From Anger to Action – The “Me Too” Campaign in China
A Roundtable Talk for the US-China Coalition at Princeton University
Regarding the current situation of women’s rights in China, there are good news and bad news. I will say bad news first. According to the third survey on Chinese women’s social status (2010), one-quarter of married women have experienced spouse violence, and the annual the income of employed women China was less than 60% of that of employed men. In 2017 China ranked the 100th in gender equality among 144 countries in the World Economic Forum report. By the way, the rank of the U.S. was 49th. In short, gender inequality in China is severe.
Can you imagine the feeling of Chinese women, especially the young generation with a higher education? When thinking about their future, these young women would realize that gender inequality is everywhere in their lives. Yes, more and more young women are getting angry. This is a good news from my perspective.
It is a fact that most people won’t stand up to transform the society, even though they feel dissatisfied. Change-makers are always the minority in most societies. However, a small group of people can empower themselves with tremendous energy. When their strategies of mobilizing, organizing and communicating work, a few people can have the capacity to “shock” the society. To be sure, social movement means more than just enthusiasm. Social change always requires strategies, tactics, and techniques.
The Chinese government keeps suppressing civil society. As reported, in 2014 there was nearly 1000 human rights defender were arrested. The situation is getting worse. At the end of 2017, four young people were arrested in Guangzhou for organizing a book club for college students. This is just one slice of the continuous crackdown. The state irritation has a chilling effect that makes people warn each other not to “cross the line.” However, the critical question is that there is no clear indication of where the line is, or where a safe zone is. In another word, no one can guarantee your safety in participating in civil actions in China.
So, facing such severe circumstance, what can the feminist community do to address inequality that women encounter every day? People are always looking for ways to resist. But how? I will give you an example of the ongoing #MeToo campaign in China.
At the beginning of 2018, a female graduate of a well-known university revealed on Weibo about experiencing sexual harassment from their former advisor, on behalf of a group of survivors. Currently based in the U.S., this woman stated in her initial Weibo post she was inspired by the U.S. #MeToo movement. Her post went viral on the Internet and made sexual harassment one of the trending keywords. Several days later, her alma mater announced that it disqualified the teaching qualification of the accused professor. However, the incident’s influence went beyond one single case.
This post has mobilized more than 3000 students and alumni to petition their alma maters. Zhang Leilei, a young feminist activist, saw this mobilizing opportunity. Leilei is one of the core members of our activism network. She mobilized more than 8000 people to petition their alma maters and to demand for anti-sexual harassment mechanism on campus. There is a lack of both effort and awareness for establishing anti-sexual harassment system in either campus or workplace in China. This is just one example of how different China and the U.S. are for feminists.
A key difference between the U.S. and China is that the U.S. president cannot censor the online posts, even though I sometimes speculate that he really wants to. It would be scandalous in the U.S. if a state agent came to knock on your door or harass your family because of your public speech. However, censorship and harassment against activists are common in China. If planning to organize a campaign in China, you would have to maximize the campaign’s impacts before the state comes to shut it down. Put it in another way. Activists in China not only need to race to achieve their goal but also have to be super alerted about protecting themselves.
Now let’s talk about organizing of #MeTooInChina. The first step for core organizers was to prepare adaptable templates for students of varies universities to use in drafting their own petitions and social media posts. The second step was to organize a team of several volunteers that Leilei has been in contact with to launch the first wave of student-led petitions. When the first wave was spreading out on social media, I witnessed students swarming into the Wechat groups created by Zhang Leilei with the questions like this, “I have read your work. Now I want to launch the petition to my university! Please give me some suggestion.” These students drafted and shared petitions with their classmates and friends online and offline. They called for more supporters and shared their experience in mailing their petitions to university administrative leadership on social media.
To summarize from this process, we can see three crucial factors of social movement: core organizers, action plans, channels of communication and mobilization. The social movement is the combination of detailed organizing work and passion of participants.
There are two organizing methods I want to share here. The first one is QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response Code). QR code is more popular in China than in the U.S. People scan QR code every day, from paying food, giving charity to beggars on the street, to getting to know new friends. The accessibility of QR code provides the fastest way to organize potential supporters. If you threw a QR code of a social media group to your friend circles, people could gather in a chatroom few minutes. QR code is also the fastest way to get petition signatures. People can access the signature page fast by scanning the code. But, why QR code? The speed is vital because any petition could be deleted in several hours or even minutes.
Another method is the picture. I am not talking about painting. If you need to escape from the censorship, you can transform your article from texts to pictures so that your content would not be identified automatically. One American journalist told us that it has been difficult for her to follow our actions because her translation software cannot recognize our pictures.
To come back to the #MeTooInChina movement, these students accumulated 8000 signatures for more than 70 universities, despite their petitions were deleted again and again, and some supervisors in universities have threatened these students. None of the mainstream media in China reported their struggles, but the world of social media has been watching. Finally, the government and the universities compromised. The Education Ministry declared that it will research on how to create a long-term mechanism to prevent sexual harassment, and some universities gave similar promises to students. Only after that, mainstream media in China began to report.
However, the hashtag #Metoo在中国(meaning Me Too in China ) was deleted once it got more than 4.5 million hits. Neither the Education Ministry nor any of those universities provide a timeline of how they will develop this long-term mechanism. To hold these institutions accountable, on January 25th 2018, one hundred oversea Chinse students and scholars issued an open letter to suggest the Education Ministry and universities complete their promised task with 6 months. Please see the petition here.
The #MeTooInChina campaign is ongoing. Until now, it has achievened the following: 1) Sexual harassment have become a public issue in China; 2) There is an increasing awareness of individual and institutional actors who are responsible of sexual harassment should be hold accountable. In short, this movement has shaped the society’s consensus towards a more feminist view on anti-sexual harassment.
I’m so proud of the young generation of China. It is these young people who start the first step of anti-sexual harassment under this harsh status quo in China.
Here are three messages I want to deliver today:
1/ The anger at inequality is so precious as it empowers people to resist.
2/ The technique of social movement is escalating to a new level to resist state repression, like China. So please stay tuned for what’s next.
3/ The young generation who hasn’t been manipulated is the hope of the world. We should never underestimate the energy of women and femmes!