Born a year before Qiu Jin's execution, Xie Bingying (1906–2000) lived in a fashion that Qiu Jin had struggled to make possible for other Chinese women. During her long life, only six years short of a century, Xie Bingying secured for herself a school-based education, trained and fought in the military, wrote and published creative works, polemical articles and autobiographies and maintained her commitment to fighting for China's independence from foreign control and freedom from internal chaos. Bingying demonstrated that women could achieve both literary (wen) and martial attributes (wu) – qualities, when found together, were traditionally the twin preserves of men in their performance of ideal masculinity. The matchmaker who negotiated her first marriage declared in a ‘premature triumph’ to her new mother-in-law: ‘Not only is she perfect in both literary and martial skills, she can handle every household chore.’ Xie Bingying escaped this arranged marriage and secured a divorce to make a love match and an independent life. Her publicly recognised exercise of both literary and martial talents was sustained over decades as she worked at the front lines of battle in three major military events – the 1926–1928 Northern Expedition in which Nationalist and Communist troops joined forces to crush the disparate warlords and unify the nation under one rule, the 1932 Shanghai Incident to repel Japanese attacks on that city and the full-scale Japanese invasion of China in 1937.

Xie Bingying is one of modern China's most remarkable women – a fighter for women's freedom from patriarchy and for China's freedom from chaos and foreign occupation. Her story shows us that the singular position Qiu Jin had created, as a feminist anti-Qing warrior, had by the 1920s become a more common phenomenon. In Xie Bingying's generation, women's participation in the military was an organised, group activity, not a lone act of a knight errant. Their patriotism was directed at unifying their republic, rather than overthrowing a monarchy, and this republic was one in which men and women would be equal partners. Bingying and her comrades-in-arms aimed to overthrow men's dominance of women through their participation in expelling militaristic aggression from China's territory.

Women's involvement in wartime activities puts them in complex moral positions. Any belligerent activity for either side renders them unconvincing as victims of enemy aggression – the premier feminine role in the myriad reinventions of war. Those who take up arms, women soldiers, are contained within the moral order of gendered warfare as noble, courageous but unusual women. Those who trade in secrets are more problematic to manage in the post-war narratives and oftentimes provoke uncomfortable debates about morality, loyalty and sexual virtue. The woman warrior prepared to take a bullet on the front line is a far less ambiguous moral figure than the woman spy who moves information between opposing forces.

Zheng Pingru (1918–1940) is one such contested Nationalist honey-trap spy from the murky world of Shanghai during Japan's occupation of the city. Pingru's mission was to facilitate the assassination of Ding Mocun (1901–1947), a fearsome security chief-cum-gangster who was collaborating with the Japanese. Japan attacked Shanghai in mid-1937, extending its ambitions to dominate China and its resources. The Japanese took control of the Chinese sections of the Shanghai in 1937 and at the end of 1941 their control reached Shanghai's foreign settlements – the British controlled International Settlement and the French Concession. Japan remained in charge of the city and its population until the end of World War Two in 1945. In this complex context multiple groups competed to negotiate better terms with the Japanese, resulting in a pro-Japan government being formed in 1940 under the one-time Nationalist Party leader, Wang Jingwei (1883–1944). This ‘national’ government's members are today still derided as ‘collaborators’ and ‘traitors’. Throughout these years Shanghai was dominated by a brutal group of men, including Ding Mocun, comprising a security apparatus of secret police, assassins and gangsters. Shanghai was a city of drugs, murder, duplicity and terror.

Shanghai's pro-Japan Security Police executed 23-year-old Zheng Pingru in 1940 after a failed assassination attempt on Ding. In 1946, at the end of the War of Resistance against Japan, her execution came to public attention during the trials of ‘traitors against the Han people’.In the trial against Ding, her mother, Zheng Huajun, asserted Pingru's integrity as a courageous ‘patriotic daughter’ and demanded that Ding be held to account for her illegal killing.

All military operations require spies to gather and deliver information about enemy activities. Espionage and counter-espionage are central to the war effort and women are regularly involved in all aspects of intelligence work. As we saw in the preceding chapter both the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained extensive underground networks of agents and informers throughout the wars against Japan and each other. Frederic Wakeman noted that the Nationalist Party's Central Statistics Bureau (CSB) included women both as agents and as sex workers for his male agents. And, as we saw in Chapters 5 and 7 above the sexualisation of women's espionage was explicitly discussed in the popular and political press. During war ‘our’ use of women as sex spies is comparatively unproblematic and the existence of women sex spies is a topic that is debated publicly and in a matter-of-fact fashion as a necessary feature of war strategy. But, once the fighting ceases, the woman sex spy's utility ends and discussion about her work for ‘us’ becomes problematic. The post-war rewriting of history routinely depicts ‘our side’ as clean fighters and ‘their side’ as the source of ‘dirty tricks’ – with activities like sex spying and opportunistic or punitive rape associated with the latter. This reappraisal of sexuality and women sex spies occurs because once peace is restored national, social and moral borders need to be reaffirmed. ‘Our’ soldiers were heroic and ‘our’ women chaste, while ‘theirs’ were dastardly and cheap. Memories of the humiliation of enemy invasion of national borders, the forced fragmentation of families and the degradation of the national citizens’ bodies are all reframed within the rubric of noble, sustained resistance and ultimate, victorious repulsion. Evidence of the woman sex spy's solicitation of this very same degrading penetration and her duplicity in tricking men – even if they are enemy men – blurs the moral borders that are being actively rebuilt. The incorporation of women sex spies into a history of a glorious and upright national struggle is difficult given the high moral value placed on women's sexual loyalty in most societies, including Chinese society.