Introduction
Lü Pin (b. 1972) is a feminist and activist best known for founding Feminist Voices 女权之声, which between 2009 and 2018 was one of the most important and influential social media platforms on feminism in China (it is notable that Chinese authorities chose to suppress the platform on March 8, International Women’s Day, adding insult to injury, I suppose). Lü was in the United States when the Feminist Five were arrested in China in 2015, and after learning that police had visited her apartment as part of arrest efforts, decided to stay in the United States. She continues to write on issues concerning feminism and activism, however, notably on the site Wainao/Why Now; ten of her articles are available here. I won’t have time to translate them all, but those interested in Chinese feminism should certainly take a look, because as the text translated here illustrates, she writes extremely well and has a keen understanding of social movements.
I learned about Lü Pin after talking about youth issues in China on Kaiser Kuo’s podcast a couple of weeks ago, when one of Kaiser’s listeners, a young Chinese woman currently in the United States, wrote me to say the trauma I talked about resonated with her experience. She also suggested that I translate Lü Pin’s text on feminism and the blank paper revolution because it put the youth issues and PSTD I talked about in another, broader context. I read Lü’s text and agreed, so here it is.
Lü’s moving essay is in essence a history of feminism in the past few years, culminating in the “blank paper revolution” [2] in late November of 2022, which ultimately brought about the end of China’s zero-covid policy. She writes as a feminist and an activist and for people who share her views, which are that feminism is a major force in China, in fact the only movement that has not been completely shut down by the Chinese state, and hence was intimately involved with the blank paper revolution, even though feminism’s ranks and strength have been depleted by state suppression in recent years. Skeptics may doubt the role feminism played and may insist that the “blank paper revolution” was not a revolution at all, but they should still read Lü’s essay for its perspective and its insights.
Lü still posts on social media in China, but a text like this one would be taken down immediately, because it discusses Xi Jinping and zero-covid, and is radical and even revolutionary in its intent. The website where she published her work, however, is solely in Chinese, and is aiming to reach “a younger Mandarin-speaking generation,” as it says on its website (which is funded at least in part by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, a part of the United States government). I have no idea how many in people in China read Lü on Wainao/WhyNot?, but as the young Chinese woman who directed me to her said, “Most people I know in China age under the age of 40 are using a VPN. It’s not just activists who are reading beyond the firewall.”
In any event, as China enters Xi Jinping’s third mandate, it is clear to me that reading the China Dream means reading Chinese discourse produced outside of China as well as inside. Chinese pluralism has not disappeared, it has just changed its address, hopefully only temporarily.
Translation
The “blank paper revolution” was like a bolt of lightning that split the darkness, arrestingly sharp, yet short-lived and fragile. I was grateful to bathe in its light, ashamed that I was neither part of it nor had paid the price for it. Yet not being part of it gave me the luxury to think in solitude, from the moment the movement took wing through the subsequent vengeful repression, striving to grasp the uncertainty of the social changes the moment opened up. It might be cold and calculating to use the sacrifice and suffering of others as material to build something new or to solve a riddle, but I will forgive myself because I have an inspiration, a search that will lead me to renew my own political commitments as well. My idea is to discuss the following issue: the relationship between the blank paper revolution and the Chinese feminist movement, how it marks an important stage in that movement, and what is possible for Chinese feminism in the era following this revolution.
No one can give a complete picture of the blank paper movement because most of the participants are nameless and faceless, and even if we know some of them, all they can share is their limited personal testimony. Until it is reliably and fully defined by the participants themselves, it would be presumptuous for others to judge the movement in its entirety. Of course, there are signs - including the exploits of those women arrested in Beijing that everyone knows about - that hint at the preponderance of women in the movement and their leadership ability, and the connection of these women to feminism. In short, without labeling the movement, what is valuable is to discuss how women’s identities and feminism prompted certain people to position themselves on the front lines of the movement.
The main paradox in gender issues in today’s China is that women of all ages and classes are more powerful, independent, and have more self-respect than ever before, while state and society stubbornly insist on keeping them in subordinate positions, refusing to pay them a fair price for what they contribute with their labor. This is why feminism has taken root and is at the forefront of conflict, representing women. The maturation of women and feminism occurred together with economic development, and another side of modernization’s demand for a “highly qualified” female labor force has been the creation of a new generation that rebels against patriarchy.
