In March 2018, a blog called CoolLabs published two posts on WeChat and Weibo smearing Feminist Voices and me, claiming that we had set up an international prostitution racket. People cut and pasted the content, and it went viral. The posts accused Feminist Voices and me of being run by "hostile overseas forces," of being a cult, and of deliberately sowing division in China. The tone was juvenile and the writing liberally dotted with outrage and exclamation marks: like a high school student telling their classmates how somebody was secretly eating peanuts during the flag-raising ceremony. Despite that, the posts did a lot of damage that couldn't be undone by the numerous posts that my feminist comrades and I fired back in return. Feminist Voices had no legal status, and therefore couldn't sue anybody. So I sued CoolLabs in a personal capacity, or rather, I sued Beijing Funzhi Alpha Tech Co., Ltd., their parent company. After a good deal of foot-dragging, my case was heard in late 2020, at the Yuexiu District People's Court in Guangzhou. I lost. I appealed, but to no avail. If I'm honest, the whole case was a lost cause from the start. Because this kind of insidious smear campaign is the main method currently being used to silence feminist voices in this country. I will try to explain three things. What kind of wording was employed by CoolLabs and their allies? What was the backstory to this smear campaign? And finally, why are we still talking about this, two years after the event? Firstly, the words they used to attack Feminist Voices. The article claimed to "break the news" that a person going by the alias Queen Mary, who called herself a feminist, was introducing Chinese women to foreign men looking for girlfriends, and charging a fee. It libeled us by saying that we were a "transnational agency trafficking Chinese women and girls to foreign men." We were, it said, part of an "organized prostitution ring," and then got straight to the point, demanding, "Why do Chinese women prefer foreign men? Aren't Chinese men good enough?" It then went on to answer its own question, claiming that many feminist organizations have Western influences behind them. It said Feminist Voices received funding from the Ford Foundation. They said that I, Zheng Churan of Feminist Voices, liked to attack the government and cozy up to foreign powers. They accused me of trying to split the country, of supporting independence for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tibet. If this were allowed to continue, the article railed, China would wind up controlled by the West, and Chinese women would become the playthings of foreign men. The first post garnered more than 100,000 views, and the second 60,000 times, despite only being posted to Weibo. Anti-feminists had a field day in the comments sections. Easily swallowing these outrageous lies, they screamed for “justice,” forwarding the posts and spreading the lies still further on major social media platforms. Even back then, the anti-feminists were predicting that the court would rule against Feminist Voices. Why did this tall tale of an international prostitution ring whip them into such a frenzy? There's always a huge demand for smutty gossip and scandal, and anything like that spreads like wildfire. Male nationalists get very worked up about sex work, especially when Chinese women offer their services to foreign men. Sexually active young women are regarded as the property of men. Once they have been "used" by foreign men, it is humiliating to Chinese men. It's a lot like the old custom that an ancestral tablet that has lasted 18 generations can be defiled by contact with menstrual blood. So the CoolLabs story, senseless and insulting as it was to women, made male nationalists feel as if their future wives were being defiled by a process of colonial sexual assault. These same men regularly rail against Chinese women, who, according to them, think Chinese men aren't worth marrying, having neither money nor muscle. So the idea of "foreign devils" getting their hands on Chinese women is an emotive one, even today. It was a clever move to claim that Feminist Voices was engaged in an international trafficking and prostitution ring right at the top of the post. It wasn't so important that it was me, or Feminist Voices, being accused of these alleged crimes. Once you have the initial denunciatory slogan, the struggle session can begin. The post also alleged that I had received overseas funding to support Hong Kong and Tibetan independence. The idea of secession is another convenient way to whip up fervor. The posts were full of factual errors. I am not a member of Feminist Voices (and if I were, I would consider it an honor). I didn't win a Top 100 Thinkers award, but was made one of the BBC's One Hundred Women. Maybe the writers were too patriotic to learn any English. As for the Ford Foundation, it has funded research projects in 985 Chinese universities in recent years, including Renmin University, the alma mater of CoolLabs employee Ms. Dan Dan. None of that mattered once they had started talking about secession. They needn't even bother trying to back up their claims. Because once they brought independence for Hong Kong, Tibet, and Taiwan into the mix, it was open season. Only people who have lived in China for a long time know what that means. Some people in California may be angry that Trump got elected, or people in the UK may feel frustration over Brexit. But