In the run-up to the Global Women’s Summit slated for October in Beijing, which will mark the 30th anniversary of that city’s influential 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women, some WeChat accounts focused on feminism and women’s empowerment have been blocked or had their content deleted.
Earlier this month, feminist blogger Jiang Chan (姜婵, Jiāng Chán) had her official WeChat account blocked. The account now displays a message saying that it has been blocked, and that the content cannot be viewed because it is in violation of Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) regulations. Jiang hasn’t updated her Weibo account, with 41,000 followers, since May of 2023, but on WeChat she has published many popular articles and essays with over 100,000 views. Her WeChat account description reads, “We were not silent; we participated in change.” In August, her WeChat article about a sexual harassment incident at the Wuhan University library was censored. The article included screenshots of online comments and private messages from women with sons who either supported the young man accused of harassment, made excuses for his behavior, or engaged in victim-blaming. Jiang described these women as “spoiled-boy moms” (男宝玛, nánbǎo mǎ, literally “moms of ‘precious boys.’”)
Another feminist blogger, Night of the Witch (女巫之夜, Nǚwū zhī yè), reported that three of her articles had been deleted from WeChat during August and September. And in a recent post on X, the poet, essayist, and former elementary school teacher Li Tiantian announced that her personal WeChat account (山花诗田, Shānhuā shītián) had been banned. Li left China in 2022, after she was “mentally-illed” (forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward) in retaliation for her support of a fired Shanghai history professor who questioned the Chinese government’s official death toll for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Li said that while she hadn’t been posting much to her WeChat account since she went abroad, she was grateful to her over 100,000 readers for their support over the past decade.
Censorship and deletion of feminist social media content—in addition to content focused on LGBTQ+ issues, human- and labor rights, environmental and safety issues, grassroots NGO activity, and more—has become routine in China, and the crackdown stretches back many years. This summer saw large-scale censorship of online discussion about the MaskPark scandal, in which tens of thousands of Telegram users shared non-consensual video and images of women. In both 2021 and 2023, WeChat carried out mass deletions of feminist, #MeToo, and LGBTQ+ accounts, and in 2021, social networking site Douban shuttered a number of popular feminist groups. During this same period, many civil society groups advocating for women were forced to close their social media accounts or disband due to government pressure. On International Women’s Day in 2018, the Lü Pin-founded advocacy group Feminist Voices was permanently banned on both Weibo and WeChat, where it had 180,000 and 70,000 followers, respectively.
This weekend, SCMP’s Phoebe Zhang reported on the upcoming Women’s Summit scheduled to take place in Beijing in October on a date yet to be announced. Despite Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun’s pronouncement that “in promoting gender equality and women’s all-round development, China is not only an advocate but also an active actor,” the vagueness of the conference details, the emphasis on Xi Jinping’s thoughts on gender, and the effective exclusion of grassroots Chinese NGOs suggests that the summit is unlikely to break new ground on gender equality or women’s empowerment:
Several international officials and organisations are expected to attend. However, domestic grass-roots NGOs were not likely to be invited unless they were sponsored by overseas entities, sources told the South China Morning Post.
Two books by President Xi Jinping published earlier this month featured selected speeches and articles covering issues ranging from gender equality to traditional family values, and instructing China’s women’s federation not to become like Western feminist groups.
[…] Li Yingtao, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University and an expert on gender issues who attended the 1995 conference, cautioned that challenges remained and solutions were still needed.
[…] “There is much work to be done,” she said. “We need to recognise issues such as internet safety and gender-based violence facilitated by technology, such as doxxing.” [Source]
The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing continues to resonate thirty years on. The political-science focused website Good Authority recently published an interview with historian Allida Black on the legacy of the conference, and why it still matters. One reason the conference was so pivotal, says Black, was “because it was the first time women’s rights were clearly articulated as human rights on a global stage.” Another recent article in Ms. magazine by Annie Hillar, Rachel Jacobson, and Happy Mwende Kinyili looks back on the many accomplishments of the 1995 Beijing Conference, and identifies some of the areas in which progress has lagged:
The Beijing Platform for Action—the bold blueprint for equality adopted by all 189 countries at the conference—urged, for instance, greater representation of women in government; soon thereafter, 22 countries passed laws on that issue and the ratio of women in parliaments has more than doubled since. (This matters on a personal level; if you live in a country with more women in government, you’re more likely to enjoy family-friendly policies like paid leave.)
The platform demanded that governments eliminate barriers to education for women and girls; and girls’ primary-school enrollment has more than doubled in the decades since. (Again, a fact that can transform whole generations, since having even primary education halves a woman’s later risk of dying in childbirth.)
The list goes on: Since Beijing, as a result of the policies women’s organizations pushed hard to get included in the platform, child marriages have dropped dramatically, 88 percent of the world’s governments have passed laws taking action on violence against women and the inclusion of women in peacemaking processes has led to more lasting conflict resolution in key regions.
Given the success of those efforts, the women’s movements who pushed for Beijing and saw their work transform the world could have been hailed as heroes and innovators. Instead, funding for women’s movements has—slowly over the last decades and then rapidly over the last year—begun to shrivel. As of this spring, an astonishing 47 percent of all women’s rights organizations in crisis regions projected that they would have to shut down within six months if current financial conditions continue. [Source]
