Anti-Feminism: four strategies for the demonisation and depoliticisation of feminism on Chinese social media

ABSTRACT

Anti-feminism and misogyny online have intensified globally over the last decade, bringing substantive challenges to feminist identification and activism. This article explores the strategies for silencing and expelling feminists via the deployment of an anti-feminist discourse online, in response to feminism’s increasing visibility in China. Data was collected via observation of 23 influential feminist accounts on Weibo. This was bolstered by data from 10 semi-structured interviews with feminist Weibo account contributors. By applying critical discourse analysis (CDA), four strategies used to demonise feminists and depoliticise feminism online in China are identified: feminists as deviant women, as betraying the nation, as connected to Islamists, and as “fake-feminists.” The article highlights a kind of intertwined anti-feminism that draws power from distinct features—nationalism and Islamophobia. It argues that by interlocking Chinese historical and structural conditions as well as cultural context, anti-feminism diverts public attention away from systematic gender inequality, and onto antagonisms between feminists and anti-feminists, which further restricts the discussion of intersectional oppressions that affect women’s lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-feminism
• online misogyny
• nationalism
• fake-feminists
• Weibo

Introduction

In 2020, the catchphrase “average-yet-confident” went viral online in China. It derives from a punchline, “How can he be so average, yet so full of confidence?,” delivered by a young stand-up comedian Yang Li to describe women’s experience of men with oversized egos. Soon after, on social media, she was accused of “sexism,” “man hating,” and “provoking antagonism between men and women,” and was reported to the National Radio and Television Administration for promoting “sexist” speech. More concerningly, her social media pages were flooded with insults and threats.

Although Yang Li, as a public figure, is more likely to be the target of online abuse than women in general, it is a shared experience for both Yang Li and women more generally to encounter online misogyny when they discuss gender issues. While social media provides women and feminists with a space for collective emotional and political expression, anti-feminism and misogyny have also become more acute in such spaces. The boundaries between misogyny and anti-feminism are blurred. Debbie Ging and Eugenia Siapera (2019) argue that “misogyny” usually refers to general attitudes and behaviours towards women, while “anti-feminism” constitutes a response to feminism as a political project, but both share a common goal: to discipline women’s thoughts and bodies in order to maintain patriarchal rule. Importantly, as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) and Rosalind Gill (2016) note, there is a close relationship between feminism and misogyny; when the feminist movement becomes visibly powerful, the misogynist response becomes stronger—it is a “bad romance” (Banet-Weiser 2018, 37). In light of this, anti-feminist backlash and online misogyny are inevitable challenges for Chinese feminists and many women netizens (a portmanteau of the word internet and citizen).

While many studies draw attention to feminist responses to misogyny or other specific characteristics of anti-feminism in China, this article aims to explore how anti-feminism and misogyny have evolved to confront online feminist discussions as a trend. It asks: What anti-feminists and misogynists strategies are employed in debate relating to feminism on Chinese social media? How are they similar to, and different from, anti-feminist strategies in the West? How are the toxic politics of the “manosphere,” which have mainly to date been studied via an Anglo-American lens, popularly reproduced in Chinese digital culture? I am aware that using terminology like “the West” may leads to ambiguity or imply that it is a homogenic entity, therefore to clarify, the term is used here to refer to the Anglo-American context. I utilise this term not only because it is still widely used in both academia and everyday narrative, providing an effective (albeit oversimplified) shorthand, but also for its political and ideological framing in China.

I begin this paper by situating my enquiry in relation to the literature on anti-feminism and online misogyny, and on the current state of feminism in China. I then outline the methods: online observation and semi-structured interviews. Based on an analysis of anti-feminists’ online posts and interactions, I identify and analyse four different strategies that interactively attack feminists and silence feminist discussions. I argue that these evidence a kind of intertwined anti-feminism which diverts attention away from structural gender inequality in China, thereby cementing patriarchal hegemony.

Anti-feminism and online misogyny

In the era of Web 2.0, Emma A. Jane (2014) has characterised online attacks, abuse, vitriol, trolling and cyberbullying against individual women as “e-bile.” This form of chauvinism occurs on a wide range of digital platforms, and Jane identifies that the circulation of e-bile has normalised hostile and hateful discourse in which victims are accused of being insecure and lacking a sense of humour, reducing the inclusivity and civility of online spaces. Furthermore, Eugenia Siapera (2019) summarises two manifestations of online misogyny. The first is represented by the Gamergate¹episode and refers to attacks on prominent women in the male-dominated technology, games and politics spheres via doxing (a kind of online harassment that publicly discloses someone’s personal information), abusive messages and rape threats in order to silence and exclude them. The second, represented by comedic memes, ironic comments and Urban Dictionary-style abbreviations, constitutes “a constant undercurrent of ‘banal’ everyday misogynism” (Siapera 2019, 26). It posits feminists as extremist, childish or irrational and reproduces pejorative and sexualised representations of women in terms of their looks, intelligence or “promiscuity” (Debbie Ging, Theodore Lynn and Pierangelo Rosati 2020, 850). While such banal misogyny may not be as noticeable as attacks and threats against well-known women, it should nevertheless be understood as an important dynamic of online misogyny which risks becoming an acceptable part of mainstream culture.

