Since the May 4th Movement was introduced to China from the West, feminism had a brief climax in the early days of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.Mao Zedong once had a famous saying: “Women hold up half the sky”. That’s a powerful statement on gender equality.Today, Chinese women still face many problems in the workplace, politics and family. However, the feminist movement did not continue the early development trend, and was suppressed unprecedentedly.
Louise Edwards, Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales, has spent the past forty years researching Chinese history and the women’s movement.She said China has made impressive progress in women’s rights over the past century, but the Communist Party’s ruling model is still deeply rooted in patriarchal thinking.”They still think that men should be the ‘real’ holders of power and women should only be assistants or deputies,” she said.
“After 1949, the achievements of women’s rights were guaranteed through work in the party bureaucracy, especially the work of the All-China Women’s Federation, rather than through the broader civil society.”
However, since the introduction of reform and opening up in the late 1970s, China’s early gains in women’s rights have gradually begun to unravel.
Prof Edwards said after the political quotas for women were abolished, sexism in the workplace and in advertising became widespread.
The Chinese government has also stepped up efforts to silence feminist voices. On popular social media platforms such as Weibo and Douban, dozens of feminist accounts were abruptly shut down.
The space for the feminist movement has been compressed. Both “feminist” and “MeToo” are considered sensitive words and have been censored online.
On the eve of Women’s Day in 2015, five feminist activists, Wang Man, Wei Tingting, Zheng Churan, Li Tingting (Li Maizi), and Wu Rongrong planned to hold public rights protection activities against sexual harassment on buses before March 8th Women’s Day, but they were respectively arrested. Police in Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Beijing arrested and detained for 37 days for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.In China today, the term “feminism” has become highly politicized and has come under attack from nationalists online as a result, Li Maizi said.
Before that, she also organized activities such as the bloody bride and the occupation of the men’s bathroom.
Her Weibo account was canceled After that.
In June, a five-minute surveillance video of a woman being attacked in Tangshanwent viral on Chinese social media, prompting a rethinking of the state of women’s rights in the country.
After US #MeToo movement, Chinese women speak out against harassment and assault despite widespread censorship.But feminist voices are increasingly being marginalized. “The Tangshan incident indirectly reflects the difficulty of MeToo.
Last summer, at least a dozen college queer and sex education groups across the country found their WeChat accounts deleted. Overnight, they became “anonymous official account”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-censorship-machine-erasing-chinas-feminist-movement
All of these things reflect the current difficulties faced by the development of feminism in China. It is almost impossible to launch a fierce movement, and it can only be infiltrated in a gentle way. Therefore, it may be an easier way to spread feminism through art.
Ref:
1.www.abc.net.au. (2020). ‘向历史要答案’——从弦子诉朱军案看中国MeToo运动. [online] Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/chinese/2020-12-22/china-metoo-movement-after-two-years-zhu-jun-xiaoxuan/13004848 [Accessed 24 Nov. 2022].
2.www.abc.net.au. (2021). 从‘半边天’到删帖销号：中国女权的崛起、消退和未来. [online] Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/chinese/2021-06-08/feminism-in-china-internet-crackdown-erase-womens-voices/100194910.