Detention of the Feminist Five in China

Author(s): Wang Zheng

Source: Feminist Studies , Vol. 41, No. 2 (2015), pp. 476-482
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15767/feministstudies.41.2.476

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Wang Zheng

Detention of the Feminist Five

in China

On March 6 this year, just before International Women’s Day, the

Chinese police in Beijing arrested five young women who had engaged
in activism to protest sexual harassment on public transportation. The
month-long detention of these five young feminists has changed the
landscape of Chinese feminism. The global feminist mobilization that
emerged to appeal for their release also presents a fascinating example
of a successful feminist response to authoritarianism. In this short piece,
I open with a few personal snapshots to briefly illustrate the history of
Chinese feminist engagement with sexist sexual norms. Next, I will sit-
uate the five young feminists’ actions within this historical context in
order to illustrate significant changes in Chinese feminist practices as
well as in Chinese society. Finally, I will discuss the political implica-
tions of the detention of the so-called Feminist Five as well as the global
mobilization for their release.
In 1985 I came from Shanghai to study US history at the University
of California, Davis. I made quite a few American friends in the gradu-
ate program. They were very curious about my life in China, and I was
very proud of being a liberated woman from socialist China. I acted
like an ambassador, talking to different groups about the great accom-
plishments of women’s liberation under socialism in China. As a young,
urban woman I enjoyed equal education, equal employment, equal pay,
and equal opportunity for promotion. I had never experienced gender

476 Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

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News and Views 477

inequality, I thought. One day I was telling my friends about how I once
confronted a thief who had just snatched my wallet on a crowded bus
in Shanghai and how I forced him to drop my wallet. My friends were
very impressed: “Wow! You were so brave,” they said. A few days later, I
happened to mention that on the same crowded Shanghai buses, men
would frequently grope women, and my friend asked instantly, “How
did you respond to them?” I replied without thinking, “What could I
do? I just tried my best to move to another spot to avoid such rascals.”
My friend then raised a question that shattered my self-perception as a
brave and liberated woman: “Why did you dare to confront a thief but
not a sexual harasser?” I answered, “Oh, I would be so ashamed if people
around me noticed.” Immediately, I realized that my reply was highly
problematic. That conversation set in motion a process of soul search-
ing. Why would a liberated woman still continue to observe the patriar-
chal value of chastity? Why would women of my generation — the liber-
ated Chinese women in socialist China — have no consciousness of the
serious problems contained within these sexual norms? It was not only
a personal reflection. From this point, I embarked on a long review and
contemplation of women’s liberation in socialist China. I realized that
in the realm of sexuality, while state feminists were able to transform
the sexual double standard to a single standard for the general public
(although some top male leaders continue double standards and engage
in extramarital sexual relationships without being punished), puritan-
ical sexual morality did not shake deeply entrenched masculinist cul-
tural values of women’s chastity and virginity. As a result, a liberated
woman such as myself could internalize such sexist values with no con-
sciousness, let alone action, focused on changing such sexist culture.
In 1992, I attended a conference by the Shanghai Women’s Federa-
tion. When a US feminist scholar asked if there were any cases of sexual
harassment in China, the Chinese women participants all replied, “No,
no, we don’t have sexual harassment.” I stood up and named things that
happened to women every day on Shanghai buses as sexual harassment.
By then I had long been empowered by my study of feminist history and
theories.
In 1995, at the NGO forum at the Fourth UN Conference on Women
held in Beijing, feminists from inside and outside China openly chal-
lenged pervasive sexist sexual norms. Sexual violence and sexual harass-
ment were clearly defined as violations of women’s human rights. Since

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478 News and Views

 n February 14, 2012, three activists dressed in wedding gowns stained with
O
simulated blood protested in central Beijing to raise awareness about domes-
tic violence. (Left to right: Li Tingting (Maizi), Xiao Meili, Wei Tingting).
Photograph courtesy of Feminist Voices.

