14 Feb 2024 | Asia and Pacific, China, News and features
It was in 2015, during my internship at one of China’s most prominent digital media publications, that I had my first close encounter with censorship. Every so often the editor-in-chief would repost a message to our online chat group coming from someone whose username was “The Person is Present” (“人在呢”). They were from the Cyberspace Administration, which is the national internet regulator and censor of China. The message was always an instruction such as “Look up and delete all related reportage on the topic of A, report by 6PM.” The username, together with the requests they made, created an Orwellian atmosphere that even at my level as just an intern was chilling. All I could think was: “Big Brother is watching you.”
That same year, “the Feminist Five”, a group of feminist activists, were arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment on public transport just before International Women’s Day. Today even more feminists have been targeted, including Index 2022 award winner Sophia Huang Xueqin, who has been in jail for years now for her journalism and activism. Many of those who protested and were later arrested during the White Paper Revolution were also connected to the feminist movement. But not all discussions around women’s rights were or are silenced.
“To be honest, in today’s China, it’s difficult to discuss other topics in detail, but the topic of feminism can be discussed to some extent,” the journalist Qing Wang said in one episode of her podcast The Weirdo. Books about feminism by authors such as the Japanese feminist Chizuko Ueno have become bestsellers in China, even though the publishing sector censors other subjects. Feminist conversations with Chinese characteristics, which oppose the display of female sexuality and eroticism, as exemplified in the discussions around K-pop star Lisa’s Crazy Horse cabaret performance, are allowed to flourish rather than being censored because they essentially align with the ruling patriarchal and traditional Confucius values.
The most recent incident that sparked a widespread debate on feminism in the Mandarin-speaking world was a unique eulogy article written by Dr Lang Chen, the wife of assistant professor Xiaohong Xu at the University of Michigan, in which she delineated the gender dynamic in an intellectual household. The single article went viral online and reached more than 100,000 readers this January.
General feminist topics such as period poverty and gender-based healthcare inequalities are also essentially allowed. The latter discussion has even led to positive change. For example, in September 2022, after a woman’s complaint about the unavailability of sanitary towels on bullet trains became a trending topic on Weibo, the bullet trains started selling period products.
As shown in the Baidu Index, searching for the word “nvquan” (feminism) surged to a historical high at the time of the 2022 Tangshan restaurant attack, in which four women were savagely beaten by a group of men after rejecting their unwanted advances. However, the censorship machine soon turned the narrative from gender-based violence and femicide towards gang violence. Any efforts to approach the incident from a feminist angle on social media such as Weibo and WeChat was subject to the accusation of “inciting conflict between genders” and therefore scrubbed by the censors. For example, an article from the account Philosophia哲学社, which discussed the incident under the title “The Tangshan Barbecue Restaurant Incident Is Exactly An Issue of Gender”, was promptly removed from the WeChat platform. All the while other discussions asserting the idea that it was not a gender issue but rather a matter of human safety were allowed to spread.
Another illustration of where it starts to move into murkier waters is the well-known case of Zhou Xiaoxuan (better known as Xianzi) accusing Zhu Jun, a host from the state broadcaster CCTV, of sexual harassment. This case did spark widespread feminist discussions and helped launch the #MeToo movement in China. But the #MeToo term itself was promptly banned on social media (which led to a series of other terms to try and bypass the censors), Xianzi was suspended from Weibo and the court case ruled against her, symbolising a setback for China’s feminist movement.
The Chinese-US novelist Geling Yan was also silenced on Chinese social media because she voiced her anger in 2022 about the Xuzhou chained woman incident, where a woman was trafficked before being chained to a wall for years, continuously raped and gave birth to eight children. Yan called Xi Jinping “a human trafficker” in one interview. Directing her anger to the top was not appreciated. Her essays were removed from social media, she was blocked and her name was even removed from a Zhang Yimou film based on one of her novels.
So how can we make sense of the fact that some discussion of feminism is allowed while some discussion is not? Essentially feminist debate faces censorship once it starts to attract public attention, challenge the ruling power and has the potential to move to offline collective action. As one activist and member of the civic group BCome, who acted in the feminist theatre play Our Vaginas, OurSelves, has said:
“The censorship machine is most concerned with the potential of offline gathering and organised collective action. As made evident in ‘the Xuzhou chained woman incident’, Wuyi was just an ordinary netizen who had no previous activist records, and she got arrested only because she took the action of going to the actual place and investigating the incident herself.”
