AHR Forum
The Male Bond in Chinese History and Culture
SUSAN MANN
HISTORIANS OF EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA credit feminist theory and women's
history for introducing gender as a category of analysis, sparking interest in gender
identity and performance, leading in turn to new work on "the history of men as
men."! Not so-at least not yet-in the field of Chinese history. Among historians
of China, women's studies and feminist theory have stimulated reams of published
work. Much of this work, however, remains at the margins of mainstream academic
research, which may partly explain why scholars of China have been slow to grasp
the significance of gender theory for the study of Chinese history. But it is not
simply the reluctant reception of women's history that makes the China field
anomalous when it comes to the study of men. In point of fact, historians of China
have yet to develop a sustained interest in the study of sexuality, which has been the
starting point for work on the history of men and of masculinity in European and
North American studies. 2 And even China scholars drawn to women's history have
been slow to appreciate the importance of men's studies to their own enterprise. 3
It is worth noting, then, that the articles in this Forum constitute the first
collaborative attempt by historians of China writing in English to investigate social
relationships among men, using gender as a category of analysis.
Why have historical studies of Chinese men "as men" been so few? The question
The articles in this Forum were first presented at a panel on "The Male-Male Bond in Late Imperial
and Republican China," presented in Atlanta on January 5, 1996, at the annual meeting of the
American Historical Association. Special thanks are due to Norman Kutcher, who organized the panel,
and to Gail Hershatter, who served as chair. This writer also acknowledges with appreciation the
comments and criticisms of the editors and manuscript reviewers for the American Historical Review
and the suggestions of Catherine Kudlick, Clarence E. Walker, and Weijing Lu.
I Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 19%), 2. Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York, 1997), x, credit
feminist theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler for historians' interest in masculinity and
femininity as "multiple sites for the production of cultural meaning."
2 Exceptions are Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female
Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham, N.C., 1995); Frank Dikotter, Sex, Culture and
Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican
Period (Honolulu, 1995); and Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History,
960-1665 (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
3 As Leora Auslander put it, "Adequate explanations of how men come to understand their gender
and sexuality are crucial even if one's primary preoccupation is women. Given the relational nature of
gender, and the centrality of processes of differentiation to its making, ignorance of one gender
produces ignorance of the other." See "Do Women's + Men's + Leshian and Gay + Queer Studies =
Gender Studies?" differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (1997): 7.
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is especially vexing because, as we shall see, bonds among men were key to success
and survival for rich and poor, elite and commoner, in Chinese history. One answer
may lie in the history of gender studies in the China field as a whole. This history
began in the 1970s, when anthropologists in Taiwan, together with scholars
interested in women and socialist revolution in China proper, shook loose decades
of scholarship encrypted in the "patrilocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal" language of
China's family system. Historians of my own generation still recall the startling
impact of Margery Wolf's classic analysis of women and the family in rural Taiwan.
The rhetoric of the Chinese family system-rhetoric that shaped the perception of
virtually all historians-relegated women to the margins; but the meaning of family
relationships, Wolf showed, placed women at the center. Ephemeral emotional
bonds centered on a single mother during her lifetime were revealed, in Wolf's
stunning analysis, to lie at the very heart of the enduring "patriarchal" family
structure. 4 Wolf's work inspired new research on modern Chinese women, and by
the 1990s a veritable flood of major monographs and articles on women in earlier
periods had come into print. s This rapid transformation might have signaled a
transformation of the kind that reshaped European and North American history.6
Curiously, though, research on Chinese women did not stimulate much interest in
the subject of men or male culture in Chinese history. Instead, ironically, the turn
toward "women's studies" in the China field seems to have encouraged a turn away
from studies of men. The turn away from studying men, in other words, was perhaps
an inevitable result of a backlash against the China field's obsession with problems
of patriarchy and male dominance. Still another reason why histories of women
have not been followed by historical studies of men may be that studying men looks
easy, while studying women (if the Chinese historical record supplies your
evidence) is hard. What men do is, after all, the pervasive subject of Chinese
documents and texts of every kind. Women, by contrast, become visible only if
historians read between the lines, track down obscure sources, and bring neglected
collections to light. A new book about women-razzle-dazzle-may transform the
field! But another book about men? Many scholars seem to have concluded that we
know enough about Chinese men already.7
Margcry Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford, Calif., 1972).
The subject of Chinese women's history is now a virtual publishing industry, much of it still
reclaiming a past where foot-binding and female suicide are not the dominant themes. Meanwhile,
studies of women have retained a prominent place in the interdisciplinary field of contemporary
Chinese studies in North America. For recent reviews of this literature, see Ann Waltner, "Recent
Scholarship on Chinese Women," Signs 21 (Wintcr 1996): 410-28; linhua Emma Teng, "The
Construction of the 'Traditional Chinese Woman' in the Western Academy: A Critical Review," Signs
22 (Autumn 1996): 115-51; and Susan Mann, "The History of Chinese Women before the Age of
Orientalism," Journal of Women's History 8 (Winter 1997): 163-76.