It is worth noting the important role that digital technology has played in increasing the flow of anti-feminist ideas. Emma A. Jane (2016a) describes the recent emergence of abusive language as “rapenglish” (33), which has been visualised and expanded through, for example, photoshopping images, cyberstalking and creating revenge porn. Moreover, Debbie Ging (2019) cites the example of the rapid propagation of Red Pill “philosophy”² across multiple platforms, such as the UK website AngryHarry and dedicated subreddits (subsidiary categories within the Reddit). Likewise, Gamergate garnered widespread support from pick-up artists, men’s rights activists (MRAs) and “men going their own way” (MGTOW) (Ging 2019). Such cases illustrate the difference between pre-internet, issue-driven men’s rights groups, which espoused collective action, and the new groups, which rely on “personalized content sharing across media networks” (Ging 2019, 47). Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kate M. Miltner (2016) conceptualise this personal and affective form of politics as “a networked misogyny” (171) that allows misogynist expression to be rapidly communicated from different sites, and which share a common loyalty to hegemonic institutions.

More importantly, Banet-Weiser (2018) and Siapera (2019) point out that anti-feminism and misogyny in the West cater to traditional conservative values (pro-life, sexual abstinence), especially the alt-right political agenda. Banet-Weiser (2018) summarises the logic behind anti-feminism and misogyny as the notion that society has been destroyed by feminists, and men have been “injured by women” (35). In response, anti-feminists and misogynists seek the restoration of male capacity and patriarchy from women and feminists to “save” men from a fictional crisis (Kristin J. Anderson 2014). Therefore, online misogyny is far from a mere subculture; rather, it is “the articulation of an increasingly powerful far-right populism buoyed by re-energised forms of post-crisis neoliberalism” (Theodore Koulouris 2018, 758). As such, any analysis of anti-feminism and online misogyny must take into account the political and economic context.

The phenomena of anti-feminism and online misogyny are far from being confined to Western social media. For instance, in her account of specific hashtag activity against misogyny, Jinsook Kim (2017) highlights online misogyny in South Korea, which includes not only gender-based discrimination and harassment, but also discourse that “reinforces traditional gender roles” (807). Given that this is a global social problem, with constantly changing manifestations as new digital platforms and technical advances emerge, it is important to analyse how anti-feminism and misogyny have evolved to confront online feminist discussions in China.

Feminism and anti-feminism in contemporary China

Notions of “gender” and feminist knowledge have been introduced and discussed in China since the UN’s 4th World Women’s Conference in Beijing 1995. Importantly, women civic organisations, supporting groups and NGOs were established subsequently, which focused on women’s reproductive rights, women empowerment in rural areas, and domestic violence. With this development, changes in the state of gender equality were no longer driven solely by the government-led All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF), nongovernmental autonomous groups with various gender-related concerns began to promote discussions of women’s rights in regard to education, family, work and reproduction while raising the feminist consciousness (Xiao Han 2018).

Since the government has tightened censorship and surveillance on civil society organizations and street-level collective activism, social media has become a vital digital platform for the voice and actions of women’s empowerment (Altman Yuzhu Peng 2020). On the one hand, the internet gives women an opportunity to publicly and globally call out and challenge the sexism and misogyny they have personally experienced (Ealasaid Munro 2013). For example, Chinese feminists and victims of sexual violence participated in the global #MeToo movement and it made significant progress in catalysing digital activities into practical results. One example being that at the end of 2018, the Supreme People’s Court added “sexual harassment liability and dispute” as a civil course of action. On the other hand, feminism has become a sensitive term, not only because of its Western grounding, but also because it is strongly associated with social or political change, which “can pose potential threats to China’s political stability” (Han 2018, 739). Various methods are used to control “risky speech” on social media platforms, such as deleting posts (Xueyang Xu, Z. Morley Mao and J.Alex Halderman 2011), suspending accounts (Han 2018) and even banning them permanently (Roberts 2018). In a similar vein, the hashtag #MeToo and the posts following this hashtag were blocked and deleted soon after it went viral online. Building “a harmonious society” is a priority; as such, anything that may cause “social unrest” or threaten the government’s legitimacy is carefully moderated (Jing Zeng 2020).

