Thread by @jessnevins

So who's interested in a life story of someone interesting?

Anyone, anyone?

The following is in no way a recommendation of an action plan for those who’ve lost loved ones to COVID thanks to Trump’s inexcusable policies. No message is to be found in the following. Definitely not. It’s all just a random assemblage of meaningless words.

線!

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Let’s start with a little Chinese history.

In 1911 many Chinese were angry w/the emperor & his advisers—and also with the Qing Dynasty as a whole. The Qing were (largely accurately) seen as corrupt, weak, & unwilling to fight foreign aggression & exploitation of China.

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The anger toward the government had existed since 1842, when China lost the First Opium War, and had mounted through the century, reaching new highs following China’s defeat in the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) and the humiliations inflicted on China by foreign powers.

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(This wasn’t entirely or even mostly a China-v-the-West dynamic; the foreign troops who treated the Chinese the worst during the Boxer Rebellion were the Japanese and the Russians. Patriotic Chinese were (deservedly) furious with all foreign powers, not just the West).

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What followed was the governmental suppression of any domestic activism against the government, armed or peaceful. Naturally, the suppression made the activism more vehement, more hardcore, and more dangerous. There were strikes, revolts, and uprisings for a decade.

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This culminated in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911. Spontaneous revolts across the country led to the abdication of the (6-year-old) emperor, a brief civil war, & then years of political strife & the Warlord Era, when rogue military leaders controlled various regions.

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In October 1925 open conflict between the forces of the Fengtian clique (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengtian_…) and the Zhili clique (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhili_cli…) led to a battle in the Yangzi provinces which the Zhili won.

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The Zhili military leader on the battlefield, Sun Chuanfang—the “Laughing Tiger,” seen below—took prisoner the Fengtian military leader, a guy named Shi Congbin. Sun Chuanfang then decapitated Shi Congbin and displayed his head at a train station.

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This was a mistake.

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Sun Chuanfang didn’t know that then, of course. He carried on fighting (also killing many workers in Shanghai when he ruled there), & when he was deposed in early 1927, he retired to Tianjin & founded a lay-Buddhist society with a fellow warlord & some of his former troops.

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Shi Congbin, the decapitated guy, had a daughter: Shi Gulan. Shi Gulan grew up privileged and got a combination of classical and modern education, including—this is relevant—extensive schooling in classical poetry and literature.

She was 19 when her dad was killed.

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The only reason she found out how her father died & what Sun Chuanfang did to him postmortem was because one of her father’s servants escaped the slaughter of the Fengtian troops &, exhibiting great bravery, resourcefulness, & loyalty, somehow made it to the Shi family home. 12/

The servant was “too grief-stricken to speak,” and the Shi family didn’t find out all the details of Shi Congbin’s death until they went to Tianjin. Shi Congbin’s death meant his wife (whose name I haven’t been able to find, sorry) had to raise their six children by herself.
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Tradition stated that dutiful daughters and chaste wives would commit suicide if their fathers or husbands had been killed unjustly.

Except that Shi Congbin’s wife was too grief-stricken to commit suicide. Grief-stricken—and furious. Shi Gulan shared her mother’s attitude.
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Shi Gulan and her mom wanted revenge. Nothing less would satisfy them.

Their motivations for revenge spring from the usual places--who wouldn't want revenge?--but also from cultural sources and recent historical causes.

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The Confucian tradition, still alive in the classical education Shi Gulan had received growing up and still given at least lip service by privileged Chinese in the 1920s, said that avenging one’s father was a righteous task. *The* righteous task, really.

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Confucius himself had quoted the Book of Rites (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Of_R…): “With the enemy who has slain his father, one should not live under the same heaven.”

But there was more going on with Shi Gulan’s yearning for revenge than obeying Confucius.

