Chinese Feminism Research Articles

#AverageYetConfidentMen: Chinese stand-up comedy and feminist discourse on Douyin

ABSTRACT With the rise of feminist sentiment and the growing awareness of gender equity in China, social media has become an increasingly central space for Chinese feminist expression. However, the complex dynamics of feminist expression in these online spaces—and the role of popular culture in facilitating such discourse—are still to be fully elucidated. Here, focusing on the understudied social media platform Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), we analyze the online discussion sparked by the stand-up comedy acts of Chinese female comedians. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of Douyin videos and related comments, we demonstrate how users employed the platform’s creative features to challenge everyday sexism by echoing or building upon the stand-up comedians’ gags. At the same time, the analysis also uncovers how Douyin is used to insult and push back against these feminist voices. Our findings shed light on the sophisticated role of Douyin as a platform for digital feminist expression, and the ways in which it can amplify both feminist discourse or, conversely, give voice to misogynistic attacks.

Unpacking ‘baby man’ in Chinese social media: a feminist critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the proliferation of the new term ‘baby man’ has an impact on reconstructing established gender relationships and resisting China's authoritarian political power in a highly-censored online environment. This study employs feminist critical discourse analysis to investigate how Chinese feminism adopts the discursive construction of ‘baby man’ and how they echo the complex historical and sociocultural backgrounds through a case study of 43 posts containing ‘baby man’ on Chinese social media. The finding suggests that the term ‘baby man’ is employed in discursive strategies, namely, double irony, the blunt resistance against both gender and power relationships that deconstruct the heteropatriarchal gender norm through the mother – son female gaze and contempt for the nation's past and current population policy. It argues that despite perennial censorship, these three discursive strategies help reconstruct the extant gender hierarchy backed by conservative Confucianist ethics and represent a grassroots challenge to the political authoritarianism indoctrinated by the state.

Feminist Developments and Dilemma in China in the Post-epidemic Era

Since the epidemic era, the discussion on feminist issues has attracted a lot of attention on the internet. Many studies on the development of feminism in China have been done in the past, but there is still a gap in the research on the current situation of feminists. In this paper, the current issues faced by feminists in China are analyzed by reading the literature and reviewing the major events related to feminism on the Internet in the past few years. The problems faced by feminists in China are multifaceted, and all these problems will take a long time to be solved. Great progress has been made, as many feminist issues have been brought to the public attention. Yet there is still a long way ahead for feminism in China. It is undeniable that Chinese feminists still require a long time to make attempts to address the various issues.

Chinese Feminists Face Paradoxical State Policies

Struggles for women’s rights, and the state’s responses, have shifted over the history of the People’s Republic of China. In an initial period of socialist state feminism, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated “women’s liberation” and offered child-friendly services to facilitate women’s entry into the workforce. During the era of post-socialist economic modernization, services were curtailed, shifting family responsibilities back to women and reinforcing patriarchal norms. Most recently, a form of made-in-China feminism has emerged, characterized by everyday resistance to prevailing gender expectations. Now, the state is suppressing feminist activists while adopting some of their proposals into law and policy.

The Development of Female Roles: A Comparison between Chinese and Western Literature

This paper describes the influence of western feminism on Chinese feminist literature in the 1980s. Through the research of the history of feminist literature development and comparison between western feminist literature and Chinese feminist literature, the shortages and differences of Chinese feminist literature are revealed to promote the development of modern feminist literature. The depiction and portrayal of female characters in the literature vary greatly between Western and Chinese literature. While Western literature often reinforces the submissiveness of women and the idea of a man-centric world, Chinese female literature is marked by its revolutionary significance and close relation to the movement of democracy and women's liberation. Both Western and Chinese literature works have addressed the issue of sex workers, but with different approaches. Despite personal fights, female characters such as Marguerite Gautier challenge traditional concepts and stereotypes of sex workers in Western literature. It is important to acknowledge the impact of female authors in both Western and Chinese literature and to recognize the importance of feminism in promoting gender equality worldwide.

