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| Demonstrators in NYC showed their support for Feminist Voices © Jun Chen |
On 20th
February 2017, the main social media account of a prominent Chinese women’s
organisation, Feminist Voices, was
shut down for 30 days. The group had publicly shared their support for the
women’s strikes in the USA planned for March 8th, by posting a link
on their Weibo* page. They were not calling for Chinese women to strike, they were simply
showing their support for anti-Trump demonstrations occurring elsewhere.
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| Feminist activist Li Maizi, who spoke in London on 7th March © Li Maizi |
But China
strictly prohibits political resistance and public demonstration of any kind. They
received a message stating, ‘Hello, because content you recently posted
violates national laws and regulations, your account will be banned for 30 days’.
This prompted waves of support from women the world over, with images pouring
in from overseas Chinese women who attended demonstrations, but nothing has
changed the fate of Feminist Voices’
public platform.
Hearing this
news, I checked on my own web presence. A piece I wrote for a major Chinese
media platform had vanished with no explanation. Just days after its
publication on 13th February, the link my editor had sent, and that
I’d shared with family and friends, stopped working.
I had
interviewed a wonderful woman writer whose recently released debut novel deals
with themes of migration, class, and gender inequality through the lens of sex
workers in Shenzhen, southern China. I was not aware that the content of our
interview might be regarded as even remotely incendiary. I’d struggled over edits and pitched numerous
publications. In the end, all that hard work got me was a blank screen and 404
error message.
Recently, I volunteered
to help organise a public celebration of women to be held just days after
International Women’s Day. We lined up novelists, poets, storytellers, actors,
comedians, and activists who wanted stage time. We found a handful of
organisations to provide free information. We decided to fundraise for an NGO
supporting transgender teens in southern China. We arranged sponsors, a venue,
and a poster. We invited guests.
Just six days
before the event was due to take place, we got a message from an LGBT rights
activist and founder of Beijing’s LGBT Center, who was due to take part in the
panel discussion. Her lawyers had been contacted by police, and recommended we use
caution, if we chose to proceed at all.
Her last
attempt at speaking at an IWD event was met with suspicion, too. She got phone
calls from the authorities telling her not to go to the 2016 Beijing Literary
Festival event she was billed for. When she showed up, she was threatened by
police at the door and decided not to risk arrest. A year earlier, five young
feminist activists were detained for five-weeks without being sentenced,
because they’d planned to hand out fliers about domestic violence on public
transport.
She and other
Chinese participants had the ovaries to forge ahead, hoping to ensure the event
would happen if they could. They are well versed in the consequences of
addressing sensitive issues in public. But as a bunch of foreigners, we couldn’t
be sure of the repercussions for ourselves, our guests, or the cause we
believed we were supporting. Ultimately, we had little choice but to cancel, while
hoping that bowing out now provides us space to come back stronger another day.
The scariest
thing about censorship is that it’s so covert. There is no reason given, no
apparent logic behind censorship (only a vague sense of clamping down ahead of
political events, such as the ‘Two Sessions’ annual congress in March). Feminist
Voices were told they’d broken Chinese law, but not told how. My article had
disappeared without a trace, the editor promising to ‘look into it’ before
going silent. The authorities had not explicitly told us to cancel the event, we’d
not been contacted directly (we didn’t event know which of the vast array of
‘authorities’ we should appeal to). The vague threat that we’d been ‘found out’
was enough to scare us into compliance.
The
difference between the cancellation of our one-time event, or the disappearance
of my one-time article, and the plight Feminist Voices represents for feminism
across China, is obduracy. The majority of that handful of foreign women
dabbling in women’s rights activism will leave China, sooner or later. They
have the choice to leave censorship behind them. Chinese Feminists, in and
outside China, however, will continue to face persecution for their beliefs and
risk fates far worse than censorship if they push the envelope too far. Their
futures can only lead towards assessing their role in the battle for gender
equality against their personal safety.
* Chinese state-owned microblog
platform akin to Twitter, which is blocked in China
Read on
(link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/world/asia/china-feminist-weibo.html)
***
The author is
from Norwich, UK and is currently based in Beijing, China, where she teaches
English Literature at a state university, and writes about gender and culture in
contemporary Asia. Her writing has featured in various media outlets in China
and the UK. Read more at www.zhendegender.com
