Editor's note: Women's rights activist Xiao Meili was invited by the Chinese University of Hong Kong to take part in its artist-in-residence program from March-July 2020. This article is based on an Apr. 3, 2020 Zoom lecture she gave, titled "Women's Rights in the Post-#MeToo Era." How #MeToo grew on Chinese soil My friend Guo Jing once said, "Everything we have done since 2015 was impossible." In 2015, five Chinese feminists were detained for 37 days for planning a campaign against sexual harassment on public transport for International Women's Day. They became known as the Feminist Five. Their detention had a huge impact on the Chinese feminist movement. Some people are still living with the consequences, such as daily struggles with fear and anxiety. The feminist movement is still suffering from the blow to organized feminist campaigning, to the policy advocacy model, and to collective action. Around this time, a large number of human rights and pro-diversity NGOs disappeared. Individual activists were also targeted. In 2016 and 2017, I was forced to move house five times by the Guangzhou police because of my involvement in a subway anti-sexual harassment billboard campaign. Things have gotten worse still The Great Firewall has become a permanent fixture, not just online, but in the minds of many people. Censors' powers to block sensitive words and reroute online traffic seem magical, and malicious reporting of political content is widespread. The censors and their online helpers are able to get into everything, making it hard to conduct a serious rights protection campaign. People have started using code words and abbreviations to get around censorship, meaning that a lot of people who don't know how Chinese internet works and aren't up on the latest trend can't understand what is being said. Topics relating to the #MeToo hashtag are often deleted, so people use secret codes instead. Account closures are now the norm, and it's gotten hard to set up new ones. Social media platforms often carpet bomb public interest organizations and rights activists, and the government-backed trolls are legion, systematically manipulating public conversation, making it dumber and more emotional. For example, if a celebrity cheats, public opinion divides into two camps, supporting either A or B. Anyone trying to talk about the issues involved, rather than just casting blame, is set upon by both sides, or asked which side they are on. Any discussion tends to ascribe the problem to limited ideas of identity, fan circles, Gen Z problems, and so on. Such an environment is bad for everyone, including the feminist movement, which has a lot of enemies forever ready with their anti-feminist ideas and emotional attacks. So how did #MeToo get through this barrage and get heard? Thanks to the efforts of feminists up until that point, there had already been considerable online discussion of sexual violence and harassment. Many were familiar with the idea, for example, that sexual violence is about power and control rather than sexual desire at its core, and with the idea that victim blaming is wrong. The public already knew quite a bit about it. They also knew quite a bit about Lefebvre’s fascinating and complex concept of social space. Literary works like “Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise” by Li Yihan were also important assets for anti-sexual violence campaigners. There was also a pan-feminist community that had sprung up in 2012, and a network of intensive campaigners who paved the way. The initial participants in the #MeToo movement also drew on considerable experience of feminist activities, campaigning and knowledge of feminist theory. They were the ones who launched the letter writing campaign to universities in which more than 9,000 alumni wrote to their alma maters calling for a mechanism to prevent sexual violence and harassment. Nearly 80 college students also signed a joint letter to their principal. The scale was astonishing. When we took part, Lü Pin, the founding editor of Feminist Voices, worried that either Zhang Leilei, who coordinated the activities, or Feminist Voices itself would face retaliation. Sure enough, the Feminist Voices Weibo account was shut down at 2 a.m. on March 9. Action-oriented organizations will always be targeted, and this was just another example. By July 23, a large number of #MeToo cases had been posted to the public welfare community on WeChat. This was largely because that circle is a relatively safe space for feminists. Quite a few feminist groups are members, and individual cases can be more impactful there, and gain more support. After that, #MeToo cases started springing up in other WeChat groups, including those related to media, religion, the art world, and so on. The battle against censorship #MeToo's breakthrough was multifaceted. The topic wasn't regarded as quite so sensitive and politically confrontational as organized feminist actions, and the individual cases didn't really lend themselves to the mentality used by the stability maintenance system, which always looks for a "black hand" or puppet master behind the scenes. As long as there was widespread sexual violence, it was going to be hard to stop #MeToo. Lü Pin made the point that the #MeToo movement was decentralized; some scholars in Taiwan pointed out that from the perpetrator's point of view, #MeToo creates hypervisibility, so that powerful and resourceful people will come under intense scrutiny if they are