Writing gender into Chinese script: The feminine third-person pronoun in modern Chinese language reform

Abstract

This article examines the contested formation of the feminine third-person pronoun, 她, within the broader project of linguistic nationalization in early twentieth-century China. Rather than treating the pronoun as a byproduct of “modernity” or linguistic Europeanization, I situate its emergence within negotiations among orthography, diverse speech forms, and the construction of a national language. The analysis centers on three moments: Zhou Zuoren's 1918 experiment with “他_女,” subsequent debates over pronunciation, and Li Jinhui's 1923 pedagogical song “He. She. It.” I argue that the new character functioned as a practical instrument through which reformers probed the stylistic and structural capacities of the emerging written vernacular. Its eventual loss of phonetic distinctiveness, however, exposes a persistent tension among script, the modern written vernacular, and the spoken standard. By tracing these developments, the article shows how the material reconfiguration of modern Chinese unfolded through orthographic practice and invites renewed reflection on the unsettled relation between writing and speech in linguistic reform.