Even though social media has increased visibility of feminism and contributes to a sense of solidarity among victims of gender inequality, in the case of China, feminist writings, images, performance art, drama and videos have been subjected to online attacks and abuse. For example, Yalan Huang (2016) investigation of comments on The Vagina Monologues online photo exhibition in China demonstrates the ubiquity of online sexism and misogyny. She points out that feminism is attacked as morally destructive, imported from foreign countries and linked to a “bourgeois” project. Zhaohui Liu and Robin Dahling (2016) argue that this reaction against feminist discourse is rooted in a misunderstanding of feminism, which some view “as a western kind of ‘feminist Orientalism’” (3), resulting in increasing calls to banish such foreign culture. Since the revival of Confucianism—understood as upholding “harmony” and the “Great Unity” of society—has prominently positioned in the state propaganda, women who publicly claim to be feminists have been viewed as challenging the sexual values, norms and morality of Confucian culture (Han 2018). When feminists promote the idea of economic independence and encourage women to dismiss marriage as necessity of life, they are blamed by anti-feminists for transgressing against the conventional gender order. Angela Xiao Wu and Yige Dong (2019) suggest that anti-feminists view this anxiety about economic inequality to women’s rebellion, namely the awakening of feminism posing a threat to hegemonic masculinity. They argue that when considering the nature of anti-feminist backlash, it should not be merely understood as gender antagonism but concealed class antagonism, which needs more discussions. Moreover, in an investigation into the online gender-issue debates, Peng (2020) explores how digital nationalism exacerbates online misogyny in China. He emphasises that, as a masculine concept, nationalism has been deployed in the governmental propaganda as a strategy to “reaffirm its authority” (87). In this context, a conspiratorial discourse has been framed to suggest that all feminists are associated with external enemies of the country. This linking of gender-based issues with international politics contributes to a collective boycott of all kinds of feminist thought and activism. These literature discusses a vivid interplay between anti-feminism and Confucianism, censorship, social class and digital nationalism respectively. Yet, insufficient attention has been paid to understanding the intertwined strategies of anti-feminism, particularly regarding the ways in which anti-feminist discourse is used to rationalises a political agenda in China, as this paper goes on to substantiate.

Methods

Weibo is the primary research site in this study; a Twitter-like social-media platform in China and one of the most popular platforms, with 230 million daily active users in 2021. I used two key strands of data collection: online observation and semi-structured interviews. The data for this paper constitute a sub-section of data from a bigger project.

In the sampling process, I first looked at several active and influential feminism-focused accounts with a certain number of followers, in order to determine the sampling frame. These accounts have “feminism” or similar homophones (given the sensitivity of the term mentioned earlier) in their names or bios. I found that most of their posts concerned a clear set of themes, including women’s rights, the promotion of gender equality and social justice, feminist theory and practice, and active engagement in online and offline feminist activities. This early observation provided a good starting point for setting criteria for sampling accounts. Accordingly, the final sampling criteria I used were: 1) the account had over 20,000 followers, which guaranteed a certain level of reach; 2) the account had the “V” symbol—like the blue tick on Twitter—meaning the account owner’s identity had been verified by Weibo’s owner, the Sina Corporation; and 3) its aim was to promote feminism, and all of its posts were concerned with feminism and gender inequality. Finally, 23 feminism-focused Weibo accounts were selected in 2017. In the process of online observation, I collected anti-feminist and misogynist comments in response to these feminist accounts’ posts and discussions of feminist issues. This part was done from March 2020 to May 2020. 893 pieces of data were collected which includes two types: 1) hostile attacks on feminists or feminism in response to published posts and 2) anti-feminist and misogynist content exposed by the selected feminist accounts citing from various sources, such as netizens’ experience of their daily lives and discussion of the #MeToo movement.

The second phase of data collection involved semi-structured interviews. During sampling of the accounts, I started to identify potential interviewees connected to them. I did not simply select account runners because, apart from the purely personal accounts, operating non-personal accounts was a team effort; for example, different people would write articles, organise online seminars and shoot vlogs. As such, the feminist ideas these accounts promoted stemmed from not only the account operators themselves but also their associates. I chose interviewees who played different roles in online feminist discussions, including operators of selected feminist accounts, authors of feminist articles, an organiser of online feminist activities, translators of English feminist content, speakers who gave feminist presentations, and a vlogger who made feminist videos. In total, I interviewed 10 participants in March 2018. They shared their experiences of anti-feminist backlash, such as being doxed, attacked and receiving threats.

I conducted critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the textual discourse sourced from online observation and interviews. CDA is a classic qualitative approach to scrutinising media texts as a form of social-action, which unpacks the political patterns and cultural knowledge in the formation of discourse (Ruth Wodak 2014). I categorised the data into three clusters based on different objects/actions that anti-feminist discourse reacts to: hostility against the accounts’ daily posting/news commentary/introduction of feminism; hostility against digital feminist movements (for example, degrading the victim-survivors of #MeToo); hostility against individual feminists (private messages published by the accounts and discussed in interview data). I applied open coding as the first step of inductive analysis, which picked out words, terms and sentences related to the research questions to forge the initial codes. Then, I started to analyse the relationships between these initial codes, and based on the analysis constructed thematic codes to classify the initial codes. For example, the demeaning of feminists’ appearance and the denigration of their moral quality repeatedly appear in all of the above clusters. The initial codes for these data include “old,” “ugly,” “crazy,” “slut,” “lonely,” “vicious,” “hysteria” and so on. I then organised these initial codes into a theme—a strategy excluding/othering feminists from normal women, as discussed in the first part of the forthcoming analysis section. Naturally, some of the initial codes did not fit perfectly into a single theme; I set these aside in a discrete group and returned to them after the thematic codes were completed. After categorising the data using the thematic codes, themes with more than 150 pieces of data were considered important. Notably, the themes of deviant women and betraying the nation had over 220 pieces of data each. At the end of the process, four key thematic codes were identified, which will be discussed in detail below.