reported. But the stability maintenance system was unable to silence these powerful people, because it was designed to protect them. Action-oriented NGO organizations have many vulnerabilities: they need full-time employees, need official legitimacy, and are easily demonized and discredited as being in the pay of foreign forces. Not so for victims reporting cases of sexual assault. While some people have been "stabilized" and intimidated, this often created further public backlash when a case generated a lot of interest. While advocacy challenges policies, systems and laws, #MeToo victims have more concrete goals because they demand that the focus turn to the individual abusers. The system is more willing to cut off and abandon individual perpetrators, and the price the perpetrators must pay can be increased with some hard bargaining. Personal narratives and flesh-and-blood stories spread more readily on social media, moving into the gap left by voices that have already been silenced. They provide an outlet for high levels of public anger, especially among women going about their daily lives. It's not quite the same as consuming the misery of others and getting angry about it either. Passing on #MeToo accounts could actually be constructive and lead to a positive outcome. The accumulation of cases could lead to positive changes in institutions, or in the culture at large. The #MeToo movement was also quick to adapt to the secret codes used on China's internet. The Rice Rabbit, a homonym for the English words "me too," was used, as was the name of author Fang Siqi. Images of posters from a MeToo exhibition, the words "Hou Liangqing of Nortel" and a 95-page pdf about Longquan Temple were also secret signs for it. #MeToo's dilemma -- and a strategy #MeToo relies on the internet and the media, and only a few cases that tick the right boxes in communications theory - that tell a strong story about a powerful and well-regarded perpetrator - go viral. Those reporting these stories also need strong social media skills, be able to write clearly and accurately about their own experiences, organize their reporting and hit all of the key buzzwords in the headline, and start seeing their story not from their own point of view, but from the view of what the readers want to see. They also need considerable psychological resources, as they will face a torrent of abuse and immense pressure to be the perfect victim. In Chinese mythology, whenever protagonists try to gain immortality, they are invariably struck by lightning, regardless of whether they succeed in the end. Sexual harassment and assault campaigners often have that feeling. After University of Minnesota student Liu Jingyao filed a civil lawsuit for rape against JD.com's Richard Liu, she was accused of laying a honey trap, and subjected to a smear campaign in the mainstream Chinese media. When Huahua reported Lei Chuang, her friends took her cell phone away to stop her from getting hurt by the online comments. The worst-case scenario is when victims muster the courage to speak out, but don't get enough exposure, or the attention that is paid soon evaporates, leaving them with no support. Online anger doesn't always translate into real life change, so the perpetrator could be left untouched by the whole process. The media still don't really know enough about how to report sexual assault allegations, framing the relationship between the parties, whether to identify them, and how to choose which information to publish. To what extent do the details of the assault need to be described, so as to arouse a reader’s empathy but not encourage lewdness or voyeurism? All of this has to be carefully weighed. There were a lot of issues with the early reporting of the Bao Yuming sexual assault case. The police didn't make enough details clear from the start, and the media never followed it up properly. Not enough facts were reported, and there was too much sensationalism. Lightning that strikes more than once The whole process of reporting the case at the police station was like that afore-mentioned lightning strike. I went with the woman to the police station and sat next to her through the whole process, during which a policeman took a blunt knife to her deepest trauma. He ignored the entire point of the report, which was that the woman's consent had not been given. She had to constantly and firmly reassert that she had been sexually assaulted. Then he started to try to trap her, trying to get her to admit that she was a paid sex worker, interrogating her about her private life, making humiliating sexual jokes, and generally acting in an unprofessional manner. We asked for a policewoman to be present, but she turned out to be more of a decoration, and didn’t get involved in any part of the reporting process. She sat, smoking and playing on her phone in a corner, full of resentment for being forced to work overtime. The only benefit she may have conferred on the proceedings may have been to limit the lethal options open to the male police officer. Later, we discovered that the perpetrator and some of the policemen at the station were actually good buddies. Naturally, this isn't always the case with the police, but there have been surprisingly similar cases. Regarding the relationship violence allegations made by a woman using the handle @The_whole_point_of_Debussy, the police kept accusing the women who reported the crime of trying to destroy the perpetrator's life. When the woman reported her