our state media just file these things under "foreigners living in dire circumstances." For us, the big shibboleth is national unity and territorial integrity. In 1997, when I was just eight years old, I asked the teacher if Hong Kong people were doing so well, why should the city be returned to China? My teacher didn't answer, but warned me nervously not to ask anyone else that question, or I could get into trouble. “Got it, kid?” Most people in China are not politically apathetic. They are actually pretty keen on politics. It's just that they know how it can bring down disaster on their heads. We are currently under the sway of ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping's speech on the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." This defines Western countries as powers that are using China to strengthen their own sense of national unity. Certain keywords in the speech show us where the spiritual pollution lay: "Western" followed by "certain powers;" the Kuomintang (KMT) followed by "reactionaries," the US followed by "imperialist cultural aggression.” Nobody cares whether "the West" is supposed to refer to North America, Eastern Europe, Australia, or the Pure Land of Buddhism. No one considers what the relationship is between the leaders of the different factions of the Kuomintang and China; whether everyone and their dog in the United States actually does dream of one day planting the Stars and Stripes in China; what all those NGOs and foundations might actually be up to. Nobody thinks about these things because it's easier to toe the line, easier to agree to walk into the soundproofed room, easier to give up your understanding of the world, and of politics. It feels horribly powerless and dangerous to be pushed to the brink of these ideological no-go areas. Once these keywords are invoked, we become public enemies in our own country, legitimate targets for everyone to spit at and curse as traitors. This sort of language weaponization is very useful for dealing with people who won't toe the line. But these words alone can't take down the feminist movement. There has to be a coordinated effort. So, let's take a look at what happened just before and just after the CoolLabs posts. Just one week before, on International Women's Day 2018, the Weibo and WeChat accounts of Feminist Voices were shut down. In the contemporary Chinese feminist movement, Feminist Voices didn't just disseminate opinion, it also functioned as an organizing platform. Since 2012, it has played an indispensable role in supporting and promoting street action -- which I have personally taken part in -- and offering support for the #MeToo movement. When it was shut down, the movement lost its base camp. At the time, readers tried posting articles, pictures, and emoticons to show support, but much of the content never saw the light of day. Sometimes they thought they had posted screenshots in groups or to their friend circles, but actually only they could see it. This is a phenomenon that many WeChat and Weibo users find familiar today. After that, the smears began. These posts were made with the full knowledge and collusion of the state, setting a totally unethical precedent. We could only see posts in which we and our comrades were smeared: if we tried to refute them, we were silenced. CoolLabs has been handed a free pass to rail against the United States, the private sector, and the media. It takes part in each and every pro-CCP campaign. It is positioned as the patriotic youth of the new era, praising the state. In the Qing Dynasty, they would have been made marquises for their valor. One blog looking to expand its influence goes by the name Insight Vision. Another with a large readership is Guangzhou Day by Day. These platforms, along with some anti-feminist individuals, blew the whistle that kicked off the anti-feminist movement. The silencing of women's rights activists was the result of a series of events. From March to April 2018, WeChat trending stats showed that there was a sharp rise in the number of keyword searches for "feminism" after Feminist Voices was shut down, in a show of spontaneous solidarity from the community. But this effect had worn off by the time CoolLabs published its posts. Now, few are willing to even mention feminism. It's clear that the whole point of the CoolLabs post was to discredit me, and to discredit Feminist Voices. The authorities ban us from platforms, stop us from speaking up in our own defense, and incite male nationalists to attack us. Feminists like Feminist Voices and myself are clearly not welcome in this country. Like prisoners in days gone by, our faces have been tattooed, so the whole country knows we are among the most wanted criminals. What closed the door to us was the fact that we dared to start using the word "feminism." The smear campaign was a success, waged against us for daring to kick the hornet's nest. So what was the backstory to all of these events? The #MeToo movement came to China in early 2018. At that time, other social movements were making slow progress. Many of them were under constant political pressure, and started working as community aid organizations. They struggled to reach people online, outside of their usual bubble. The feminist movement had been struggling to gain any major traction too, until #MeToo came along. Unusually, it brought some real victories for feminists in its wake. What do you think of when you see the word "feminist"? At the time, the feminist base was much bigger than it had been when the Feminist Five, myself among them, were detained on International Women's Day in 2015. It was almost standard for young women online to identify as feminists. They spoke out on women's issues, and they had the potential, if organized, to turn that into larger-scale action. For example, more than 100 people nationwide launched anti-sexual harassment campaigns in 2017. After Luo Xixi kicked off the Chinese #MeToo movement, at least 94 colleges and universities and more than 10,000 alumni and students took part in campaigns against sexual harassment and for greater accountability on campus. But any large group with shared values is a potential threat to social stability in China. All along, as activists, we have been careful not to engage in political opposition. To walk the line of not betraying the cause, but all the while remaining accountable to the state. We don't sing red songs, but we don't want to be outright opponents of the government either. The women's movement must remain out in the open. It can't achieve anything through underground organizations. So we want to preserve the grey area, and with it the vitality we need to advocate for women's rights. Unfortunately, the government needs to ensure that any movement presenting a threat to stability crosses a red line. So it eliminates the grey areas, taking away the movement’s room to act, and forcing the movement to admit that it stands in confrontation with the government. Even back in 2015, the government came after the feminist movement by detaining the Feminist Five. Four other activists and I had been planning an anti-sexual harassment campaign in the run-up to International Women's Day. But we were detained in our home provinces and taken to Beijing under criminal detention. They finally gave up trying to bring criminal charges after an international display of solidarity. Back then, the state only had iron fist tactics in its repertoire for counteracting dissent. They could use criminal detention to disrupt the work of activists, but there was no criticism of the activists coming from the general public. All the censors could do was delete posts to stop solidarity from spreading further. But events have shown us that silencing people alone doesn't work. So the fight against the feminist movement evolved and matured into something smarter. They combined the iron fist approach with smear campaigns from collaborators. That was far more watertight. This is why the CCP indulges and even cultivates the bloggers that are willing to engage in ridiculous and vicious smear campaigns. Blogs like CoolLabs are its hired thugs. Neither has there been any let-up in the anti-feminist movement in China. Some of the main propaganda sources post anti-feminist content almost every day. Zhihu, while pretending to be objective and neutral, posts outright vitriol on Weibo. After the public transport anti-sexual harassment operation, many of us were forced out of our residential compounds at the same time as being subjected to a torrent of online abuse. At the time, some people on Weibo published my home address to intimidate me. How did these people get hold of my address? There is an invisible hand at work that consciously cultivates and enables the online underworld. Over the past few years, it has trained and built capacity in a number of anti-feminist groups, using various incidents. It defines where the forbidden zones are in any debate. Anyone touching on those areas is immediately attacked. And yet the forbidden zones are constantly expanding. Once it became forbidden to talk about Muslims, they began attacking Feminist Voices for supporting Muslim women who had been victims of abuse. When Ma Rong and Wang Baoqiang got divorced, they directed their efforts at feminists who refused to go along with the online abuse of Ma Rong as an evil woman. In 2017, the Global Times published an article saying that "Lü Pin and her ilk" were all pseudo-feminists controlled by foreign powers, and that the only real feminists were in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Articles like this blow the dog whistle, so any anti-feminist are able to understand the message. With training, anti-feminists learn more and more ways to discredit their opponents. They are taught the best mode of attack, which people to deploy, and how many. So when CoolLabs published those posts, the anti-feminists heard the message loud and clear, and piled on to attack me, Feminist Voices, and the entire feminist community. Why are we talking about this today? When I was researching and writing this article, every cell in my body screamed in protest. It was torture to reread all of the comments about the CoolLabs posts, the sheer arrogance of the language used. I felt like reporting a workplace injury. Replaying all of that was deeply unpleasant, but I still have some inspiration to share. Maybe it's the kind of nourishment that can help us to grow despite difficult times. The first is that as a feminist, I am disenchanted with the idea of using "legal channels." Before this happened, I was well aware of the lack of justice in our legal system. But afterwards, my comrades and I still thought that some kind of account would be made to society if we sued, and that we would be on the wrong side of the argument if we didn't. Victims are often distracted by this kind of argument, and lose their focus in