In the days before International Women ’s Day 2015, Chinese authorities arrested five women — Wei Tingting, Zheng Churan, Li Maizi, Wu Rongrong and Wang Man — for planning to hand out stickers challenging sexual harassment on public transport across China. They were detained for 37 days. Over the course of their detainment, the five were subjected to violent interrogations, denied important medication and medical treatment, and were routinely harassed and humiliated.
The women had been involved in feminist and LGBTQ rights activism for some years. While at university, Zheng Churan — known by the nickname Da Tu (Giant Rabbit) — and a group of lesbian friends had split from the main LGBTQ student group to form a queer feminist group, called Sinner-B (b for bitch). Its members collaborated on acts of feminist performance art.
In 2012 the group joined up with Wu Rongrong’s Gender Equality Work Group and other activists, including Li Maizi and Wang Man, to call for more public toilets for women. Li and twenty other women occupied a men’s public toilet in the southern city of Guangzhou, holding placards with the slogans “love women, starting with convenience” and “the more convenience, the more sexual equality.”
That same year Zheng Churan, Li Maizi, Wei Tingting and others worked on the “Bloody Brides” Valentine’s Day action, protesting the absence of a nationwide law against domestic violence. They held signs that read “love is no excuse for violence”.
Fast forward to 2015, and the women were planning their action against sexual harassment on public transport. Like their previous actions, the subject was chosen partly because it wasn’t directly challenging the Chinese Communist Party and they thought — incorrectly, it turned out — that it would be less politically sensitive and less likely to result in reprisal. The plan was simple: have women handing out stickers, take photos and send a press release to local news. Volunteers signed up across the country. On 7 March, before the action could take place, the five were arrested.
CENSORSHIP
Ironically, if the women had not been jailed, their action may well have passed with little notice. As it happened, the detention of the Feminist Five precipitated a political turning point. Their treatment inspired solidarity actions both within China and across the world; pressure which led to their release, but also marked the beginning of a new area of tighter surveillance of feminist activism.
The term “feminist” suddenly became politically sensitive and subject to censorship. The state took down posts and spiked news reports that mentioned the Feminist Five. They stopped short of removing all content about feminism on social media, however, and this gave the emerging movement a small amount of space to organise. Solidarity messages rolled in from academics, students and activists. Factory workers posted images of themselves holding signs declaring their solidarity with the five. Perhaps the most iconic picture that found its way onto social media was that of a man’s bare upper torso with the slogan: “Giant Rabbit, always proud of you! The proletariat supports you!” — aimed at Zheng Churan, who had spent time organising with sanitation workers in Guangzhou.
One year on from the arrests, the number of people calling themselves feminists on social media had ballooned. Weibo responded by banning their accounts. By May 2017, the state campaign against feminism was in full swing. The official organ of the Chinese Community Party, The People’s Daily , wrote that “Western feminism” was being used by foreign powers to interfere in China. Song Xiuyan, an official of the All-China Women’s Federation, argued that all women in China must be vigilant in not allowing the country to be infiltrated by Western ideology, as Xi Jingping had always said.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE
State censors also took aim at the #MeToo movement, which reached China in earnest in January 2018. Thousands of students across the country signed petitions calling for an end to sexual harassment and assaults on campus. Ironically, or perhaps deliberately, Weibo waited until International Women’s Day (March 8th) before banning Feminist Voices , the most important feminist account on the site. A day later, their account was also deleted by WeChat. Across the two sites, this ban robbed the movement of access to around a quarter of a million followers.
Chinese feminists have good reason to fight on the issue of sexual violence. The government freely admits that about one in four married women is subject to assault by their partners, though that figure is likely to be far higher in reality. The state does not collect data on harassment and gendered violence, and the law does not contain a clear definition of harassment, but a survey by the Sunflower Women Workers’ Center in 2013 estimated that about 70% of women factory workers in Guangzhou had been harassed.
Despite the introduction of the first law against domestic violence in 2015-16, domestic violence shelters are still empty. The new law does not even mention sexual violence and marital rape is still legal. Repression has not stopped the movement against sexual harassment from reaching a much wider layer of society and gaining an audience among the Chinese working class.
PATRIARCHAL AUTHORITARIANISM
The Chinese media called XI Jingping "Xi Dada" — “Daddy Xi” — until 2016. The leader’s manliness is a core part of his public image, as is his upholding of traditional family values. Women are supposed to be obedient and to engage in acts of caring, childbearing and social reproduction, and this is seen as a core part of the nation’s political stability. The state sees no problem in denying women their bodily autonomy, as the one-child policy showed with forced abortions, sterilisation, and the forced insertion of contraceptive implants.
The one-child policy became a two-child policy in 2015 and a three-child policy in 2021. Now, women are being pushed to have children, having spent 35 years being forcibly prevented from doing so. But the state only wants some women to reproduce: single women are penalised for having children, and are in general stigmatised. Without a “reproduction permit”, the government can deny their children birth certificates, and by extension seriously impede the child’s access to schools and healthcare. If women give birth outside of wedlock, they are routinely fined. Victorian attitudes to illegitimacy are being applied by a state with infinite access to information and a bureaucracy willing to use it to persecute unauthorised lifestyles.
There is more than a hint of racism and eugenics in the state’s policies around parenthood and gender. The government wants Han women (the dominant ethnicity in Chinese society) to get pregnant and marry. But it is actively pushing ethnic minority women not to reproduce. In some cases, as in the case of the Uyghurs, this discouragement goes so far as forced sterilisation. While Uyghur women are prevented from having large families, Han women living in the same area are not.
The picture for women in China might seem bleak. In some senses, women’s rights are going backwards and conservative family models are becoming more entrenched. The emerging feminist movement faces obstacles that we could only dream of navigating. But it is, despite everything, emerging. So, too, is a new wave of workers’ resistance in factories. Much will depend on the ability of activists like the Feminist Five to link up their struggle to a broader working class movement against the CCCP regime. They will face prison and worse — but if recent years have shown us anything, it is that the movements they lead are capable of growing and thriving when the odds seem insurmountable.