This Week in China's History: The March 18 Massacre and the Death of Liu Hezhen

March 18, 1926

There comes a time when the citizens of a nation deem their government unable or unwilling to effectively represent or lead them. In a stable democracy, this might lead to partisan action or electoral change: the sorts of democratic opportunity that many revolutionaries and activists in China sought in the early 20th century when they overthrew the ruling Qing dynasty. A hereditary monarchy — especially a non-Han Chinese one that had conquered the nation — could ignore the demands of the Chinese people, but a Republic, a Republic of China, would represent the best interests of the people and respond to their needs.

This might well have been the reasoning of Liu Hezhen 刘和珍 when she took to the streets in March of 1926.

It had been 14 years, almost exactly, since the last Qing emperor had abdicated, ushering in a republic that, in theory at least, would represent the will of the people. The theory, though, had been challenged from the very start. Women had been promised the vote in the new China, but that had been denied in the republic’s first months by the men who worked out the details of its structure. A 1913 “second revolution” that tried to thwart creeping autocracy failed. Song Jiaoren, the great hope for China’s future, was assassinated by an emboldened Yuan Shikai, who even declared himself emperor, but Yuan’s half-assed effort to restore the monarchy went comically, and tragically, awry. Leaderless and rudderless, the Republic devolved into China’s “warlord era,” with a revolving door of governments in Beijing and the country a patchwork of would-be states, fiefdoms, and battlefields.

Liu Hezhen, born in 1904, had been just a young girl when the Qing fell. She had grown in the turmoil of the Qing dynasty’s last decade and the fits and starts of republican revolution. Despite the chaos — maybe in part because of it? — she blazed a trail that would have scarcely been possible to earlier generations. She enrolled at the Beijing Women’s Normal College (now a part of Beijing Normal University), which had been founded just a few years earlier as the Imperial Women’s Normal School. According to historians Jiang Lijing and Wei Bin, this was the first institution founded by Chinese to provide higher education to women and also the first national institution of higher education for women in China.