The legendary life of "the first female killer of the Republic of China"

Her husband was the mayor of Nanjing Special City of the Republic of China.

Her fame, though, didn't just come through the mayor's wife

With the title, her own experience is a legend.

Assassinated Yuan Shikai and was known as the "First Female Killer of the Republic of China";

Became the first female doctor of law in Chinese history,

The first Chinese female lawyer to stand in court;

Later, she became the first provincial-level female administrative officer during the Republic of China period.

The first female president of the district court and the director of the two departments of trial and prosecution...

She is Zheng Yuxiu, a Republic of China strange woman.

Rebellious by nature, he wrote a letter to retire from marriage

In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, with the influx of many Western social concepts, the idea of equality between men and women gradually took root in China, and the status of traditional Chinese women also entered an important turning point. Many women who embraced new ideas began to fight for their rights, and Zheng Yuxiu was one of them.

Zheng Yuxiu was born in 1891 in Guangdong to a family of eunuchs, his father was an official of the household department, and the concept of family etiquette was very strong. Her mother often taught her to recite the scriptures, but Zheng Yuxiu was rebellious by nature and ignored the discipline of "three from four virtues". At that time, the custom of foot binding was still prevalent, but despite the soft and hard treatment of her family, Zheng Yuxiu, who was only five or six years old, resolutely refused to let her feet be wrapped, and her family had no choice, and she escaped from the fate of foot binding.

When Zheng Yuxiu was 13 years old, her grandmother betrothed her to a family affair, and the marriage contract was the son of the governor of Liangguang at that time. Zheng Yuxiu was quite dissatisfied with this, and even wrote to her fiancé himself, stating that the marriage contract was dissolved. As soon as this move came out, there was an uproar. After that, Zheng Yuxiu was forced to run away from home.

In 1907, she and her sister went to Japan to study, came into contact with the League, which was active in Japan at that time, and agreed with Sun Yat-sen's anti-Qing revolutionary ideas, believing that only by completely breaking the decadent order could a new China be established. A year later, through Liao Zhongkai's introduction, she joined the league, a bourgeois revolutionary party led by Sun Yat-sen. Soon, Zheng Yuxiu returned to China to engage in revolutionary activities.

Revolutionary heroine, assassinated Yuan Shikai

At the beginning of the late Qing Dynasty, due to limited resources, the means of struggle were mainly armed uprisings in local areas, supplemented by the assassination of key government officials, and the forces of the Qing government were attacked in this way. As the elite of the League, Zheng Yuxiu participated in the activities of the revolutionaries to assassinate important members of the Qing court many times, and Wang Jingwei assassinated the regent Zaifeng, and the bomb he used was zheng Yuxiu who used his ingenuity and cleverly used various connections to evade layers of scrutiny before it was delivered to Wang Jingwei's hands. During the Xinhai Revolution, Zheng Yuxiu secretly transported arms and information for the revolutionaries many times, and personally carried out assassinations of important government officials of the authorities.

Zheng Yuxiu's first assassination target was Yuan Shikai, who later became the president of the Republic of China and was restored to the throne. At that time, the Xinhai Revolution broke out, and the anti-Qing revolutionary forces throughout the country developed rapidly, causing great panic in the Qing government, and Yuan Shikai was appointed as the prime minister of the cabinet, responsible for suppressing the activities of the revolutionaries. As a result, Yuan Shikai became the primary target of assassination by the revolutionaries.

In order to succeed in killing Yuan Shikai, Zheng Yuxiu and other revolutionaries arranged in advance for the volunteers to be divided into groups and prepared to throw bombs at the predetermined location. On January 15, 1912, when everything was ready, Zheng Yuxiu suddenly received an urgent order from the Beijing branch of the League to abandon the assassination of Yuan Shikai. Because the latest situation shows that it is the sectarian socialist party headed by Liangbi who really hinders the peace between the north and the south, not Yuan Shikai. Zheng Yuxiu acted overnight to inform his comrades-in-arms, but some of the comrades who did not receive the notice had begun to carry out the assassination operation according to the original plan, and Zheng Yuxiu had no choice but to rush to the scene.

Due to changes in planning, the assassination ended in failure, and more than a dozen people involved in the operation were arrested. Zheng Yuxiu cleverly evaded the pursuit with his own intelligence, and through foreign friends who were journalists, he released 7 of his comrades-in-arms on bail in their name.

Later, when formulating a plan to assassinate Liangbi, Zheng Yuxiu learned the lesson. Thanks to adequate preparations, the operation was finally successful.

"With a rose as a gun"

Zheng Yuxiu's assassination angered Yuan Shikai. In 1914, Yuan Shikai decided to assassinate Zheng Yuxiu, and in this case, Zheng Yuxiu was forced to leave the country.

Having been engaged in the revolutionary cause for many years, Zheng Yuxiu suddenly found that it is not enough for a person to have enthusiasm, but must have advanced ideas and technologies to have a real place to use, so she chose to study in France. Zheng Yuxiu entered the Sorbonne University, the predecessor of the University of Paris in France, and received a master's degree in 1917. In 1924, she received her Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Paris, becoming the first female Doctor of Laws in Chinese history.

