Sorry for my poorly english, I'm a shenmue fan from china.
And I just heard something about the prototype of Xiuying, from Gadio, a chinese TV-game podcast.

In Yu-san's tour to china, his tour guide Ms. Zhang told him the past of her family. Because her grandfather had worked for japanese during the WW II, her parents suffered persecution and died in the cultural revolution. And her elder sister joined the Red Guards (红卫兵, the group killed Ms. Zhang's parents) after that.
Yu-san got inspiration from Ms. Zhang, he planned to design a character named Zhang Hongyu (张红玉) for Virtua fighter 3.
Finally Zhang Hongyu became Hong Xiuying, and there is no doubt that Ms. Zhang's family story is the source of the plot of Xiuying and Ziming.

The interviews of Yu suzuki in beep MD magazines:
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1jGMuZSa

So he was gonna put that Zhang Hongyu in VF 3 or 4 but then he decided on making Vanessa for VF4 and some other character (Aoi?) for VF3 and leave Zhang Hongyu for Shenmue. Great find! =D>

Also, if some of you want to read up on the youth movement Ms. Zhang's sister joined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Guards_%28China%29

Yes, and the original news source is an interview of Yu-san in one vol. of the Beep! MegaDrive magazine 1994.
The interview mainly talk about Yu-san‘s tour to china.
A friend of mine have the magazines, I'll upload the photo of the article few days later.

Interesting stuff, welcome!

Can you post a link to the Podcast?

OK, the podcast is in chinese. You can listen to it in their website and iTunes.
http://www.g-cores.com/volumes/15746
https://itunes.apple.com/cn/podcast/ji-he-wang-gadio-you-xi-guang-bo/id420660752?mt=2

The part about Xiuying and Ms. Zhang starts at 46:20.

In fact, there is more historical references of chawan sign except Kenji. But them were almost all written in Chinese or Japanese.

The oldest one is 清稗类钞(Qingbai leichao/Qing Petty Matters Anthology), an unofficial history of the Qing Dynasty by Xu Ke. In Qingbai leichao, you can find chawan sign and Black words in the chapter of 会党 Huidang.
Chawan sign and black words were traditions of the Chinese secret society, like 哥老会 Gelaohui and 洪门 Hongmen.

Chawan sign and black words were also mentioned in 洪门志 Hongmen Annals and 中国秘密社会史 The history of Chinese secret society.

Update:
The interviews of Yu suzuki in beep MD magazines:
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1jGMuZSa

I'd be interested! I bought the vinyl and only played it once via usb turn table ;) and as you can imagine, It didn't sound great. I mainly bought it to add to my collection, but have since framed it and will be putting it up on my wall some time later this week. I'll post the pics here once I do it.

link: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1o822bZc password: spum

Here it is. Please forgiving me forgot it so long. This rip was reoceding with tascam da3000, and the pickup was VdH COLIBRI XPP.