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.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese feminism
• Weibo
• feminist critical discourse analysis
• baby man
• social media

Introduction

From April to June 2022, Chinese social media, mainly Weibo, witnessed three high-profile incidents that drew the attention of the Chinese public. The first occurred on 12 April 2022, when the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) posted the following headline on its social media account: ‘Extreme feminism has become a poisonous tumour on the Internet’ (League, 2022). The post triggered a huge controversy because a set of pictures recently published on the account, which reflected the historical events of the Chinese Communist Revolution with the theme ‘Every generation has its own Long March’, were criticised by many netizens for deliberately ignoring women, as the pictures mainly featured male soldiers. Then two vicious attacks against women occurred in June. One involved nine men beating four women in a Tangshan Grill restaurant, and the other was a male student at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) who attempted to rape a female student by placing taurine-effervescent tablets in her coffee cup. The three incidents prompted public attention to patriarchal gender norms, which allowed for various discourses of men to emerge in extended, social-mediated debates. In response to the debate, the nomenclature ‘baby man’, in Chinese 男宝, became a popular metaphor, and the ‘baby man’ discourse was widely spread on Weibo.

Media discourse, as a form of social practice acting on ideology, affects the social structure and, at the same time, is shaped by social structures and contributes to social change (Fairclough, 2000). Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, is the largest and most popular social media platform in China, where users can present themselves in multiple ways and build identities through status updates and individual profiles (Yuan, 2018). As a vital barometer of public opinion, public discussions on Weibo reflect the current values and beliefs of Chinese citizens (Guo, 2019). Therefore, the nature of this gender debate revolving around the three aforementioned incidents forces one to think about how language may help create, reflect upon and challenge discourses about gender and power relationships in social events. In this vein, feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) focuses on how hegemonic and asymmetrical power relationships systematically empower men as a social group while excluding and disempowering women as a social group in clear or subtle ways (Lazar, 2017). Using FCDA to closely read the language used in the incidents may help understand how Chinese feminism is reconfigured in social practice to negotiate and confront hegemonies perpetuated in patriarchal systems.

By adopting FCDA both as a theoretical foundation and a specific qualitative analysis method, this article seeks to critically examine how gender power and relationships are discursively produced, represented and resisted (Lazar, 2007) through the ‘baby man’ discourse on Chinese social media. Specifically, it unpacks how ‘baby man’ is linguistically represented and how different ideologies emerge and are negotiated through the discursive construction of this catchphrase. This article first outlines its cultural and historical backgrounds based on the culture of masculinity under the patriarchal system in Chinese society and current feminist research on Chinese social media. Then, it introduces the theoretical framework of FCDA within the model of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Finally, this study shines a light on how ‘baby man’ echoes the gender discourse in Chinese society by analysing the linguistic, interactional and sociocultural elements of online posts and comments within the FCDA theoretical framework.

Recalling Chinese masculinity

Chinese masculinity needs to be delineated and expounded in a complex socio-historical context. The Taoist concept of yīn and yáng and its cultural connotations have deeply shaped the Chinese aesthetic and philosophical pursuit. When considering Asian gender symbols, the pervasive yīn – yáng ideology is the most prominent and frequently referenced Chinese paradigm. In a dichotomous relationship between male and female, femininity and masculinity, yīn refers to female, and yáng is male (Humana & Wu, 1971). Yáng corresponds to 阳刚 in Chinese, referring to masculine, strong, courageous and persistent.

However, the fluidity of the yīn – yáng binary comparisons inhibits incisive theorising of masculinity because each statement might equally apply to femininity (Edwards & Louie, 1994). Moreover, conceptualising the universe in symbolic black – white and yīn – yáng forms is common in many philosophies (e.g. Marx's dialectic); therefore, it is insufficient to capture how Chinese masculinity performs (Louie, 2014). Louie (2002) uses the ancient Chinese literary – military dichotomy wén – wŭ, a model that traditionally only applies to men and excludes women, to classify Chinese masculinity. The wŭ is related to physical and military power, and wén refers to refined qualities associated with classical scholars’ literary and artistic pursuits. Wén is therefore used as a synonym for government officials. As a soft power profoundly related to wealth and education and a sign of power and privilege, wén demonstrates how cultural achievement always precedes physical power in China.