Feminist resources and feminist spaces were always limited until the Internet popularized feminism. By this I mean not only the capacity of the Internet to reach a broad range of people and popularize ideas, but also the way in which the Internet has linked feminism to the everyday lives of Chinese women, launching a large-scale discursive project to overturn the normalization of gender inequality, and developing a body of critical explanations and resistance strategies that speak to the plight of countless nameless women, allowing many people to find themselves in the project. The Internet has also given rise to many intense and influential debates, allowing women to strengthen their identities in one heated gender battle after another.
In the short space of a decade, millions of women have come to identify with feminism, building extended communities that transcend the shackles of current reality, giving them more strength to fight their own battles against patriarchy. Although we can talk about the feminism of the Little Pinks [3] and about “commercial feminism,” [4] what we commonly recognize as the shared language of Chinese feminism is anger at daily injustices, which is quite remarkable in an era of heightened authoritarianism. Largely as a result of being shocked by the strength displayed in their struggles, society has been forced to acknowledge that feminist issues matter, even if the response to such issues is often reactionary.
Since 2015, activism – by which I mean a feminist orientation dedicated to promoting social change, especially through organization and strategy – has been increasingly criminalized. The “Feminist Five Incident” of March 2015 was just one sign of this, and subsequent criminalization has mainly not used the legal system, but instead has taken the route of continued harassment, threats, and disruption of organizers and activism. This is paired with laws against”picking quarrels and stirring up trouble“and”foreign NGOs" that label feminist organizational resources and tactics as illegal. In addition, activist discourse is being increasingly devalued in the feminist community, as it is unable to compete with bloggers who are better able to manipulate emotions. The root cause of this is that authoritarianism continues to regulate the boundaries of feminism, reminding people that anger can take on legitimate or illegitimate forms, and directing the flow of that anger.
Between 2018 and 2020, activists could no longer set the feminist agenda, but were still able, through their hold on public opinion and their advocacy capacity, to transform certain concerns that had already surfaced into large-scale mobilization and advocacy, moving from underground to above-ground. In December 2020, at the first hearing in the Zhou Xiaoxuan v. Zhu Jun sexual harassment case, hundreds of people gathered outside the courtroom, an amazing event illustrating the mobilizing power of feminism and #MeToo. In an age where it is so rare to find people who dare to stand up and be physically present, and where there are so few opportunities for them to take action, these are the people who will most likely to continue to show up in the future. However, what generated the most traffic in 2020 was the “gender antagonism” [5] that culminated at year’s end, illustrating that mainstream online feminism remained involved in a war of words with anti-feminist male netizens, and that behind the seemingly exuberant confrontation was a tacit acknowledgement of the responsibility of the state in allowing and encouraging the “debate” - the “elephant in the room” - and frustration with the path of change through action. [6]
The contemporary feminist movement in China has in fact remained within a boundary that does not touch the legitimacy of politics or the regime. The origins of this stance can be traced to a group of establishment intellectuals with a sense of justice who were concerned about the dispossessed women left behind by reform and opening, but who hoped to promote the freeing up of legal resources for women and changes in the attitudes and behavior of those who enforce the law through negotiation rather than pressure.
As these scholars were absorbed into the establishment, the movement was briefly taken over by NGOs - a type of organization that has now virtually disappeared in China - and shifted to strategic mass mobilization, before becoming a vehicle for young urban women to air their grievances following the popularization made possible by the Internet. In the course of this process, the movement did increase its critique of and challenge to the system on a selective basis, but throughout continued to advocate for women’s social, economic, and cultural rights, following a path that acknowledged state power as necessary to the legal redress of gender inequality. The movement has never given up on negotiation, although pressure has had to be applied in order to make negotiation possible. Of course individuals within the movement have their personal views, but that does not necessarily mean they can inject these ideas into the movement.
Since the vast majority of participants in the movement are motivated by the emotional desire to eliminate gender inequality in their personal lives, and do not by any means want to engage in political opposition, mainstream communication in the movement reflects this. But at a deeper level, people acknowledge and accept activities that take place within legitimate boundaries, and hope to be able to realize feminist goals by making all possible use of that space – but of course, this presupposes that the space exists. After realizing that the state’s commitment to gender equality was leading nowhere, feminists nonetheless insisted on remaining in the political middle because they believed it would maximize their movement’s possibilities and better serve women’s current interests.
The problem is that the spaces allowing for the discussion of the rule of law and reform are constantly being shut down, and public opinion is increasingly losing its ability to call for change. One example was the introduction of a “divorce cooling-off period” in the Civil Code in early 2021, which ignored the strong concerns of women netizens about freedom of divorce and domestic violence. Lawmakers stood firm, claiming that people should not “read too much into it” but instead “take it for what it is,” etc., etc. As the shrinking of the middle ground became a general tendency, feminists gradually lost their political safety zone and were further exposed to organized campaigns of political insults, being labeled as”hostile forces“and a form of”cyber cancer," etc., etc.