To reduce the loss of meaning and improve the validity—as Fenna van Nes et al. (2010) recommend—and to avoid interrupting the language transition, I carried out the early stages of data collection and coding in the original language (Chinese). Translation of quotations to English was done before writing up. Given that it is easy to trace and identify usernames online, I present the publishers of this anti-feminist data anonymously. Importantly, the limitation of this study design should be recognised here; these data were collected from feminist Weibo accounts and individual participants’ experience, thereby providing only a partial insight into anti-feminist discourse from these feminist perspectives. Only by recognising a partial perspective can critical and self-critical consciousness be raised and maintained, and thus it is possible to obtain the “situated knowledge” (Donna Haraway 1988). For an opposing angle, the ideas and discourses deployed by those who are positioned as anti-feminists will arguably be a valuable area for further research.

Four strategies for expelling feminists and depoliticising feminism

Based on the aforementioned data, I discussed four strategies that are used to demonise feminists and delegitimise feminism online: identifying feminists as deviant women, as betraying the nation, as connected to Islamists, and as “fake” feminists. It is important to note that these four strategies are not mutually exclusive; rather, they often overlap in a chorus of anti-feminist rhetoric.

Identifying feminists as deviant women

The most common form of online abuse directed at women feminists involved criticising their appearance, marital status and personality. For example, the following comment was made on an influential grassroots feminist account:

Judging from the women I personally know, no women who call themselves feminists have good looks, have a good personality or receive love from men. Feminists are pathetic. They are all ugly and do not enjoy any gender privileges. Feminism is good because it shows who female losers are. (February 28 2016, 03:19)

Most of my interviewees had received similar abusive comments and private messages; for instance, Lexi said:

They [anti-feminists] sent us private message to curse us as old ugly spinsters … those words are vicious. (Interview, March 9 2018)

This apparently “banal” but powerful way of demonising feminists—portraying them as deviant women who are not liked by men or are somehow “not women” – is common worldwide. This mirrors Christina Scharff (2012) description of the rejection of feminism within postfeminist contexts. She points out that feminists are considered unfeminine, like men, and presumed to be lesbians, which is due to the combined effect of heterosexual hegemony, homophobia, and the patriarchy’s suppression of all critical voices. Rosemary Lucy Hill and Kim Allen (2021) point out that identifying feminists as “unattractive” is a common sentiment within anti-feminist humour and works to “bolster claims of irrationality” (15) attributed to feminists. This amplifies feminists “non-feminine” characteristics and depicts their behaviours as morally corrupt, contributing to the stigmatisation of feminism.

Data discussed here suggests that the suppression of digital feminist activism has become more obvious, especially for ordinary women who dare to speak out. During the #MeToo movement, I noticed that women who accused men of being perpetrators faced the challenge of being the “perfect victim.” This strategy is commonly used to target female victims of cyber-hate (Jane 2016b), but the challenge is now often posed not only by perpetrators but also the supposedly neutral mass media (Rituparna Bhattacharyya 2018). For example, a female student, Liu Jingyao, accused the tycoon Liu Qiangdong (known as Richard Liu) – a billionaire and the CEO of JD.com³ – of raping her in her apartment after a dinner party. Inspired by #MeToo, two hashtags were launched on Weibo – #HereForJingyao and #IAmNotAPerfectVictimEither—which sparked support from Chinese netizens. However, simultaneous misogynist challenges against the female student became relentless, with hashtagged comments such as:

I want to know if you are a moral girl, who will bring a married man back to your flat alone? (September 12 2018, 13:21)

Richard Liu’s behaviour was just the behaviour of a normal man. That woman’s behaviour is not like a woman who has been well educated, but a veteran who goes in and out of the red-light district. (May 6 2019, 15:39)

How do you know if it was rape? Definitely the price was not negotiated. (June 18 2019, 18:24)

It must be a badger game (仙人跳).⁴ (July 30 2019, 09:25)

In many comments, the female student is described as a “slut” who seduces men, and as a sex-worker playing “a badger game,” while Richard Liu’s cheating on his wife is “very much understandable as he is a very wealthy man” (December 26 2018, 10:54). The tone of these posts shows sympathy towards Richard Liu, implicitly conveying that his action was nothing more than a private moral issue in domestic life, not a crime. Similar comments are common in many cases of sexual harassment whenever female victims speaking out about their experience. Like them, the above comments seem to personally attack Jingyao as an individual, potentially silencing and demonising women who dare to speak out and their supporters who attempt to break patriarchal norms. In particular, due to the influence of Confucianism—a Chinese woman is still largely regarded as unvirtuous if she does not remain a virgin until marriage (Tani Barlow 2004), the humiliation of “slut shaming” is powerful. Women who try to defend their rights are degraded into caricatures—grandstanding “sluts” with ulterior motives. It is a way to shift the debate from the merits of the case and discussions of structural inequality, to personal attacks on women who fail to follow traditional gender norms.