6 In European historiography, the growth of men's studies was signaled by the founding, in 1989, of
the journal Gender and History, followed in the United States in 1992 by the Journal of Men's Studies.
Reviews begin with David H. J. Morgan, "Men Made Manifest: Histories and Masculinities," Gender
and History 1 (Spring 1989): 87-91; see also Frank Mort, "Crisis Points: Masculinities in History and
Social Theory," Gender and History 6 (April 1994): 124-30; and Anna Davin, "Historical Masculinities:
Regulation, Fantasy and Empire," Gender and History 9 (April 1997): 135-38.
7 The most important historical work on men to emerge thus far from the new era of gender studies
on China is a study of male homosexuality: Bret Hinsch's Passions of the Cut Sleeve. Hinsch's work is
the first in English to survey the counterculture of male love and sexual relations outside the boundaries
4
5
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The failure of China historians to consider male bonds and relations among men
as a legitimate subject of gcnder analysis has already creatcd new distortions and
pedagogical obstacles-obstacles that many historians in European and North
American fields immediately identified and sought to overcome as women's history
gained stature. Graduate students studying Chinese history still equate "gender
studies" with "women's studies," and they may search in vain for examples of
scholarship using gender as a category of analysis where the historical subjects are
entirely male. 8 Ironically, this unhappy situation is an even bigger problem in the
China field than it was in either European or North American history, because
China's late imperial society was even more sex-segregated than contemporary
societies in the West or, for that matter, in the rest of East Asia. Thus any historian
of China whose subject lies outside the domestic sphere-in the bureaucracy, in
trade and commerce, in secret societies or rebellions, in scholarly academies or the
civil service examination-will find himself or herself studying almost exclusively
men and their relationships with each other. Yet no one has thought to ask what
sorts of homosocial bonds these various sex-segregated social networks gave rise to
or how they might be understood. 9
How might we use gender as a category of analysis to understand relationships
of the patriarchal family. But with its exclusive focus on sexuality, Passions of the Cut Sleeve is hardly
the male-centered answer to studies of Chinese women that explore "women's culture" and the bonds
joining women as writers, as friends, or as kinfolk. And it does not correspond at all to the studies of
"masculinity" that have produced new journals and new genres in Euro-North American history since
the late 1980s. See Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley, Calif.,
1990). Two recent studies point in new directions, however: Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society
in Late imperial China (Stanford, Calif., 2000); and Giovanni Vitiello, "Exemplary Sodomites: Chivalry
and Love in Late Ming Culture," Nan Nil: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 2, no.
2 (2000) [in press]. See also Michael Szonyi, "The Cult of IIu Tianbao and the Eighteenth-Century
Discourse of Homosexuality," Late Imperial China 19 (June 1998): 1-25. In the Japan field, by contrast,
studies of male sexuality have been more numerous and broader in scope. See, in particular, Roger
Keyes, 1he Male Journey in Japanese Prints (Berkeley, 1989); Gary P. Leupp, Male Colors: The
Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley, 1995); and Gregory M. Pfiugfelder,
Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (Berkeley, 1999).
8 In the China field, for example, students looking for gender studies will encounter works on women
such as Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley,
Calif., 1997). This has been a problem in North American and European history as well; see Morgan,
"Men Made Manifest." Kimmel, Manhood in America, 3-4, complains about women's studies and its
failure "to make gender visible to men," citing Thomas Laqueur's observation that "woman alone
seems to have 'gender,' " in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.,
1990), 22. In this regard, scholars should take note of the forthcoming publication of Chinese
Femininities/Chinese Masculinities, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, with a
foreword by Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley, Calif., 2001). This reader will pair new or reprinted essays on
women with commissioned essays on related topics that deal with manhood.
Y Analogues from the U.S. and European literature bring to mind (on guilds and merchants) Merry
Wiesner, "Guilds, Male Bonding and Women's Work in Early Modern Germany," Gender and History
1 (Summer 1989): 125-37; and Lyndal Roper, "Stealing Manhood: Capitalism and Magic in Early
Modern Germany," Gender and History 3 (Spring 1991): 4-22; (on friendship) Leonore Davidoff and
Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago,
1987), 99-103, 215-19; (on brothcrhoods) Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian
America (New Haven, Conn., 1989); Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and
Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J., 1989); and Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930
(Princeton, 1984). Among U.S. historians, the notion of para lIe I "male" and "female" communities has
even entered mainstream textbooks, as in Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered
Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996), 203-39.
