A special Interpreter series ahead of International Women’s Day, 2025, on 8 March.
In March 2015, Beijing police arrested and detained a group of young women planning to hand out stickers on the subway on International Women’s Day opposing sexual harassment. They were jailed for more than a month, received “criminal suspect” status, and remain under surveillance today. These women became known as the Feminist Five.
Ten years later, and people are still talking about what happened.
I was sitting in a Hong Kong university class recently along with ten other PhD candidates (all from Mainland China except myself). We were discussing feminist approaches to critical research in international affairs. One woman said she didn’t think feminist research methods should be applied to China. It was a Western concept, and China didn’t need any more of those.
As soon as she had finished speaking, another woman rebuked her. She said feminism was not just a Western concept and was absolutely needed in China. She said there are many Chinese phrases for feminism, and Chinese people care as much about equality as people anywhere else.
This was different to any of the feminist debates I have ever overheard in university classes or pubs in Australia. The discussion wasn’t over the universality of rights, or the repressive binary of gender norms. Instead, it was about resource allocation, access to medical services, the capacity for women to work and earn money while having children, and the autonomy to choose not to have children at all. Once the two got away from the West vs China debate, it became a very practical discussion on how to enhance Chinese women’s lives.
Hearing this reinforced my belief that feminism is shaped by specific local circumstances, and people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. However, by the end of the conversation the first woman was still convinced the term “feminism” was nothing more than a Western plot to shame China. So, let’s examine the evidence.
China has dropped 37 ranks in the Global Gender Gap Index – run by the World Economic Forum of which China is an advocate – since Xi Jinping became Communist Party General Secretary in 2012. The Communist Party diminishes the role of women in public office. For the first time in decades, there is not one woman among the 24 Politburo members, China’s executive policymaking body. Party spokespeople often encourage more traditional roles for women – as caretakers and mothers – to address an ageing population. And the Party has made it harder for women to organise or advocate for themselves in China, using online censorship and the 2017 Overseas NGO Law to stifle dissent among civil society.
China has dropped 37 ranks in the Global Gender Gap Index since Xi Jinping became Communist Party General Secretary in 2012.
To avoid “collaboration with Western hostile forces”, the Overseas NGO Law prohibits local Chinese NGOs from receiving funding from individuals or companies based overseas. Given the difficulty in public fundraising, this has practically cut off the money supply to activist organisations in China.
Without the capacity to formally organise, Chinese feminists have turned to social media. The Party has followed. Beijing’s great firewall automatically censors words such as “feminism” online, marginalising the movement by painting it as a taboo subject. To be fair, there is some space for the discussion of women’s issues online in China, but only as long as it is not critical of the Party. For example, I am a member of a couple of WeChat groups that discuss women’s health and sexual pleasure. However, no one would dare criticise Party policy, or plan any sort of public activism to address the issues discussed.
In her 2023 article “Stay angry and leave hope for tomorrow”, Chinese feminist Lü Pin writes “if we understand change only as the overthrow of the regime, the feminist movement will never possess such power … We must move away from the notion of change being indicated solely by reform or revolution, since both are unlikely.”
Although I am sympathetic to throwing the proverbial patriarchal baby out with the bathwater, in more countries than just China, I understand Lü’s perspective. The feminist movement in China – if it can even be called a movement – cannot survive if it is about overthrowing the Communist Party. There are smaller, more practical feminist changes people can make within the system.
Lü says “I value the choice to remain unmarried and childless as a woman’s strategy for nonviolent non-cooperation with the state.” From my conversations with female colleagues in Hong Kong, and friends in Mainland China, I see this reality unfolding, whether women view it as a feminist action or not.
Ten years on from the arrest of the Feminist Five, China may not be where they hoped it would be. But the tug of war between feminists and the state, and all the people advocating for smaller changes in between, continues.
