On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, Chinese authorities jailed five feminist activists for planning to hand out stickers against sexual harassment on subways and buses.
China’s leaders evidently thought they could crush a nascent feminist movement by detaining five young women, but they were sorely mistaken.
News of the arrest of the “Feminist Five” spread swiftly, sparking protests and expressions of diplomatic outrage around the world.
Faced with enormous global diplomatic and social media pressure, the Chinese government released the women — Li Maizi (李麥子), Zheng Churan (鄭楚然), Wei Tingting(韋婷婷), Wu Rongrong (武嶸嶸) and Wang Man (王曼) — after holding them in a detention center for 37 days.
Four years later, against all odds, the fledging women’s rights movement has not only survived an intense crackdown by the government, but grown larger.
China has no press freedom, no freedom of assembly, no independent judiciary and the world’s most aggressive system of Internet censorship and surveillance.
Beijing perceived the threat from feminist activists to be so dire that in May 2017, the People’s Daily Online — the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party — published an announcement from the vice president of the All-China Women’s Federation warning that “Western hostile forces” were using “Western feminism” and the notion of “putting feminism above all else” to attack China’s views on women and the country’s “basic policies on gender equality.”
In January last year, thousands of students and alumni in China — women and men — signed #MeToo petitions at dozens of universities, demanding action against sexual harassment, but many of them were deleted by censors soon after being posted on social media.
Late on the night of International Women’s Day last year, a Chinese microblogging site banned the most influential feminist social media account, Feminist Voices (女權之聲), because it “posted sensitive and illegal information.”
The following day, the group messaging app WeChat banned their account as well. At the time the ban was imposed, Feminist Voices had more than 180,000 followers on the microblogging site and more than 70,000 followers on WeChat.
The shrinking public space for discussing women’s rights in China makes it even more extraordinary that a feminist movement is able to survive at all.
The party-state’s ongoing crackdown on women’s rights activists is particularly ironic, given the central importance of gender equality during the communist revolution and the early Mao Zedong (毛澤東) era, following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
The early communists enshrined “the equality of women and men” in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China and the new government introduced ambitious initiatives to put women to work in building the new communist nation.
By the 1970s, the Chinese government boasted the biggest female workforce in the world. However, with the onset of market reforms and the dismantling of the planned economy in the 1980s and 1990s, gender inequality came roaring back, leading to the rise of the contemporary feminist movement.
While prominent male human rights activists have emerged over the years — most notably, the Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), who died in custody in 2017 — very few ordinary Chinese citizens knew about them or could relate to their abstract goals.
By contrast, feminist activists today take up causes that do not directly confront the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, but have broad resonance with millions of young, urban women across China, such as sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, and gender discrimination in employment and university admissions.
The feminist activists have cultivated a networked community numbering into the thousands, revolving around university students and graduates.
They have become effective organizers and arguably pose a larger, more complicated challenge to the communist regime than the male activists who preceded them.
“The feminist movement is about women’s everyday concerns and building a community, rather than just having one or two famous individuals who can enlighten everybody else,” said Lu Pin (呂頻), the founding editor of Feminist Voices, who is completing graduate studies at the State University of New York at Albany.
“Chinese women feel very unequal every day of their lives, and the government cannot make women oblivious to the deep injustice they feel,” Lu said.
Even as the government cracks down on feminist organizing, ordinary women are increasingly sharing information and voicing their anger about sexism on the Internet — even if they do not embrace the label of “feminist.”
One of the most prominent voices in China’s #MeToo movement is 25-year-old Zhou Xiaoxuan, known in China by the nickname Xianzi (弦子), a former intern at China’s state-run television agency who has accused a famous TV host, Zhu Jun (朱軍), of forcibly groping her.
Rather than backing down when Zhu sued her for defamation, Zhou decided to file a counter lawsuit, charging the host of hurting her right to personal dignity.
As the #MeToo lawsuits continue, Lu describes the government’s backlash against feminism as “loose on the outside, tight on the inside” (waisong neijin, 外鬆內緊), meaning that the authorities want to crack down while giving the world the impression that they are not too repressive.
Meanwhile, Lu foresees a difficult battle in the years ahead.
“We must out-survive our enemies,” she said.
Leta Hong Fincher is the author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.
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