Tcheng Yu-hsiu was a feminist, the first female lawyer and judge in Chinese history and anarchist revolutionary.
Life
Early Life
Tcheng was at first home-schooled and then enrolled at a formal school in Beijing. She refused to have her feet bound or to marry the man picked by her grandfather. Her family sent her to a mission school in Tianjin, where she learned English but refused the religion.
Political Radicalisation
In 1912, she met the anarchist and revolutionary organizer Li Shizeng and enrolled in the school to prepare to go to France on the Diligent Work Frugal Study program. The school was the first in China to be co-educational. She was one of the handful of women to go to France on the program. She wrote later that she and Li were part of a terrorism cell which was involved in the attempted assassination of the emperor of China.
Later Life
In Paris, she worked with the Chinese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and received her doctorate of law from the University of Paris in 1926. She married the lawyer Wei Tao-ming and they moved to Shanghai to establish a law firm. She became a the first female judge in China. She died of cancer in San Francisco, 1959.[1]
Influences
Her writings are widely credited with influencing the implementation of women's rights into law in Vietnam.[1]