Zheng Yuxiu's study abroad career in France can be described as colorful, especially at the "Paris Peace Conference" in 1919, her righteous deeds became a highlight of her life.

At the Paris Peace Conference, China, which had participated as a victorious country, was finally treated as a defeated country, especially after the news spread that the Shandong Peninsula, which had been forcibly occupied by Germany, was assigned to Japan, and there was an uproar among the French Chinese, and Zheng Yuxiu, who was studying in France at this time, was elected as a representative to negotiate with Lu Zhengxiang, head of the Chinese delegation. On the evening of June 27, more than 300 students studying in France and Chinese workers surrounded Lu Zhengxiang's place and demanded that he not sign the peace treaty. By this time, however, Lu Zhengxiang had received a signal from the Beijing government to sign the peace treaty. Zheng Yuxiu was in a hurry, folded a rose branch in the garden, hid it in his sleeve, resisted Lu Zhengxiang, and said in a strong voice: "You have to sign, I will not let you go with this gun." In the end, the Chinese representative did not sign the peace treaty, retaining the right of the Chinese government to take back Shandong. Later, Zheng Yuxiu also brought this rose branch back to China and hung it in the living room for many years.

The first female lawyer in China

In France, Zheng Yuxiu also found his lifelong partner, and later her husband, Wei Daoming. Wei Daoming became the mayor of Nanjing Special City in 1930.

Wei Daoming's little Zheng Yuxiu is nearly 10 years old. After graduating from Jiangxi Provincial No. 1 Middle School, he followed his father to Beijing and studied at the Law and Literature Hall. In 1919, he went to France to study, and was introduced to Zheng Yuxiu by his fellow villagers. The two often discussed their homework together, and Wei Daoming's words were pertinent and unique, and she was able to convince Zheng Yuxiu, who had a high self-esteem, so that she changed her original attitude towards him and regarded Wei Daoming as a confidant.

In 1926, Wei Daoming received a doctorate in law from the University of Paris, returned to China in the autumn of the same year, and soon Zheng Yuxiu also returned to China, and at the end of the year their joint law firm opened. At that time in Shanghai, because foreigners enjoyed consular jurisdiction, there was a good chance that chinese and foreigners would suffer losses in a lawsuit, and ordinary lawyers were unwilling to accept such a thankless case, but Zheng Yuxiu and Wei Daoming did not believe in this evil, and did not hesitate to fight with the consuls of Britain, France and other countries, and won rights for the Chinese several times, so Wei Zheng Law Firm became famous. In 1927, Zheng Yuxiu and Wei Daoming married in Hangzhou.

At that time, although the social status of Chinese women has been improved, they can engage in various freelance occupations, but the profession of lawyers has always been a forbidden area for women, such as the statutes promulgated by the Ministry of Justice in 1915, which clearly stipulate that lawyers should be "men over the age of twenty in the Republic of China", from the perspective of legal professions, the "should" in the legal provisions is actually the necessary meaning, so the "sexism" clearly stipulated, which shows the tradition of the social atmosphere at that time.

That being the case, there is always a way. After carefully studying China's judicial system, Zheng yuxiu found that as a Chinese licensed as a French lawyer, she could appear in the courts of the French Concession. As a result, Zheng Yuxiu became the first Chinese woman to set foot in this forbidden area.

As more and more cases were handled, Zheng Yuxiu gradually became a barrister who was counted at that time. For example, in the then famous Divorce Case of Mei Lanfang Meng Xiaodong, Zheng Yuxiu, as Meng Xiaodong's agent, mediated between the two parties, and the case finally ended with Mei Lanfang paying Meng Xiaodong 40,000 yuan.

In addition to his career as a lawyer, Zheng Yuxiu also held a number of important social positions in the nationalist government in Nanjing at that time. In 1927, Zheng Yuxiu successively served as director of the Shanghai Court, member of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee of the Kuomintang, member of the Jiangsu Political Committee, director of the Jiangsu Local Procuratorate, president of the Shanghai Provisional Court and president of the Shanghai Issuance Institute, of which the president of Shanghai Fazheng University served for 7 years. In addition to teaching, she has published two books that have contributed significantly to the Chinese legal profession.

With the establishment of the Legislative Yuan of the National Government in Nanjing in 1928, Zheng Yuxiu was appointed as a member of the Kuomintang legislature and a member of the Construction Committee. In January of the following year, Zheng Yuxiu, Fu Bingchang, Jiao Yitang, Shi Shangkuan and Lin Bin were designated to form a civil law drafting committee to be responsible for the drafting of civil law.

Zheng Yuxiu died in Los Angeles on December 16, 1959, at the age of 68. The couple wandered away in their later years, and no matter where they went, Zheng Yuxiu carried the French rose branch with him. The long-dried branches were framed by her and hung on the living room wall until her death. Some people say that this Republic of China woman, who floated and floated in high society, still misses the historical moment of "using roses as guns" and those long-lost happy and vengeful times.

Source: Web Author: Liu Dian