Legal feminist empires: Zheng Yuxiu and the gendered legal networks of republican China

Dr. Zheng Yuxiu held a series of unprecedented positions: China’s first female Doctor of Law, female lawyer, female judge, the only female to have contributed to the drafting of the Republican Civil Code, and the first female law-school dean. Yet historical memory has polarised her image, allowing the romanticised ‘rose-pistol’ assassin and identification as a diplomat’s wife to eclipse the jurist, educator, and legislator. This article recovers Zheng’s professional life through her revolutionary transformation, Sorbonne doctorate, international and legal roles, and landmark legislative and litigation work. It reads these episodes as nodes in the female legal network she assembled. Methodologically, it treats the controversies around Zheng, the archive’s loud celebrations, and its silences as part of a single gendered economy of memory. Doubts about women’s authorship, fractured records of women entering law, and the interplay of silence and noise reveal the tensions faced by Chinese women intellectuals in transition. Zheng’s significance lies less in her individual ‘firsts’ than in the institutional pathway she made reproducible: a cross-generational network of scholars, lawyers, revolutionaries and others. Her network offers another women’s-rights narrative beyond revolution and a Chinese counterexample to Euro-American models of feminist legal evolution.