The period from 2003 to 2007 marked an unprecedented change in the People’s Republic of China with the dawn of what came to be known as the rights protection movement.
This shift was precipitated by the Sun Zhigang (孫志剛) incident, when a college graduate from Wuhan was arbitrarily arrested, detained and murdered for not having documents to prove his right to work in Guangzhou.
This led to a public outcry and, surprisingly, resulted in the urban repatriation law being scrapped the following month. Yu Jiang (俞江) — one of three legal scholars, along with Teng Biao (滕彪) and Xu Zhiyong (許志永), who petitioned the National People’s Congress Standing Committee to revise this inhumane legislation — said in a 2013 interview that “an important legacy of the incident was the rise in ordinary people’s awareness of their rights over the past 10 years.”
Despite the reformist hope for more substantive change, the tide began to shift when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) quashed the March 2008 Tibetan uprising in the lead-up to the Beijing Summer Olympics in August that year.
Perhaps more significantly, several months after the Olympics, prominent writer Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), together with more than 300 Chinese intellectuals and activists, published the historic Charter 08, which demanded an end to one-party rule, and the adoption of human rights protections and meaningful democratic reforms.
Although not as high-profile or widely covered by international media, a number of Chinese intellectuals such as Li Shenzhi (李慎之), Mao Yushi (茅於軾) and even former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) personal secretary Li Rui (李銳) had publicly called for democratic reforms a decade earlier in 1998.
While former Chinese leader Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) cracked down on Internet-based dissent in China after coming to power in 2002, a systematic purge of these reformist elements, with zero lenience for “rights agitators,” was not unleashed until Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) came to power.
In his book Rethinking Chinese Politics, Joseph Fewsmith says: “On July 9, 2015, the party would crush the rights-protection movement, arresting 300 lawyers. No action more clearly illustrated the limited tolerance under Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Hu Jintao and the turn to harsh repression under Xi.”
A few months earlier, Chinese authorities had arrested prominent LGBTQ feminist activist Wei Tingting (韋婷婷) and several of her colleagues, who came to be known as the Feminist Five.
In her 2018 book Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, Leta Hong Fincher recounts how Lu Jun (陸軍), cofounder of the Chinese antidiscrimination non-governmental organization Yirenpin (益仁平), told her: “China’s feminists today have a new enemy: Xi Jinping. And this enemy is very powerful.”
The situation has only worsened under Xi’s pet project to resurrect unwavering obeisance to the CCP in all matters of life. Together with fomenting populist nationalism and opposing the “corruption” of his enemies, strengthening the party has been key to Xi’s overall governance strategy.
In a Brookings Institution report from September last year titled “Show and Case: How Beijing Approaches Gender Equality and LGBT Issues on the World Stage,” Yale Law School researcher Darius Longarino notes: “As LGBT issues have become more visible globally, China’s UN delegates have also begun to make statements voicing opposition to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, reaffirming that China does not view homosexuality as a mental illness, and even claiming that the government supports LGBT organizations in their work.”
As Longarino’s research discloses, however, this attempt by the CCP to garner soft power abroad is a pure facade the party-state uses to bamboozle the international community.
We saw this clearly when news quickly circulated about censors putting the kibosh on sexual minorities in China this week by deleting the WeChat accounts of numerous tongzhi (LGBT+) student groups across the country.
For many, this move harkens back to when Sina Weibo announced in April 2018 that they would remove homosexual content and then a year later blocking lesbian content (both of which they later walked back due to a backlash) as well as the sudden shutdown of Shanghai Pride last year.
Chinese journalist Jiayun Feng suggested that “WeChat’s move against LGBT+ communities comes amid increasingly strident official discrimination and widespread homophobia in Chinese society.”
While a growing number of Chinese young people are LGBT-friendly, tongzhi still face considerable obstacles from their conservative families and the state.
By now it has become painfully clear that the CCP’s modus operandi is to swiftly denounce any group calling for rights, or just greater social space, as having been incited by “hostile foreign forces.” This hackneyed response is obviously a strategy to diffuse opposition, but it also functions to erase the agency of Chinese citizens who exercise their own minds.
As one activist in Beijing told me, LGBT+, feminism and gender equality issues all fall under “hostile” as an umbrella term. Exasperated at this blow to the LGBT+ community, a student from central China retorted: “To put it simply, under Xi Jinping, the CCP has become fascist-ized” in its sweeping ideological campaign.
In an open letter on Wednesday, one Chinese social media user, writing under the pen name Zitian (梓湉), lamented the suppression of these important social issues: “Under the intensely burning light of the Party, they have turned to ash after all,” Zitian wrote.
Zitian’s online profile description states: “Hoping to flee ASAP.”
Another gay student from northern China told me that after he saw the government announce its “three-child policy” in May, he knew that feminists and LBGT+ groups would be targeted.
Given the self-inflicted demographic crisis created by decades of strictly enforcing a one-child policy, the CCP must now corral the masses to follow its latest pro-natalist policies.
Thus, feminists and tongzhi are not just potential sources of ideological divergence, but can now be cast as existential threats to the future of the Chinese nation.
The regressive objectives of authoritarian leaders — from Thailand to Russia, China and beyond — are increasingly meted out these days through sophisticated forms of digital repression.
Unfortunately, as Steven Feldstein concludes in his book The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance: “For states with highly developed coercive capacity, the emergence of formidable technological tools presents new opportunities to cement their power.”
While many activists around the world are digitally savvy, the CCP is uniquely positioned with its “Great Firewall” to thwart Chinese digital space as it sees fit. Virtual private networks, widely known as VPNs, are still available, but they do not offer a comprehensive alternative to connect online for most people in China.
As we assess these ominous changes under Chairman Xi from the vantage point of Taiwan and those clamoring for “cooperation” across the Taiwan Strait, we would be wise to heed the warning of the late Chinese political scientist Tsou Tang (鄒讜).
In the 1991 book Contemporary Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective, Tsou reflected on what appeared to be a willingness by CCP leaders to compromise and make concessions after China’s “reform and opening up” policy was launched in the late 1970s.
Yet, in light of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, he cautioned that such posturing should be understood as “tactical measures that did not lead to permanent institutions and fundamental processes according to which all political forces would have to conduct their contestations, promote their interests, and accept the results.”
Thirty years later, Tsou’s words ring even truer today than they did back then.
Taiwanese tongzhi have fought too hard and too long for the legal gains and social progress they have made to be hoodwinked by false promises of “prosperity” and “a separate system” dangled by CCP leaders and unification stalwarts in Taiwan under the mirage of the so-called “1992 consensus.”
Ultimately, this most recent clampdown is not merely an isolated case of an anti-LGBT measure, but rather, as China academic Perry Link astutely points out, should prompt “the logically prior question of whether the CCP is accurately seen for what it is.”
What happened this week to tongzhi in China is a stark reminder that defending Taiwanese sovereignty is the only way to preserve LGBT rights for the people living within Taiwan’s archipelago.
Adam K. Dedman is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. His research explores “the China factor” within Taiwan’s LGBT social movement.
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