The vilification of feminists and women who resist patriarchal norms of femininity simply reproduces the centuries-old mother/whore dichotomy (Angela Nagle 2017) in anti-feminist and online misogynist discourse. In this dichotomy, “good women” are like mothers—non-sexual, happy to sacrifice for the family, never alone with a strange man—while “bad women” are likened to sex-workers, deemed to be sexually promiscuous, and can be dismissed and devalued as such. It is problematic that framing sex as bad and erroneous and women engaged in sex work as deserving of hate/discrimination. As Jane (2016b) points out, e-bile—although circulated in a new medium—merely perpetuates an attitude “with a far older tradition—one which insists that women are inferior” (287). By side-lining and repelling women who do not follow patriarchal rules, anti-feminists and misogynists reframe feminism as a threat to conventional masculinity and femininity, which is defined by men’s dominant position (Banet-Weiser 2018). Such discourse promulgates the idea that men resources are being plundered by women, especially feminists. As such, the strategy of dismantling and delegitimising feminism operates as an attempt to eliminate male’s anxiety engendered by class inequality in the post-socialist transition (Wu and Dong 2019) and re-stabilizes the hegemony of dominant masculinities in cultural changes.

Identifying feminists as betraying the nation

Chinese anti-feminism and online misogyny are closely entwined with nationalist discourse, which is a site for accomplishing hegemonic masculinity (Joane Nagel 1998). This connection arguably legitimises anti-feminist rhetoric and attacks on women as a patriotic defence of, and sign of commitment to, the nation. For example, an influential feminist account posted a Virginia Woolf quote on Woolf’s birthday: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world” (January 25 2018, 14:57). Some anti-feminists used this post as evidence to argue that acceptance of feminism constitutes betrayal of the nation:

We can see that feminism has been completely developed in the direction of anti-nation, anti-state, and anti-Chinese men. When feminism, which should fight for the legitimate rights and interests of women of our country, has completely deviated from the bottom line of our nation, then this feminist power has become the greatest evil. (August 11 2018, 22:33)

Without understanding the background and meaning of Woolf’s quote—many of these anti-feminists probably did not even know who Woolf was—its seeming contempt for the concepts of “country” and “nationalism” inevitably provoked their anger.

Moreover, feminists are easily slandered as haters of Chinese men and worshippers of Western men. A good example of this is when a feminist account published a post encouraging more tolerance of diversity in intimate relationships (such as less discrimination against divorced women and inter-racial marriage) in a Western context, and criticised Chinese men for their intolerance of Chinese women marrying foreigners.⁵ This post attracted many anti-feminist comments:

This is a group of fucking bitches who worship foreigners. Get out of China … Our great motherland is not where you traitors should stay. Go lick your foreign sugar-daddy, idiot. (February 3 2019, 19:02)

Women with foreign boyfriends are easy girls … feminists are anti-family, anti-Han race and anti-state. They are losers among Chinese women. (February 4 2019, 18:34)

In this discourse, feminists are regarded as “traitors” because their posts express praise for certain Western phenomena. This illustrates that Chinese women are still objectified as belonging only to Chinese men by right; women who act otherwise are labelled “easy girls,” and feminists are constructed as thieves of what “rightly belongs” to men. As Peng (2020) argues, anti-feminists reconstruct feminism as “a symbolic accomplice of Western, masculine invasions” (95) which antagonises the nationalist sentiment of Chinese men.

Many prior studies demonstrate that the “Western-rooted” characteristic of feminism is constructed by anti-feminists as an imaginary threat to traditional Chinese moral values and culture, especially when China’s renaissance has been prioritised in the government’s political agenda. I further suggest that anti-feminists’ nationalist rhetoric is not just based on the pretext of “Western-rooted” characteristics, but is also easily rationalised by the official discourse and actions of the ACWF, which is framed in governmental propaganda as the only correct and suitable organisation to empower women in China. The term “feminism” (and related terms, such as “feminist” and “patriarchy”) has rarely been used in governmental discourse. One of my interviewees, Yvonne, pointed this out when talking about why feminism is highly stigmatised in China:

Feminism in China is easily regarded as a Western anti-China force. However, the term “women’s liberation” [funü jiefang] also comes from the West, from Marxism. Unlike feminism, women’s liberation has been “officially qualified.” (Interview, March 14 2018)