allegations of sexual assault by Bao Yuming, it was her neck the police grabbed. Why the media matters There were some issues with the media reporting of Bao Yuming's case in its early stages too. The police didn't give out information in a timely manner, and media failed to follow up on it. The lack of available facts and the highly emotive nature of the case meant that much was left to people's imaginations, and public opinion flip-flopped a number of times. All of this fed public impatience with the case, and provided ammunition for future attacks on the #MeToo movement. Amid the constant assault on non-government organizations (NGOs), the feminist movement decentralized, leaving everyone isolated and without support. Former clients had no support system, and neither did those who tried to help them. Everyone was exhausted and vulnerable. Widespread public concern about sexual assault in China has been fuelled by the blood and tears of the victims. On this the #MeToo movement has been highly dependent on social media and individual campaigns, putting huge amounts of pressure on the parties involved. A single wrong or misunderstood comment can inflame public opinion, which will then turn on the victim. The woman who accused Li Yang of domestic violence said on Thanksgiving that she forgave him, although it seemed that it was more out of a need to let the matter drop than out of any forgiveness for the violence she suffered. That also caused a lot of anxiety on social media. Navigating sexual harassment and assault complaints is so fraught in China these days. Many routes have been closed off entirely, and the only route left can feel like traversing Huashan’s mountain top suspension bridge at times. A single falling rock can leave people feeling as if it’s game over. As Lü Pin once said, “The #MeToo movement is hypervisible, but very few people actually focus on the core issues.” That's not normal, and yet it's a product of where we are politically. After #MeToo, what next? The first big victory of the #MeToo movement was that of a female employee who brought a sexual harassment case against prominent social worker Liu Meng. As a result, liability for damages for sexual harassment was inscribed into civil case law. But there has been scant progress in developing sexual harassment prevention mechanisms in universities and colleges since 2018. The lawsuit brought by former TV intern Zhou Xiaoxuan (Xianzi) against former TV host Zhu Jun made headlines in 2018, but the case stalled for more than two years. The first court hearing was only held recently, and there is still no date set for the second. Given the hostile climate in which it emerged, #MeToo was nothing short of the miracle. It gave us a glimpse that social change is possible, and that we are all just waiting for the opportunity to make it happen. People say the internet has a short attention span, and that everything gets deleted, but it also reaches a large number of people who refuse to forget. People want the deep and complex discussions that #MeToo generated, and that desire will continue to grow. We are already having very different public discussions about sexual assault than six years ago. In the past, offline activism was still needed to ramp up public concern for these cases, but nowadays, somebody will usually write it up, regardless of the angle they take. #MeToo has also laid the foundation for wider discussions about gender, and given people experience on which they can base future actions. It has fed the community, intellectually speaking. Public awareness of how the government manipulates public opinion has also grown through the #MeToo movement, which has managed to break through several different kinds of censorship. People were watching and learning the whole time, and they used some of what they learned later, in the public outcry over Wuhan pandemic whistleblowers Li Wenliang and Ai Fen. What do we do when the world has moved on? Some people are still posting about this on social media. For example, Central Academy of Fine Arts professor Yao Shunxi was alleged to have been sexually harassing students for many years, as well as demanding gifts from them and holding their artwork hostage, according to one student of his, Xiao Yang. When the story went viral, the Central Academy said they would handle it, but all they did was to tell Yao to stay away from students. They didn't permanently remove his teaching privileges. When the heat seemed to die down, Xiao Yang kept on posting, using the hashtag #CentralArtsAcademyProfessorYaoShunxi, kickstarting public discussion again and making it harder for them to make the issue go away. Volunteers from during the Lei Chuang case still write messages to him every day. Lei said he would withdraw from public life after being exposed, but he never did. These volunteers call on him to do that every day, to this day. Xianzi spends a lot of time on Weibo, keeping abreast of all the hot topics and actively participating in public discussions, where she has become a “big V” tweeter, with an ever-expanding base of followers. Xianzi, Huahua, Jingyao, Xiaoyang, and many others have followed up on subsequent #MeToo cases too. They reached out to each other and formed a mutual support network. Later victims contacted them for reliable media contacts and legal resources. Some volunteers sorted and archived all of the #MeToo cases into a database, including related online discussions from January 2018 to July 2019. There