Achieving postfeminist ideals: a study of Chinese female wanghongs and their self-framing on social media

ABSTRACT This study investigates how Chinese female wanghongs on Douyin self-frame their image and identity, and how interactions between wanghongs and their followers co-frame the image of contemporary female Internet celebrities. We discovered that the four dominant self-frames of wanghongs are beauty, talent, personality traits, and gender expression through a qualitative coding analysis of the selected 30 female wanghongs’ posts and media interview narratives, along with viewer comments. Besides, we found that the co-framing of influencers and fans as a collective strategy assists women in breaking the aesthetic framework of traditional patriarchal culture. Furthermore, when conflicts arise between framing actors like wanghongs, fans, media, and political parties, female wanghongs tend to respond with resistance or compromise. We argue that examining the identity framing process of female wanghongs on social media can reflect the dilemma that Chinese feminists face when attempting to highlight women’s accomplishments in multiple roles.

Fighting the Patriarchy: A Feminism with Chinese Characteristics

This paper examines the status and challenges of feminist movements in 21st century China. While the state has implemented laws and policies promoting gender equality, traditional patriarchal ideology persists in fostering discrimination against women. Through a socio-historical lens, the paper traces Chinese feminism from early 20th century reforms to current issues. It contends that the internet has enabled tech-savvy young activists to initiate theatrical protests against gender violence, catalyzing China’s #MeToo movement in 2018. However, structural barriers inhibit working-class and marginalized women from speaking out. Moreover, censorship, online harassment, and anti-feminist rhetoric have stifled the movement’s progress. Recommendations include public education campaigns to engage male allies, counteracting stereotypes that stigmatize feminists. Greater representation of women in the political sphere is required to enact substantive reforms protecting gender rights. In conclusion, the paper emphasizes interdependence and collective organizing as central tenets for Chinese feminism to overcome patriarchal constraints and achieve enduring social change.

Gendering Chinese diaspora: New Women’s Monthly and transnational sisterhood in postwar Malaya

ABSTRACT Studies on the Chinese diaspora often privilege male subjects as agents of mobility, the patriarch in kinship, social networks and livelihood, and producers of knowledge and thoughts, perpetuating an androcentric understanding of Chinese-ness and diaspora. This article challenges the dominant framework and highlights the uneven ways of being diaspora in Malaya and the different political, social, and psychological experiences between men and women and between women born overseas and locally. It traces the cultural production, thoughts, and networks of Chinese women in postwar Malaya by uncovering a short-lived socialist Chinese-language women’s magazine titled New Women’s Monthly, founded by Chinese feminist intellectual Shen Zijiu. The article argues that the fluidity of transnationalism mediated the communication of ideas in the new freedom in postwar Malaya, but nationalist movements could not accommodate it. It investigates the ways the editors and writers imagine a model New Women image through transnational sisterhood narratives and how they wove together the macropolitical discourse of nationalism and practical discussion of women’s emancipation, solidarity, and mobilization. These imaginations showcased the complex interplay of the women’s gendered intersubjectivities of the self, the family, the nation, and the world, through which women were empowered and constrained at the same time. In the end, Shen Zijiu’s harsh criticism of “Miss Nanyang” indicated her nationalist expectations for Chinese Malayan women to serve both Malaya and China were impractical and resulted in the exclusion of sisterhood for the creation of a modern national identity.