Since Xi Jinping came to power, many other movements have been suppressed and are no longer on most people’s radar, including human rights lawyers and labor movements. The feminist movement has suffered much less in terms of criminal persecution, however, and the movement has been growing despite the general trend, and while we might attribute this first and foremost to the loyal and courageous intelligence of countless feminists, ultimately it is because the movement has not lost its legitimacy.
In terms of the movement’s successes, it has dramatically changed the lives of countless participants, as well as powerfully unsettling Chinese society, and it has changed the landscape of public discourse related to women’s rights. The facts show, however, that it has proven incapable of changing the state, or, to be more precise, if one distinguishes between substantive, procedural, and structural dimensions of state change, there have been some substantive changes – I’m thinking of the resolution of certain cases and partial changes of certain laws and policies - but there have basically been no procedural and structural changes, and this is becoming increasingly impossible, as the movement itself has been stripped of legitimacy and depleted by a counter-movement, and even more so because of China’s general situation.
The feminist movement entered a particularly difficult phase in 2021-2022. The consequences of the massive cyber-violence against feminists in April 2021, triggered by a random incident, went far beyond the loss of the online accounts of the few feminist activists at the center of the storm; they were in fact forced to sink into silence and leave the front ranks of the movement. What most people do not know was that the police were deeply involved in the incident and followed the trail of cyber violence to deploy a harsh and lengthy campaign of surveillance. The incident also created widespread fear among feminists, leading to a further reduction in community activity, as well as to secrecy and mutual isolation. Today it is difficult to find information about the feminist community’s activities on the open Internet in the absence of pre-existing access to that community.
The Xuzhou “chained woman” incident shocked all of China in January of 2022, but from a feminist perspective, the incident was a huge setback. The truth, which was that the “chained woman” was in fact imprisoned, remained unknown, and while a few minor figures were punished for public consumption, no one followed up on the systemic nature of gender violence. The arrest of Wu Yi [7] traumatized the feminist community, sending the message that individual actors with no organized background or experience could now be criminally persecuted. In addition, police harassment and threats were extended to many “ordinary” feminists when they tried to start small protests, or even posted things in their friend circles. When experienced organizers withdraw from the fight and the “ordinary” feminists who step up are targeted, I am led to the pessimistic conclusion that the greatest effect of incidents like that of the “chained woman” is to expose those who feel called upon to protest against authoritarianism, which ultimately strengthens regime stability.
The second hearing in the Zhou Xiaoxuan v. Zhu Jun sexual harassment case occurred in August of 2022, but while only eighteen months had elapsed since the first hearing, the spectacle of hundreds of people gathering at the courthouse did not recur, not because people did not want to support Zhou, but because there was no way to organize and very few people were able to attend. Zhou’s final defeat was another bitter blow, a symbol of the fact that the #MeToo movement is ultimately unable to open the gates of the rule of law. In the past few years, people like Zhou who wound up involved in feminist causes have contributed their experiences to the movement, replacing those activists who were forced to keep a low profile, but they too have faded away due to lost cases, online violence, and injunctions keeping them from speaking out.
In a year when my work as an organizer was as slow as it had ever been, and when I had almost stopped discussing the movement in public, a dark feeling took hold of me, as I worried that there was nowhere for the movement to go, because despite the existence of a large community, there was no longer an obvious path forward. On the eve of the opening of the 20th Congress of the CCP, I felt sick.
At the same time, what soon became abundantly clear was that a year of setbacks for women’s rights led to the ultimate awakening of many. Technically, in fact, this also had to do with the visual impact of short videos, as the clips of the Xuzhou “chained woman” and the Tangshan beating created a moment of “moral shock” for thousands of women all at once. By “moral shock" I mean the moment when a person suddenly realizes that she has been treated unfairly and hence perceives the world anew. What brought women back, even if they were disengaged or far from where the events occurred, was not solely righteous indignation, but rather genuine fear and despair regarding the destiny of their gender, the idea that “I will be treated just as cruelly as they were, and the state will not protect me.” They realize that there is no contract with the country where they were born and which they love. In other words, their self-perception had moved toward a break with the dominant ideology.