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between men in Chinese history and culture? What new insights may emerge to
transform the field if we do? Historians of women have already raised questions
about flashpoints or shifts in thc construction of masculinity. Reflecting on the
origins of foot-binding during the Song dynasty (960-1279), Patricia Ebrey opines
that "new notions of masculinity" were partly responsible, in particular the ideal of
an upper-class gentleman scholar who "might seem effeminate unless women could
be made even more delicate, reticent, and stationary" than their male counterparts.
Gail Hershatter's study of an emerging modern consciousness in twentieth-century
Shanghai shows how "men defined themselves in relationship to each other" by
embracing rituals that either celebrated courtesans or criticized prostitution. lO
Rather than examining a flashpoint of historical change, the three articles in this
Forum explore fault lines and contradictions embedded in the structures of ordinary
life in latc impcrial and carly modcrn China. Each helps thc rcadcr to scc why, in
a sex-segregated society, male bonds embodied particular kinds of tensions. By
showing how gender relations were constructed in relationships among men, the
authors also raise new questions about Chinese women's history.
A FOCUS ON THREE DIFFERENT VENUES in this Forum enables Adrian Davis, Lee
McIsaac, and Norman Kutcher to defamiliarize and reexamine Confucian norms
governing human relationships in male culture. The three venues of male bonding
their articles consider are the family (fraternal bonds between siblings), sworn
brotherhoods or secret societies (fictive kin bonds or bonds between surrogate
brothers), and friendship (bonds between male friends). These three venues are the
sociological outcome of three grand structures or processes that framed human
action in late imperial China: the family system, the civil service examination
system, and patterns of male sojourning. Each of thcsc structures cnsured that men
spent most of their sociable time with other men, not with women. Let us begin by
reviewing these structures briefly.
In the Chinese family system, parents' foremost obligation was rearing a male
heir to carry on the descent line. This imperative introduced a decided preference
for sons into reproductive decisions, especially among ordinary commoners with
limited means. As a consequence, practices ranging from neglect of daughters to
female infanticide skewed the sex ratio in most Chinese populations, leaving large
numbers of unmarried men competing for a relatively small pool of eligible brides.
Meanwhile, in the absence of a respectable alternative to marriage for women,
more than 99 percent of women in Chinese society became wives or were "married"
as concubines. An endemic pool of young, rootless single males, the demographic
casualties of this marriage market, flocked to towns and cities looking for work,
homeless and vulnerable." They supplied the membership of the secret societies
to Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Song
Period (Berkeley, Calif., 1993),41-42; Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity
in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, 1997), 11-12.
II Ted A. Telford, "Covariates of Men's Age at First Marriage: The Historical Demography of
Chinese Lineages," Population Studies 46 (March 1992): 19-35; Telford, "Family and State in Qing
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-FIGURE 1; The Peach Garden Oath, in which the Three Kingdoms heroes Liu Dei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei
pledge themselves to brotherhood in the cause of righteousness. Woodblock print in an edition from the Yu
family publishing house, Jian'an, Fujian (fourteenth century). Reprinted in Zhonggllo banhua shi tll III
[Illustrated record of the history of Chinese woodcut illustrations], Zhou Wu, ed. (Shanghai, 1988), vol. 2:
456.
studied by McIsaac. The Chinese government kept an eye on this group, especially
in crisis periods of the sort McIsaac examines. Unemployed vagrants and homeless
China: Marriage in the Tongcheng Lineages, 1650-1880," Institute of Modern History, Academia
Sinica, eds., Family Process and Political Process in Modem Chinese History, 2 vols. (Taipei, 1992), 2:
921-42.
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people, and other persons who were not safely rooted in families and stable
agrarian communities, were always sccn as potcntial rebels or bandits.12 Therefore,
it must be stressed that this particular venue for male bonding, with its attendant
tensions and manifest instability, was continuously reproduced as a result of China's
normative family system and its normal functioning.
In China's late imperial culture, where elite mobility strategies focused on the
civil service examination system, schooling for clitc males past thc agc of ten or so
took place almost exclusively in academies and schools outside the home, with the
sole aim of training students to pass.13 An examination degree was a prerequisite
for a position in government in late imperial times, and government was the most
prestigious career open to elite men. 14 The civil service examinations and the
educational institutions that prepared men to sit for the exams were exclusively
male domains, since no women held posts in the government's civil service. In the
schools and in the examinations themselves, men established hierarchical bonds
with other men through patronage, mentoring, and "pupilship" or "discipleship."
They learned to compete against one another for recognition and status even while
forming self-conscious bonds of solidarity and friendship, based on common
examination year, common teachers, common schools, and so forth. Here, too, as
young boys (as we learn from the great eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red
Chamber), they formed their earliest emotional attachments outside the family. IS
In other words, like the family system, the civil service examination system
sustained both the bonds that engaged men as comrades and the conflicts that set
them at odds as competitors. Examination training socialized men to bureaucratic
norms and public service. It also introduced them to the niceties of personal
connections and patronage that were keys to success in the cumhersome government apparatus where they had to negotiate their careers.