The phrase “women’s liberation” (funü jiefang) has been used as an official term in governmental discourse which is distinct from feminism (nüquan zhuyi) in the Chinese language. This distinction has an historical legacy in China as feminism was deemed a product of the bourgeoisie, and separated from the socialist women’s liberation (Dongchao Min 2005). Based on socialist ideals, the ACWF tend to carefully to distinguish “Marxist women’s liberation theory” from “Western bourgeois feminism.” They provide aid to women at a governmental level, which while valuable, remains socially conservative and paternalistic in terms of challenging patriarchal power. In contrast, the ideas circulated through—and the strategies applied by—grassroots feminist activists on social media seemly more closing align with the “Western” way of doing feminism; for example, advocating for “speaking out” in the context of the #MeToo movement, calling for LGBT rights and for policy change, and protesting against sexism in employment and education. These feminist ideas and activities are criticised by opponents as “middle-class oriented;” Andrea, an experienced editor of a popular grassroots feminist account shared her experience:

It[feminism] is regarded as a very elite thing, a very middle-class thing … Also, it is [viewed as] closely related to the “white leftists” in the US, so it is also very ideologically offensive. (Interview, March 11 2018)

Therefore, the confrontation between socialism with Chinese characteristic promoted by the CCP, and that of Western ideologies, has become a significant tool for justifying anti-feminist and misogynist attacks on feminism as forms of anti-colonial and nationalist resistance. Anti-feminists have often highlighted the omission of feminism from governmental discourse to portray feminists as anti-state. For example, by characterising feminists as obeying the demands of Western anti-China forces (also called “external hostile forces”) against China’s renaissance, one anti-feminist posted: “I hope that all sisters will stay clear-headed and not be instigated by the so-called “feminism” and become a weapon against our government used by some anti-China forces to incite domestic struggles” (January 31 2019, 19:31). Legitimising anti-feminist acts as resisting “imported goods” and forms of neo-colonialism conceals the underlying political and economic contradictions in society and transfers the blame for structural inequality and systemic injustice onto (feminist) women. Such xenophobia is, in fact, a manifestation of deep prejudice that demands unquestioning submission to the authority of patriarchy (with women being made nothing more than a resource) and which is intolerant of any deviation from strict rules of conduct (gendered, patriarchal norms). In this sense, the amplification of the ideological Chinese-Western binary is an effective strategy to circulate and reproduce anti-feminist discourse aimed at suppressing feminism.

Identifying feminists as connected to Islamists

The third main strategy in which anti-feminists stigmatise feminism is by linking feminists with Islam and using Islamophobia to stir up public panic about feminists and feminist organisations. Few academic papers have specifically focused on this online phenomenon, but several news reports have covered the linking (disseminated by others) of feminism with Islam. These reports, and the feminist account operators I interviewed, agree that an event in 2014 was the starting point for this specific kind of cyber-attack on feminists and feminist accounts. At a college in Guangzhou, a female Muslim student was asked to take off her headscarf during military training.⁶ After she posted about this incident online, some feminists supported her right to choose her own religious beliefs and how to dress. That night, an influential feminist account’s home page was hacked, and a cartoon image on the page was altered so it appeared to be wearing a black burqa. A simplified but “persuasive” rationale was then circulated online: removing the hijab was the liberation of Islamic women while putting on the hijab was a surrender to Islamic culture. Speaking on behalf of Muslim women is a way to reinforce anti-feminist ethno-nationalist privilege. Such sudden concern and ostensible support for Muslim women’s “freedom” against Islamic culture is actually thinly disguised Islamophobia (Siapera 2019). After this incident, posts claiming that feminism had colluded with Islam began to circulate on social-media platforms.

Since then, anti-feminist discourse featuring Islamophobia has framed feminists and Muslims who are supportive of one other, as undermining “civilised society” while victimising Chinese men. For instance, in 2017, an influential feminist account commented on a post about the consequences of divorce for Arab Muslim women, including being stoned to death by their ex-husband’s relatives, or having their faces disfigured to stop them remarrying. The feminist account argued that the punishment of stoning is in fact, usually used in cases of blasphemy, homosexuality, and adultery, but not in all divorce cases. Notwithstanding the account holder’s attempt to offer further clarification regarding the claims made in the original post, the comment was been interpreted as the feminist account denying that divorced women may be stoned as a punishment, and as defending the brutal treatment of Muslim women in Saudi Arabia. A screenshot of the comments, like a rock thrown into water, provoked a wave of criticism:

Chinese feminists are so powerful, why don’t you go to the Middle East to save Muslim women? (May 18 2017, 21:41)

Feminism has gone to the opposite side of the initial feminist movement, and become a hate organisation that plagues normal social order and keeps bullying men. Feminists only bully the civilised men in civilised society. They never speak for the women who have no human rights in the barbaric and backward Islamic countries, and don’t even dare to confront the barbaric Muslim men who do not respect women. (February 23 2018, 10:05)

These posts show that anti-feminists assume all Muslim women need to be saved by feminists, and that feminists, instead of liberating Muslim women, only target white or Chinese men. Such logic presents a dualistic framework in which white and Chinese men are considered civilised while Muslim men are assumed to be barbaric. According to this framework, feminists are portrayed in a kind of bullying role, but they don’t dare to oppose hegemonic Muslim men—and are therefore hypocritical. This appears to be related to the Islamophobia that prevails around the world, in which Muslims often become synonymous with terrorism and violence towards women.