the conference, redefined feminist conceptions of gender and sexual

norms have circulated widely among feminist NGOs in China, includ-
ing NGOs that promote gender training in the women’s federations and
in the government. Since the UN Conference on Women, we have wit-
nessed a continuous growth of feminist-organized activities nationwide,
and I have been a participant in this process. Because the political envi-
ronment in China is highly unstable and not congenial to NGO activism,
the feminist-activist strategy has been to steer clear of politically sensi-
tive issues and instead to concentrate efforts in the realm of promoting
gender equality as guaranteed by China’s constitution and Chinese laws
protecting women’s and children’s rights.
As beneficiaries of socialist ideals and policies of gender equality in
education and employment, quite a large number of women profession-
als emerged from my cohort, and by the 1990s, they had access to policy

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News and Views 479

making. Understandably, their feminist activities are often aimed at

participation in the policy-making process, including drafting laws and
promoting their passage. They are mostly located in the official system,
either in government, in the women’s federation, or in academic insti-
tutions. Enjoying the dividends of socialist gender equality, this gen-
eration of feminists has, or has access to, resources and power in the
system. They prefer to work behind the scenes and not attract unwanted
attention.
Young feminists in China have adopted strategies different from
their predecessors in promoting gender equality. Growing up in an era
of privatization, at a time when many socialist institutional mechanisms
for gender equality (and indeed any equality) have been dismantled, the
young generation of feminists, often the “princesses” of their one-child
families with high aspirations, soon discover that this world is absolutely
male dominated. They find that, at every corner, they encounter exces-
sive gender discrimination and pervasive masculinist sexual norms that
openly treat women as sex objects. In such a chauvinistic society, young
women have few social resources to make their voices heard, let alone to
participate in the policy-making process. In response to this widespread
problem, we see the emergence of a cohort of very brave, creative, and
smart young feminist activists who are good at staging public perfor-
mances about gender discrimination that are designed to attract media
attention and to engender social and cultural change in realms previ-
ously unnoticed by the public, or even by older feminists.
In this context, when I heard that young feminists were planning to
launch a campaign to combat sexual harassment on public transporta-
tion as a means to celebrate International Women’s Day this year, I was
truly delighted. In their action, I saw significant progress in the history
of Chinese feminism. I compared myself — a liberated socialist woman
who, at their age, had tolerated sexual harassment on public transporta-
tion — with these young women taking action to address the same issue
of sexual harassment, which had practically gone unnoticed in my gener-
ation. The pervasive sexist social environment had enabled the younger
generation to acquire a gender consciousness beyond that of their fore-
mothers. Although younger women do not have the same access to and
resources in the official systems of governance, they have enjoyed tre-
mendous intellectual resources from transnational feminisms in this age
of globalization and Internet access.

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480 News and Views

But just as I was watching their preparations for March 8, Inter-

national Women’s Day, with tremendous joy, pride, and anticipation,
they were each arrested on March 6 from different locations in China
and detained in Beijing Haidian District detention center. A few his-
torical facts highlight the gravity of this detention: Since 1913, when the
Yuan Shikai authoritarian government suppressed the Chinese femi-
nist suffrage movement, until these arrests in 2015, no Chinese govern-
ment has openly suppressed feminists. In the past century, any politi-
cal force that claimed to move China to modernity would treat equality
between women and men as a badge of modernity. Since its inception in
1921, the Chinese Communist Party openly endorsed equality between
women and men (nannü pingdeng, which translates as “sexual equal-
ity”), which is one of the major reasons that the party attracted so many
women and committed feminists over the long course of the Chinese
Revolution. Upon the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949,
these strong socialist feminists in the party made a substantial differ-
ence in transforming a patriarchal culture, and women of my genera-
tion are deeply indebted to them. After the brutal suppression of the
students’ movement in 1989 in Tiananmen Square and the international
condemnation that followed, the Chinese government proposed to host
the Fourth UN Conference on Women as a way to return to the interna-
tional community. At that point, it was not too far-fetched for the Chi-
nese Communist Party to assume that in the realm of equality between
women and men, China had something very positive to show to the
world. The 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing, with its accom-
panying NGO forum that was attended by close to 40,000 international
feminists, allowed Chinese feminists to legitimately launch women’s
NGOs nationwide. Other Chinese NGOs followed suit thereafter.
Against this historical setting, the unprecedented detention of
feminists in the People’s Republic of China is an ominous signal in mul-
tiple respects. The attempt to criminalize legitimate feminist activism
is, first of all, a mockery of the state’s declared aspiration to the rule of
law, revealing a huge gap between the words and deeds of the state. It
also appears to be an attempt to turn back the clock twenty years to the
pre-UN Conference on Women/post-Tiananmen Square political envi-
ronment. The state has accelerated clamping down on NGOs in recent
years, especially targeting those with a national reach and international
funding, although feminist NGOs have so far been untouched by these

