NPR: China Is Attempting To Muzzle #MeToo
"In high school, we were never allowed to wear makeup, then when we started university, all of a sudden, becoming a 'pretty woman' became a very important responsibility," said Xiao. "I tried hard but it was just impossible for me to live up to all these ridiculous standards placed on women."
Ten years later, Xiao has become a prominent feminist activist and one of many Chinese women who have seized on the momentum of the global #Me Too! movement against sexual harassment to call for change at home.
As the #Me Too! campaign spreads from one university to another in China, it is demonstrating the extraordinary resilience of a feminist movement that has posed a unique challenge to China's male-dominated, authoritarian regime. For the first time since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, organized feminist activists, independent of the ruling Communist Party, have tapped into a broad discontent among Chinese women and developed a level of influence over public opinion that is unusual for any social movement in China.
Ever since authorities arrested five young women — known as China's "Feminist Five" — in 2015 for planning to commemorate International Women's Day by handing out stickers about sexual harassment, the Communist Party has tried to stamp out the feminist movement. Almost a year ago, censors temporarily banned Feminist Voices, the most influential feminist website and social media account in China, ostensibly because it had posted an article about a planned women's strike in the United States protesting President Trump on International Women's Day.
The founding editor of Feminist Voices, Lu Pin, believed the 30-day ban was meant to send a warning to the growing number of vocal Chinese feminists online.
"Chinese women feel very unequal every day of their lives, and the government cannot make women oblivious to the deep injustice they feel," says Lu. "The feminist movement is about building a community to address women's everyday concerns."
Despite the authorities' sustained persecution of women's rights activists in recent years, the feminist resistance may yet have the potential to become China's most transformative movement in the long run — provided that any social movement is allowed to exist in the repressive political environment. Feminist activists have cultivated a closely networked community of supporters numbering in the thousands, revolving around university students and graduates in different cities across China. Some of them have become effective organizers, capable of mobilizing citizens around issues that resonate deeply with ordinary Chinese women, such as pervasive gender discrimination and sexual harassment on public transportation, in the workplace and in schools. Even as authorities harass the most prominent feminists, local governments sometimes respond to the activists' demands, for example, by displaying anti-sexual harassment ads on subways in cities like Shenzhen and Beijing.
As record numbers of Chinese women attend university, both in China and abroad, they are beginning to challenge widespread sexism and unequal treatment. Since the government abolished its one-child policy at the beginning of 2016, it has aggressively promoted a new two-child policy, urging women to marry and have children as soon as possible, to address its demographic crises of a severely aging population, falling birth rates and a shrinking workforce.
But women in China's rapidly expanding middle class are increasingly recoiling from the intense pressure of heterosexual marriage and child-rearing pushed by sexist Chinese state propaganda, as gender inequality in wealth and status has widened along with breakneck economic growth.
More and more young Chinese women are identifying as feminists. And, in recent weeks, thousands of female — and also some male — students and alumni in China have defied heavy Internet censorship to sign #Me Too! petitions at dozens of universities, demanding action against sexual harassment.
Feminist activist Xiao launched a #Me Too! petition addressed to her alma mater: "Given the severity of sexual harassment at institutions, we feel obliged to be vocal. It's imperative that Chinese colleges construct a mechanism to prevent sexual harassment on campus," said her petition to Beijing's Communication University of China.
It was deleted by censors soon after she posted it on the social media platform Weibo and the group messaging app We Chat. A week later, several women who signed Xiao's petition said that a professor had questioned them about why they were taking part in the #Me Too! movement and whether they were influenced by "hostile foreign forces."
This line of questioning is not new. Last May, the website of the People's Daily — the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party — published an announcement warning that "Western hostile forces" were using "Western feminism" to interfere in China's handling of women's affairs. The vice president of the All-China Women's Federation, Song Xiuyan, was quoted as saying that Party officials working on women's issues were in the midst of a "serious political struggle" and urgently needed to follow President Xi Jinping's instruction to guard against Western ideological infiltration.
As International Women's Day (and the anniversary of the arrest of the Feminist Five) on March 8 approaches this year, feminist activists may face another crackdown in an attempt to prevent the #Me Too! movement from spreading any further. Already, calls for an end to sexual harassment have begun to expand beyond China's university-educated women to factory women.
An anonymous female assembly-line worker who suffered routine sexual harassment at Foxconn, Apple's main supplier for Asia, published an essay last month on a Chinese women's labor rights website demanding that her employer set up proper channels of recourse for victims like herself. "We call for more men to pay attention to the situation of their sisters," she wrote in the essay, translated by Sup China.