the public opinion wars. So how did things pan out in court? Before the lawsuit, my lawyer was telling me that based on the evidence alone, we had a winning case. During the court hearing, I read the impact statement to the court with plenty of emotion welling up inside of me. So much so that my lawyer, a man who has defended many difficult cases, was reduced to tears. But to his surprise, the court delayed the case for a whole year after the hearing, only to rule against us. Their reasoning was that CoolLabs hadn't mentioned my name directly in its post, despite the fact that my name and profile picture were publicly linked to the Feminist Voices account. They only talked about Feminist Voices, and they blocked out my profile photo while they were calling it a cult. Therefore, I wasn't the target of their attack. Nothing to see here. Move along now. "So they were always going to rule against us," my lawyer sighed. "They just took a year to find an argument that would stand up to public scrutiny." This result, taken together with the recent and also rejected #MeToo lawsuit, makes me sure that the government will never allow any kind of feminist victory, online or in the courts. Small successes are important to people like us, who spend our time throwing eggs at a rock in the hope of making a kinder, more equal society. And yet it is nowhere to be found. I have realized that the idea of using legal action to solve problems is another form of superstition, no more effective than lighting incense to honor the gods. From the moment they file their suit, the client is treated with systemic violence. Court injustice is a condensed form of social injustice, and tosses you back and forth, before you lose the case anyway, along with every shred of human dignity. Our opponents revel in this, deleting our accounts and our content. Nothing good can come from any of it. I am not saying that feminists shouldn't try to use the law, but they should certainly try to use it more effectively in future, making it just one part of their strategy, rather than the whole attempt. The second lesson I learned is that some people are paying a heavy price on behalf of the feminist movement, which may be hidden from view but should never be forgotten. The CoolLabs article was released late at night. I read it before going to bed. The next morning I had an upper respiratory tract infection and lost my voice. I had a physical reaction at every critical moment of the litigation process. Then there was the impact of state violence in other areas of my life -- my husband Wei Zhili was imprisoned for helping defend workers' rights. I was in an angry, depressed state the entire time. It was exhausting for me to respond to the libel published about me by CoolLabs. I could have been focusing on other kinds of work or self-care. I have suffered mental torture to the point of numbness and silence, and yet the libel is still out there. These are the costs of the crackdown on feminism. And yet, not everyone seems to understand how much damage has been done to feminist activism. Some people think that they can avoid being shunted across one of the government's red lines just by taking care to manage their own reputations. But we can't protect anyone unless we all protect each other. Lately, some people in the movement have been forwarding articles from CoolLabs and Insight Vision. The saying that the internet remembers nothing is so true. To this day, I am still living with the consequences of being libeled by that bunch of thugs. This is a call to action, for anyone reading these words. Please remember who did this. Please remember these accounts. Don't forget. Forgetting is a choice we make, an active choice to continue harming victims. Please also remind others, anyone you see reposting these people's work. Remind them of this incident, this part of the history of Chinese feminism. My final lesson is actually a very empowering one, and it is that my lawsuit was doomed right from the start. And though I may have been the meat on that particular butcher’s block, I have always felt the community standing with me. In my support network, people continue to talk strategy and plan articles and posts to counter-attack anti-feminists. This is going on day and night. People have delivered letters to CoolLabs' Beijing headquarters. They also ask me to tell the story of Feminist Voices. There is solidarity from other communities, including the eight young people who won their case recently, and the women working on assembly lines. I am still working to restore the feminist movement to its true nature. I haven't given up. The community is doing its best to nourish and support me. This is hugely significant, and truly life-saving. It means I am still in the fight. Time and again, I am reminded that feminism hasn't died. It’s inexhaustible. The WeChat Index showed a sharp fall in the number of keyword searches for "feminism" after the furor around the libel died down. But keyword searches for "sexual harassment" rose again sharply after dipping, and have remained high ever since. I get the sense that people will keep on joining the feminist movement and the #MeToo movement, regardless of all of the slander and abuse. The changes we have seen in the movement since 2018 are staggering. Every year, our numbers surge to new records. The sheer power of collective anger against gender injustice is dazzling. People can't avoid it just by closing their eyes.
