Beyond Gender Constraints and National Boundaries: Positioning Xie Xuehong in Modern China and Taiwan

Abstract

Due to the Taiwan Government-General’s suppression of social movements and the Kuomintang’s anti-communist ideology in postwar Taiwan, studies on Taiwan’s communism started rather late and are often ideologically embedded. The status of female communists becomes even more marginalized in the largely male-centered historiography. The fact that the story of Xie Xuehong (1901-1970), one of the founding members of Taiwanese Communist Party, remains untold until the lifting of martial law in 1987 in Taiwan demonstrates this. To redress this, the paper focuses on the life and political engagement of Xie Xuehong. Based on textual analysis, this paper reviews Xie’s political trajectory and examines her diverse images in existing secondary resources. It first appraises her political path and then analyses the images of Xie in postwar Taiwan (in which she was used as a negative example by the Kuomintang and later treated as a Taiwan-leaning heroine by independence-minded writers such as Shi Ming and Chen Fangming) and China (in which she was hailed as a revolutionary hero, castigated in the 1950s, and eventually became a taboo topic until 1980). Finally it looks at Li Ang’s feminist take of Xie in Li’s Autobiography: A Novel. The paper places Xie as a legendary example who crosses both gender constraints and national boundaries. It argues neither the deification nor the demonization of Xie can do her justice, whereas Li’s coining Xie as a feminist risks sensationalizing Xie. The story of Xie thus remains drifting and awaits a multifaceted reconstruction and less tendentious interpretation.