In 1948, in anticipation of their victory in the civil war, the communist authorities controlling Harbin City opened a memorial hall called ‘The North East Martyrs’ Museum’ to mark those who had died in the struggle against the Japanese and the Nationalists. The woman guerrilla fighter, Zhao Yiman (1905–1936), occupied a significant part of the exhibition space – lodged, as it was, in the very same premises in which she had been tortured during interrogation by the occupying Japanese twelve years earlier. The major thoroughfare leading to the museum is called ‘Yiman Road’ in her honour. In 1960 a museum also dedicated to her opened in her hometown, Yibin, in the western province of Sichuan and in 1996 a further commemorative building dedicated to her memory was opened in Shangzhi City – the location of key events in her heroic life and early death. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has built and sustained stories of Zhao for decades, consolidating her status as the premier communist woman warrior martyr right to the present.

During her lifetime, few people knew her name. Unlike the infamous Aisin Gioro Xianyu discussed in the preceding chapter, against whose Manchukuo state Zhao's forces waged their guerrilla battles, Zhao Yiman only became known years after her death when the People's Republic of China (PRC) commenced its memorialisation of wartime heroes. The PRC propaganda system adopts a ‘total propaganda’ approach – all ages, classes and localities are targeted with carefully constructed, subtly evolving messages using diverse media and formats. As well as the museums and memorial halls, she is the subject of two full-length feature films, multiple serialised comics, poems, paintings, textbooks, websites and biographies. The great wall of narrative surrounding figures like Zhao Yiman recreates war ‘memories’ as emotionally charged pedagogical experiences of political and moral self-improvement.

Her status as a guerrilla mother is central to her efficacy in the total propaganda system because it enables the CCP to prompt people's emotional responses around their fears of the integrity of their family units. The CCP positions itself within the propaganda narrative as a supra-parent caring for the national family.

Hua Mulan has entranced and intrigued generations of Chinese. Since the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534) stories of her remarkable adventures in the military realm, replacing her father in the imperial troops disguised as a man, have been a recurring theme in both elite and popular cultural forms, including poetry, drama, opera and more recently film, television series and video games. Mulan's continued popularity over 1,500 years, in part, can be credited to the flexibility of her story and its redactors’ enthusiasm to make adjustments to the plot line and narrative resolution. The various evolving renditions of her story inevitably illuminate the concerns of writers in specific historical and ideological contexts as well as their diverse artistic goals and commercial interests. As Wu Pei-Yi aptly put it, ‘She was, and still is, amenable to all forms of fantasizing and manipulation.

Over the centuries critics have identified a wide range of often-contradictory perspectives on the central significance of the Mulan story – from filial piety and feminism, to maidenly chastity and militarism, onwards through Marxism and patriotism. Distinct consistencies underpin this apparently paradoxical list and these reveal how the many women warriors of China's rich cultural heritage buttressed, rather than challenged, the existing social order. The presumed nascent feminism of China's iconic women warriors is counterbalanced by their stories’ role in reinforcing a male-dominated and masculinist gender order. While figures like Hua Mulan did inspire real women to take on new and different social roles – feminists in the early twentieth century explicitly invoked Mulan – the overarching narrative framing China's traditional women warriors consolidated rather than disrupted the status quo patriarchy. Mulan's story embeds militarisation into the core virtue of filial piety – respect for and obedience to one's parents and seniors. And, as we will see in the discussion of the twentieth-century renditions of her story, she is harnessed to promote ‘militarised filial piety’ as the modern social virtues of patriotism and sacrifice to the nation-state. Hua Mulan is ‘grandmother’ to all the later women warriors discussed in this book.The retelling of her story across multiple media in the twentieth century set the tone for popular culture and propaganda that used women warriors to promote the militaristic ideologies that support China's war system.

In the winter of 1947 a teenaged girl from a small Shanxi village was beheaded with a hay-cutter-turned guillotine – Liu Hulan was another victim of the bloody Chinese Civil War of 1946–1949 in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party vied for control over the country. Her membership of the CCP and active involvement in its armed struggle within the local People's Militia drew her into danger as the village came into Nationalist hands. Within weeks of her execution, the CCP mobilised the story of Liu Hulan to rally support for its campaign. Mao Zedong himself declared that hers was ‘A great life and a glorious death’ and personally penned the calligraphy of this epithet that now graces the various memorials and materials constructed and produced in her honour. A peasant girl of enormous courage and bravery, defiant in the face of death and resistant to her captors’ demands that she recant her communist beliefs and betray her comrades, Hulan has been hailed as a heroic communist martyr for well over half a century.