“Eileen Gu fetish” as a feminist phenomenon: the intertwining of feminist, neoliberal, and nationalist discourses on Chinese social media

ABSTRACT During the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Eileen Gu attracted considerable attention and sparked numerous discussions on Chinese social media. Using the method of textual analysis, this paper examines the various responses of Chinese women, particularly Chinese feminists, to Eileen’s achievements on Chinese social media, framing these responses within recent studies of neoliberalism’s undoing of feminism as well as long-standing debates about the relationship between feminism and nationalism. This paper argues that discussions about Eileen on Chinese social media not only illustrate how neoliberalism is absorbed, reworked, and resisted in its transnational circulation but also demonstrate how nationalist narratives can be strategically used by Chinese feminists to validate their feminist positions. It further enriches existing scholarship on neoliberalism with a transnational perspective, reaffirms the importance of contextualizing the relationship between Third World feminism and nationalism, and highlights the significance of uncovering indigenous feminist resources in Third World countries.

The popularity of Korean romance novels in contemporary China: A feminist interpretation

AbstractThis essay deals with Korean romance novels translated into Chinese, especially the works of Kim Ha‐in and Guiyeoni which forms a pattern of cross‐cultural communication from the marginal culture to the center. Most studies treat them as an aspect of fast‐food culture that undermines serious literature, with little attention to this literary and cultural phenomenon. Why are Korean romance novels so popular in contemporary China? There are some answers from different perspectives. However, it is obvious that Korean romance novels offered Chinese women the opportunity to reconceptualize gender. This article contributes to criticism on the interface between Korean romance novels and Chinese feminism and further unveils the relationship between Korean popular romance novels and new interpretations of femininity in contemporary China. The success of Korean romance novels benefits from the conscious choice of Chinese readers in the cross‐cultural context, influenced by changes in Chinese women's concept of gender. The response to the aesthetic needs and expectations of readers has prompted the appearance of inverted cultural export, wherein such novels influence other cultures, reflecting upon and even challenging the gender concepts of other countries, which manifests the symbiotic relationship between popular literature and feminism.

Labor Precarity of Chinese Feminist and LGBT NGO Activism—a Social Reproduction Perspective

Abstract: This article examines an under-explored topic of labor precarity of Chinese feminist and LGBT NGO activism from the perspective of social reproduction. Contextualizing the intimate connection between the Chinese party-state outsourcing social service delivery to global civil society and the burgeoning of feminist and LGBT NGOs since the 1990s, it argues that the party-state relies on the social reproductive functions of these NGO while containing their political influence; at the same time, the transnational non-profit funding complex utilized these NGOs for political intervention in China. Arguing against a binary framework of civil society versus state and resistance versus oppression, this article centers the lived experiences of feminist and LGBT activist workers and highlights the contradiction and interplay of agency and conformity of these workers in the state- and market- orchestrated processes of moralization, illegalization, and professionalization, whereby they reshape, revise, or reinforce norms associated with gender, sexuality, and neoliberal standards of productivity and efficiency. Building on Marxist feminist theorization of labor, this article valorizes NGO labor as socially valued work and calls for attention to the issue of labor precarity of NGO activist workers under the backdrop of increasing state violence and market cooptation in many parts of the world, especially in the global South.

Invasion as Trespassing Spatial Boundaries

The surge in domestic violence (DV), akin to a lurking shadow, coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This ‘shadow pandemic’ prompts me to explore the intricate interplay of spatial dynamics between DV and the COVID-19 containment measures. Mirroring the spatial patterns seen in DV, the pandemic restrictions too encompass physical and social isolation in cramped living spaces, as well as exclusion from the public sphere. In this contribution, through my engagement with the Foucauldian concept of the ‘political dream’ in a plague-stricken town, I put forth an account of ‘invasion’ as an audacious act of trespassing boundaries, particularly the transgression of citizens’ privacy during lockdowns. This concept of invasion, I argue, entwined with and starkly juxtaposed against the passive ‘non-invasion’ of DV victims in the guise of marital privacy rhetoric, leaves DV victims in a significantly more precarious position in the global epidemic. Unsettling the rigidity of the private/public; personal/political boundaries, Chinese feminists launched ‘Anti-Domestic Violence, Little Vaccine’ campaign during the Wuhan lockdown. It is in my examination of their performative intervention that I propose my second account of ‘invasion’ – invasion as trespassing a prior boundaries. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of the Habermasian public sphere theory, I delineate that the AVLV campaign is an act of invasion performed on the edges of the fixed spatial, political and legal boundaries, thereby blurring these pre-established lines.

