Turning limitations into opportunities: researching Chinese feminist activism as a male outsider

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jin Guo, Miao Wei, Liu Tingting, Catherine Driscoll, Tim Laurie, and Liam Grealy for their guidance and support. I am also grateful to the Conversations Editors, Catia C. Confortini and Natália Maria Félix de Souza, and to Brooke A. Ackerly and Ben Woolhead for their helpful comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bin Wang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Nanjing University, and a Lecturer in the Qu Qiubai School of Government at Changzhou University. He completed both his Master's and Doctoral degrees in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. His PhD thesis examined the development of popular and academic feminism, as well as feminist activism, in contemporary China. His research interests include youth cultures, digital feminism, and youth activism. He has published articles in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Asian Women, and Asian Cinema.

Notes

1 In this article, I refer to my primary contact Qin Qian by her first name, Qin. For other feminists I mention, I either use pseudonyms of their choice or keep them anonymous for those who requested it in our interviews.

2 In China, WeChat is the most popular messaging and social networking app and is owned by Tencent.

3 The word “Weibo” means “microblog” in China. In this article, by “Weibo,” I specifically refer to Sina Microblog, which is the most popular among Chinese internet users.

4 In the late 2000s, it was quite common for Chinese college students to have never heard of the translated Chinese word for “feminism” (nüxingzhuyi or nüquanzhuyi) since it had not been a topic in the media and popular culture in China. A few feminist activists of a similar age to me got to know “feminism” when they started to work in feminist organizations or to pursue their postgraduate studies.

5 The Chinese word zhe refers to a person; hence nüquanzhuyi means “feminism,” and nüquanzhuyi zhe means “feminist(s).”

6 The phrase nüxingzhuyi had also been in popular circulation in the first half of the century, and continued to be in wider use in Taiwan. It was reintroduced into mainland China when scholarly exchanges across the strait began to increase in the 1980s (Chen 2013).

7 The phrase nüquanzhuyi in fact had been used in early twentieth-century China but was later denigrated by the Chinese Communist Party as a Western and bourgeois concern. It was banished from public discourse during the Mao era of the People's Republic of China (1949–1976), replaced by a socialist discourse of “women's liberation” (Wang 2017).

8 A few “feminist academics” even said that they were doing research on women and gender but were unwilling to be associated with nüxingzhuyi either, let alone nüquanzhuyi (cf. Liu 2002).

9 The group used the phrase “‘Women's Awakening” as the English name for its WeChat and Weibo accounts.

10 For the same reason, here I choose not to disclose the formal names of the NGOs whose members had constituted YFAG.

11 Chinese feminist activists used this name to circumvent internet censorship and they had to invent a different one when their account was later suspended.