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Ever since the end of the Second Opium War (1856-1860) and the looting and burning of the Summer Palaces by British and French forces, many upper-class Chinese had seen that the weakness of the Qing government was irreversible. The only available option seemed to be violence.
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Violence--specifically the assassination of government officials. Unusually for Chinese history, many of those who set out to kill officials were women. (Eventually, there were enough late Qing female assassins for academics to study it as a discrete phenomenon).

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One sterling example is Qiu Jin (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiu_Jin), who deserves her own thread: a cross-dressing latter-day nüxia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youxia) and anti-Qing revolutionary. Srsly, read her Wiki entry and then everyone write novels about her!

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There were also foreign female assassins who were popular with late-Qing radical elite, women like Sofia Perovskaia (journals.openedition.org/pipss/4169). The female assassin of wicked government officials became a cultural icon and touchstone in China in the 1910s & 1920s.

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Undoubtedly Shi Gulan was influenced at least partially by the examples of previous female assassins, both real and fictional (there were a number of stories, serials, and novels about assassins published in China from the turn of the century until the late 1930s).

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Even more than the female assassin role models, though, Shi Gulan must have been influenced by the spirit of “dare to die,” the abiding sentiment of the anti-Qing revolutionaries formed and promoted by Sun Yatsen and Huang Xing during the 1911 Revolution.

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“Dare to die” troops were suicide squads who were happy to die as long as they could take some of the enemy w/them—gvt troops in 1911, Japanese troops in the 1930s. The “dare to die” squads were largely made up of zealously patriotic college students, both men & women.

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“Dare to die” men and women really really *really* DGAF. They’d happily wreathe themselves with grenades or bombs and then throw themselves at their enemies. They were willing martyrs and were honored as such, even revered, by other Chinese.

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“Dare to die” never really went away, either. It was present during the Korean War during Chinese mass infantry attacks against well-entrenched U.N. positions. And it was present during the Tiananmen Square protests—protesting students formed “dare to die” squads.

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“Dare to die” was in the air, everywhere, in the 1920s, and I’m certain Shi Gulan took some inspiration and comfort from it—not only would her revenge against Sun Chuanfang be sanctified by Heaven, but society itself would view it as an act of courage and justice.

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So in early 1926, after returning home, Shi Gulan changed her name to “Shi Jianqiao,” “Jianqiao” meaning “raise the sword,” a sobriquet that said everything about Shi Jianqiao’s intentions toward Sun Chuanfang.

But Shi Jianqiao had a problem. Where was Sun Chuanfang?

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Nobody she talked to knew. None of her family friends and associates could or would tell her—keep in mind that Sun Chuanfang still had a lot of loyal troops and no little sway with the authorities. He was a -former- warlord, yes, but he was still the Laughing Tiger.

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It took nine years of searching to locate Sun Chuanfang. It was the Warlord Era; finding one man in the chaos of that time and place was tremendously difficult. But she did it, and discovered that he was in Tianjin, leading his bros in lay-Buddhist teachings on Nanma Rd.

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It was early November—very cold, very wet. She took several trips alone to the congregation site to learn Sun Chuanfang’s schedule—she’d spent nine grueling and frustrating years searching for him, she wasn’t going to rush things now that she knew where he was.

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She planned to carry out her long-delayed revenge on the morning of the 13th, when Sun Chuanfang was scheduled to lead the sutra-recitation session. But he was late that morning because of heavy rains, and when he finally did arrive she had to rush home to get her pistol.

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(It was a Browning FN 1928, a 9 mm., a gun for serious people, the kind of thing you use when the mfer you’re shooting absolutely positively MUST get their brains splattered).
When she returned, services were underway, and Sun Chuanfang was kneeling and leading the prayers.
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Picture the scene: a temple full of former warlord troops and the Laughing Tiger. The door opens, the cold wind blows in. Shi Jianqiao, dressed formally, calmly walks past everyone, ignoring the ex-soldiers, eyes only for the Laughing Tiger.

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She sat directly behind him. BLAM (back of the head) BLAM (right temple) BLAM (into the waist, out through the chest).

