The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
Well, it looks like Sina Weibo (China's equivalent of Twitter) and private messaging app WeChat have both permanently blocked the accounts of Feminist Voices, the most prominent women's advocacy network in the country. The group's Weibo account had some 180,000 followers and had served as the movement's most important channel for spreading information. The group had been suspended from Weibo for a month last year as well, but this new block is more ominous, as there is no indication that the account will be restored. The reasons given were vague and insubstantial, as official statements often are in China these days. It's worth noting the timing: Feminist Voices was blocked beginning the day after International Women's Day.
Similarly, last year Weibo blocked the #MeToo hashtag after a former doctoral student named Luo Xixi shared a letter on the network about being sexually harassed by a former professor. Her story quickly went viral, launching a public debate about predatory sexual behavior in China, as it has elsewhere. In China though, the official response was censorship. Activists have created the alternative hashtag #RiceBunny in its place since the Chinese words for rice bunny are pronounced "mi tu" when spoken aloud. These are the sorts of lengths the movement has to go to stay alive in a repressive police state.
The women's movement is being repressed because, with its rapidly growing support in urban areas, and especially on college campuses, it's seen as posing a threat to single-party rule. The irony is incredible. Modern-day China is ultimately seen as the creation of one Mao Zedong, who, among other things, integrated women into the army (yes, in combat roles), banned arranged marriages, legalized divorce, banned infanticide, foot-binding, and prostitution, ratified the equivalent of the Equal Rights Amendment (never ratified in the U.S.), integrated women into the regular workforce, created collective child care programs to render as much pragmatic, appointed a female co-chairperson (head of government), gave his feminist wife Jiang Qing essentially singular control of the nation's media, and created state-sponsored movements like the Iron Women's Brigade tasked with actively tearing down social stigmas against women participating equally in public life using slogans like "Women hold up half the sky". In today's China, by contrast, the social advancement of women is considered a threat to the regime rather than a programmic pillar holding it aloft.
As much could be said for the Eastern world overall though really. During the Cold War, when "the East was red", as the saying went, countries like China, India, and Russia were considered to feature more equitable relationships between women and men than their Western counterparts. For example, then-socialist India democratically elected a female head of government (prime minister) all the way back in 1966. The Soviet Union legalized abortion in 1968, five years before the United States. Etc. Etc. Since the Cold War though, said situation has largely reversed. Contemporary feminism is largely traceable to the Western world and a suppressed and censored opposition movement in countries like China, Russia, and India; countries that used to lead the world in equality between the sexes.
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Originally Posted by Ethereal