Due to the action-oriented nature of her work, the actor-turned-activist suffered from constant harassment from state security agents, and her phone which was registered in China, was traced and tapped.
This also helps explain the swift action around Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who accused a top Chinese official of sexual harassment. Shuai has largely disappeared from the public space since she spoke out. While what she did didn’t necessarily fit into the box of collective action, like the Feminist Five’s actions, Peng still went after a top official. As this Index article highlights, China has space for people to accuse low-level officials but not those at the top and Peng learnt the hard way.
Another issue that feminists now face is China’s low birthrate, which fell for the seventh year in a row in 2023. Fear is that censorship of feminism will increase as an growing number of Chinese feminists now hold negative views on marriage and childbearing. This is especially true for those identified as “radical feminists”, who are strongly against heteronormative marriage and childbearing. Many believe this was the reason behind the overnight crackdown on eight radical feminist groups in 2021 on Douban, with the officially stated reason being that they “consisted of extremism and radical political ideology”.
One episode of the critically acclaimed feminist podcast Seahorse planet, which discussed resisting the tradition of unconditionally obeying one’s parents, was similarly censored as filial piety is seen as the bedrock of the Chinese patriarchal order – which demands an increasing birthrate. On the flipside you have labels like “leftover women”, a negative term that gained traction from 2006 to essentially try and shame women into getting married, which continues to be used on one form or another. Ultimately it’s expedient for the government to pressure Chinese women into having children and they’ll ramp up rhetoric that helps that, while curtailing conversations advocating the opposite.
So is the topic of feminism free to discuss in China? Yes, so long as it’s not oriented towards collective-action, it leaves the ruling power of the party-state untouched and doesn’t threaten the birthrate, which doesn’t really leave much to discuss at all, except perhaps sanitary pads and lipstick.
22 Dec 2023 | News and features
In 1970, the British socialist Mervyn Jones addressed the peculiar, indeed unique, passions that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inspires, far more than any other. Jones was addressing fellow socialists, though his remarks apply to left-liberals too. He termed the conflict a “labyrinth” and wrote, “One cannot easily recall another problem over which Socialists of good faith have disagreed so much” – disagreed over everything from “sympathies” and “possible solutions” to an “analysis of the very nature of the problem.”
Almost from the moment that Hamas’ attacks of 7 October unfolded, the USA has been roiled by vitriolic debates that prove Jones’ observation – debates that, frankly, I have never witnessed in my lifetime. (The country was also torn by the Vietnam War, but that was a conflict in which tens of thousands of US soldiers were dying.) Both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel (reductive terms that I try to avoid) advocates have been punished: A magazine editor and a leading university president have been fired, speakers have been cancelled, medical school doctors have been relieved of their posts. Legal organisations, non-profits, unions, businesses, publications and city councils have been wracked by extraordinarily hostile internecine discord. Job offers have been rescinded. Even a Santa Claus was fired.
But much of the attention has focused on the country’s most elite and influential universities, which train our future leaders and are the object of both awe and resentment. And just as the Israel-Hamas war revealed long-standing rifts between what I would call the anti-fascist and anti-colonial Lefts, it also revealed trends and practices that have been distorting academic life for at least the last decade, and that have been decried by some on the Right and a smaller minority on the Left.
In the most immediate sense, the problem started with a plethora of statements – some shockingly bloodthirsty – that issued from students at Harvard and other universities, which praised the 7 October attacks, blamed Israel for them, exalted the Hamas “martyrs” and eagerly anticipated future violence against Israel. Demonstrations calling for the elimination of Israel, which some regard as a genocidal aim, became frequent. Many university administrations were either silent about the attacks themselves or issued anodyne statements: a sharp contrast to their heartfelt condemnations of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and to their support for the Black Lives Matter protests that followed.
The atmosphere at some campuses soon turned more ominous as some factions of the pro-Palestinian movement became more extreme: Jewish students were threatened with death; violently antisemitic messages flooded social media; classes were disrupted by students chanting Palestinian slogans; public spaces were defaced; speakers were shouted down; classrooms and faculty offices were blocked. What in the world was happening and, more important, why did university administrators seem to be paralysed? The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – three of the country’s most selective institutions – were called before a congressional committee to explain.
It did not go well. Disaster, fiasco, pathetic, embarrassing, feeble, infuriating, hypocritical: the presidents’ testimony elicited a tsunami of outrage from various political quarters. The hearings were conducted by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a right-wing Trump supporter, but the criticism was hardly confined to the right. Laurence Tribe, who taught at Harvard Law School for decades and whose defense of constitutional rights has made him a hero to the liberal-left, described the Harvard president’s testimony as “hesitant, formulaic”, “bizarrely evasive” and “deeply troubling”.
At the hearings, the academic leaders offered bloodless, legalistic answers to the question of whether advocating the genocide of the Jewish people contradicts the schools’ codes of conduct. (Let’s not lose sight of how extraordinary it is that this question needs to be asked.) “To call their performance robotic would insult robots,” Heather Mac Donald wrote in City Journal. The three presidents might as well have been discussing a physics equation; they manifested little understanding of the fact that for many Jews, genocide is hardly a theoretical issue. In response to often hostile questioning, the academic leaders insisted that the First Amendment, and the academy’s longstanding commitment to academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas, meant that only harassing conduct, not heinous speech, could be subjected to disciplinary action. In essence, they argued that “context matters”: speech and action are not the same. In this, they were right.
The problem, however, is that academia, and especially elite academia, is the place where free speech goes to die. In fact, the nonpartisan free-speech organisation FIRE ranks Harvard as last among 248 US universities when it comes to protecting free speech. (University of Pennsylvania is second to last.) And that, too, has a long context.
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The First Amendment is often misunderstood by outsiders, and by many Americans too. Its defense of free speech – and more important, free thought – was extremely radical in the 18th century and still is. It is the first clause in our Bill of Rights because the founders believed that in its absence no other rights would matter or, even, be possible. It prohibits any governmental body from either prohibiting or mandating speech. (Private universities are not required to adhere to First Amendment principles, though they claim to do so; as recipients of federal funds they are, however, subject to federal anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws.)
There are many exceptions to the amendment. Calling for imminent violence is not protected. Death threats and extortion are not protected. One cannot falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theatre or blare music at four in the morning in a residential neighbourhood. Defamation is not protected, which is why a jury recently decided that Rudy Giuliani, one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers, must pay $148 million to two African-American election-poll workers whom Giuliani falsely accused of electoral fraud – accusations that led to years of horrifically violent, racist threats against them and that ruined their lives. But political speech – even burning the American flag – is protected.
Despite their stated dedication to First Amendment principles, many universities spend a lot of energy curtailing speech. Sometimes this emanates from the Right, and has the force of the courts and the government behind it. In some Republican-controlled states, most notoriously Florida, prohibitions on how teachers can, and cannot, address gender-related issues or teach the history of slavery have been legislated. Professors are leaving the state’s universities. Conservative groups like the erroneously-named Moms for Liberty are busy banning books, especially those dealing with LGBTQ or racial issues.
But at the elite universities, the assaults on free speech stem almost entirely from the Left, resulting in a culture of anxiety that muffles professors and students alike. So-called hate speech codes, which are both vague and capacious, dominate. Controversial views are frequently punished: at Harvard, a law school professor was stripped of his faculty deanship because he joined the defense team of an alleged sexual predator, which offended feminists, and an evolutionary biologist was vilified for asserting that there are “two sexes,” which outraged trans activists; she eventually left the university. At MIT, a noted geophysicist’s public lecture was cancelled because he had critiqued some aspects of affirmative action. These and other incidents are well-known within academia, and to some outside it, which is why the presidents’ sudden championing of free speech struck many as ludicrous or worse. Time and again, university administrators have placated angry students rather than defend either their own faculties or the free circulation of ideas; the word “feckless” comes to mind.
Talk of “privilege” abounds; in fact, in a sharp departure from its courageous history of defending political dissidents, many on the Left now argue that the First Amendment itself is a form of privilege and therefore needn’t be defended. A bizarre campus culture of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” has emerged. Underlying all this is the premise that offense is synonymous with actual danger – that speech and action are the same – and that students must therefore be protected from ideas that don’t accord with their own. Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist and robust free-speech advocate (who was the target of an attempted cancellation), has described the terrain: “Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship.”
Complicating this situation has been the emergence of a group of ideas and practices called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), which gained steam after George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matters protests. It is difficult to separate the criticism of the presidents’ testimony from the DEI context. Though DEI aimed to increase minority representation, it is also associated with a range of highly contested ideas and has, perhaps ironically, created an intellectual monoculture: the very opposite of the multiplicity that diversity implies.
DEI is a constellation of ideas, but certain themes predominate. Many of its proponents consider any racial disparities in academic test scores or grades to be ipso racist, and argue for discarding such assessments. Some push for virtual quotas in hiring and student acceptances as the sign of “equity,” which they contrast to equality of opportunity. Others posit that US history should be taught as, primarily, the story of “structural racism”. All these ideas are debatable: except that, often, they are not. Throughout the country, DEI has become the reigning ideology at numerous universities, colleges and even elementary and high schools. Combatting “white hegemony” and “neo-colonialism” is a pedagogic aim; the Columbia School of Social Work’s framework for its entire curriculum focuses on “power, race, oppression and privilege.”
Faculty fear committing “micro-aggressions”, which can include anything from mispronouncing a student’s name to introducing an idea that makes them uncomfortable. (No one actually knows what a micro-aggression is, so everyone is kept on their toes.) All this has made faculty nervous, but far more important is that students are too: they tell me that they fear using the wrong word, expressing the wrong idea or posting the wrong thing on social media. As one explained to me, “We’re policing each other.”
Administrations are policing them too. Students and faculty at some universities attend mandatory anti-racist training sessions. Fealty to DEI principles is a stated prerequisite for hiring or promotion at some universities (including, at times, mine).
Meanwhile already hired professors can be required to post “anti-racist” affirmations, an eerie echo of the anti-Communist oaths required during the McCarthy era. Many of DEI’s critics emanate from the Right, but there are liberals and leftists, including prominent black intellectuals, who also reproach it: Randall Kennedy, a leading legal theorist at Harvard who identifies with the Left, has observed that “the DEI regime has a big problem, and that big problem is the problem of coercion.” Danielle Allen, an influential democracy theorist (also at Harvard) who was a member of the university’s initial DEI committee, has lamented the fact that like so many political projects, the positive intentions of DEI morphed into their opposite. In the wake of the Congressional hearings, she wrote, “Counter to the anti-racism agenda, we cannot create a framework for inclusion and belonging that is focused on accusation. . . Somehow the racial reckoning of 2020 lost sight of that core goal of a culture of mutual respect… A shaming culture was embraced instead.”
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A crisis can be an opportunity, and it is unclear what direction universities will take in the wake of the Congressional hearings and the debates – welcome debates, in my view – that they have inspired. The University of Pennsylvania’s president was fired (cancelled, in effect), which strikes me as exactly the wrong response, if only because it implies that the problem lies with an individual rather than with a culture. Some have called for universities to expand the definition of hate speech to more specifically include antisemitism and to fold antisemitism into the DEI project: another wrong turn. (As David French, a conservative New York Times columnist and Harvard Law School grad argued, “Censorship helped put these presidents in their predicament, and censorship will not help them escape.”) Conversely, others have argued that DEI has proved to be inherently anti-democratic and should be abolished, though it is extremely unlikely that many universities will accede to that.
At the moment, both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students feel beleaguered, victimised and unsafe, particularly on highly-politicised campuses in New York City. Jewish students feel intimidated when they walk through a gauntlet of masked protesters shouting “From the river to the sea!” as they go to class or see signs saying “Zionism is Fascism”. Pro-Palestinian students have been doxed – an indefensible attack on their right to expression. Anti-Israeli events have been cancelled, and Students for Justice in Palestine, the most extreme group, has been suspended by several universities: sometimes for speech, sometimes for actions. Dueling headlines in a recent edition of the New York Times capture the atmosphere well: “Defenders of Palestinians Feel Muzzled on Campus” and “Feeling Estranged, Some Jews Wonder if They Have a Place at Harvard”.
Allen has stressed the urgency of the situation: “The health of our democracy requires renovation of our colleges and universities,” she wrote. My own dream is that faculty and students will become unfettered, that an atmosphere of robust intellectual debate will be fostered, and that faculty can raise a generation of students to be fearless, independent critical thinkers unburdened by dogma, which is the prerequisite for an informed citizenry. But changing a culture is a difficult task, far more so than issuing new guidelines. And it is actually quite hard to get the balance right between speech and harassment, and to figure out if, say, overt support for terrorist acts crosses the line from one to the other. Allen admits, “We do not know how to protect intellectual freedom and establish a culture of mutual respect at the same time. But this must be our project.”
