Chinese Internet Feminism

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Chinese Internet Feminism is a colloquial term referring to feminist activity conducted over the Internet in China.

History of Feminism in China

Feminism began in China at the start of the 20th century with movements beginning to draw attention to women's rights and gender equality. Whilst in ancient China, women were subordinate and treated poorly, at the turn of the twentieth century, radicals and social reformers such as He-Yin Zhen and Qiu Jin advocated for recognising women’s civil, political and economic rights.. However, it was not until the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949 that the state actively mobilised women to bring about equality. Mao Zedong’s famous saying, “women hold up half the sky”, reflected the Communist regime’s emphasis on women’s role in society and the liberation of women as a marginalised group . Several vital pieces of legislation were enacted by the government that enshrined women’s political and civil rights and status as equal to men. Feminist activity during this period up to the end of the cultural revolution had been kept on the back foot. However, as China pursued more open policies like economic reform and modernisation, feminism re-entered the fray as Chinese women without socialist job protection became increasingly more vulnerable to market fluctuations and job losses . Despite women making up a large part of the national workforce, they still faced oppression and discrimination within the labour market and also within the home. The state’s commitment to national development and economic growth came at the expense of previous commitments to permanent state employment and welfare provision resulting in more women returning to the home with the expectation of childbearing . Whilst women clearly suffered societal setbacks, the feminist movement in the 21st century has been marked by a new wave of civic activism despite facing heavy censorship from the CCP. “Post-2000 feminism” or “new feminism” increasingly focuses on gender discrimination, domestic violence and sexual misconduct. Feminists in China have been using online platforms to challenge widespread sexism and unequal treatment even if they would not explicitly define themselves as feminists.

Involvement and use of Social Media

In 2022, 70% of the Chinese population are active internet users, most also using social media regularly. The number of social media users in China in the past few years has tremendously grown, with most of the Chinese population now using many platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, QQ and many more.

Although censorship within these social media outlets has stifled the spread of several posts on certain cases that feminists in China have been trying to spread, the proliferation of topics concerning the movement nonetheless has gained traction. In one case, a Tibetan farmer who ran a popular Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok) account was murdered on her live stream by her ex-husband who was filmed assaulting her. This led to a major backlash on social media and over 211,000 posts on Weibo were made under the hashtag #LhamoBill calling for the legislature to combat domestic violence and criticizing the authorities for their lack of effort in preventing such attacks from happening until it was censored and taken down by Weibo

Being the largest social media platform in China, Weibo is home to 598 million users alone with numerous celebrities and public figures having accounts on the platform with hundreds of millions of followers in several popular accounts. This has made Weibo the platform preferred by Chinese feminists such as Xiao Qiqi who garnered more than 2.3 million views on her #MeToo hashtag . It has also been an outlet for victims of sexual harassment and abuse with individuals such as Zhou Xiaoxuan who has 200,000 users following her account which is the average size for most of the accounts on Weibo that focused on women's issue . As such, Weibo has become the outlet for feminists and activists on gender equality to be able to connect with the wider Chinese public who now no longer see social media as ubiquitous.

Online Opposition and Nu Quan Movement

Social media sites like Weibo have served as a platform for women to advocate women's rights and share their experiences with sexual harassment, domestic violence, and gender discrimination, but at the same time, social media is also facilitating sexism, misogynism, and censorship of the feminist movement. It is thus both a tool for feminism and a tool for gender antagonism in Chinese society. Chinese women that are actively participating in this online feminist movement face backlash in the form of cyberbullying. One form of this cyberbullying is the phrase nǚ quán which is now used against women who speak up for feminism. ‘’Nǚ Quán’’ is the Chinese name for feminism literally means women’s rights, but internet users have replaced the word ‘’quán’’ which means ‘’rights’’, with the homophonous character meaning ‘’fist’’ creating a derogatory term for feminism. This is a way to describe feminists as hostile and nasty and is part of the stigmatization of feminism in China. The demonisation of feminism continues by the local media, which characterizes feminism as men-bashing and condescending towards women who put marriage above themselves. This characterisation of feminism is called pastoral feminism and often when somebody speaks up for women, they get labelled in this manner. This automatically delegitimizes everything they have ever said because people now view them as an extreme feminist, resulting in people moving away from calling themselves feminists. The discrediting and abuse of the feminist movement in China are in line with a broad gender antagonism in society with attitudes that see feminism as morally deviant, foreign-rooted, and associated with the upper class in China’s social media. Because of the scale of this abuse, Chinese feminist perceive and characterize the Chinese online environment as a masculine cyberculture that has the same patriarchal structure as the real world. Most online platforms such as Hupu, Zhihu and Tianya, are deemed misogynist and phallogocentric by Chinese feminists and only on Weibo do they feel like the feminist discourse is generally largely visible. This shows that it is not only the users that are active on these platforms but also the platforms themselves that are responsible for this misogynistic climate. This is often because of the control of the CCP on these platforms.

