The Agrarian Question and the Woman Question

• In Event: Thinking Economics in Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

This paper shall compare two debates about Chinese society over the course of the 1920s: first, the introduction of a discourse on agrarian economics and, second, the debate over the status of women in China. I shall focus on the writings of Wu Juenong (1897-1989), one of the pioneers of agrarian economics in Republican China and a figure who also, scholars have discovered only recently, wrote over twenty articles translating and debating the ideas of European feminism and Chinese society. Historians have treated these two bodies of writings as belonging to two separate strands of intellectual debate. This paper attempts to read Wu Juenong’s writings together, in combination with the works of other prominent writers engaged in agrarian economics and Chinese feminism. How did the two discourses mirror one another, and how can an appreciation of the logic of agrarian economics and of feminism in China mutually illuminate one another?

Author

• Andrew Liu, Villanova University