their two children moved from Hunan to Beijing. Her husband turned out to be an alcoholic .

For Qiu, life in the imperial capital was decidedly less boring. She made friends with like-minded women and became interested in China's political affairs. She refrained from tying her feet, drank copious amounts of wine and experimented with gender-inconsistent clothing and sword fighting.

Unperturbed, Qiu rose to be an early and fierce advocate of the liberation of Chinese women by defying prevailing Confucian gender and class norms, defying the tying and dressing conventions for women, and leaving her young family to study abroad to strive for.

The following excerpt from a poem Qius from 1903 documents her perception of the overwhelming gender roles in China at the time: 

Mein Körper erlaubt mir nicht,
Mich unter die Männer zu mischen,
Aber mein Herz ist viel mutiger
Als das eines Mannes.

At the time the poem was written, China was a distressed empire; the Qing government was on its last legs, suffering from the weight of internal bureaucratic decline and external pressures from foreign powers. But the frustration of their marriage came at a heavy price to their psyche. Her husband, she felt, was uncultivated and had no interest in poetry or education. With the uncertainty of the time, opportunities came for educated Chinese women like Qiu. As a result, Qiu soon found himself at the forefront of a new wave of feminists who believed that women's rights and political revolution naturally went hand in hand.

Departure to Japan

In the summer of 1904, Qiu, then 28, made a brave decision: she left her husband and two children, sold her jewelry, and sailed to Japan. (For this reason researchers sometimes call her “China's Nora”, after the character in Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House from 1879). She summed up her life in a 1904 poem entitled Regret: Lines Written on the Road to Japan : 

Sonne und Mond haben kein Licht mehr, die Erde ist dunkel,
Unserer Frauen Welt ist so tief gesunken, wer kann uns helfen?
Den Schmuck verkauft, um diese Reise über die Meere zu bezahlen,
Abgeschnitten von meiner Familie verlasse ich mein Heimatland.
Indem ich meine Füße losbinde, reinige ich mich von tausend Jahren Gift
Mit heißem Herz erwachen aller Frauen Geister.
Ach, dieses zarte Tuch hier
Ist halb mit Blut befleckt und halb mit Tränen.

At the Kōbun-Gakuin ( 弘文 学院 ) she was accepted into an intensive course for teachers. She improved her language skills in the Japanese courses offered by the Association of Chinese Exchange Students ( 中国 留学生 会館 ) and took part in the weekly student meetings in her home region of Zhejiang. At the practical women's school Aoyama ( aoyama jissen jogakkō 青山 実 践 女 学校 ) she studied education, handicrafts and nursing. She devoted herself to studying until late at night. In the martial arts club of Kōjimachi - Kagurazaka she learned the production of explosives and improved her accuracy.

Shortly after arriving in Japan, she joined the Kōmontenchikai ( 洪門 天地 会 , also sangōkai 三合会 ), a secret society in Yokohama , and rose to the rank of "white fan". She was also active in the Guangfuhui ( 光復 會 "Revive the Light Society") founded in September 1904 and the Tongmenghui founded by Sun Yat-sen in September 1905 . In Tongmenghui, the students from Zhejiang developed a strong sense of belonging. Qiu Jin also helped found an all-female organization, the Gongaihui ( 共 愛 會 ).

Return to China and death

Statue of Qiu Jin in Shaoxing

In February 1905 she returned to China. Her goal was to have her cousin Xu Xilin , who like herself grew up in Shaoxing, join the Tongmenghui. Before she went home, she asked Táo Chéngzhāng ( 陶成章 ), a member of the Guangfuhui, to write her a letter of recommendation for acceptance. She presented this to Cai Yuanpei , the leader of the movement in Shanghai , who also gave his approval.

In the spring of 1905 she traveled to Japan again to take care of the membership recruitment in the association of Chinese exchange students and to protest against the Japanese regulations for exchange students ( ryūgakusei torishimarikizoku留学生 取締 規則). In Tokyo, she attended a women's school founded by Shimoda Utako and shortened her name to Qiu Jin. However, the main focus of her activities took place outside the classroom, as she made contact with other reform-minded Chinese students who, like her, strived to promote the revolution at home. She joined influential anti-Manchu secret societies, including the Restoration Society and the Sun Yat-sen Revolutionary Alliance .

She returned to China in 1906 with militant determination to advance the women's cause and overthrow the Qing government.