As such, if an influential feminist account mentions anything about Muslim women or covers issues of religion or ethnicity impartially, the posts are highly likely to be bombarded with accusations of connections with Islamic extremism by anti-feminists. Both Lexi and Yvonne shared such experiences:

They kept tagging us, for example, under the news of a women raped by a Muslim, or Muslim women who were disfigured by splashing sulphuric acid. In addition, they sent these pictures to us. Many of us have received horrible pictures of disfigured faces, it is particularly scary and intimidating … Islamophobia is so scary … According to what they said, we have an American sugar daddy, Saudi Arabian sugar daddy, and lots of money comes from them. But actually we are very poor. (Interview, March 9 2018)

When we talked about the topic of Muslims, they commented on every one of our posts, scolding us for being in alliance with Muslims. This lasted for several weeks. I have also received various anonymous calls, but I did not pick up. I did not know if it is these people [who posted online and called me], I felt very scared. (Interview, March 14 2018)

Feminist account operators report that they often suffer trolling and harassment; they feel anxious, scared, and insecure as a result, and may delete posts or be less willing to discuss Islam or other religious topics. In turn, naturally, this restricts—or at least makes difficult—intersectional discussions and debates. Global Islamophobia, fear of terrorist attacks and one-sided interpretations of Muslim culture further increase Chinese netizens’ resentment of Islam and simultaneously reinforces fear and hatred of feminists. Also, it is worth noting that the distinction between Muslim and feminists framed by anti-feminists is not necessarily binary, which overlooks the complexities within feminist community, for example, there are feminists who are Muslims/Muslims who identify as feminist.

Therefore, anti-feminist Islamophobic rhetoric functions to mythologise and demonise feminist organizations by invoking framing moral panics and marginalising “the Other.” This, in addition to the nationalist discourse mentioned in the previous section, provides ideological under-girding to substantiate the “danger” of a feminist conspiracy, and subsequently discredit feminism.

Identifying feminists speaking online as fake-feminists

The aforementioned three strategies show how anti-feminists or misogynists are aligned with other groups—such as nationalists, Han supremacists and Islamophobes—to form a loose and polycentric alliance. A fourth strategy has been generated: anti-feminists and misogynists adding prefixes such as “fake,” “extreme” and “rustic”⁷ to “feminism,” constructing two kinds of feminism: “real” and “fake,” to distinguish feminists from women who are viewed as “actually” contributing to women’s progress. Data analysis revealed that according to anti-feminists, the “real” feminists who do “progressive” things are figures such as female doctors, entrepreneurs and astronauts. The so-called “fake-feminists” are the “ugly” radicals who oppose national traditions, are in league with Western anti-China forces and Islamists, are only active on social media, and use the “feminist” label to garner unearned advantages.

When referring to the “fake-feminists,” derogatory terms such as “feminist cancer” and “feminist bitch,” and the Chinese homophone “women boxers” are used to imply they are brutal and beat up men online. For example, the comments on a Weibo video introducing different schools of (Western) feminism included the following:

One more school [of feminism] should be added on—Weibo women boxers [feminists]. Their main purpose is to maximize their own interests and to cause hatred and antagonism between men and women. (May 11 2020, 19:23)

To be honest, I’m not against women’s rights. But the feminist cancers on Weibo really bother me. If you talk to them, you will experience online violence. (May 11 2020, 21:04)

We support real feminism, the rustic feminism and extreme feminism must be destroyed. (May 12 2020, 17:03)

These comments lump all feminist ideas online together, as if all urgently need to be suppressed. Yet, both Wu and Dong (2019) and Peng (2020) studies show that there are many strands of feminism in Chinese online cultures, for example, an entrepreneurial strand, as termed by Wu and Dong, which encourages women to capitalise on their own sexual attraction to maximise benefits in the marriage market. Such an apolitical feminist agenda leads to Chinese men’s misunderstanding and criticisms of feminist movements (Peng 2020) while hybridising stands of feminism in anti-feminist discourse further hinders discussions of structural gender inequality.

Moreover, some anti-feminists portray themselves as neutral, objective, and rational—as opposed to online feminists. For example, comments like the following attack online feminism as being pointless:

You, keyboard warriors, could have done something more meaningful … I hope that all women can be independent and I hope that oppressed women can pursue gender equality but not feminism … Everyone should stay calm and rational … What this group believes is never truth, but blind obedience, cruelty, paranoia and fanaticism. (May 5 2019, 21:13)

This is representative of many of the comments I found during analysis. First, it reaffirms the belief that online feminism is a kind of slacktivism, with no impact or understanding of the real world. Second, it patronises women by asking them to pursue gender equality as defined by a narrow neoliberal perspective—encouraging individual women “to be independent” as their own responsibility without interrogating the socioeconomic and cultural structures which contribute to gender inequality (Catherine Rottenberg 2018). Gender equality and feminism are treated as two completely different concepts, and are sharply separated, to place online feminists beyond the pale.

