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In the People’s Republic of China, one of the front lines to embrace Western feminist theories was a group of scholars who were trained in foreign languages and literature, and interested in gender studies. These Chinese scholars’ translation of feminist thoughts into Mandarin Chinese and their analyses and revisions of Western feminist theories were important vehicles that helped to bring feminist thoughts from the West into China. This front line was a key factor in terms of how Western feminist theories were transferred into China. After Chinese women had the opportunity to hear and learn about feminist theories, the way in which Western feminism was received in China began to merit further investigation. In order to analyse the details of Chinese feminist literary research in an accurate way, I surveyed all the articles related to purely Western feminist literary theories in Wenyi Lilun (Literary and Artistic Theories) during the 1990s. According to my survey, this journal preferred French feminist theories in the decade immediately following the Tiananmen incident. I aim to examine how and why this phenomenon might be the result both of Communist China’s «open door policy» to welcome the West, and Chinese society’s fear of social movements.