She founded the short-lived "Chinese Women's Magazine," which, unlike most feminist magazines, used the vernacular to appeal to a wider audience on topics such as the cruelty of footbinding and arranged marriages. She also learned how to make bombs.

In 1907 she became the director of the Shaoxing Datong School for Physical Education Teachers. Contrary to the name, the actual purpose of the school was to train military cadres for the revolution, which other teachers at the school, such as Wang Jinfa and Zhuo Zhuoxian, had also dedicated themselves to. The plan was to start a revolution in Zhejiang and Anhui in order to then unite the troops and take Nanjing .

Xu Xilin, her friend and founder of the school, was executed for murdering his Manchu supervisor: On July 6, 1907, he carried out a successful attack on En Ming , the governor of Anhui Province , in Anqing . However, the planned insurrection was betrayed and suppressed, and Xu Xilin was arrested, interrogated and executed. After Xu's death, friends warned Qiu that Qing troops were coming to Shaoxing to find the woman they believed was his co-conspirator; however, she refused to flee. On July 12th, Qiu Jin was also arrested. Since there was incriminating evidence against her, she was sentenced and beheaded three days later . In one scene that has since been honored and embellished in a variety of ways, Qiu attempted to strike back but was quickly captured, tortured, and beheaded.

Her grave is next to West Lake in Hangzhou , and a museum was built in Shaoxing in the People's Republic of China . More than a century after her death, many Chinese still visit her grave on West Lake in Hangzhou to pay homage to the woman, who is firmly embedded in national consciousness, as a bold feminist heroine. Some can also recite the famous words she wrote shortly before her death: “Autumn wind, autumn rain, fill the heart with melancholy.” Her last name Qiu means “autumn” in Chinese.

legacy

Her legacy as one of China's pioneering feminists and revolutionaries began with her death on July 15, 1907, when she was beheaded at the age of 31 by imperial army units charged with conspiracy to overthrow the Manchu-led Qing government. Her death was her final act of resistance, and it later earned her a place in the pantheon of revolutionary martyrs of China. Critics repeatedly accused her of naivete, believing that the overthrow of the Qing of China could solve social and political problems. Others believe her death was unnecessary as she had enough time to escape the advancing soldiers.

Lu Xun and Qiu Jin

Perhaps her most notable critic was Lu Xun, one of China's greatest writers of the 20th century, who believed that Qiu's reckless behavior in Shaoxing was due to the enormous admiration she had received during her time in Japan; she was "applauded to death," he told a friend.

The figure of the rebel Xia Yu (夏 瑜) in Lu Xun's story The Remedy from the anthology Call for Fight is modeled on Qiu Jin. He changed her family name from Qiu (秋, "autumn") to Xia (夏, "summer") and also changed the character of her first name slightly. In an essay he writes: Qiu Jin was killed by treason. Shortly after the revolution, she was hailed as a heroine, nowadays her name is hardly used any more. In the sketch "Fan Ai Nong" (范愛農) he describes how the news of Qiu Jin's death in Shaoxing is brought to Tokyo.

Movies

Her life was filmed three times in China, in 1953 (with Li Li-Hua ), 1983 (by Xie Jin ) and 2011 (by Herman Yau ). The first two films are titled Qiu Jin . The latest film is called Jiànhú Nǚxiá Qiu Jin and is known in Germany under the English title Woman Knight of Mirror Lake . Another English language film, called Autumn Gem , was produced by Rae Chang and Adam Tow in 2009.

literature

  • Catherine Gipoulon: Qiu Jin - The Jingwei Bird's Stone. Woman and revolutionary in China in the 19th century. , Munich 1977: Women's offensive
  • Julia Kristeva: The Chinese. Munich 1976

(German translations of the works listed below will be added if possible)

  • 夏衍: 『秋瑾 伝』 （1936）
  • Takeda Taijun (武 田泰淳): 『秋風 秋雨 人 を 愁 殺 す ・ 秋瑾 女士 伝』 (1968)
  • Fujimori Setsuko藤森 節 子: 『秋瑾 嘯風』 『架空 旅行 記 ・ 紹興 の 街 と 秋瑾』 (1997)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an https://www.nytimes.com /interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked-qiu-jin.html
  2. ↑ Ip Woman imdb
personal data
SURNAME Qiu Jin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Qiū, Jǐn; c = 秋瑾 (Chinese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese revolutionary
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Xiamen , Minhou District , Fujian Province
DATE OF DEATH July 15, 1907
Place of death Shaoxing , Zhejiang Province