Online feminism has a short but turbulent history in China, its intensity ebbing and flowing alongside the country’s ever-shifting red lines of permissible speech. Young women are largely unaware of earlier waves of activism — long since erased by government censorship — but not unaffected.
Lü Pin, a prominent feminist activist, remembers the golden age of Chinese social media. Weibo launched in 2009, and grew to 500 million members within four years — in part because foreign competitors like Facebook and Twitter were banned in China.
The tide turned in 2015, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first term. That March, Beijing police detained five feminist activists who had been handing out stickers against sexual harassment on public transport. The month-long detention of the Feminist Five, as they became known, was a landmark event. “It meant organized feminist events and groups are not welcomed by the government,” Lü told Rest of World. She was in the U.S. when the five were taken into custody, and decided to stay there.
More restrictions followed. In 2016, a new law gave the security apparatus control over the funding and activities of NGOs, causing the country’s most prominent women’s rights organization to close. Police increasingly asked feminist activists to come “drink tea,” a euphemism for being interrogated.