As for male sojourning, in China's core towns and cities with ready access to trade
and transport networks, commoner males routinely traveled abroad to engage in
husiness or the trades, joining the elite travelers studying for or taking examinations
and holding office. By contrast, most respectable women-whether elite or
commoner-remained at home. This pattern of sex-segregated male sojourning was
once again a function of the normative family system, devoted to perpetuating and
preserving the purity of male descent lines. Cloistered daughters in respectable
families were married by parental arrangement to young men from comparable
hackgrounds. Keeping a daughter respectahly at home was one key to an advantageous marriage alliance. Meanwhile, as men sojourned abroad, they relied not on
women but on male networks based on common native place or common
occupation. Guilds and native-place associations (often translated as Landsmannschaften, citing the nearest European counterpart) supplied welfare, medical
Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare oJ 176R (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
Ichisada Miyazaki, China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China,
Conrad Schirokauer, trans. (New Haven, Conn., 1963).
14 Ho Ping-ti, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 136R-J9JJ (New
York, 1962).
15 See Cao Xueqin, The Story oJ the Stone: A Chinese Novel in Five Volumes, David Hawkes, trans.
(vols. 1-3) and John Minford, trans. (vols. 4-5) (New York, 1973-86),1: 177-82,205-16.
12
13
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•
FIGURE 2: "Four Brothers Happy Together." Auspicious New Year painting (color woodblock print)
celebrating brotherly harmony among the many sons in this family. Qing dynasty. Reproduced in Zhonggllo
minjian nianhua shi tu lu [Illustrated record of the history of Chinese New Year paintings], Wang Shucun, ed.
(Shanghai, 1991), vol. 2: 656.
care (including death benefits), networks of friends who spoke one's native dialect,
and connections to powerful people who could serve as advocates and protectors. 16
In sum, as a result of these three grand structures, late imperial China was a
society where the dominant channels of social mobility ensured that men would
spend the better part of their social lives interacting exclusively with other men.
This was a culture where we could expect homo social bonding to reach the state of
a very high art. The way men learned to be social was in the company of other men.
Let us now turn to the three venues for male bonding examined in the following
essays.
16 See especially Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in
Shanghai, 1853-1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); on guilds, see Peter J. Golas, "Early Ch'ing Guilds," in
G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif., 1977), and literature cited
therein.
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ADRIAN DAVIS'S ARTICLE BEGINS WITH a crucial anthropological observation about
the Chinese family system, identifying thc tension that lies at its heart. Under the
rules of equal inheritance, brothers are "equal" as eo-parceners of their father's
estate. Under the rules of Confucian filiality, on the other hand, brothers are
hierarchically ranked siblings who must self-consciously address one another as
"elder" and "younger." It was not uncommon for family members to nickname boys
in the same generational cohort by birth order, hence "Big Eldest," "Little Fourth."
Brothers shared a common obligation of filial piety to their parents, but their
relationships to one another were highly differentiated. These differences were
exacerbated, ironically, by parental behavior, because Chinese parents made
differential investments in their male offspring based on practical assessments of
their chances for success in different occupations.17 Tracing these basic tensions at
the core of the Chinese family system, Davis stresses that fraternal relations were
negotiated and that legal cases reveal a variety of conceptions of fraternity.
Therefore, a central point we may take from his article is that little boys learned
about the strife and competition embedded in hierarchical adult male bonds from
their earliest childhood interactions with their brothers. Brothers' common moral
obligation to filiality instantly embroiled them in intense competition for parentalespecially maternal-affection and favoritism. Notice, too, that whereas most
studies of Chinese childhood focus on child socialization by parents, Davis's article
shows that much of child socialization occurred in sibling relationships, not
relationships with parents, and brothers socialized their brothers, often in spite of
their parents' intentions. Relationships between brothers were potentially subversive precisely because parents could not, in the end, control or monitor them; as I
have noted, male sibling relations bred conflicts that parents themselves exacerbated. 18 Fen jia-the division of the family estate contested by two or more married
brothers-is the emblem of the inability of parents ultimately to control these
competitive filial interests.
