Xi directs quashing of Chinese feminists even as he praises advances at women’s conference | China
Addressing dignitaries gathered in Beijing on Monday, Xi Jinping praised the “historic achievements” in women’s rights in China. China’s president said maternal mortality rates have fallen by almost 80 percent in the past 30 years and women are now participating in the national governance project with “unprecedented self-confidence and strength.”
Xi was speaking at a global women’s summit to mark the 30th anniversary of the historic UN world conference on women in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday. In 1995, US First Lady Hillary Clinton made her “women’s rights are human rights” speech here; These words are now frequently quoted by people advocating for women’s rights in China.
This year, Chinese officials used Xi’s speech to highlight China’s contributions to the advancement of women. Xi announced a $10 million (£7.5 million) donation to UN Women, the organisation’s gender equality agency, as well as a $100 million fund for countries in the global south.
But while Xi hailed “a magnificent chapter in women’s advancement,” in recent years Chinese feminists have found it increasingly difficult to defend or even talk about women’s rights.
“Today, countless people, especially young women, identify as feminists and make feminist choices in their personal lives,” said Lü Pin, a New Jersey activist who founded an influential feminist organization in China that was forced to close in 2018.
“However, feminist activities beyond personal life are severely limited, including public debate, policy advocacy, accountability and collective action,” said Lü, who has lived in the United States since 2015, when several of her colleagues, known as the “feminist five,” were detained in China after a protest against sexual harassment on public transportation.
As leader, Xi oversaw a sweeping crackdown on civil society and ushered in a patriarchal transformation in politics. In 2022, it established a new politburo, the executive branch of the Communist Party of China, which does not include women for the first time since 1997.
While social attitudes toward divorce and workplace equality have become more liberal, the government routinely encourages women to fulfill what it considers traditional responsibilities, such as marriage and childbearing, especially to help the country combat a falling birth rate. By 2023, Xi said China should “develop a new culture of marriage and childbearing.”
While organized feminist groups have been mostly suppressed, there are still independent bloggers and commentators who focus on women’s issues. But even these are under increasing pressure.
Last month, the official WeChat account of feminist blogger Jiang Chan, whose articles regularly received more than 100,000 views, Chinese Digital Timesdeleted.
This comes just weeks after more than 1,300 accounts on Weibo, a separate social media platform with nearly 600 million monthly active users, were issued temporary or permanent bans for inciting “gender hostility.” One account was temporarily banned for sharing “extreme anti-marriage” rhetoric.
In June, the platform launched a launch. special complaint category For reporting content that “promotes gender hatred.”
Wang Huiling, a vlogger from rural Anhui province, rose to fame with her candid videos about marriage, family and women’s independence during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her experience of coming from a village where social norms were more conservative contrasted with the more middle-class feminist discourse in Chinese cities. “When I started posting videos online in 2019, I hadn’t heard of feminism,” she said. She just wanted to share the real-life struggles that she and the women around her face in Chinese society. “Only later did I realize that I was part of the feminist community and that women fighting for human rights were feminists.”
At its peak, it had more than 4 million followers on Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, and more than 6 million fans across different platforms, according to Wang.
But Wang’s exact reach in China is now difficult to gauge because all of his social media accounts were deleted without explanation in January. In April, she was informed that her 2021 memoir, Grassroots Women, had been banned from reprinting (although it was still available on e-commerce platforms). “I don’t know the exact reason for the ban, but it was probably because they were afraid of awakening independence in some women,” Wang said.
Additional research by Lillian Yang
