Mediating female martyrdom: the making of Hui Xing and the gendered politics of modernity in late Qing China

This article examines how late Qing Chinese media transformed the story of Hui Xing – a Manchu woman who committed suicide in 1905 to sustain a women’s school – into a moral allegory of modern womanhood and patriotic virtue. By interrogating a meticulously compiled archive of newspaper reports, memorial writings and theatrical adaptations, this study explores how Hui Xing’s death was reframed within emerging discourses of gender, education and nationalism across media networks. The research contends that late Qing media reconstructed female martyrdom by navigating competing understandings of morality and public responsibility. Whereas traditional martyrdom functioned as a state-sanctioned performance of morality governed by dynastic norms, the press reframed Hui Xing’s sacrifice in accordance with emerging nationalist concerns, rendering her death a pragmatic catalyst for institutional and educational reform. Furthermore, the study highlights how the theatrical staging of her life extended the reach of print culture and produced distinct affective regimes, emotionalizing modern citizenship through spectatorial engagement. By synthesizing feminist historiography with media and performance analysis, the article demonstrates how print culture and stage performance collectively produced new imaginaries of feminine heroism. Ultimately, Hui Xing’s mediated afterlife reveals the tensions between moral virtue and female agency that shaped Chinese modernity, laying the foundation for her subsequent canonization in the later twentieth-century historical compendiums.