A Chinese feminist analysis of Chinese social media responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine

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Acknowledgments

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Meghana Nayak, Co-Editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics’ Conversations section, for her insightful comments on early versions of this piece. It would have been impossible for me to use the journal’s platform to show my solidarity with the victims of Russia’s war crimes without her encouragement and continuous support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All translations from Chinese to English are provided by the author.

2 In China, all prestigious universities are funded by the government and always publicly endorse state policy. This is especially the case for this particular university, which is famous for political sciences and public administration studies and has educated a lot of top officials.

3 The solar term is used in China's traditional calendar to convey seasonal change. A whole year has 24 solar terms. In this sentence, the professor uses the phrase “24 solar terms” as an alternative expression for an entire year to make it sound more memorable.

4 Generally speaking, Chinese people are aware of the crude Russo-centric masculinity that Putin embodies and the cultural differences between Russia and typical Euro-American democracies. However, Russia is simultaneously considered to be part of Euro-American cultures through the lens of race in China because popular Chinese racial discourses largely follow a simplified classification of race as “Yellow” (Chinese/East Asian), “white” (Euro-American), “Brown” (South Asian/Latin American), and “Black” (African). In this coding, ethnically Slavic peoples such as Russians and Ukrainians are considered to be “white.” Barack Obama, while Black, is coded as embodying a style of hegemonic masculinity that is “Western” (Euro-American), as is discussed below.

5 While more complex than I can explain in this paper, wen masculinities are about being “gentlemanly,” culturally competent, and “intellectual,” whereas wu masculinities are about physical skills/prowess and military readiness.

6 While I do not have room to expand on this here, the “Western”/Euro-American-style hegemonic masculinity is in a sense an interesting abstraction and reduction of wen characteristics but is also seen as preferable to balanced wen–wu masculinity. I am also interested in Trump as an aberration from Euro-American hegemonic masculinity and an emulator of Putin’s cruel and brutal style of masculinity.

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Altman Yuzhu Peng

Altman Yuzhu Peng received his PhD from Newcastle University, UK, and is currently Assistant Professor in Intercultural Communication in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK. His research interests lie at the intersections of critical discourse studies, feminism, media and cultural studies, and public relations. He is author of A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere (2020) and has previously published in the Asian Journal of Communication, Convergence, the Chinese Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of Gender Studies, Media International Australia, Social Semiotics, and Television and New Media.