Early-twentieth-century China witnessed a surge of invented or reformulated terms and concepts that reinterpreted long-standing gender norms or principles in various ways. The differentiation between “he” and “she” in Chinese had appeared early in 1870s. The imperative to invent a Chinese equivalent to the female pronoun “she” in English was facilitated by the intensified language and cultural interactions between China and the West from the late nineteenth century onwards.
