Picking Quarrels and Creating a Disturbance: An Analysis of the Survival of China's Grassroots Feminist Movement on Social Media

Abstract

In the 1990s, as Chinese civil society expanded following China’s global economic integration, a nascent independent feminist movement broke the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) monopoly on gender issues. Over two decades, independent feminists formed gender-based organizations and started to both collectively and individually challenge China’s patriarchal structure. In 2012, the movement gained momentum as a group of young independent feminists used social media and public demonstrations to call for structural changes to Chinese society. However, since its inception in the 1990s, the independent feminist movement has lived under the constant threat of suppression. China operates the world’s most sophisticated and extensive censorship apparatus and, since 1949, the CCP has relied on media manipulation to monitor, regulate, and repress civil society. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, the space for civil society in China has been dramatically reduced and the CCP has heightened media restrictions and surveillance mechanisms to achieve this, increasing tension between the feminist movement and government. The detainment of five leading feminists in 2015 marked a sharp transition in the government’s tolerance of independent feminism. Since 2015, despite the CCP’s numerous attempts to silence the movement, the movement has survived and pushed back. This thesis answers the following question: How has China’s independent feminist movement survived in an increasingly hostile environment under Xi’s leadership?

Using a mixed-methods approach, this thesis found that from 2014 to 2021, China’s bottom-up independent feminist movement shifted their tactics on social media to evade the government’s media controls and increase the likelihood of their content surviving. This paper’s results also suggest that the adoption of these evasion tactics did not compromise the fervor of online debate. Online discussions and debates have continued to allow feminists and non-feminists to engage with one another and challenge each other’s existing beliefs; the independent feminist movement has not only survived but advanced. Based on my results and firsthand conversations with Chinese feminists, I generate a theoretical framework—bottom-up evasion—to explain the movement’s improbable survival. As China faces increasing demographic challenges with an aging population, shrinking workforce, and declining birthrates, feminist calls for women to focus on their careers and have children later, if at all, directly conflict with the CCP’s agenda. The outcome of growing tension between the CCP and China’s resilient bottom-up feminist movement has the potential to not only shape domestic political outcomes but may also alter the course of gender progress globally. ¬