A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #11-26 - He-Yin Zhen. The Spontaneous Balance of Natural Justice (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

He-Yin Zhen was born in 1884 and died in 1920. A Chinese 
anarcha-feminist writer contemporary to Emma Goldman, she developed a 
philosophical and political theory that unites anarchist and feminist 
concerns-worldviews that are not only compatible, but convergent. He-Yin 
Zhen was born into a wealthy family like He Ban and later chose to sign 
her name with her mother's maiden name, Yin, and the epithet Zhen 
("thunder"). "The Thunder of Anarchy" is the title of the Italian 
translation of her most famous work.

He-Yin Zhen's philosophy and political thought are inspired by Taoism, 
despite, or perhaps because of, her education and training in the 
classics of Confucianism.

Chiara Bottici, an anarcha-feminist philosopher and university professor 
from Carrara, came into contact with Yin Zhen's thought while studying 
the anarcha-feminist tradition, extending her research and studies 
beyond the West. Not only was Yin Zhen the first to translate the works 
of anarchists such as Kropotkin and Goldman into Chinese, as well as the 
first to translate the Communist Manifesto, but she also made an 
elaborate and original contribution to anarcha-feminism.

Regarding her political and philosophical thought, Bottici highlights 
two fundamental concepts: one concerns the concept of gender binarism as 
primordial oppression; The other is the system of patriarchal and 
capitalist exploitation, as opposed to a Taoist worldview: this is the 
idea that a spontaneous order exists-or rather, would exist-in the 
world, that is, that nature itself does not create the accumulation of 
wealth and capital that underlies the oppression, privilege, and 
exploitation of man by man (and woman). The conditional is necessary, 
because this spontaneous order would exist, precisely, if it were not 
for the systems of domination that characterize capitalist society. It 
is precisely the accumulation of wealth that allows, indeed requires, 
the few to oppress the many (and, again, the many). This spontaneous 
balance is well defined by the phrase "natural justice," which is also 
the title of the magazine for which He-Yin Zhen writes.

But did this spontaneous balance ever really exist? The question remains 
open, but He-Yin Zhen, and Chiara Bottici with her, addresses the issue, 
highlighting the fact that anarchist theory was born with modernity 
precisely because previously "anarchic" experiences and "spontaneous 
equilibria" were realities, lived lives. Bottici, echoing Yin Zhen, 
highlights how for most of human history, it was not governments, 
states, and their entire institutional apparatus that held a substantial 
monopoly on economic and political power in the way they do today-a 
topic already addressed in the previous article published in Umanità 
Nova for this column, the one on Emma Goldman entitled "Anarchy as a 
Teacher of the Unity of Life and the Sovereign State as an Instrument of 
the Sovereign Sex-Gender." In short, it is only when wealth accumulates 
that the few who have appropriated it to the detriment of the many 
establish a new way to protect their privileges, building a refined, 
controlling, and pervasive system of economic and political power: the 
State.

For Yin Zhen, the categorization of bodies into the binary system of 
male-female and man-woman is the primary means through which the idea of 
oppression is established, to the extent that it establishes the idea 
that some bodies (and the people who are those bodies) are superior to 
others due to intrinsic and indisputable qualities. In this view, 
capitalism merely reclaimed the idea of oppression thus constructed and 
internalized, translating it into terms of class oppression and 
embodying it within an apparatus-the state-for the purpose of reifying, 
perpetuating, and universalizing it. Capitalism, in Bottici's words, 
re-signifies the misogyny already present in pre-capitalist patriarchy.

At this point, an excerpt from Anarchy's Thunder reads, "If women would 
exchange their desire to be part of the government for a desire to 
abolish it, then I would be truly happy." This political statement fits 
into a social context, the early twentieth century, in which the women's 
emancipation movement, led by suffragists, clamored for the right to 
vote. For Yin Zhen, replacing a woman with a man does not change the 
patriarchal nature of government and the state, which is nevertheless 
legitimized-another theme already extensively discussed in previous 
articles. Therefore, the winning political strategy, for Yin Zhen, is 
not to fight for membership in the government, but to abolish it, to 
rethink the world and our way of being in it.

In this vision, quoting Yin Zhen again to close the circle, it is clear 
that "Women's liberation means neither submissive women nor submissive men."

Neither servants nor masters. Neither maids nor masters.

If.

https://umanitanova.org/he-yin-zhen-lequilibrio-spontaneo-della-giustizia-naturale/
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