THE EXCLUSIONARY FORCES OF THE MARRIAGE MARKET-which discriminated harshly
against poor young men-explain why brotherhoods were so important in late
imperial Chinese society. But why were brotherhoods subversive? Lee McIsaac's
article on brotherhoods begins to answer this question by pointing out that the
language of secret societies used a contradictory code. When addressing one
another, society members used the terminology of loyalty and brotherhood, but
their codes of conduct invoked the virtues of friendship. That is, the oaths of sworn
brothers committed them not to brotherly fraternity but to the "common purpose"
(tong zhi) or "shared heart" (tong xin) of friends. In that sense, brotherhoods
17 G. William Skinner, "'Seek a Loyal Subject in a Filial Son': Family Roots of Political Orientation
in Chinese Society," in Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Family Process and Political
Process in Modern Chinese History, 2: 943-93.
IS Skinner, "Seek a Loyal Subject," 959-62, points out that the presence of a sister greatly reduces
the subversive potential of brothers' behavior in Chinese families and that, for that reason, Chinese
parents might find it highly dcsirablc to havc at least one daughter.
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display not the hierarchical arrangement of geese in formation (the metaphor for
brothers in the kinship system); instead, sworn brotherhoods fostered distinctive
relationships in which junior men "of common purpose" shared equally in a
common relationship of subservience and loyalty to a patron, or "elder brother."
McIsaac presents a range of possibilities for male bonding within the context of
sworn brotherhoods. At one extreme is the macho version. This is represented by
the coercive leadership style of the Robed Brothers, based on patronage and
protection serving the interests of elders. At the other extreme, though, we find
young boys at work as sailors, hoping only to avoid being attacked or even killed
when setting foot on a strange dock, or strategizing to escape conscription into the
Nationalist Army. What does this tell us about these brotherhood bonds? They
provided leadership opportunities, power, and perquisites for the few, protection
for the many. But they were also fragile bonds, easily quashed-as the Qing
government recognized-by seizing key leaders, or readily coopted-as Republican
leaders knew-to serve other goals.
Philip Kuhn's study of an eighteenth-century sorcery scare reveals dramatically
how brutal Chinese government and community opinion could be toward the
rootless and the homeless. 19 The marriage market ensured that virtually all of the
rootless and homeless poor were men. Their attachment to the language of
friendship and loyalty, which they used to create fragile bonds of patronage and
protection, is one of the great examples of the crucial function of male bonding,
enabling the survival of the most vulnerable members of the population.
More subversive than commoner brotherhoods, as far as the state was concerned,
was male bonding within elite circles of scholar-officials. In the Qing period,
"cliques" of men bound by a common "high purpose" (tong zhi) were condemned
and suppressed by suspicious Manchu emperors, who recalled only too well the
immense danger posed to the state by the Donglin faction and other groups
maneuvering for influence in the late Ming court.20 In a provocative essay on
friendship in the late Ming, when circles of "friends" were probably at their most
powerful, Joseph McDermott has shown how late Ming dissenters viewed friendship circles (wu dang) as a potential moral base from which to attack imperial
despotism. 21 Their focus on tong xin ("same heart-mind") led some of these men to
Kuhn, Soulstealers.
On factions in Chinese politics of this period, see David S. Nivison, "Ho-shen and His Accusers:
Ideology and Political Behavior in the Eighteenth Century," in Nivison and Arthur F. Wright, eds.,
Confucianism in Action (Stanford, Calif., 1959).
21 See Joseph P. McDermott, "Friendship and Its Friends in the Late Ming," in Institute of Modern
History, Academia Sinica, Family Process and Political Process in Modern Chinese History, 1: 67-96. This
notion can be traced at least as far back as the Song, when feelings of shared moral and intellectual
commitment formed the basis of thc "fellowship" joining Zhu Xi and others, who called themselvcs
devotees of "Daoxue" in order to "identify a particular tradition and fellowship distinct both from other
Sung Confucians and from conventional Confucians." Hoyt Cleveland Tillman selects the term
"fellowship" (conceding that he is not referring to an association or a society) to underscore the fact
that the members had "a network of social relations and a sense of community with a shared tradition,"
on the basis of which they "forged personal, political, and intcllectual tics in a common effort to reform
political culture, revive ethical values, and rectify Confucian learning." Their bonds were strengthened
by a common meeting place (a local academy), rituals involving prostration to declare themselves
pupils of a common teacher, mutual aid (especially in careers), distinctive mannerisms and styles of
dress and deportment, and a special vocabulary and focus on certain issues. By the 1170s, they were
19
20
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FIGURE 3: Bo Ya plays the zither while Zhong Ziqi listens. New Year painting celebrating the friend who
"knows my sounds." Ink-line woodblock print, color-filled, nineteenth century, from the publishing house of
Yangliuqing, Tianjin. Reproduced in Zhongguo Yangliuqing muban nianhua ji [Album of Paintings of China:
Yangliuqing Woodblock New Year Pictures], Tianjin Yangliuqing hua she, compo (Tianjin, 1992), vol. 1: 14.