This chapter explores the use of the story of the girl warrior, Liu Hulan, to understand the CCP's militarisation of ordinary citizens – particularly rural dwellers. From the establishment of the PRC (People's Republic of China), the CCP and its military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), have maintained an extensive network of People's Militias – building off those that had operated in rural China during the wars against Japan and the Nationalist Party. The chapter shows that women warriors can be particularly effective in propagandising the ideal of ‘citizen soldiers’ because they are able to simultaneously invoke martial valour and virtues of the ‘hearth and home’ while also revealing the permeability of the boundaries between home and battlefield. In the case of the girl martyr/woman martyr warrior, we also see how proponents of militarisation promote the ideal of youthful passion and use the tragedy of early death as emotional hooks to draw the audience into sympathy with their ideology.

The People's Militia (minbing) is ‘a civilian mass organisation of politically reliable and physically fit men and women under the dual leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA’. Integral to the CCP's military and political success in the years leading up to 1949 the organisation became regularised and actively promoted after 1949.

There is a striking omission from the story of war presented in the narratives about the Chinese woman warriors and wartime spies – the question of whether the sacrifices required of people were ‘worth it’. Jay Winter's study of European memories of the so-called Great War shows us the considerable extent to which the validity of the war project was repeatedly questioned in art, literature and film. Was all the sacrifice in vain? Were the promises of glory simply orchestrated deceit and lies? He identifies the 1914–1918 war as the point after which ‘Slowly but surely, expressions of patriotism, or inhumanly idealised images of combat, suffering, and death as “glory”, began to fade away.’ Soldiers, their families, journalists and medics queried the validity of the butchering they had just experienced. In China's twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there has never been such a point of public questioning. People may have expressed their doubts in private but the public record of art, literature, film, school texts and journalism remains mute about the possibility that any of the conflicts of the twentieth century were in vain or that those who lost their lives died in anything less than heroic glory. Those now governing the territory on which the blood of millions was spilt, the People's Republic of China (PRC), are invested in an unproblematised glorification of war. The glue that binds the nation to its communist state comprises a complex amalgam of narratives of imminent military threats to China's sovereign borders and threatened treacherous destabilisation by spies in foreign employ, as well as a sustained education about how the military weakness of the Qing court allowed foreigners and imperialists to ‘carve up China like a melon’.

Since the mid-twentieth century these stories are bound together as ‘national humiliation’. Militarisation in twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ China is encased in teaching the PRC population that it has been shamed and degraded. Chinese leaders from both the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) teach people who could otherwise have thought of themselves as glorious survivors of foreign aggression that they have been humiliated by the military aggression of others.

In early March 1948 the Chinese press reported that the Manchu Princess Aisin Gioro Xianyu (1906–1948? 1978?) had been executed as a traitor to China. She was well known to ordinary Chinese through a media profile that crafted her as a dangerous, cross-dressing monster and femme fatale. One of dozens of trials investigating traitors held in the aftermath of the War of Resistance against Japan, Xianyu's generated huge popular attention and mobs forced their way into the Beiping (now Beijing) courtroom just to catch a glimpse of this evil, royal beauty. The mysterious woman they saw in the docks was dressed as a man illustrating her fame for skillful disguise. The legal case and media reports confirmed her treachery by studiously using her Chinese or Japanese names, Jin Bihui and Kawashima Yoshiko, rather than her Manchu name. The court ruled that Xianyu was guilty of spying for Japan, but she regarded herself as fighting to establish a Manchu state independent of China – a Manchu nationalist rather than a traitor to China. Xianyu's very public life and death encapsulate the dangers for individuals of mobile identity and ethnicity when wars change ‘national’ borders and complicate post-war memorialising.