What Is “Rural Feminism”? A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Popular Antifeminist Discourses in Chinese Social Media

Along with the popularization of feminism in Chinese social media, an antifeminist wave has become increasingly prominent since 2014, marked most notably by the stigmatization buzzword “rural feminism.” We collected 2,104 texts regarding “rural feminism” on Zhihu (the Chinese Quora) and applied approaches of computer-assisted discourse studies (i.e., topic modeling, collocation, and concordance analyses) as lenses to help us understand the connections and patterns within these fragmented social media texts, to uncover hidden antifeminist strategies. The findings reveal that popular antifeminism adopts strategies that we defined as “double embrace” and “double rejection” to minimize the realistic threat of feminism to men’s vested interests. These deliberate strategies hint at and further exacerbate the complex interplay between current Chinese antifeminism and feminism. On this basis, we argue that the previous framework of understanding this relationship as a simple dichotomy no longer applies and that we need to reconceptualize the current challenges and threats to Chinese feminism in the context of the specific history and reality of Chinese society and the rich interactions between antifeminism and misogyny, neoliberalism, postfeminism, and various versions of feminism active in China.

Women, Homeland and Memories: Feminist Yan Geling’s Writings

Yan Geling, a feminist of Chinese origin, is a gifted and successful storyteller and creator of characters. However, despite a widespread contribution, Yan Geling’s writings are not popular in the West and remain in a marginalised position. A qualitative case study of Yan Geling’s writings will fill in the literature gap to understand those marginalised Chinese women’s voices. This study examines the work of Yan Geling by applying various observations and data sources. It concentrates on her depiction of her homeland: her fiction takes place in realistic settings during the turbulent years of the 20th Century. Nevertheless, Yan Geling’s works, particularly her writings on women’s situations using a feminist lens, have rapidly increased in recent years. This perspective is an attempt to reflect on Yan Geling’s novel, the analysis of which are more likely to contribute to future Chinese feminist studies.

The Influence of the Rise of Chinese Feminism on the Marketing Strategy of Beauty Products

This research study is based on the realistic background of the rise of feminism in China, which noticeably influenced female consumers, specifically through the spread of the internet. Due to the high activation of the topic of feminism, this study plans to discover its influence on the beauty market in China, as female consumers occupy a relatively higher proportion in this market. This research has a deep background of the development of the Chinese beauty industry since reform and opening up in China. The marketing principles in the Chinese beauty market are then discussed and analyzed while supported by a questionnaire based on the "snowball" sampling method. It leads to Chinese consumer segmentation based on consumers' definitions of feminism. Throughout the research, consumers' willingness to see feminist elements in beauty advertisements and the variety of feminism that consumers have defined have been discovered. It hints at the future patterns of "how to market" to beauty organizations in the Chinese market. This research study can help widen the range of research in the academic marketing field and provide more ideas to academicians in future marketing coupled with a way to think from a new angle. It could also possibly help business people who work in the beauty industry in the Chinese market to have an idea of how to present consumers and potential consumers think and how to manipulate and reflect under the condition of fast development on feminism.

Awakening to Independence: The Evolution of Chinese Urban Women's Ideology Behind Consumer Behavior

Women, in the long-standing structure of social development, have been excluded from the relations between production and consumption; they have been repressed in the gender confrontation between men and women. Chinese feminism started late and was influenced by the patriarchal system that has existed in China for thousands of years, so there was great resistance to its development Nowadays, with the prevalence of consumerism, "women" and "consumption" are even more bound by social identity. The process of Chinese women's pursuit of independence is tortuous and difficult. Therefore, focusing on the current situation of women's consumption can help us understand the current situation of Chinese women's survival, so as to summarize the problems facing the development of Chinese feminism and explore the possible future development trend of Chinese feminism. First, this paper composes and summarizes the current consumption status and survival status of Chinese women, using the Chinese Women's Living Conditions Report as a data source. Secondly, it briefly reviews the development trajectory of Chinese feminism and points out the problems faced by Chinese women in their pursuit of independence at present and the possible countermeasures to be taken. In order to make useful reflections on the development path of Chinese women.

#MeToo with Chinese characteristics – analysis through a lens of Chinese feminism

ABSTRACT As a victim-survivor and feminist activist who participated in the #MeToo movement in China, I always have confusion and questions generated from my experiences and observations. The limited literature on Chinese social movements rarely utilises China situated frameworks, which reduces the understanding. This article focuses on ‘how #MeToo movement(s) manifest and evolve in China’ and aims to find out its ‘Chinese characteristics’. Through an analysis of two archives and my autoethnography using He-Yin Zhen’s feminist analytical concepts ‘nannü’ (man/woman) and ‘shengji’ (livelihood), Confucian moral outlook, and ‘Chinese characteristics’, I find that the movement displays ‘Chinese characteristics’ in multiple aspects. There is not one monolithic #MeToo movement in China but many with different agendas, although some of which are prioritised more than others. These findings stress the importance of privileging the historic-cultural context and personal perspectives in studying social movements. This article illustrates that situated feminist research is needed to reconstruct feminist studies in the global South, and that feminist movements need to consider the historical and cultural context, and challenge dominant romanticising and elitist discourses, in order to develop sustainably.

Shifting the struggle inward: Mainstream debate on digital grassroots feminism in China

ABSTRACT This research suggests that the legitimacy of Chinese feminist public opinion is reflected in mainstream digital grassroots feminism. The authors investigate the use of feminist discourse in the Chinese Internet with the aim of highlighting and focusing current discussions among grassroots feminists in China. This research reveals that mainstream debates revolve around radical and conservative feminism. We propose that there is an emerging radical force in the mainstream debate, which is conceptualized as “new feminist activism.” It tries to separate itself from national and sexual politics, and has evolved from western radical feminism, separatist feminism, and socialist feminism in China. In addition, new feminist activism is labeled as extreme feminism and pseudo-feminism and is not only criticized by conservatives such as liberal feminists and socialist feminists but is also ruled by the state for ideological control. Appropriation of feminist discourses by grassroots feminists have led to positions of different groups splitting, and there is an intense internal fight for power over discourse. In general, digital feminism in China is characterized by a focus on the private sphere, de-political, and indirect confrontation.

The Analysis of Why Women Kill Season 2 Based on the Development of Feminism in China

The second season of Why Women Kill has been widely disseminated and discussed in China. By combining an in-depth viewing of Why Women Kill II and the current development of Chinese feminism, this paper adopts the textual close reading to analyze the connotation of beauty, the awakening of female self-awareness, and the abnormal development of Chinese feminism. The work hopes to promote the further development of Chinese feminism, raise the level of gender consciousness in the whole society and accumulate experience and provide reference for similar feminist drama series and related researches in China and abroad.

The Comprehensive Research of Feminism in Edith Wharton's Novels

Chinese literature and foreign literature constitute the world literature system, reflecting the wisdom of human literature and art. The two promote each other and progress together, facing the development of Chinese literature against the background of foreign literature. Based on the theory of literary criticism and comparative literature, this thesis comprehensively uses the literature research method, the psychology research method, the close reading of texts, the comparative research method and the "three theories" research method to evaluate and analyze the feminism often shown in Wharton's novels. This paper deeply understands Wharton's exploration of the ideal social order and ideal new women, and displays from more perspectives the features of this outstanding writer and the social culture at that time, as well as the lasting charm and the value of The Times of her works, so as to provide reference for the creation of Chinese feminist literature.