People talk about the personal struggles or crises they experience in this process of losing faith, because outside of the system of domination, it is extremely difficult for the insignificant individual to find a foothold. In such a situation, “political depression” is in fact only a term that is thrown about. Those who advanced from this state of mind to join in the blank paper revolution were merely a minority within a minority, who sublimated the anger accumulated in the feminist movement and completed a sufficient degree of self-politicization. Looking back on the above history, what is most poignant that the feminist movement gave birth to a new generation of revolutionaries at a time when it was losing its own momentum.
The blank paper revolution awakened me from my silence, and I am still working through what I learned from it. The first thing was that I reawakened to the basic fact that society never dies, that no one is 100% submissive, and that people are always looking to resist. There is no shame in the fact that everyone has fear in their hearts, the lesson of past repression. Yet there is still space in people’s hearts that authority cannot get to, even if people outwardly submit, silence themselves, and ride out the wave. This of course has to do with the extent to which they are stakeholders in the regime or have been bound to it; the difficulty for the Chinese middle class lies in its dependence on the resources allocated by the system, and family ties can extend the tentacles of “stability maintenance” into a private sphere from which there is no escape.
But the system’s bondage takes different shapes and not based on a single criterion. The “youngest generation,” those who are highly educated, who live and work independently in the big cities, who do not work for the establishment, who are not trapped by basic livelihood concerns like the working class, and who have no “soft underbelly” – they are those who are the freest. These free elements seek their own spiritual space as part of a general retreat, and when too many of what had once been public activities are shut down, when the government starts to monitor small-scale book clubs and private screenings…eventually even private meetings and alternative lifestyles and cultures become vehicles for politicization, vehicles which are all the more hidden, and difficult for authorities to penetrate. Of course I don’t want to over-generalize, but what I mean is that society will always have these free elements and their combinations and their iterations, which means the state will never be able to rest easy in its overweening power.
One of the fatal errors of the zero-covid policy is that it did not divide and conquer the various groups but pushed the vast majority of people almost indiscriminately to the same extreme, regardless of whether they were delivery drivers or white-collar workers. This created the crisis of what we might call the “big number” i.e., a large base of potential resistance, in which the groups could echo each other because they have similar demands. The blank paper revolution clearly shows that the current regime has lost the possibility to adjust itself and negotiate changes. The decision to take to the streets is a last resort, but people will always be forced to a point where they have no other choice.
Scholars say that it is not the depth of oppression that leads to rebellion, but rather the opportunity to rebel. The blank paper movement in fact broke out after the announcement of the “Ten New Rules,” which promised a relaxation, but in terms of implementation on the ground, things got tighter, which pierced the last reservoir of the people’s patience. In the case of the blank paper revolution, however, the impetus came not so much from the opportunities the people had identified, but from two other factors: the cost of inaction, which could no longer be borne, and a sense of justice, which was triggered, almost by fate, by a man-made disaster in a major city.
While Peng Zaizhou’s actions at Sitong Bridge were astounding, at the time I thought he was just a lone hero, and that those who posted his slogans in bathrooms were too few and far between. In hindsight, in the absence of independent action there can be no coming together, although what is sad is that China has never lacked pioneers like Peng Zaizhou, even if he was the only one who was seen and to whom people responded. But it’s all about people, isn’t it? The state can already carry out extensive, in-depth surveillance of society as a whole, it can target each individual and move the red line forward to extinguish threats before they happen. So why are protests that haven’t been seen in decades still breaking out in the heart of major cities?
First, while experienced organizers have been identified and targeted, the new generation that has stepped forward has not. Second, people have learned to use contact tools from outside the Great Firewall, and monitoring the communications carried out through these tools can only be done manually, resulting in a much slower response time than when digitally monitoring WeChat. Third, the key is the combination of the two parameters of speed and scale, i.e., the ability to gather enough people in a short enough time to break through the surveillance, provided there is an existing consensus that does not require much communication to spread. I emphasize again that such a breakthrough is rare and that those who participated are only a minority within a minority, yet full-scale repression, in making resistance particularly difficult, at the same time also lowers the threshold for resistance to cause a crisis of domination, where a few hundred or a few thousand people and some blank sheets of paper are enough, which is arguably one of the paradoxes of authoritarian rule.
