Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- 1 Soldiering, war and gender in China
- 2 The archetypal woman warrior, Hua Mulan: Militarising filial piety
- 3 Qiu Jin: Transitioning from traditional swordswoman to feminist warrior
- 4 Xie Bingying opening public spaces to women Fighting patriarchy and fighting militarists
- 5 Aisin Gioro Xianyu: ‘Joan of Arc of the Orient’ or ‘Mata Hari of the East’?
- 6 Guerrilla resistance leader, Zhao Yiman: Warrior teacher and self-sacrificing CCP mother
- 7 Negotiating sexual virtue: The glamorous, honey-trap spy, Zheng Pingru
- 8 Ding Ling and Zhenzhen: Female chastity and good communist governance
- 9 Mobilising and militarising rural China through the girl martyr, Liu Hulan
- 10 Women warriors and wartime spies as tools for ‘total militarisation’: The Red Detachment of Women
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Ding Ling and Zhenzhen: Female chastity and good communist governance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- 1 Soldiering, war and gender in China
- 2 The archetypal woman warrior, Hua Mulan: Militarising filial piety
- 3 Qiu Jin: Transitioning from traditional swordswoman to feminist warrior
- 4 Xie Bingying opening public spaces to women Fighting patriarchy and fighting militarists
- 5 Aisin Gioro Xianyu: ‘Joan of Arc of the Orient’ or ‘Mata Hari of the East’?
- 6 Guerrilla resistance leader, Zhao Yiman: Warrior teacher and self-sacrificing CCP mother
- 7 Negotiating sexual virtue: The glamorous, honey-trap spy, Zheng Pingru
- 8 Ding Ling and Zhenzhen: Female chastity and good communist governance
- 9 Mobilising and militarising rural China through the girl martyr, Liu Hulan
- 10 Women warriors and wartime spies as tools for ‘total militarisation’: The Red Detachment of Women
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
All military operations require spies to gather and deliver information about enemy activities. Espionage and counter-espionage are central to the war effort and women are regularly involved in all aspects of intelligence work. As we saw in the preceding chapter both the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained extensive underground networks of agents and informers throughout the wars against Japan and each other. Frederic Wakeman noted that the Nationalist Party's Central Statistics Bureau (CSB) included women both as agents and as sex workers for his male agents. And, as we saw in Chapters 5 and 7 above the sexualisation of women's espionage was explicitly discussed in the popular and political press. During war ‘our’ use of women as sex spies is comparatively unproblematic and the existence of women sex spies is a topic that is debated publicly and in a matter-of-fact fashion as a necessary feature of war strategy. But, once the fighting ceases, the woman sex spy's utility ends and discussion about her work for ‘us’ becomes problematic. The post-war rewriting of history routinely depicts ‘our side’ as clean fighters and ‘their side’ as the source of ‘dirty tricks’ – with activities like sex spying and opportunistic or punitive rape associated with the latter. This reappraisal of sexuality and women sex spies occurs because once peace is restored national, social and moral borders need to be reaffirmed. ‘Our’ soldiers were heroic and ‘our’ women chaste, while ‘theirs’ were dastardly and cheap. Memories of the humiliation of enemy invasion of national borders, the forced fragmentation of families and the degradation of the national citizens’ bodies are all reframed within the rubric of noble, sustained resistance and ultimate, victorious repulsion. Evidence of the woman sex spy's solicitation of this very same degrading penetration and her duplicity in tricking men – even if they are enemy men – blurs the moral borders that are being actively rebuilt. The incorporation of women sex spies into a history of a glorious and upright national struggle is difficult given the high moral value placed on women's sexual loyalty in most societies, including Chinese society.
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- Information
- Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China , pp. 158 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016