For centuries, women war fighters like Hua Mulan have featured prominently in China's literary, dramatic and historical texts and the woman warrior icon proved hugely popular with mass audiences. Yet curiously, as we saw in the previous chapter, such stories of fighting women operated in a cultural context where women, to use Qiu Jin's words, ‘are prisoners our entire lives, and beasts of burden for half of it’. The patriarchal and oftentimes misogynistic social order of dynastic China produced and sustained the martial female image in a complex discourse that nurtured the contradictions between idealised submissive women and romanticised powerful women. This resilient cultural tradition produced a situation in 1907 in which Qiu Jin (1875–1907) could describe her countrywomen as ‘still perishing in the darkest and lowest of the eighteen layers of Buddhist hell without showing any desire to climb even one level’ despite viewing dramas and hearing tales featuring strong, sword-wielding, fearless fighting women. Why? Because for centuries, China's women warriors, like Mulan, were exemplars of consolidation and defenders of orthodoxy.

Over the three decades of Qiu Jin's short life the woman warrior would assume new significances as a result of feminist notions of equal rights for men and women that flooded into China from Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The one-time diverting cross-dressing, magical swordswoman who avenged her brother, replaced her father and defended her lord and master in countless opera stages around the country was confronted by Qiu Jin – a knife-wielding, gun-toting feminist warrior who explicitly identified the male-dominated gender hierarchy as unjust and sought to overthrow it. As she wrote in one of her impassioned essays, ‘The man always assumes the position of power and the woman the position of slave…. Alas! Dearest Sisters, no one in any other country would willingly bear the sobriquet “slave”, so why should we carry it with such docility and without feeling its shame.’

Qiu Jin's incorporation of a feminist political platform into the existing woman warrior narratives was undoubtedly inspirational at the start of the twentieth century. In China, feminism emerges as a militaristic movement at the hands of Qiu Jin.