She was born as He Ban in Yizheng, Jiangsu, but she took the name He Zhen (何震, He "Thunderclap") when she married the noted scholar Liu Shipei in 1903.

She published a number of strong attacks in anarchist journals on male social power, arguing that society could not be free without the liberation of women.

[1] Zhen was born into a prosperous Jiangsu family and given a good education in the Confucian classics, despite being female.

She married Liu Shipei in 1903 and moved with him to Shanghai, where she continued her education at the Patriotic Women's School run by Cai Yuanpei.

She and Liu fled from the Manchu government to Tokyo in 1907,[2] where she became a mainstay of a Chinese anarchist group and a major contributor to many journals.

She contributed to Tianyi bao (Natural Justice), which published from 1907 to 1908, as well as to the Paris journal, Xin Shiji (New Century or New Era), edited by the anarchist group led by Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui.

[3] Zhen also founded the Women's Rights Recovery Association (Nüzi Fuquan Hui), which called for the use of force to end the male oppression of women, as well as resistance to the ruling class and capitalists, while endorsing traditional values such as perseverance and respect for the larger community.

[2] In 1909, after a falling out with the conservative but deeply anti-Manchu people scholar Zhang Taiyan, she and Liu returned to China to work with the Manchu government.

Following Liu's death from tuberculosis in 1919, she was rumored to have become a Buddhist nun and ordained under the name Xiao Qi.

She believed that gender and social class were inseparable, and analyzed the misery Chinese women had endured for millennia from the perspective of labor.

Zhen distinguished herself from contemporary feminist thinkers in that she considered anarchy the one condition in which women could be fully liberated.

She argued that throughout history, Chinese women were relegated to closed quarters, like the home, and prohibited from connecting with the outside world.

Concerned with the commodification of women's bodies, she emphasized labor as an autonomous and free practice among humans, contrasted with its commodified model in classical and neoclassical political economy.

Once they were in office, the governmental system would lure these leftist parties towards power and authority, and neglecting their fellow suppressed commoners, including working-class women.

Zhen concluded that women's liberation could only be achieved through the action of the common people, without the intervention of the government.

[15] Zhen attempted to rebuild a system where women could actively participate in society and have real power to decide their future.

The second aspect is against the resignification of women in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese liberal feminist circles.

Although society and most Chinese scholars at that time widely judged and rethought the flaws and backwardness of Confucianism, only women in the urban areas gained more rights to improve their social status and living condition.

[16] He Zhen's 1907 article On the Question of Women's Liberation sharply pointed out facts about marriage in China and the western world.

"[5] He Yin Zhen wrote that this promiscuity of Chinese women may be a result of their long-term cloistering in the home.

Her essay On the Question of Women's Liberation, which appeared in Tianyi in 1907, opened by declaring that "for thousands of years, the world has been dominated by the rule of man.

She even said: "If we examine the past we see that troops are good for nothing but rape, kidnapping, looting, and murder" to defend her view that antimilitarism benefited all, since the military was responsible for major atrocities in China.

In this essay Zhen quoted a poem by musician Cai Wenji to depict the ongoing carnage faced by women who were captured by the invaders.

"Ever since [Japan] began deploying troops in recent years, the number of prostitutes In the country has been growing by the day".

[23] Zhen correlated militarism and prostitution, as wives were faced with the loss of their sons and husbands with little compensation.

Zhen also addressed the tragedies women faced as households were separated and brought together again by loss, particularly using poems to illustrate the sentiments of Chinese writers who had faced these tragedies Within "The Feminist Manifesto",[23] also published in 1907, Zhen tackled the institution of marriage as a root source of the inequalities between man and woman.

Zhen then addressed objections that might be made to her proposals: Tianyi bao, first published in Tokyo, Japan in 1907, is often considered the first anarchist journal in the Chinese language.

[24] Zhen partnered with her husband, Chinese anarchist and activist Liu Shipei, to publish the journal.

During the early 20th century, many of the feminist writers of Chinese society were men, which made Zhen's perspective much more radical, as she advocated reform through complete overturn of government and capitalist systems.