Tang Qunying (; 8 December 18713 June 1937) was the first female member of the Tongmenghui (Chinese Revolutionary Alliance), a secret society and underground resistance movement founded in Tokyo, Japan by Sun Yat-sen and Song Jiaoren in 1905. Tang has been cited as one of the "best-known women activists in modern Chinese history".
She was chairwoman of the Women's Suffrage Alliance, an organization created by the merger of the Nanjing Women's Alliance, the Women's Backup Society, the Women's Martial Spirit Society, and the Women's Suffrage Comrades' Alliance in 1912. In 1913, she founded Women’s Rights Daily, Hunan's first newspaper for women.
For her contributions in overthrowing the ruling dynasty in China, Sun Yat-sen personally met her and acclaimed her work and then she was awarded a second-class Order of the Precious Brilliant Golden Grain.
Early life
Tang was born on 8 December 1871 in Hengshan County, Hunan, as Tang Gongyi. She was the third of seven children (three sons and four daughters), and the second-to-youngest daughter of a general during the Qing Dynasty rule. At the age of three, she had already started displaying rebellious behaviour to her mother.
She was very close to her father who educated her and her sisters along with his sons, treating them as equals. As a child, her father recited to her the tales of Mulan and the Yang Family Warriors, to name a few. She was excellent in her studies and was also a poet. She was a very talented speaker from a young age and her quick and sharp replies and arguments early in life reflected her keen and sharp intellect. She wrote the first poem "Getting up at Dawn" when she was 15, which was praised by her father and it laid the foundation for her advocating women's rights. She learned horse riding and swordsmanship which prompted her father to call her “female knight-errant” but her mother called her "wild like a monkey". She was regarded as a child prodigy.
Personal life
After her father's death in 1890, she married Zeng Zhuangang (the cousin of Zeng Guofan) in 1891, at the age of 19. He was from the neighbouring village of Heye (Lotus Leaf), from an elite family well connected to another famous feminist leader of China, Qiu Jin. This association benefitted her with new political thoughts and contacts. Her first and only daughter died at the age of three in 1896 due to fever and her husband followed suit in 1897. She then returned to her parental family, though it was not customary to do so, (her feminist friends like Qiu Jin encouraged her to become independent) to the "Three Good Fortune Hall". She devoted herself to serious studies of books, and caring for her mother and brothers. She read widely on reforms in society. She catalogued her father's books and wrote poetry. Her friend, Qiu Jin, also supplied her books from Japan when she was living in Beijing, prior to her departure to Japan. One of the books which influenced her most was the Book of the Great Unity, which vividly brought out the condition of women in China, and she wrote a poem giving her thoughts on the effect of the book under the title "My thoughts on reading Datong shu." Her mother died in 1918.
Career
In 1904, at the age of 33, she went to Japan to pursue her studies at Shimoda Utako's Practical Woman's School in Tokyo, which promoted conservative reformist ethos of "good wives and wise mothers." This was not to her liking and then she moved to Shanghai with her brother Qian. She formed a circle of her old friends from China with similar ideology to bring about change in Chinese society and political scene. She quickly became an active member of Revolutionary Alliance of which she was the lone female member, who was affectionately addressed as “Elder Sister Tang”, and played a pioneering role. In 1905, her revolutionary approach saw her learn the handling of weapons and bomb manufacture; the Russian anarchists were the trainers and Tang took up this training with zest and zeal, in which many of her feminist friends also took part. Then the suffrage movement was launched from 1910 to 1913 and many of her friends also joined the movement. Within the exile community, Tang, with her proficiency in political journalism, played a key role in giving a positive boost to the movement.