Some students in Beijing had planned a march against sexual harassment on university campuses, but canceled it after receiving warnings from their school, according to Reuters. Still, feminist activist Lu says it will be extremely hard to silence all the women who want to speak out.
"Once women experience a feminist awakening and stop believing Communist Party propaganda," she says, "they can never go back."
Communism at odds with Feminism?! Whatever happened to the spirit of the Red Detachment of Women? To China's pride at being more gender egalitarian than Capitalist societies?
edited 4th Feb '18 11:03:17 PM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.Pretty much horseshit from start to finish.
Even when they did pay lip service to it with their "planned" economy crap in Mao's time, in practice things got even shittier for women in some ways.
Wikipedia's page on gender inequality in China.
China currently isn't the worst in this regard, which the page points out. However, in practice it's still pretty damn sexist. It's not as blatantly sexist as it was back when foot-binding was common-place, but that's a low bar to clear.
edited 4th Feb '18 11:20:08 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedThe fact that they encourage sex-selection abortions could tip one off that they don't value women.
Oh brother, who hires these writers.
It can be one.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.I'd rather not for everyone's sake.
Reclaiming words is a thing so it's not exactly inconceivable that women to reclaim it, as a male I have no opinion. .
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -HylarnConsidering I find most swears to not be that big deal even whe;they are said around children, I don’t. It’s similar to how “nigger” was repurposed as “Nigga” amongst black communities, which leads to anothe issue in regards to N Word Privledges.
In this case, it would be the issue of Country Matters instead.
edited 7th Feb '18 8:16:47 AM by Demongodofchaos2
Watch SymphogearThere is a distinction between profanity and slurs, though:
- Profanity is just impolite language and has a clear distinction from other words in the way it's processed (swearing can actually lessen pain and help someone calm down; some scientists even think it evolved as a step in between "glaring" and "pushing and shoving" during disputes, to avoid disagreements between people getting physically violent).
- Slurs have a history to them as well. They're words that were historically meant to remind an oppressed group of their place.
Calling someone a piece of shit (making it clear you're angry with them) has a very different weight to it than calling a person of African decent the n-word or calling a transgender person the t-word (since they and other slurs bring back whatever reasoning is/was used to class them as lesser).
Same goes for Country Matters (in the US anyway; here it's just a harsh profanity).
edited 7th Feb '18 8:50:12 AM by Bisected8
TV Tropes's No. 1 bread themed lesbian. she/her, fae/faerThe distinction is also culture specific.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanOne of the leaders of the Me Too! movement has been accused of sexual harassment.
That's hilariously ironic.
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
It's less funny and more tragic.
Meh, now that it's out he'll get his just desserts. Obviously the fact that he abused someone isn't what's funny, the irony is the source of my amusement.
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -HylarnFourthspartan: The accused person in question is a woman. (I agree, the link is laid out a little confusingly, but still...)
Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)Well, doesn't automatically assuming that a person accused of sexual harassment is a man while discussing it in the Sexism thread only make it more deliciously ironic?
Is right that most people that gets acussed of sexual harassement are men, but inmediately assuming that sexual harassers are men had its own implications.
Nothing really bad, but is notable.
Watch me destroying my countryAccurate implications, it's simply a question of odds. As I said, my only problem was failing to properly check it.
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -HylarnConsidering that our culture already has a problem taking sexual harassment seriously when it's committed by women, I would say that it's definitely not okay to just jump into these kind of conclusions without fact checking. That's the kind of shit racists always do, just straight out assuming that a crime reported on the news was committed by a black person since "black people commit more crime, right?".
Not seeing this as problematic is not only sexist but also hypocritical.
Also the context of it being a leader of a hashtag about women outing predatory men kinda hints that it woudl be a women.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ CyranI disagree, yes bigots can use similar logic but the important difference is that I'm not using the statistics to support prejudice. I'm not saying that women cannot commit sexual harassment or that men are uniquely predisposed towards it. So no, regardless of how problematic you think it is there is nothing hypocritical about it.
Since making gendered assumptions is apparently so problematic I'm not going to assume there's a correlation.
edited 11th Feb '18 5:34:59 PM by Fourthspartan56
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
Women not going to Engineering school doesn't mean they won't exist, the idea is that women shouldn't get an education with the power that comes with it and thus be nice house thralls. Of course these morons don't understand that in deeply misogynistic societies the "valuable" women are hoarded by the wealthy and powerful so they probably wouldn't get the models they want.
edited 4th Feb '18 7:09:47 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn