Dr. Leta Hong Fincher
HARPERS BAZZAR
Wed, December 14, 2022
Wed, December 14, 2022
NOEL CELIS - Getty Images
Outside a student cafeteria at the elite Tsinghua University, alma mater of China’s ruler Xi Jinping, a lone woman silently held up a blank sheet of paper, a symbol of censorship in what many are now calling the “white paper revolution.” Plainclothes agents tried to convince her to move, but she stood her ground as more young women joined her until a large crowd had gathered.
“If I let fear of punishment keep me from speaking out … as a student of Tsinghua University, I would regret it for the rest of my life,” the woman said with emotion, as hundreds of students cheered her on. A few miles from Tiananmen Square, at Beijing’s Liangma canal, a young woman read a speech from her cell phone about the need to remember those killed by the government’s draconian, “zero-COVID” policies: “Remember Dr. Li Wenliang [a doctor in China who warned about the coronavirus in late 2019] who was reprimanded, only to die of pneumonia. … Remember the desperate cries of fire in Urumqi. … There are too many tragedies that need to be remembered. Reject the official ‘correct’ version of memory. Don’t be ‘the people,’ be yourself!” The crowd chanted back, “Don’t be ‘the people,’ be yourself!”
As China’s largest protests against the Communist Party since 1989 have spread from one city to another, a striking number of young women have appeared on the front lines, whether standing alone to hold up a sheet of white paper, leading the crowd in chants, or confronting police officers who dragged them into waiting vans. The spark for this extraordinary wave of political protests was a November 24 fire in a predominantly Uyghur neighborhood of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, which killed at least 10 people, potentially dozens, including children. Many commented on social media that the residents were barricaded in their apartments because of the strict COVID lockdown, preventing firefighters from reaching them.
But this time, instead of confining their reactions to online comments subject to heavy censorship, residents in at least 39 cities in China (according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute) took to the streets to voice their anger—with some protesters even chanting for Xi Jinping to step down. One powerful video came from a young woman in the eastern province Zhejiang. Black duct tape covered her mouth in a symbol of enforced silence, and chains draped around her torso and arms as she marched slowly forward, clutching a blank sheet of paper, her brows furrowed in determination while surrounded by bemused onlookers.
Her chains evoked the horrifying case of a woman named Xiaohuamei(“plum blossom”), who was found chained by her neck in February in Xuzhou, where she was reportedly the victim of trafficking. Xiaohuamei became the topic of viral discussions about widespread violence against women in China. In June, yet another brutal act of videotaped violence against women went viral, this attack in a restaurant in Tangshan, where a man approached a group of women having dinner. One woman said, “Go away,” after he touched her, then he bashed her in the head and recruited his friends to viciously attack the other women with bottles and chairs.
While all of China’s citizens have suffered under almost three years of “zero-COVID” policies, women have borne the brunt of a likely severe increase in domestic violence due to months long lockdowns, where residents are imprisoned in their homes, often together with their abusers. Women’s rights lawyer Li Ying said that a new domestic violence helpline app she launched in August received calls from around 13,000 people—the vast majority of whom were women—within the first five days of the app’s launch, according to Reuters. That figure contrasted with only 600 people who called the regular telephone helpline run by her Beijing-based Yuanzhong Family and Community Development Service Center in all of 2021, Li told Zhengmian Lianjie, a media outlet on WeChat.
Some of the haunting protest images of women derive from the Chinese practice of feminist “performance art,” which caught on in 2012, when around a hundred young feminists regularly staged direct action in cities across China to denounce rising gender inequality. In Beijing that year, several feminists paraded down a main street wearing white wedding gowns stained with theatrical red blood, carrying signs with slogans like, Love Is No Excuse for Violence, to protest the country’s epidemic of domestic violence. Feminists carried out imaginative acts of performance art in public areas such as shaving their heads bald to protest gender discrimination in university admissions or occupying men’s public toilets to demand gender parity in public lavatories. Then on the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, authorities jailed five women for planning to hand out stickers about sexual harassment on subways and buses. The women, who became known as the Feminist Five, were released after international outcry, but the government has since carried out a brutal anti-feminist crackdown, censoring feminist content online and persecuting feminist activists. In 2018, authorities bannedthe most prominent feminist media platform, Feminist Voices, while its founding editor-in-chief, Lü Pin, is now pursuing a Ph.D. at Rutgers University and remains involved in diaspora feminist activities.
Under Xi Jinping, China’s strongman authoritarianism has worsened, particularly since he and the Communist Party Congress did away with presidential term limits and anointed Xi the country’s paramount ruler for a third term and potentially for life. For the first time in 25 years, not a single woman was appointed to the new Communist Party Politburo. And there has never been a woman on the Politburo’s elite Standing Committee. Why? I believe China’s all-male rulers have decided that the systematic subjugation of women is essential to Communist Party survival, turning their backs on the early Communist emphasis on gender equality, which was enshrined in the country’s constitution.
For 15 years, the Chinese government has pushed young women into traditional roles as dutiful wives, mothers, and baby breeders in the home. Women are expected to marry men to preserve stability (same-sex marriage is not legalized), provide an outlet for men’s violent urges, and perform unpaid care work at home. Faced with plummeting birth rates after more than three decades of the draconian “one-child” policy, Beijing adopted a new policy in 2021 of exhorting Han women to have three children. Meanwhile, the government has discouraged Uyghur women from having more children—sometimes through coercive measures such as forced sterilization. The Uyghur Human Rights Project found that the government has used both incentives and force to push Uyghur women into marrying Han men in order to promote “ethnic unity” and social stability.
China passed an anti-domestic violence law in 2015, but I believe the law will never be properly enforced, because keeping the patriarchal family structure intact—even when the woman’s life is in danger—is key to the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy for surviving beyond the Soviet Union’s seven-decade run. Accordingly, violence against women is a necessary feature of China’s patriarchal authoritarianism, as long as the violence is contained within the privacy of the home. As long as the government continues allowing men to abuse women in the home with impunity, men are more likely to acquiesce to a one-party dictatorship.
Police have now been deployed throughout multiple Chinese cities where protests took place, and authorities are aggressively questioning those who have participated. But the events of recent weeks have shown that a critical mass of young women across China are fed up with Xi’s patriarchal authoritarianism. Many have already chosen to renounce marriage and children in a private act of resistance. Others have decided that—consequences be damned—they must rise up publicly against the Communist Party’s oppression.
Outside a student cafeteria at the elite Tsinghua University, alma mater of China’s ruler Xi Jinping, a lone woman silently held up a blank sheet of paper, a symbol of censorship in what many are now calling the “white paper revolution.” Plainclothes agents tried to convince her to move, but she stood her ground as more young women joined her until a large crowd had gathered.
“If I let fear of punishment keep me from speaking out … as a student of Tsinghua University, I would regret it for the rest of my life,” the woman said with emotion, as hundreds of students cheered her on. A few miles from Tiananmen Square, at Beijing’s Liangma canal, a young woman read a speech from her cell phone about the need to remember those killed by the government’s draconian, “zero-COVID” policies: “Remember Dr. Li Wenliang [a doctor in China who warned about the coronavirus in late 2019] who was reprimanded, only to die of pneumonia. … Remember the desperate cries of fire in Urumqi. … There are too many tragedies that need to be remembered. Reject the official ‘correct’ version of memory. Don’t be ‘the people,’ be yourself!” The crowd chanted back, “Don’t be ‘the people,’ be yourself!”
As China’s largest protests against the Communist Party since 1989 have spread from one city to another, a striking number of young women have appeared on the front lines, whether standing alone to hold up a sheet of white paper, leading the crowd in chants, or confronting police officers who dragged them into waiting vans. The spark for this extraordinary wave of political protests was a November 24 fire in a predominantly Uyghur neighborhood of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, which killed at least 10 people, potentially dozens, including children. Many commented on social media that the residents were barricaded in their apartments because of the strict COVID lockdown, preventing firefighters from reaching them.
But this time, instead of confining their reactions to online comments subject to heavy censorship, residents in at least 39 cities in China (according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute) took to the streets to voice their anger—with some protesters even chanting for Xi Jinping to step down. One powerful video came from a young woman in the eastern province Zhejiang. Black duct tape covered her mouth in a symbol of enforced silence, and chains draped around her torso and arms as she marched slowly forward, clutching a blank sheet of paper, her brows furrowed in determination while surrounded by bemused onlookers.
Her chains evoked the horrifying case of a woman named Xiaohuamei(“plum blossom”), who was found chained by her neck in February in Xuzhou, where she was reportedly the victim of trafficking. Xiaohuamei became the topic of viral discussions about widespread violence against women in China. In June, yet another brutal act of videotaped violence against women went viral, this attack in a restaurant in Tangshan, where a man approached a group of women having dinner. One woman said, “Go away,” after he touched her, then he bashed her in the head and recruited his friends to viciously attack the other women with bottles and chairs.
While all of China’s citizens have suffered under almost three years of “zero-COVID” policies, women have borne the brunt of a likely severe increase in domestic violence due to months long lockdowns, where residents are imprisoned in their homes, often together with their abusers. Women’s rights lawyer Li Ying said that a new domestic violence helpline app she launched in August received calls from around 13,000 people—the vast majority of whom were women—within the first five days of the app’s launch, according to Reuters. That figure contrasted with only 600 people who called the regular telephone helpline run by her Beijing-based Yuanzhong Family and Community Development Service Center in all of 2021, Li told Zhengmian Lianjie, a media outlet on WeChat.
Some of the haunting protest images of women derive from the Chinese practice of feminist “performance art,” which caught on in 2012, when around a hundred young feminists regularly staged direct action in cities across China to denounce rising gender inequality. In Beijing that year, several feminists paraded down a main street wearing white wedding gowns stained with theatrical red blood, carrying signs with slogans like, Love Is No Excuse for Violence, to protest the country’s epidemic of domestic violence. Feminists carried out imaginative acts of performance art in public areas such as shaving their heads bald to protest gender discrimination in university admissions or occupying men’s public toilets to demand gender parity in public lavatories. Then on the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, authorities jailed five women for planning to hand out stickers about sexual harassment on subways and buses. The women, who became known as the Feminist Five, were released after international outcry, but the government has since carried out a brutal anti-feminist crackdown, censoring feminist content online and persecuting feminist activists. In 2018, authorities bannedthe most prominent feminist media platform, Feminist Voices, while its founding editor-in-chief, Lü Pin, is now pursuing a Ph.D. at Rutgers University and remains involved in diaspora feminist activities.
Under Xi Jinping, China’s strongman authoritarianism has worsened, particularly since he and the Communist Party Congress did away with presidential term limits and anointed Xi the country’s paramount ruler for a third term and potentially for life. For the first time in 25 years, not a single woman was appointed to the new Communist Party Politburo. And there has never been a woman on the Politburo’s elite Standing Committee. Why? I believe China’s all-male rulers have decided that the systematic subjugation of women is essential to Communist Party survival, turning their backs on the early Communist emphasis on gender equality, which was enshrined in the country’s constitution.
For 15 years, the Chinese government has pushed young women into traditional roles as dutiful wives, mothers, and baby breeders in the home. Women are expected to marry men to preserve stability (same-sex marriage is not legalized), provide an outlet for men’s violent urges, and perform unpaid care work at home. Faced with plummeting birth rates after more than three decades of the draconian “one-child” policy, Beijing adopted a new policy in 2021 of exhorting Han women to have three children. Meanwhile, the government has discouraged Uyghur women from having more children—sometimes through coercive measures such as forced sterilization. The Uyghur Human Rights Project found that the government has used both incentives and force to push Uyghur women into marrying Han men in order to promote “ethnic unity” and social stability.
China passed an anti-domestic violence law in 2015, but I believe the law will never be properly enforced, because keeping the patriarchal family structure intact—even when the woman’s life is in danger—is key to the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy for surviving beyond the Soviet Union’s seven-decade run. Accordingly, violence against women is a necessary feature of China’s patriarchal authoritarianism, as long as the violence is contained within the privacy of the home. As long as the government continues allowing men to abuse women in the home with impunity, men are more likely to acquiesce to a one-party dictatorship.
Police have now been deployed throughout multiple Chinese cities where protests took place, and authorities are aggressively questioning those who have participated. But the events of recent weeks have shown that a critical mass of young women across China are fed up with Xi’s patriarchal authoritarianism. Many have already chosen to renounce marriage and children in a private act of resistance. Others have decided that—consequences be damned—they must rise up publicly against the Communist Party’s oppression.
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