Instant chaos. The attendees were former soldiers, but she was armed & they weren’t. Plus—“dare to die” assassin in action--everyone knew what that meant.
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Shi Jianqiao coolly announced, “I have avenged the murder of my father. Do not fear. I will not hurt anyone, nor will I run away.” When the police arrived, she peacefully surrendered.

HOWEVER. It turned out Shi Jianqiao had planned everything out. And I mean *everything.*

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Before killing Sun Chuanfang, Shi Jianqiao had deposited her will at the local police station. Ostensibly a private document, it was opened immediately (as she’d anticipated) by the police and then circulated in the press. Everyone read what she’d written—which was a lot.

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She made a stirring case in her will for having acted out of filial piety—a devoted daughter finally avenging her unjustly murdered father, just as Confucius and the Book of Rites had recommended.

To say this resonated with the public is to woefully understate matters.

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In the will she made arrangements for the care of her mother and brothers and sisters and husband (yes, she was married—but what’s a husband compared to filial devotion?) after her death, thus demonstrating that she was the elder sister of the family.

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To be elder sister of a family without a father or older brother was a significant and heavily symbolic position—in essence, the elder sister was expected to take on responsibilities & obligations of both a daughter and sister and of the leader of the family.

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Laying claim to that role in her will, combined with a very deliberate and knowing invocation by her of the filial duties owed by her to her unjustly slain father, meant that Shi Jianqiao set herself up as not a political assassin but an instrument of righteous vengeance.

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The press LOVED this. Only a few hours after the assassination the Tianjin newspapers were running special editions about the murder, about Shi Jianqiao, and about her motivations. The press (and the public) couldn’t get enough of the story. It was above-the-fold for months.
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The story had everything (except sex), *especially* the ever-important conflict between human law and Heaven’s law. Which one should modern Chinese men and women obey?

Oh, did the editorial writers & cultural commenters love that part. So much to bloviate about!

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“Filial daughter Shi Jianqiao avenged her father’s death by killing single-handedly Sun Chuanfang…Her sincerity and purity are without limits; her filial revenge ranks in the top ten in history…the entire nation sympathizes with her.”

Etc etc etc

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There were plays & Shanghai operas (“All About The Avenging Daughter!”) written and staged about the assassination, starring top actors like Zhao Ruquan (1881-1961), who was an influence on Master Yu Jim Yuen, who trained Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao, among others.
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(Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past”).

There were prose serials written portraying Shi Jianqiao as a nüxia, an old school wandering female knight-errant, who had used her martial arts to kill Sun Chuanfang, who had been a sworn brother to Shi Congbin.

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The trial was a protracted affair. The guilty verdict was appealed twice & reached the Supreme Court, who at length issued a verdict of “judicial leniency” (which was quite controversial). Two months later, the Nationalist (KMT) regime issued a state pardon for Shi Jianqiao. 46/

That was October 1936. The following July Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China (they’d been occupying Manchuria since 1932), and Shi Jianqiao became a national symbol of resistance against the invaders. She led relief & fundraising efforts for the KMT.

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Her post-war life under the Communists was not happy: filial piety such as hers was “counter-revolutionary.” Being pardoned by the KMT government weighed against her with the Communists. And during the 1960s some accused her of having belonged to the “reactionary class.”

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So she laid low in the 1950s, teaching elementary school for underprivileged children. In the 1960s, when class oppressors and feudalists were hunted for, she published two autobiographies that strategically restated her past in ways acceptable to the Communists.

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Mao loved OUTLAWS OF THE WATER MARGINS as an example of a peasant revolution, so in her autobiographies Shi Jianqiao presented her past not as an example of filial piety but as one long revolutionary action against the feudalists and the Nationalist gvt.

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Under Mao, this didn’t work, and she was labeled a “counter-revolutionary.” But in the 1970s she was fully rehabilitated. She died, safe and secure, in 1979.

Thanks for reading all this!

(For more: Eugenia Lean’s PUBLIC PASSIONS)

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