The data shows anti-feminists’ ambivalence: on the one hand, they do not openly endorse gender inequality, perhaps because equality between men and women has the authority of being a fundamental national policy; on the other, in commentary on controversial activism and debates (such as #MeToo) or gender-related news from grassroots feminist accounts, anti-feminist voices are present, loud and clear. What seems to be a contradictory position on the surface, is in fact a subtle way to building collective resistances—being attuned to what people think is reasonable, as well as connecting to cultural norms and particular histories. Catherine Jean Nash and Kath Browne (2020) exploration on heteroactivism—an ideology and a form of activism that aim to reassert heteronormativity—provides valuable insights for understanding such resistances. They show how heteroactivism enables opposition to LGBT equalities through various discourses and actions which at first seem unrelated “such as freedom of speech or parental rights claims” (33), while avoiding overt vilification of LGBT people. In a similar vein, anti-feminist comments are rarely found on stories about apparent gender inequality—such as education in women’s traditional virtues, in which women are lectured to listen and yield to men, or stories about successful individual women. However, by surreptitiously alienating feminist ideas from presumed gender equality and diverting public attention to taking back control of women, the fourth strategy rationalise and adds creditability to an anti-feminist political agenda to reaffirm the authority of patriarchy.

Conclusion

The gender-political rhetoric of anti-feminism and misogyny is a recuperative continuum following the shifts of, and gaining power from, social-economy, culture, and new technologies, particularly the technological affordances of social media as a low-cost, polycentric and individualised means of depoliticising. While the existing literature highlights the interplay between the anti-feminist backlash in China and state censorship, digital nationalism, and concealed class antagonism, this paper takes a step further to investigate how the gender-political rhetoric of anti-feminism and misogyny have been rationalised and reproduced on Chinese social media. In this, it identifies four intertwined strategies, applied by anti-feminists to construct themselves as “respectful,” both victims and defenders of the state/nation.

The strategy of portraying and condemning feminists as deviating from the norm has been implemented in both the Western and Chinese contexts. Beyond noting this similarity, this paper identifies additional distinct features of online anti-feminism in China including the division between grassroot feminist ideas and ACWF’s official discourse, the travelling of Islamophobia to non-Western countries, and smearing as “fake-feminists” to justify the silencing and othering of Chinese feminists. It is vital to highlight here, that the synergy of these four strategies and phenomena effectively leads to a sort of distraction—attention that should be paid to systematic and structural problems is instead diverted toward antagonism between feminists and anti-feminists. More importantly, the nationalist and Islamophobic discourses in anti-feminism, provoke trolling and threats to feminists which lead to self-censorship, further limiting discussions and investigations of the intersectional injustices that affect women’s lives.

With the prevalence of digital feminist activism, the combination of anti-feminism and misogyny pose a number of substantial challenges to feminists including the dismantling of feminism’s complex history, hindering feminists’ struggles from emancipation, and degrading women more generally in order that they are put back into an inferior social position. Even though these challenges appear globally, anti-feminism is not monolithic and homogeneous. It is therefore important to call for nuanced critiques and comprehensive investigations into the dynamics of its specific historical and societal construction in different cultural contexts. This is crucial to any theorising on the toxic politics of the manosphere from a transnational feminist perspective.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Ruth Holliday, Dr Kim Allen and Dr Jessica Wild for their constructive suggestions and consistent support for revising this article. I also want to thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qiqi Huang

Qiqi Huang obtains her PhD at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds. Her research interests include feminism, travelling theory, social media and digital culture.

Notes

1. The Gamergate controversy began in 2014, when video-game developer Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend published a list of men Quinn had allegedly slept with, in response to them promoting her game Depression Quest. It led to a harassment campaign that targeted several women in the video-game industry with doxing, rape threats and death threats.

2. Red Pill is a popular meme derived from the film The Matrix. The main character, Neo, has to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill will free him from the machine-controlled dreamworld by showing him the ugly truth about life, while the blue pill will let him continue living in a beautiful delusion. Ging (2019) finds that the Red Pill concept has been central to the politics of the manosphere, particularly the idea of men awakening to feminism’s brainwashing.

3. JD.com is China’s second-largest e-commerce site.

4. This derogatory term describes a practice of sex-workers extorting money from innocent men. Here, it is used to show hatred towards Liu Jingyao and to elevate Richard Liu’s position—the woman wanted his money enough to do this.

5. On Weibo, Chinese women who post private photos of themselves with men from other races, especially black people, are often violently attacked by misogynists.

6. Similar to basic military training, and undertaken by first-year students.

7. Rustic feminism (tianyuan nüquan) is a derogatory adjective meaning uncivilised and bastard, used to describe online feminist discussion in China. It derives from the name of the Chinese rural dog.