believe that only among friends could one's true heart-mind develop and reach its
full morally realized potential. Why? Friends do not have the demands and
expectations, nor does friendship entail the constraints, that are unavoidable within
the family or larger kin group, or in patron-client relationships such as teacher/pupil
(not to mention ruler/minister). To get clear in your thinking, to air your thoughts
freely, to square away your real values and affirm them, you need the support of
good, loyal friends.
the great power of elite friendship in its
paranoid reactions to factions (dang) and in its very successful campaigns to
suppress self-identified cliques of friends within the scholarly elite. 22 Yet despite
government proscriptions, intimate emotional relationships among men reached far
beyond the kinship system throughout the Qing period, and the quest for "someone
who knows my sounds" (zhi yin) runs through the memoirs of Qing literati. 23 In
THE MANCHU GOVERNMENT ACKNOWLEDGED
calling themselves "our faction" (wu dang). Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy
(Honolulu, 1992), 3.
22 In his study of Qing repression of factions, Nivison observes that the Qing government's concern
harked back to the keyword "same heart-mind" (tong xin), used to connote not only friendship but
political alliance by Ouyang Xiu in his famous essay on factions, written in 1044. Ouyang noted that
"inferior persons" join in temporary alliances to serve the same material interests but later turn on each
other when those interests diverge, whereas "superior men" form permanent bonds based on their
allegiance to a common dao-they are loyal and trustworthy. Nivison, "Ho-shen and His Accusers,"
218-32.
23 The phrase "knows my sounds" comes from the story of Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi, dating from at
least the third century BCE. Bo Ya was a gifted zither player who delighted in Zhong Ziqi's company.
When Bo Ya played with his mind set on Mount Tai, Ziqi said of his music, "How it soars!" When Bo
Ya played with his mind on the rushing rivers, Ziqi would say, "How it flows!" When Ziqi died, Bo Ya
broke the strings on his zither, because there was no one left in the world who could hear and
understand his music.
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men's culture, the oldest histories tell tales of mutual trust and reciprocal
obligation-like the story of Guan Zhong and Bao Shu recounted in Norman
Kutcher's article-that form the foundations of manly relationships. Sima Qian, the
author of China's first dynastic history, describes heroic knights-errant: "Their
words were always sincere and trustworthy, and their actions always quick and
decisive. They were always true to what they promised, and without regard to their
own persons, they would rush into dangers threatening others."24 Picking up where
these stories left off, the novel-as in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, All Men Are
Brothers, and Journey to the West-later celebrated bonds joining men of common
purpose, which McIsaac emphasizes in her study of brotherhoods. The Peach
Garden Oath of the heroes of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the righteous
cause of the "outlaws of the marsh," the epic search for Buddhist texts by the
irrepressible Monkey and his three unlikely companions-all dramatized for
readers the empathic emotional attraction between men who appreciate and play
off against one another's complementary qualities. 25 Robert Ruhlmann perceptively remarks, "Liu Pei, Kuan Yii, and Chang Fei [the three heroes who pledge an
oath in the Peach Garden], meeting for the first time and by coincidence, are
mutually attracted by each other's size and distinctive features ... Passionate and
sensitive, the heroes possess 'outstanding gifts of personality and talent, and the
resolution to behave on a level higher than that of the sages and the wise.' "26 Far
from supplying mere plotlines in novels, the desire for male camaraderie runs like
a theme through other literary genres, especially autobiographical writings and
poetry.27
Naturally, through the centuries, male bonds based on a common "high purpose"
sparked radical political action, the reason why Qing rulers suppressed factions.
Even so, writings on friendship-poems, essays, letters-continued to fill the
literary collections of Qing statesmen and scholars. Poignant and empathic, their
memoirs of one another's lives testify to deep emotional attachment. These
attachments came easily to men who spent their formative years in intimate contact
with other men: taking exams, traveling lonely roads, sheltering in the care of a
24 Translated in Lien-sheng Yang, "The Concept of 'Pao' as a Basis [or Social Relations in China,"
in Excursions in Sinf!logy (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 6.
25 See comments on the first two of these novels in McIsaac's article. All have been translated into
English. See Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, trans. (Taipei,
1969); and Three Kingdoms: China's Epic Drama, Moss Roberts, trans. and ed. (New York, 1976); Shi
Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong, Outlaws of the Marsh, Sidney Shapiro, trans., 2 vols. (Beijing and
Bloomington, Ind., 1981); and Wu Cheng'en, The Journey to the West, Anthony C. Yu, trans. and ed.,
4 vols. (Chicago, 1977-83).
26 See Robert Ruhlmann, "Traditional Heroes in Chinese Popular Fiction," in Arthur F. Wright, ed.,
The Confucian Persuasion (Stanford, Calif., 1960), 150-51. Ruhlmann is quoting the study by L. S. Yang
cited in what follows.
