Peace on Our Terms by Mona L. Siegel

Author:Mona L. Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

CHAPTER V

May Flowers in China

The Feminist Origins of Chinese Nationalism

French journalist Andrée Viollis blinked once, then blinked again just to be sure. One of the latest peace delegates to arrive in Paris had just marched through her door. That fact, in and of itself, wasn’t so surprising. Diplomats and statesmen were a dime a dozen in Paris that spring. But the delegate who politely shook Viollis’s hand and sat down to be interviewed was no statesman, nor was she a man. This peace delegate was petite, young, and female. And she was from China.

As a cub reporter for the French Le Petit Parisien and a correspondent for the British Daily Mail, Viollis was still a relative novice to the world of high diplomacy and international relations when she was given the plum assignment of covering the Paris Peace Conference. It was a rare post for a female reporter, but as an intrepid New Woman and committed feminist, Viollis was firmly in favor of women’s entry into masculine professions. Like most Western women of her generation, however, Viollis held a number of Orientalist beliefs about “the East,” including the assumption that Asian women were submissive and unenlightened: objects of beauty to be admired rather than individuals endowed with intellect and authority. Such assumptions explain why Viollis, despite her cosmopolitan and militant background, was nothing short of floored when she sat down in April 1919 to talk with Soumay Tcheng (known also by her given name, Zheng Yuxiu, and later by her married name, Madame Wei Tao-ming).1

For her part, Soumay Tcheng was grateful for the interview. She had been knocking on doors, seeking to engage the interest of international reporters in China’s diplomatic fate ever since her arrival in Paris several weeks earlier. It was, after all, what the Nationalist government in southern China had asked her to do when it appointed her as an official attaché to the Chinese delegation to the peace conference. Specifically, she was tasked with acting as a liaison between the Chinese plenipotentiaries and the press as well as with representing Chinese women at the negotiations. Tcheng’s appointment was nothing short of extraordinary. In selecting her as a delegate, the Chinese government provided Soumay Tcheng with the credential denied to every other Allied woman in 1919: official diplomatic status.

Everything about Tcheng upended Viollis’s expectations about Chinese women: her fashionable, Western-style clothing, her facility in English and French, her worldly knowledge and experience. Who was this woman? Viollis thought she knew quite a bit about China before meeting Tcheng. After all, her husband was the curator of a museum of Asian art in Paris. But in this case clearly, art did not reflect reality. Viollis crafted her amazement into the lead paragraph for her article for the Daily Mail: “Confess it,” she began, “What do you know—what do most of us—know of China?” Poetry, light opera, polychrome figures on vases, she wrote, all evoke images of “ladies dressed in glowing silks with curved-up eyes, long pointed nails, and painfully small mutilated feet.

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