Kang Tongbi

Kang Tongbi a.k.a. Kang Tung Pih (Chinese 康同壁 pinyin Kāng Tóngbì), 1887 - 1969, was the daughter of Kang Youwei, a Chinese reformer and political figure of the late Qing dynasty and early Republican era.

Early life

She was born in 1887 from Kang Youwei's first wife (as an official of the Imperial era, Kang kept several wives and concubines), Zhang Yunchu. She was his second daughter. While official documents in the US indicate that her birth was on February 5, 1888, this may be due to discrepancies between the Chinese and Western calendars. Her place of birth was Nanhai, Guangdong Province, but she mostly grew up in Beijing and in foreign countries.

Her father, along with his disciple Liang Qichao, was put in charge of China's political reform by the Guangxu Emperor in 1898, but political infighting at the Qing court caused the reform movement to be summarily aborted within 103 days of its start, and a death warrant to be put on Kang Youwei. He hastily left the country with his family and would spend the next 14 years travelling the world.

Her father, a noted calligrapher, taught her traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. A few of Tongbi's own paintings survive.

In 1903, while the Kangs were in Japan, teen-aged Tongbi met Luo Chang, a young staffer at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo, and the two were married soon thereafter. There is no indication of the match having been arranged by their respective families, as was usually the case among upper-class Chinese at the time. Tongbi followed her husband when the latter was assigned to the Chinese consulate in Denmark, and later moved on to the United States where her father already was. Tongbi enlisted at Barnard College in 1907, where she was the first Asian student ever. She got a degree in journalism in 1909. The same year, she gave birth to her daughter Luo Yifeng.

Activities in China

Little information is available in English on Kang Tongbi’s life after she left Barnard College, but it is known that after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, she returned to China, where she continued to agitate for feminist causes. She was deeply involved in the women’s movement in Shanghai, advocating women’s rights through meetings and speeches. She was an editor and major contributor to "Nüxuebao" (Women’s Education), one of the first women’s journals in China.

After the journal folded, Kang Tongbi continued to crusade for women’s rights. Like her father, she took a stand against the practice of foot-binding, establishing and co-leading a "Tianzuhui" (Natural Feet Society) with other Chinese feminists that served as a base of operations for their activities. She was part of the effort to organize the various Shanghai women’s groups into a united Shanghai Women’s Association, which petitioned the Nationalist government in Nanjing for a new constitution under the slogan, “Down with the warlords and up with equality between men and women”. Kang Tongbi is also remembered for her biography of Kang Youwei, published in 1958.

She stayed in mainland China after the Communist takeover in 1949. While she seems to have been left alone by the new regime for a while, she was jailed during the Cultural Revolution and died on August 17, 1969, possibly as the result of ill treatment.

Trivia

Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a character named Kang Tongbi in his counterfactual novel "The Years of Rice and Salt", a speculation on how world history might have turned out if Western Civilization had been wiped out by the plague epidemic of the 14th century, but it is not known whether the reference is deliberate.

ources

*Barnard College online archives: [http://www.barnard.edu/archives/persons.htm#top]
* [http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/admiss/International/ Barnard College Office of Admissions. “International Students.”]
*Lo, Jung-Pang. "K’ang Yu-Wei: A Biography and a Symposium". Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1967.