A lot of interest has recently been activated around He-Yin Zhen, a
Chinese anarchist, feminist and philosopher who lived between 1884 and1920. The first publication in Italian of the collection of her writings
edited by Cristina Manzone, "Il tuono dell'anarchia", a book that was
presented at various anarchist circles and groups in recent months, has
certainly contributed to this attention. Zhen means thunder and is the
name that He-Yin wanted to give herself, evidently aware of the
noisiness of her thought, of how thunderous it was. ---- Politically
active in Chinese anarchist groups both in China and in Japan, where she
lived for some years, a contributor to various newspapers and magazines
in the 1910s, very attentive to the issues of exploitation and
oppression of women, He-Yin was many things, starting from the simplest
of her activities, that of translator. In addition to the translation of
anarchist texts by figures such as Kropotkin and Goldman, it should be
emphasized that she is the first Chinese translation of Marx's Communist
Manifesto. Despite her cultural depth, however, He-Yin's thought has
been obscured and removed; even today, after more than a century, it is
still forbidden to read her writings in China. A censorship that
obviously has affected the diffusion of her works and thoughts even
outside China, where she is in fact little known.
In the presentation of "The Thunder of Anarchy" that I had the
opportunity to follow a few months ago at the Germinal club in Carrara,
the few editorial traces of her writings were reconstructed: a small
translation produced in the Seventies and included in an anthology of
anarchist thought in English; some texts published in 2013 edited by an
anarchist group in New York; a subsequent translation into French of
some passages. Few and partial translations until, in fact, the recent
publication in Italian of "The Thunder of Anarchy", which represents the
most complete collection of He-Yin's writings published so far. It is a
series of essays that appeared in 1907 in the magazine "Giustizia
Naturale", of which He-Yin was editor.
In the collection, her feminist thought emerges with great effectiveness
and extraordinary modernity. "Women's liberation means neither women nor
men subjugated": a phrase that opens to a series of considerations
linked to a project of authentic social revolution. He-Yin rejects the
political strategy of seizing power: the goal for women should not be to
fight to be part of the government, but to abolish it; absorbing women
into government functions only serves to legitimize a power that is
oppressive for everyone. It is certainly not a foregone conclusion, as
the persistent rhetoric of the glass ceiling demonstrates, after more
than a century.
Fundamental in her texts is the reflection on the roots of female
oppression starting from what today we would call the binary and sexist
setting of society. According to He-Yin, the concrete division between
male and female - meaning by "concrete" that division that passes
between bodies that are classified according to a male/female division -
represents the first means through which female oppression was
established, based on the metaphysical idea that some bodies due to
their intrinsic capacities are superior to others, and perpetuated by
the daily experience of sexual bodies that can exercise dominion over
other sexual bodies. An oppression that capitalism has taken up,
translating it into class oppression and using an institutional
apparatus, the State, to make this class oppression universal. He-Yin
therefore shares the idea that patriarchy pre-exists capitalism, that
oppression based on the male/female opposition, or on the domination of
male bodies over female ones, is the matrix of oppression, on which the
oppression of males over other males is then structured and in general
the system of exploitation determined by capitalism and the accumulation
of wealth.
And it is precisely the accumulation of wealth that makes further forms
of oppression necessary, such as armies, which forcefully guarantee that
a few can oppress many in order to benefit from wealth.
How can we overcome all this? How can we break this mechanism of
oppression? He-Yin states that a new form of government, a more open
political turn would not solve the problem of the oppression of the
female body; patriarchy cannot be supplanted by a simple change of
government or political direction. It is necessary to completely subvert
the existing order and every type of government, breaking every field of
domination. Phrases like "Every day that money is not abolished is a day
that the economy is a source of inequality" illustrate a clear
anti-capitalist vision. Capitalism is indicated by He-Yin as the "law of
the individual", meaning with this expression the will to dominate and
supremacy that allows the affirmation of private property against the
common management of goods, a dominion that materializes with the
exploitation of bodies and classes guaranteed by the legal system of
transmission of wealth and even before by patriarchy and sexist
oppression. Something that must absolutely be gotten rid of, just as we
must get rid of armies, another element that is much insisted on.
In the essay "On the anti-militarism of women" He-Yin states that the
military system is the guarantor of capitalist exploitation, has the
task of protecting the accumulation of wealth and private property and
of preventing the subversion of class rule. But militarism is not a
generic expression of power, it also has its own specifically sexist
matrix, it represents the exaltation of the male body and the use of
force. He-Yin highlights the frequent practice of rape by armies and
observes, among other things, how marriage is nothing but a
secularization of the original rape of war. She believes that
antimilitarism is a necessity, that it has a fundamental function so
that "common people" can free themselves from the armed domination of
the state, from the system designed to guarantee exploitation and
division into classes, but also so that women, specifically, can free
themselves from the domination of men embodied in the figure of the
military. An essential path to "alleviate people from war and ensure
that peace and happiness make their way in the world".
Obviously, He-Yin's thought must be contextualized, referring to the
historical period and the cultural context of China at the time, but
what is striking is the extraordinary and clear radicality of her
reflections at a time like the one in which she wrote, in the years
immediately preceding the First World War. And one wonders what would
have happened if at the time (but the reflection is still valid today)
feminism had taken this path, instead of following, at least in its
greatest expression, the path of obtaining political rights, thus
sharing the perspective of exercising government, that is, domination,
and therefore not questioning the roots of patriarchal oppression.
And extraordinarily modern - it must be emphasized once again - the
denunciation of binarism as the matrix of oppression. The current
transfeminist debate aims to characterize itself by overcoming the
binary approach, but often addresses the issue in terms of individual
choice and the claim of a fluid identity: a fully shareable position,
but perhaps sometimes not adequately linked to a plan of overall social
change. He-Yin in 1907 argues, as part of an overall reasoning, that
abolishing the very definitions of man and woman must also be an
objective. A statement that may seem provocative or uselessly
nominalist, but on which we should reflect carefully, trying to open
ourselves to a new perspective, perhaps difficult to conquer, but
fundamental to practice and build real paths of freedom and prospects of
social revolution. The differences between bodies exist, but once
education and experiences are common, not bent to logics of power and
subordination, the differences in conformation between bodies are simple
facts, no longer declinable in terms of gender binarism and sexism.
Patrizia Nesti
https://umanitanova.org/un-pensiero-che-rimbomba-he-yin-zhen-il-tuono-dellanarchia/
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