Moreover, in the past, local governments always functioned as the fall guy for the regime, but under the system of “one position as the highest authority 定于一尊,” [8] everyone understood that “covid-zero” meant submitting to the will of one person, so the blank paper revolution was also a direct challenge to that person. While I am always quick to ferret out any hint of discontent, the smooth holding of the 20th National Congress made me think that China would be entering an era of hyper-stable totalitarianism. But it turned out that he never had that much power after all – which was a huge reveal. He doesn’t dare put his power at risk.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Xi Jinping decided to abandon the covid-zero policy after watching the video of the Liangma Bridge protest on November 27, which is consistent with Xi’s remarks to foreign leaders that “young people” could no longer put up with it. This once again reaffirmed my belief as an activist that anything is possible. Moreover, we have to give activism the recognition it deserves, although in hindsight there were economic factors in play as well as considerations that the pandemic was already out of control. Still, it is undeniable that only when a few people took action did change actually occur, and this is an unspeakably valuable lesson.
Nothing in the system changed, which is surely not the fault of the protesters, although perhaps it tells us that the effect of passionate revolutions is limited. Objectively speaking, the blank paper revolution was like a forced restart of a system that had gotten stuck, and when it came back to life, it was a bit lighter on its feet and once again eliminated the threat of dissent. The procedure of retaliatory criminal persecution is so “compliant” that it almost borders on the absurd, showing that protest as an anomaly is being comfortably absorbed by the day-to-day operations of authoritarianism. “Time passes and people go about their business”, as Lu Xun said…but will the people in jail be forgotten? Although no one knows who they are, those participants who escaped jail can only swallow their fear.
Over the last few decades, one generation after another of sacrifices has been ground up by this system, so what legitimacy do we have to encourage young people to be brave? To tell the truth, I have always been skeptical of explosive revolutions, and although I respect the participants in the blank paper revolution, the meaning of the revolution itself to my mind seems to be mainly a kind of indicator telling us that: the strategy is over, as is the possibility of any further action. At the same time, revolution is not something that can be strategized and prepared, and it is immoral to advocate it. So I accept the lessons the revolution taught me, even as I refuse to predict China’s future in this sense. I prefer to return to my “original intention 初心” [9] and envision the responsibility that feminism can assume.
I want to praise even the feeble efforts of those who continue to keep the movement going. As the movement continues to be disbanded layer after layer, those who bear the weight of sustaining it are mere individuals. People are still trying to connect and do the work for the movement. I’ve seen many anonymous feminists create projects by themselves or with partners, often very creative projects. They may have disappeared or run out of steam before they had a chance to grow, but these projects are cascading and are the ground floor of the movement today. If the movement cannot always be surging forward with great momentum, then it’s okay that a lot of the time it is an undercurrent or a ground fire, and that the most important thing is to always be able to reach people and maintain a space for them. Since what rulers strive for is to keep people separated and distrustful of each other, all the emotional labor that creates social capital for communities becomes a form of resistance. And it is very important that those maintaining connections keep their physical and mental health - ultimately people fight to have the strength and longevity to keep going.
I would also like to celebrate the collective decision of women not to marry or have children, in the sense that there will be more female participants in social change. Not marrying and not having children is passive resistance and non-violent non-cooperation on the part of women who realize that the system does not allow for negotiation. In this sense, they have indeed created perhaps the most significant crisis in this country: can a country with negative population growth still claim to be a hegemonic great power? But the crisis itself is not cause for celebration; what strikes me first and foremost is that the crisis is testimony to the power of women and feminism. In this age when everything is shut down, when social movements have receded, feminism still managed – through shunning marriage and having children – to mount a battle line and to illustrate its influence on women. What is even more far-reaching is that by not marrying and not having children, women will be liberated from the constraints the patriarchy has attached to their bodies, their time, and their minds through family and everyday life…and for this reason in the future even more women will be agents of freedom, a very exciting trend in the long run.
I am sincerely hoping that the blank paper revolution will prompt a renewal of feminist thought. It’s really a shame that in such a large community, there seems to be no stimulating ideas. The lack of practice saps inspiration, persecution leads people to protect themselves and circle the wagons, censorship keeps people from speaking freely. In fact, feminism can exist as a simple set of ideas which can become a kind of closed-loop thinking. However, the appeal of feminism as an ideological weapon is that it offers a sharp and penetrating critical perspective and a discourse that defends this perspective, while in the future it will develop itself further.
I don’t want to be the kind of lazy thinker who only gives the same answer to every question, but I especially want to develop a particular role for feminism: that of providing explanations for the most important issues facing China. The blank paper revolution meant that we broke through closed-loop thinking, right? In these times of violence and lack of hope, I will cling to my beliefs, but more than that, I want to get out of this closed loop. To my mind, the issue that the blank paper revolution has left before us is a great uncertainty. I feel far better than if everything were predetermined, but not knowing the road ahead leads to panic. I want to embrace the uncertainty, and I still hope for feminist guidance.
Lü Pin
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
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