Addressing dignitaries gathered in Beijing on Monday, Xi Jinping praised the “historic achievements” of women’s rights in China. In the past 30 years, the Chinese president said, maternal mortality rates had dropped by nearly 80%, and women were now participating in the project of national governance with “unprecedented confidence and vigour”.
Xi was speaking at the global women’s summit, an event on Monday and Tuesday to mark the 30th anniversary of the historic UN’s world conference on women, which took place in Beijing. It was there in 1995 that Hillary Clinton, the then US first lady, delivered her “women’s rights are human rights” speech, lines now often quoted by people in China advocating for women’s rights.
This year, Chinese officials used Xi’s speech to highlight the contributions that China has made to women’s advancements. Xi announced a $10m (£7.5m) donation to UN Women, the organisation’s gender-equality agency, as well as a $100m fund for global south countries.
But while Xi hailed a “glorious chapter of women’s progress”, in recent years, Chinese feminists have found it increasingly difficult to advocate for, or even speak about, women’s rights.
“Today, countless people, primarily young women, identify as feminists and practice feminist choices in their personal lives,” said Lü Pin, an activist based in New Jersey who founded an influential feminist organisation in China that was forced to close in 2018.
“However, feminist activities beyond personal life are severely limited, including public discussion, let alone policy advocacy, accountability and collective action,” said Lü, who has been based in the US since 2015, when several of her associates, known as the “feminist five”, were detained in China after a protest they staged about sexual harassment on public transport.
As leader, Xi has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society and led a patriarchal turn in politics. In 2022 he unveiled a new politburo, the executive body of the Chinese Communist party, which for the first time since 1997 included no women.
Although social attitudes towards divorce and workplace equality have become more liberal, the government routinely exhorts women to fulfil what it says are traditional responsibilities of marriage and child-bearing, especially to help the country tackle its falling birthrate. In 2023, Xi said that China should “cultivate a new marriage and child-bearing culture”.
While organised feminist groups have mostly been squashed, there are still independent bloggers and commentators who focus on women’s issues. However, even these are under increasing pressure.
Last month, the official WeChat account of feminist blogger Jiang Chan, whose articles regularly garnered more than 100,000 views, according to China Digital Times, was deleted.
It came a few weeks after more than 1,300 accounts on Weibo, a separate social media platform with nearly 600 million monthly active users, were given temporary or permanent bans for inciting “gender antagonism”. One account was temporarily banned for posting “extreme anti-marriage” rhetoric.
In June, the platform launched a dedicated complaints category for reporting content that “promotes gender antagonism”.
Wang Huiling, a vlogger from rural Anhui province, shot to fame during the Covid-19 pandemic with her forthright videos about marriage, family and women’s independence. Her experience of coming from a village, where social norms are more conservative, stood in contrast to the more middle-class feminist discourse from China’s 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 faced in Chinese society. “It was only later that I realised I was part of the feminist community and that women fighting for their human rights were feminists.”
At her peak, she had more than 4 million followers on Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, and, according to Wang, more than 6 million fans across different platforms.
But Wang’s precise reach in China is now hard to gauge because, in January, all of her social media accounts were deleted without explanation. In April, she was informed that her 2021 memoir, Grassroots Women, had been banned from being reprinted (although it is still available for sale on e-commerce platforms). “I don’t know the specific reason for the ban, but it was probably because they were afraid of my awakening of independence in some women,” Wang said.
Additional research by Lillian Yang
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