is no also a group of volunteers who offer assistance to victims in #MeToo cases, dividing up the workload between them. Journalist Huang Xueqin, who followed up on the Luo Xiqian case, conducted a survey of sexual harassment in the media, and continued for some time to follow up on new cases. She was detained and placed under house arrest in 2019 for reporting on the Hong Kong protest movement. She was later released on bail. Meanwhile, charity curators and feminists cosponsored a series of #MeToo exhibitions, bringing the online movement to offline spaces, and collecting and collating artefacts from the movement in an artistic way, pushing it further into the public gaze. Anonymous exhibitions appeared in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and New York, and spread through WeChat Moments. Exhibitions in China were subjected to varying degrees of suppression by the authorities. But offline actions tend to make stronger impacts for the movement, to a degree that isn't possible online. Feminists who were active before 2015 are also constantly changing and developing, moving to work in law, psychology, communications or assisting people on a case-by-case basis. The failure of the movement on the streets has forced us to adapt and learn new skills for a changing movement. For example, some people collect useful information for victims and post it in shelters, or distribute it to helplines or lawyers. Some have studied social work, law, or offered personal support and companionship to victims. Many feminists are using art exhibitions and other cultural events to build the movement offline, to make up for the weaknesses in online discussion. More and more social media users and citizen journalists are talking about gender these days. Podcasts are a potential medium for in-depth discussion of such issues. The podcast I ran until October 2020, A Bit Rural, provided a new platform for feminists to respond to what was going on and take part in public discussion. Feminists have gathered on a number of platforms including Douban, Zhihu and Weibo with some intensive discussions about social change taking place. Finally, I want to tell the story of an activist called Zhao Yaya. She learned about feminism at an early age. The Liu Qiangdong sexual assault case made the news while she was studying in Minnesota. Incensed by the university's perfunctory response and the smear campaign against Jingyao, she built a website to support her, started an online signature campaign, and took part in activities organized by Chinese feminists in North America, such as the #NotYourPerfectVictim hashtag campaign started by activists Qiqi and Mimi. Her support for Jingyao and her in-depth understanding of the issues led her to develop a campaign against rape culture. After the Nth Room case in South Korea [involving blackmail, cybersex trafficking, and the spread of sexually exploitative videos via the Telegram app between 2018 and 2020], she worked as a volunteer on Weibo to bring new understandings of women's rights to people in China. She told me: "The #MeToo movement that started in China a couple of years ago has laid solid foundations and paved the way for our discussions today. It is precisely because of the debates we had at the time that everyone has more awareness today. This means that we can push the debate further, and in greater detail, than ever before. I don't think our efforts were in vain; these things just need a bit of time. The thing that has surprised me is how many young people online are more aware than ever of feminism, issues around gender and gender-based violence; this has increased exponentially in the past few years.” People often ask me what can they do, but it's hard for me to give specific suggestions because I don't know their skill set, their situation and the options available to them. You will know better than anyone what you can do. You can follow others and try to figure out what they're doing, or take part in entry-level volunteering. It's hard to call everyone to action. Some of us feel more comfortable listening to lectures and venting online, and think we're pretty awesome. But when we go out into communities to post anti-domestic violence stickers or collect and deliver signatures, we may feel pushed out of our comfort zone. And even if you do these things, the impact will be limited. We're not going to bring down the patriarchy in a single day, and so we are all going to feel a strong sense of powerlessness. But this is our reality. If you don't take part, you can stay above the fray and look cool. If you do take part, you will face criticism, attack and failure. But that is the price that must be paid for change. Action is probably the main thing that defines your participation in the feminist movement. But participating in social movements attracts a lot of heat, and negative feelings and depletion of personal resources can worsen the longer you do it. The key is to maintain an attitude that thinks it is expanding the realm of the possible, even in a hostile world. We need to be on constant alert for breakthroughs. Sometimes, if you keep plugging away, an opportunity will suddenly present itself. In the era of fragmentation and decentralized action, our connections with each other have taken on a huge importance. We need to get to know and connect with each other, like nodes on a network, so we can support each other and shoulder the burden of this work against sexual violence together.
