Nation Precedes Gender?---Modern Chinese Intellectuals' Discourse on Gender and Nation

This research aims to explore the interactive relation between gender and nation in the discourse of the Modern Chinese intellectuals. Through details examination of the interactive discourse of gender and nation, this study seeks to demonstrate the inadequacy of the postcolonial critique of the nationalist bias on gender.;According to the gender analyses of the post-colonialists, gender and nation appear to be placed in opposition and conflict with one another. It is from this perspective of gender that many Chinese study scholars advance their critique on Chinese nationalism. However what I want to argue in this thesis is that such application of the post-colonial critique on gender and nation is over-representation of the gender/nation discourse in the context of Modern China.;In the first chapter of this thesis, I shall demonstrate how the discourse of Kang Youwei on "equality between men and women" has revised the conception of the "Confucian sage" for the alignment with the modern discourse on equality of gender. In the second chapter, I shall how Chin Sung-ts'en's dissemination of the conception of "Women's Right" has inspired the female elite to criticize the patriarchy in the context of the national discourse on Late Qing period. In the third chapter, I shall examine how Zhou Zuoren's discourse on women has, through his participation in the construction of the "New Sexual Morality" and his critique of the ideology of patriarchy, constructed the discursive foundation of female subjectivity during May Fourth period. And finally, in the fourth chapter, I shall explain how the discourse of the "female body" by Zhang Jingsheng reinstates female sexuality into the nationalism discourse and how such connection creates the site of liberation for female sexuality.;By analysis these four different intellectuals, this thesis has traced the development of these distinctive models of discourse on gender and nation, and demonstrated a mutually implicated relation between the two from the Late Qing to the May Fourth period in Modern China.