As throughout most of Chinese history, wén held priority over wŭ, it would be a simplistic assumption to assert that the wén – wŭ matrix is all-inclusive and can be utilised to explain all possible forms of Chinese masculinity (Song, 2004). In his book The Fragile Scholar, Song (2004) argues that the wén – wŭ paradigm is challenging to apply to other masculinities in Chinese cultures, such as effeminate masculinity, which is evidenced by intellectuals’ appreciation of the fragile scholar书生/才子(shūshēng/cáizǐ) archetype. Reusing yīn – yáng as the fundamental paradigm to analyse Chinese gender discourse is paramount as yīn – yáng is not limited to male/female sexual implications and demonstrates the fluidity and politicisation of gender identity in pre-modern China (Song, 2004).

Early modernisers, such as Liang Qichao (1873–1929), who aimed to depart from traditional literary – cultural wén ideals by encouraging men to be more robust and physical, initiated a significant shift in the structure of Chinese masculinity (Louie, 2014). Then, around 1980, the crisis of masculinity was revived (Song, 2010). The pursuit of masculinity was initially associated with political resistance to women's empowerment in China, premised on a reduction of men's economic power. This reduction reduced men's social status, undermined their masculinity, and made them subservient tools of the authoritarian party – state (Wang, 2003). Before 1989, the inherent shift in the cultural politics of the ‘remasculinising’ of Chinese culture in the post-Mao era was reflected in root-searching culture (Song, 2010). It portrayed China's outdated feudal patriarchy as impotent and ineffective and advocated a return to a genuine, virile, masculine Chinese culture, where rural folk culture remained primitive and untouched by Confucian or Western influences. This increasing anxiety about looking for masculinity has been reflected in numerous films, such as 红高粱Red Sorghum, and some works of contemporary literature, such as 绿化树Mimosa.

Since the 1980s, Western countries have witnessed an increase in metrosexual masculinity, which questions the significance of hegemonic masculinity in defining the ideal man (Pompper, 2010). Chinese metrosexuals tend to associate modernity with the West, in which younger groups are inclined to identify far more strongly with Japanese and Korean cultural icons (Louie, 2012). In recent decades, capitalism has empowered women unprecedentedly, directly impacting culture and the construction of masculinity (Baranovitch, 2003). It has also stimulated the proliferation of cultural products centred on the female ideal of masculinity in China. For example, the images of ‘little fresh meat’ represent a remarkable reversal of the hegemonic male gaze on women, as young heterosexual women are the primary target audience for this type of male beauty. Interwoven with the ‘boys love’ (BL) subculture, the trend towards the feminisation of men through the commodification of the male body is evident in both female empowerment and China's economic growth, as well as the significant changes in female subjectivity and desire (Song, 2022).

In Chinese mainstream expressions, the politics of patriotism has been an important site of masculinity achievement (Song, 2010). Political loyalty to the state and adherence to Confucian values, such as gender norms, is closely linked with a perceived rise in nationalist sentiment guided by the government's desire to expand the consumer market and strengthen ideological education (Song, 2022). This implicit cultural commitment closely ties masculinity to male-dominated national self-esteem. Some argue that soft masculine beautification does not constitute the feminisation of masculinity but represents a shift towards beautification as an integral part of heterosexual masculinity (Miller, 2006). However, the prevalence of gender pluralism has concerned Chinese scholars because of the emergence of a range of feminine personalities and traits in male adolescents, such as physical weakness and psychological fragility (Liu & Song, 2021). For instance, research on niángpào aesthetics suggests that critiques of the feminisation of masculinity expose anxieties about the masculinity of a male-dominated nation, and many are delivered nationalistically (Song, 2022). In his speech on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Party, Present Xi Jinping called on the youth of China in the new era to take it upon themselves to achieve the great rejuvenation of the nation. In response to such mainstream propaganda, some studies fully explore how implementing and assessing physical education programmes can enhance physical activity and the muscular strength of (male) students and subsequently prepare them for achieving China's great rejuvenation (Liu & Song, 2021; Zhao & Wang, 2020). The manhood they seek resorts to Chinese soldiers as an exemplar of the ‘sunny and robust’ masculinity required by the nation (e.g. