2:40 A.M., June 10, 2022, Tangshan city in northeastern China –– A man entered a barbecue restaurant and approached a table of three women. He put his hand on the back of one, who rejected his advance. In response, the man slapped the woman in the face. Within seconds, the assault flared into savage violence – eight more men joined the aggressor to beat the women, hitting them with chairs, kicking them and dragging them outdoors. Other customers at the restaurant stood by; one female passer-by who seemingly attempted to intervene was quickly pulled back. The woman who rejected the original advance was kicked in the head, smashed by beer bottles, and left motionless and bloody on the street as the men fled the scene.
The security camera footage was appalling in its brutality. This video rapidly circulated online, flooding social media with outrage against misogyny in China, taking up the top six places of the Twitter-like Weibo’s most-discussed topics, with billions of views of the attack-related hashtags. State television called for the suspects to be severely punished. Fury and terror at the threat of sexual violence. Gender-based discrimination looms over everyday life.
The intensity of the public response to the attack made clear the growing attention to sexual harassment and gender-based violence in China. However, this is set against a foundation of systemic misogyny. China only made domestic violence punishable by law in March 2016; before 2001, physical abuse was not even grounds for divorce. Even in recent years, women have had little success in holding sexual assault to account, with very few cases ruling in the victim’s favor and denunciation and suppression (via censorship) of complaints in the first place. A few particularly severe incidents of violence against women like the Tangshan attack overwhelmed censors and garnered irrevocable momentum on social media. In September 2020, a social media star with hundreds of thousands of followers was set on fire by her ex-husband while she live-streamed on TikTok, dying two weeks after. In January 2022, a woman was found chained up in a hut in Xuzhou, revealed to be a mother-of-eight and victim of human trafficking. However, when tennis star Peng Shuai accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault in November 2021, she was wiped from the web and disappeared for weeks. The public response, government operation, and new activism after such incidents have shown both growing awareness of women’s rights and how divisive and controversial feminism still remains. It is unclear if the Tangshan attack – or another trigger – will function as the tipping point that uproots misogyny in Chinese society.
Throughout most of China’s history, men were placed at the core of the family and society at large. Traditional China was decidedly patriarchal. As early as the Zhou dynasty (1050 – 221 BCE), gender roles were divided such that “men plow, women weave. Families desired sons and did not want daughters. The philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) would prescribe discourse on gender for centuries: Confucianism esteemed ancestral rites and family virtues, where women’s roles were primarily kinship roles: daughter, sister, wife, mother, to accord with the needs of men. During Han times (202 BCE – 220 AD), writings emphasized female virtues including humility, subservience, self-abasement, cleanliness, and industry. The family system from Han on was patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchal, and allowed concubinage. The Tang dynasty (618 – 907) was a golden age for women: Wu Zetian became the first and only empress of China; women pursued occupations as trade, weaving, performance, and secretary work; elite women enjoyed higher education and degrees of autonomy. However, there was a growing perception of women as a commodity as laws allowed unlimited buying of concubines. By Song times (960 – 1279) women’s status recoiled, as Neo-Confucianism became the dominant belief system, enforcing physical segregation of men and women and emphasizing the gender vocabulary of yin and yang: Women were yin – soft and yielding – and men were yang – active and assertive, claimed as part of universal natural order. The Song began a cult of widow chastity (that widows not remarry), and the practice of foot binding (binding young girls’ feet to prevent them from growing more than a few inches long) for centuries to come. Meanwhile, women were becoming generally literate (female poets rose to fame) and possessed greater property rights. The Qing dynasty (1636 – 1912) maintained Confucian principles, women had no legal rights to property, but upper-class women cultivated skills in arts of the domestic sphere as music and writing.
Women’s role changed significantly in the 20th Century. With the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing monarchy and established a new republic, reform extended to women: foot binding, widow chastity, parental control of marriage, and concubinage were all eliminated; women were allowed in higher education and more entered the workforce; women were actively involved in the revolution in order to win their right to vote and stand for election. In the 1930s, women’s suffrage was achieved under the government of the Nationalist Party, along with legal reforms such as the right for women to initiate divorce and to choose their marriage partners freely. After the Sino-Japanese War and Civil War between the Nationalists and Communists, the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party, with gender equality established as state policy from the onset. Mao famously said, “Women hold up half the sky.” Women were granted equal rights as men entitled by law – to education, employment, and participation in politics – for the first time. The 1950 Marriage Law outlawed arranged marriages, concubinage, dowries, and child brides. Women were also granted the right to file for a divorce. The government encouraged women to take up traditionally male-dominated professions and ensured equal pay.
With the reform and opening-up policies that began in 1978, Western feminist theories were introduced and ideologies on gender and women’s rights were disseminated to a wide audience. The 1980 one-child policy (which limited families to one child each) dictated women’s options for childbirth and meant that girl babies often went unregistered or were aborted. However, the one-child policy also freed women to work instead of focusing on childcare, and shifted opportunities and parents’ investment to only-child girls. The economic reforms of the last twenty-five years bolstered women’s financial independence, with men and women competing for education and employment in the booming capitalist economy.
However, after decades of CCP leadership and years of economic liberalism, Chinese society is still deeply interwoven with gender traditions, often condoned as “cultural.” China’s early gains for women have not been maintained since the country opened up its economy in 1978. According to the Gender Gap Index by the World Economic Forum, China has slipped in global rankings for gender equality from 57th in 2008 to 173rd in just over a decade. Quotas for women in politics were abolished. There are no women in the Politburo Standing Committee; only a quarter of the national legislature are women; sexism in the workplace and in advertising is pervasive; the majority of society believes that men belong in the workplace and women in the home; expectation that women have children persists with pressure from parents and in-laws; women are still subject to discrimination in employment and job promotion and underrepresented in certain career fields; and the disapproving label “leftover women” was constructed for well-educated, high-income women who are unmatched by male partners. The one-child policy was replaced in 2015 by a two-child policy, and then the three-child policy in 2021. This encouragement for increased childbirth must be distinguished from coercion, but the policy likely means that some women will return to childcare and housekeeping under persisting gender norms.
However, against this backdrop of maintained gender inequality, a feminist awakening is underway. On Women’s Day in 2015, a group of young Chinese women, who came to be known as the “Feminist Five,” were detained for planning a demonstration against sexual harassment on public transport. The imprisonment of the women garnered international outrage that contributed to their eventual release the next month, but the effects of their activism have been long-lasting, credited with laying the foundations for the emerging #MeToo movement. In 2018, a Beijing university professor was accused of sexually harassing his former PhD student a decade earlier. The high-profile case ignited China’s #MeToo movement, with many university students petitioning against sexual harassment on campus. A slew of #MeToo cases later in that year swept through various workplaces, and the movement has seen results despite censorship that lowered its intensity and pace, with China’s first successful prosecution for sexual harassment in 2020.
Under President Xi Jinping, there’s been increased control on feminist activism. Terms like “feminism” and “MeToo” are sensitive and subject to online censorship, and dozens of feminist accounts such as Feminist Voices have been shut down on social media sites like Weibo and Douban.
However, cases as the Tangshan attack have propelled into the limelight and mainstream discussion – not only by a critical mass of young women, but also by male allies and the LGBTQ+ community. There is new awareness about the true horrors of sexism in China today, shocking in its incongruity against perceptions of the shining, peaceful and abundant Chinese cosmopolitanism for younger generations – and demanding action.