From her earliest childhood in the palaces of the declining Qing court, Xianyu was trained to assume a leadership role within the Aisin Gioro imperial line that had ruled China since 1644. With the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 Xianyu was sent to Japan, a child of barely 7 years, as a member of an exiled imperial line seeking territory to rule. Her task was to become equipped with the linguistic, military, political and cultural skills to bring a new Manchu nation into being – and in March 1932 with the formation of the Japanese-controlled state of Manchukuo in the traditional homelands of her people, this goal seemed realisable. When Xianyu returned to China in 1927, aged in her early twenties, it was to live a dramatic life filled with cross-dressing, espionage, soldiering and myriad sexual liaisons with a domestic media profile to match.Outside of China also her fame grew and she became known variously as ‘the Joan of Arc of the Orient’ or ‘the Mata Hari of the East’ – the latter in reference to the Dutch ‘exotic dancer’ executed by the French as a German spy in 1917.

For centuries, women war fighters like Hua Mulan have featured prominently in China's literary, dramatic and historical texts and the woman warrior icon proved hugely popular with mass audiences. Yet curiously, as we saw in the previous chapter, such stories of fighting women operated in a cultural context where women, to use Qiu Jin's words, ‘are prisoners our entire lives, and beasts of burden for half of it’. The patriarchal and oftentimes misogynistic social order of dynastic China produced and sustained the martial female image in a complex discourse that nurtured the contradictions between idealised submissive women and romanticised powerful women. This resilient cultural tradition produced a situation in 1907 in which Qiu Jin (1875–1907) could describe her countrywomen as ‘still perishing in the darkest and lowest of the eighteen layers of Buddhist hell without showing any desire to climb even one level’ despite viewing dramas and hearing tales featuring strong, sword-wielding, fearless fighting women. Why? Because for centuries, China's women warriors, like Mulan, were exemplars of consolidation and defenders of orthodoxy.

Over the three decades of Qiu Jin's short life the woman warrior would assume new significances as a result of feminist notions of equal rights for men and women that flooded into China from Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The one-time diverting cross-dressing, magical swordswoman who avenged her brother, replaced her father and defended her lord and master in countless opera stages around the country was confronted by Qiu Jin – a knife-wielding, gun-toting feminist warrior who explicitly identified the male-dominated gender hierarchy as unjust and sought to overthrow it. As she wrote in one of her impassioned essays, ‘The man always assumes the position of power and the woman the position of slave…. Alas! Dearest Sisters, no one in any other country would willingly bear the sobriquet “slave”, so why should we carry it with such docility and without feeling its shame.’

Qiu Jin's incorporation of a feminist political platform into the existing woman warrior narratives was undoubtedly inspirational at the start of the twentieth century. In China, feminism emerges as a militaristic movement at the hands of Qiu Jin.

Women soldiers and wartime spies challenge foundational gender norms in their daring deeds and dramatic actions – so it is little wonder that stories about women's involvement in wartime action attract instant popular interest all around the world. The vision of a woman killing another human being affronts long-held views about women as life-givers rather than harbingers of death. Envisioning female bodies in military uniforms challenges normative ideas about feminine beauty and grace. Contemplating women risking their lives undermines the notion that such courage is primarily a manly attribute. Imagining the adventures of the beautiful and sexy undercover agent thrills audiences as they see conventional sexual morays crumble in the face of service to the nation. How can a woman kill? How can she lead in battle? Will she have the courage to fight? How can she sacrifice her virtue to trade sex for secrets?

In China the popular fascination with women who go to war has existed for centuries. They filled the pages of classical novels, frequently appeared in operas and plays, and in our current-era populate movies, television series, propaganda posters, computer games and schoolbooks. Interest in women warriors and wartime spies shows no sign of abating in the twenty-first century despite the dramatic changes in gender norms that have occurred during the last 100 years. All around the world, including China, women have become politicians, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landowners and scientists – roles previously prohibited to them. But none of these roles generates as much fascination as women's participation in warfare and espionage. In many countries, the armed forces remain one of the few professions where biological sex can still determine the nature of duties assigned – women are frequently prohibited from front-line combat. The People's Republic of China (PRC) is one such nation that limits women's combat roles – despite the extensive promotion of women as active war fighters in public narratives. This phenomenon tells us that war fighting continues to be intimately linked to notions of maleness and masculinity in ways that teaching, banking or administering are not.The symbolic power of the woman war fighter reveals that war and militarised violence continues to be structured around gender norms – indeed war needs gender norms to continue its logic. Conventional, some would say outdated, gender norms help governments and armed groups present war as an attractive option for conflict resolution to ordinary citizens.