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News and Views 481

restrictions. The detention of the Feminist Five on the basis of their NGO
affiliations, however, threatens to delegitimize feminist NGO activism.
Furthermore, the timing of the arrest and detention of the Feminist
Five reveals the national security system’s sheer ignorance about— or
contempt for — global feminist movements. They arrested the feminists
right before International Women’s Day (March 8) and the twentieth
anniversary of the Fourth UN Conference on Women (March 9) where
the United Nation’s fifty-ninth Commission on the Status of Women
was to assess global progress for women twenty years after the Beijing
Declaration (Beijing+20). As part of UN activities around Beijing+20,
the United Nations and China will be cohosting the Global Summit of
Women in September 2015, a great international forum for the Chinese
state. Ironically, the detention of the Feminist Five reveals to the world
that the Chinese state is afraid of its young women who reject sexual
harassment. The combination of ignorance, contempt, and paranoia by
a rising global power, fully displayed to the whole world through this
detention, is a worrisome sign to the global community. The overwhelm-
ing global feminist protests against the detention reflect the shock and
indignation felt by those concerned about justice and human rights
in China. In the first two weeks after the arrests, over three thousand
people from more than one hundred countries signed online petitions
for the activists’ release. By the time of their release, over two million
people had signed petitions on multiple websites set up by various trans-
national organizations. Feminist organizations in South Korea, India,
Taiwan, Malaysia, and Japan have organized demonstrations to protest
the detention of the feminist activists.
On April 13, the police released the Feminist Five on bail. In the
Chinese context, this is the first time that a group of detained social
activists have been released all at once. The decision shows that the mas-
sive mobilization of global feminist NGOs and their allies’ support was
effective. The various grassroots-based petitions not only pushed their
own respective state politicians to respond, they also demonstrated
clearly to the Chinese government that petitions were not instigated by
a nation-based political enemy, but by a global political force — femi-
nist voices and grassroots organizations committed to social justice and
equality. This global political force could not be suppressed by the Chi-
nese state in this case, and it is instructive to other states as well: they
treat this global political force as their enemy at their own peril.

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482 News and Views

The fight is not over yet. Feminists within and outside China insist
that the police drop all charges against the Feminist Five and stop treat-
ing them as “suspects,” restricting their physical mobility and job oppor-
tunities and depriving them of their freedom and rights as citizens. The
fight for their total freedom continues.
We have all noticed the United Nation’s awkward silence in the
global uproar against the detention. Now global activists are shifting
their gaze to the United Nations to see if it can do anything to set the
Feminist Five totally free. So long as NGO activism for advocating and
implementing gender equality laws is defined as criminal, Chinese fem-
inists as well as activists working for social justice in other realms will
continue to feel threatened. We need feminist communities to raise
their voices at this time to make both the United Nations and the Chi-
nese government understand: the test for whether China is qualified to
host the September 2015 Global Summit for Women is whether the Fem-
inist Five are completely freed or not.

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