27 On autobiography, see Pei-yi Wu, The Confucian'S Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 59-60, 258-59. Poems about parting or separation celebrate the
devotion of friends, as Kutcher points out. They take as their tropes historical figures like the Han
dynasty prisoners of war Su Wu and Li Ling, forced to part after nineteen years in captivity. See Arthur
Waley's translation of the poem attributed to Li Ling, "Parting from Su Wu," in Chinese Poems
(London, 1962), 44. A fine example from the Qing literati is the poem by Qiao Lai translated by
Jiaosheng Wang, in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, Victor H. Mair, ed. (New
York, 1994), 366-67.
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benefactor, struggling to support a distant wifc, parents, and childrcn, lending each
other money, doing one another favors. Reflecting on his bonds with his own male
friends, the eighteenth-century scholar-official Hong Liangji counted only one
"friend for life," and a single "soulmate," along with two "close" friends, five
"literary" friends, and five others whom he considered purely "ceremonial." He
describes his "friend for life" as a person who was "not influenced by glory or
humbleness, not affected by decline or prosperity; a man who does not measure
your worth by the vicissitudes of your career, nor judge your character on the basis
of your public record." Of the "soulmate," Hong remarks, he "has nothing in
common with me, whether dwelling at home or traveling abroad, and yet the
expressions from his heart may be trusted. He is a man who may go in many
different directions but who throws himself completely into whatever he does."
Hong's "close" friends he describes briefly as "men of high caliber, able to discern
right from wrong and sort out the evil from the good." His literary friends were a
mixed lot: one was inspiring because he "freely poured out his feelings," three
others were good to read classical texts with, and the last was "utterly correct" in
everything he did and everything he wrote. As for the "ceremonial" friends, "our
relationships have very clear limits set by the demands of etiquette and propriety."28
Hong Liangji's brief sketch on friendship sums up the tensions identified by
Kutcher: true friends are rare, and friendships are strained by the hierarchical
social pressures bearing down on all men who strive for success. Reading to the end
of Hong's little essay, I was surprised to encounter his final words: "The spirit of
ancient men of high purpose continues through the ages. This poor body of mine
may be cast aside, but my pledges of trust will endure." Perhaps genteel scholars
like Hong Liangji always measured their relationships with other men against the
standard of the heroes of Sima Oian's day, or other heroes of time past-including
those who died as martyrs resisting the Qing conquest. Perhaps when they
conceived of friendship, they always imagined the ideal of the blood oath, signaling
integrity as weJl as nurturance and security.29
to neglected essays like Hong's, the studies of the male
bond in this Forum offer insights that invite deeper research into gender relations
and gender difference in Chinese history. As European and North American
historians have discovered, studies of men bring us back to women's studies with
JUST AS THEY CALL ATTENTION
2H "On Friendship" [Yuan you], "Juanshige wen, yiji, xubian" [Essays from the Pavilion of the Juanshi
Plant, Second Collection, Supplement], Shoujing tang edn., n.d., 4b-5a, in Hong Beijiang xiansheng yiji
[The collected works of Hong Beijiang (Liangji)], 18 vols. (rpt. edn., Taipei, 1969), 2: 944-45.
29 The blood oath of violent criminals, messianic cults, and idealistic rebels, in other words, also
quickened the emotions of friends bonded within the scholar-elite. See David Ownby, Brotherhoods and
Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China: The Formation of a Tradition (Stanford, Calif., 1996),
40-42. To a Qing dynasty rcader, refcrenccs to "ancicnt mcn of high purpose" would also recall the
valor of Ming loyalists. For a discussion of the political complexities of male friendship in the early
Qing, shadowed hy the Ming loyalist legacy, see Lynn A. Struve, "Ambivalence and Action: Some
Frustrated Scholars of the K'ang-his Period," in From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity
in Seventeenth-Century China, Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, Jr., eds. (New Haven, Conn.,
1979).
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new questions. What, for example, was the metaphorical language of female bonds,
and how did that language differ from its male counterpart? How did sworn
sisterhoods differ from brotherhoods? Were the kinship bonds between sisters less
fraught than those joining their brothers? How did homo social bonds-male and
female-serve to produce and reproduce gender performance?
We know that both men and women in late imperial times formed bonds reaching
beyond the domain of kinship and the domestic sphere. To cite some telling
examples: James Polachek has shown how the "aesthetic fellowship circles dominant in Ch'ing examination-elite culture," especially the Xuannan Poetry Club,
provided the framework for new forms of political activism in the nineteenth
century. J oscph Eshcrick's study of the Boxers dcscribes local cultures where
all-male martial arts and sectarian groups came together and flourished. 3D As for
women, Dorothy Ko has identified bonds of friendship among female poets, many
sustained by exchanging writing rather than personal contact. And novels describe
the female networks joining ordinary commoners, including the female pilgrimage
societies organized for religious journeys to Mount Tai. 31 Does this mean that
whereas male groups moved easily into arenas of political action or violence,
women's bonds propelled them into venues that were primarily literary or religious?
