By way of introducing the articles to follow, this essay provides a brief overview of studies of femininity and feminism in China and the West, from the early 20th century up to the present, focussing mainly on Chinese/Western comparative studies carried out by Chinese scholars. Two dominant Western influences on Chinese theories have been Henrik Ibsen and Virginia Woolf: Chinese comparative studies have responded to these “feminisms” in various ways. Also we find laid out here the two fundamental “differences” with which any such comparative study is concerned: that of China/West and that of male/female. As for the former, Tam distinguishes the Chinese process of identity formation—identity is formed through relation-to-others—from the Western—identity formed through distinction-from-others. As for the latter, one of the more recent studies is that of Gilligan, who distinguishes a female focus on the context of human relationships from a male focus on competition and the drive toward success of individual egos. The contributors to this volume, whose essays follow this one, are thus set here within both an historical and a theoretical context.

This essay compares two women’s autobiographies, A Chinese Winter's Tale (Yu, China, 1980) and Right Hand Left Hand (Livesay, Canada, 1977), two ground-breaking works. The focus. is on three innovative dimensions of these two works which the author suggests may be intrinsic to “woman’s autobiography” as a kind of genre: (1) the need to tell a woman's story, coupled with the hybridity of generic forms; (2) a mixture of gender-related masculine and feminine styles; (3) a boundary-crossing or boundary-free blending of private and political subject matter. These two autobiographies, while employing Maoist (Yu) and Marxist (Livesay) discourses, differ radically in purpose: while Livesay wants to remind her Canadian readers of their socialist-feminist legacy from the 1920’s and 30's, Yu criticizes the politicization of everything in China to the neglect of private life and sexuality. Nonetheless both writers worked out, independently of one another, powerful means to challenge the patriarchal norm for autobiography writing.

This essay first situates Zhu, in the history of “literary gendering” in Taiwan, as a follower of Zhang Ailing, Taiwan’s “literary mother” who stood over against the Iterary father, Lu Xun. While her critics claim that Zhu has rejected such postmodernist, politicized feminist concerns as selfhood, economic autonomy and sexual awakening in her writing, returning instead to an implicitly apolitical, traditional Mainland Chinese lyricism, it is argued here that they misunderstand the author, particularly in her most recent phase. For Zhu has moved from neotraditionalism to neo-nativism: as we see in her fiction (Splendor) and her screenplay for the Taiwanese film City of Sadness, she is indeed in touch with the most avant-garde “postmodernist” currents, breaking down such binaries as China/West, colonizer/colonized, tradition/modernity, ego/desire, unity/chaos. This highly sophisticated reading of the author brings into play recent postcolonial theory, “third cinema,” Lyotard’s, Kristeva’s and Deleuze’s views on sublimity, chaos, abjection and desire. Her critics’ claim that Zhu is somehow “ahistorical” or “apolitical” misses this author's (very contemporary) complexity, her negotiation of a space “in-between.”

Modern Chinese feminist literature, particularly that of Zhang Xinxin reveals that its heroines’ difficulties in achieving selfidentity, is complicated by culture. Though Mao’s Communism proclaimed equality for male and female, in actuality, Communism merely replaced the Father in the system of patriarchy. The social role of female is still constructed as being a victim, now, not just to her family, but to the state as well. Females trying to achieve independence and self-identity hurt themselves psychologically when they attempt to break with the traditional roles of daughter, wife, and mother. And when they attempt to enter the academic arena, they find themselves competing with males who are younger than they are and who are more highly educated. Zhang Xinxin’s story On the Same Horizon explores the difficulties Chinese women have in achieving self identity, in much the same way that Virginia Woolf does in her writing.

Here Stanley Kwan's recent film, Red Rose/White Rose, is read as a “feminine” re-reading of the “feminist” writer Eileen Chang’s 1994 novella, Red Rose and White Rose. Drawing from Bloom's theory of poetic revisionism and Bryson’s theory of painting as an art which exists in a certain state of tension with its own past, both incorporating and revising it, the argument is that through Kwan's filmic re-reading and transposition the power of Chang’s words, and the hidden male ideology of the madonna-whore dichotomy behind her text, is literally and figuratively challenged and canceled. Thus in effect Kwan presents a “feminine” cinema whose subtext—the substratum of its filmic space—is his commentary on Chang's reticence about the historical context. He thereby also unveils the possibility of what Chang denies, i.e., the fluidity of female desire and the growth of female subjectivity.

The problem of female identity-formation in China is set within the wider context of male and female Chinese identity vs. Western identity-formation. While in the traditional Chinese Confucian view the self is a “role-self’ formed through the socializing process and identity is ren-tong, that which makes “me” the same as others, in the West self-identity is grounded precisely in the distinction of “myself” from others. Thus the impact of Ibsen and generally of Western ideas on China in the May 4th period was unsettling: intellectuals and students craved “individual self-identity,” free from social and cultural repression, but there was no historical-philosophical basis for this new attitude, thus ledsing to confusion in the attempt to construct a new model of the Chinese woman's identity: while women writers like Bing Xin tended to model female identity on Ibsen’s autonomous Nora (Doll’s House), male writers (Lu Xun, Mao Dun) tended to subsume male and female gender identity to a prioritized “national’ Chinese identity, and more specifically to see the new “national self’ as something that could replace a new “female self.” Understanding this history helps us to understand current Chinese/Taiwanese confusions about identity-construction.

Based on a brief critical review of Western feminist theory from the Chinese perspective, the author tries to analyze some phenomena that appeared in current Chinese literature: the awakening of the female sense and the rising of the feminist writing of Chinese characteristics. The present essay is aimed to reinterpret the female writing of some newly rising Chinese fe- male novelists and their texts. To the author, these writings are produced under the influence of Western feminist theory, but on the other hand, they are of more indigenous characteristics, which have a unique, long tradition and which might well carry on theoretical dialogue with Western feminist theory.

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