CCP Censorship of Chinese Internet Feminism

Censorship tactics employed by the CCP

One of the most prominent struggles currently faced by the online feminist movement within China is the surveillance and censorship tactics utilised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Since the introduction of the internet within China in the late 1980s, the CCP has progressively worked to limit citizens’ ability to access information online. Such tactics have come to be colloquially referred to as the ‘Great Firewall of China’; a term first used in 1997 by journalist Sang Ye. The term encompasses the technological and legislative actions taken by the CCP, in order ‘suppress dissent or expression that finds fault with the Chinese state, policies, and political leaders, as well as the possibility of collective action. Hence, feminist websites and voices within China have been shut down by this system, due to their potential to become ‘large-scale threats’. As stated by journalist Leta Hong Fincher in the New York Times; "As the movement could become large-scale, the government sees young feminists as a threat to Communist rule".

Impact on the Online Feminist Movement

Since the development of the #MeToo movement in 2017, the CCP has further increased censorship in order to repress feminist voices. In April 2021, ten feminist forums on Douban; China's most popular social networking platform, were banned. Many ex-employees who performed censorship work at Chinese companies confirm that their goal was to ‘flatten discussion without appearing to stop it outright. Furthermore, as stated by Eric Liu, an ex-Weibo censor, "The voice of feminists are removed - All that’s left is the state’s version which becomes the "official narrative".

Countermeasures to CCP Censorship

The online feminist community has found avenues to continue to spread its message, despite increased surveillance from the CCP:

‘Rice Bunny'

In response to the censorship of the hashtag #metooinchina, Chinese activists launched #RiceBunnyInChina (米兔). When said in Chinese, this is pronounced ‘#MiTuInChina’. This allowed online activists to evade censors. Other methods include using emojis (of rice bowls and bunny heads) and local dialects. Two examples of the latter are laozi yeshi and an yeshi, (‘I also’, in Sichuan and northern dialects, respectively).

Yue Xin’s letter

In 2018, in the midst of #MiTu, Yue Xin, a student who initiated a petition to reinvestigate the case of a student who committed suicide following her accusation of sexual assault by her professor, revealed on social media how she was threatened by the university to stop the campaign. Activists have continued to share this, despite the original post's censorship. This is done by rotating the image before posting it on social media - avoiding detection from censor algorithms, utilising tamper-proof blockchains to store it, and even using cryptocurrency transactions to circulate the image.

Wider Chinese Society

It is not only online feminists who employ creative tactics to avoid internet censors. Protesters in Hong Kong in 2019, and those in 2022 criticising the CCP policy of COVID-19 lockdowns, found that messages in Cantonese, rather than Mandarin, were not detected by censor algorithms. Additionally, use of VPNs, designed to hide an internet user's location and allow them access blocked content, rose 11% between 2014 and 2017, before a CCP crackdown on their availability.

Remaining Impact of Censors

Despite the increasingly innovative methods employed by activists, censorship has prevented a large-scale online movement akin to those seen in the West. Posts under mainstream hashtags such as #MeToo are frequently removed, or are drowned out by pro-government propaganda. The regional disparity within China also hinders the feminist movement; its online nature leads to it remaining an urban phenomenon, yet to spread to rural areas, nor to women working in industries such as manufacturing. Furthermore, the disappearance of Peng Shuai in 2022 following her accusation of abuse by a Chinese politician, shows the continued danger facing those who speak out against the state.

Challenges to the Future of Chinese Internet Feminism

In the future, feminist activities in China will face pressures from both the authority and society. China has a strong state but a weak society. In recent years, censorship has become severe, resulting in a shrinking public sphere. However, as the alternative platform for feminist activities in China, social media are censored strictly to prevent the deterioration of public opinion. Up until now, the online discussion about feminism usually does not relate to further collective mobilization and remained in disputation or denouncement among the network community to a large extent. In the future, it will be challenging to upscale online activities to a collective mobilization on the street. Besides the cost of participating in protests in China, this may account for the absence of a necessary confident mechanism in the network community where the connections between people are weakened. In addition, authority also stigmatizes feminism as a socially destabilizing factor, which provides a moral high ground for Anti-feminists. In 2017, the state-owned feminism press —— China Women’s News published an editorial about the hostile western forces attempting to attack Marxist feminism by spreading western ‘feminist supremacy’ in China.

Although restrictions and stigmatization still exist, the online discussion somehow shapes public opinion towards protecting females’ well-being. A spontaneous online project aims to set up free period product boxes outside of toilets in high schools and universities to break the period stigma, which has been accomplished in 338 schools in some areas. In Zhejiang province, a domestic violence history inquiry system has been created for the public, aiming to provide more protection to those women who are about to get married. The drivers of these improvements in female well-being are partly the outcome of online Feminist activities. Still, notably, the improvements are also somehow selected and tacitly approved by the authority. Today the online feminist movement in China is facing unprecedented repression, but more young people today identify themselves as feminists. However, suppose the existing political structure and legal framework remain unchanged. In that case, the future situation of online feminist activities in China may still be quite difficult to improve.

References

This article "Chinese Internet Feminism" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Chinese Internet Feminism. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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