Not exactly, for female bonds could be subversive as well. The marriage-resisting
sisterhoods of thc Canton Delta, and the orgiastic Buddhist female cults who
worshiped Guanyin with rites of self-immolation, explicitly challenged the normative Confucian order. 32 This raises the ironic possibility that men's commitment to
the language of Confucian loyalty rendered even their most radical collective bonds
less dangerous than those formed by women, who used a language alien to the
vocabulary of Confucianism.
In twentieth-century China, political and economic transformations opened new
arenas for female bonding, as Emily Honig showed in her study of sisterhoods
among female factory workers. 33 Yet public culture in contemporary China remains
dominated by structures formed of male bonds. Not only is this true of the
government bureaucracy and the Communist Party elite, it is also the case
throughout rural China's villages. In a landmark study of the decades preceding and
following the Communist Revolution in the countryside (cited elsewhere in this
Forum by McIsaac), Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden pointed
30 Scc Jamcs M. Polachck, The Inner Opium War (Cambridgc, Mass., 1992), 39-61; and Joscph W.
Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 38-67, 216-22. Paul A. Cohen's
recent study of the Boxers analyzes another aspect of Boxer male culture: avoidance of female
pollution. See Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York,
1997), 128-45.
31 Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China
(Stanford, Calif., 1994), 179-293; Glen Dudbridge, "Women Pilgrims to T'ai Shan: Some Pages from
a Seventeenth-Century Novel," in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, Susan Naquin and Chiin-fang Yii,
eds. (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
32 See Janice E. Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies
in South China, 1860-1930 (Stanford, Calif., 19R9); and James A. Benn, "Where Text Meets Flesh:
Burning the Body as an Apocryphal Practice in Chinese Buddhism," History of Religions 37 (May 19lJ8):
295-318.
33 Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills. 1919-1949 (Stanford,
Calif., 1986), 209-17.
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FIGURE 4: Battle scene from one of a series ()f late Qing n()vels celebrating the exploits of sworn brothers who
fight to aid righteous officials in bringing criminals to justice. Ink-line woodblock print, color-filled, late
nineteenth century, from the publishing house of Yangliuqing, Tianjin. Reproduced in Zhongguo Yangliuqing
muban nianhua ji [Album of Paintings of China: Yangliuqing Woodblock New Year Pictures], Tianjin
Yangliuqing hua she, camp. (Tianjin, 1992), vol. 1: 80.
to an enduring pattern of male dominance in rural China. Above all others, they
stressed, the Communist Revolution in the villages empowered violent young men.
In their words, "certain strands of violence-prone village culture working through
militia, military and a myth of Mao ... bound tough village males to the socialist
state" by making them the primary beneficiaries of revolutionary change. 34 This
"macho-military" culture dominated by bonds among young males has in recent
years reached from the countryside into the cities through networks of job-seeking
male migrants. Male culture has not always dominated rural China. Before the
Communist Revolution, informal female networks used gossip to check the
behavior of wayward or abusive village men. Margery Wolf's studies of women in
rural Taiwan were the first to identify the power of these female networks, in which
mothers and their daughters-in-law minutely discussed and passed judgment on the
activities of their menfolk, then used their influence to check men's abuses, mainly
through gossip and shamc. 35 After the Communist Revolution, however, collective
labor reduced the discretionary time women could devote to either laundry or
gossip.36 This suggests that one unidentified consequence of the revolution in China
was the erosion of possibilities for female bonding, and the enhancement of the
power of males who forge bonds. Whether this was in fact the case, and whether,
34 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New
Haven, Conn., 1991), xxiii, see also 271-72, 277-78.
35 Wolf, Women and the Family, 38--52, esp. 40.
3(, William L. Parish and Martin King Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago,
1978), 242-43.
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if so, it remains true in the post-Mao reform era, is only one of countless questions
raised by the provocative studies of the male bond in this Forum.
Studying men, in other words, is not as easy as it looks. In the field of Chinese
history, moreover, women's studies can yield at best an incomplete understanding
of gender relations, absent a balanced attention to the homosocial bonds that
shaped men's culture.
Susan Mann is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and
past president of the Association for Asian Studies. She is the author of
Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (1997) and of the
AHA pamphlet Women's and Gender History in Global Perspective: East Asia
(China, Japan, Korea), and co-editor of Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on
Gender in Chinese History (Berkeley, Calif., forthcoming, 2001). Mann is an
active participant in the U.c. Davis Cross-Cultural Women's History Program.
She is currently working on the history of a family of women writers in
nineteenth-century China.
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