EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 16 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 193 from Chinese activists, scholars and others over the years — including a draft that was circulated by the Anti-Domestic Violence Network (Fanbao) in 2009 and policies that were adopted by most provinces and model cases issued by the Supreme Peoples Court in the past two years — and from international sources including international human rights frameworks and the UN, and finally influences from other countries' law, including the U.S. in particular. China’s law reflects a very interesting mixture of influences that are also apparent from what is not included in spite of significant efforts by domestic anti-domestic violence and LGBT activists, scholars and others. What is contained in the law reflects a blend of influences that resulted in a law that is uniquely Chinese. The paper will focus on specific provisions that exemplify the efforts of domestic and international advocates and link them to specific examples of that advocacy, and highlight particular provisions that domestic and international groups sought unsuccessfully. Wang Qi (University of Southern Denmark) Collective Male Feminism in China Key words: collective male feminism, feminism, gender, gender equality, China Historically, there has been a quite vocal and persistent advocacy of women’s liberation among the progressive Chinse male intellectuals and revolutionaries. Ever since the dawn of the modern era, these wise men have argued that China won’t be able to transform itself into a strong and modernized nation without having solved women’s problems. Later on, with the unfolding of the Communist revolution and subsequently the establishment of the Chinese Communist state, ‘women’s liberation’ was not only woven into the on-going social transformation process in China but also became an integral part of it. Although women within the Chinese Communist elite had actively pushed for the adoption of women- friendly policies, the voice of male party leaders in uttering women’s issues has nevertheless been evident and indisputable. This paper coins the term of ‘collective male feminism’ to feature the feminist stand of the Chinse male intellectuals and revolutionaries and examine the historical conditions that both fostered and sustained the modern ‘collective male feminism’ tradition in China. Arguing that the Chinese ‘collective male feminism’ is historically conditioned and thus fragile, the paper will then survey the post-socialist ‘reform’ discourse and the major contending schools of political thoughts in China today, such as Liberalism and the New Left, to illuminate how the progressive tradition of ‘collective male feminism’ has faded away and how a regressive consensus has set in in the reform thinking, inferring that China’s current economic development no longer needs to center around women’s issues. The last section of the paper brings in another form of ‘male feminism’ seen in current Chinese society, i. e. NGO-based male activism, and conceptualizes the differences between the ‘collective male feminism’ tradition and the novel male activism/feminism in the post-socialist context. Wang Mengxiao (Yale University) JealousWives as Disciples: Buddhifying the Subgenre of JealousWomen Narratives Key words: jealous wife, Buddhism, Shihou ji, Xiuwei deng, Cu hulu The narrative of jealous wives has been widely discussed in the field of late imperial Chinese lit- erature. Many scholars focus on the social backgrounds to explain the emergence of the subgenre of jealous women stories in the 16th-18th centuries. However, their works have not adequately addressed the significant role played by Buddhism in building the structures of these narratives, and how Buddhist plots are reversely mimicked. My paper explores how Buddhist themes are adopted in the subgenre of jealous women narratives, based on a close reading of two plays, Shihou ji and Xiuwei deng, and a novel, Cu hulu, which share a common Buddhist motif of enlightening jealous wives. Shihou ji sets a model of a Buddhist monk delivering the envious woman Liu to the Pure Land through preaching to her and taking her on a sightseeing journey to hell. The latter two follow this narrative model but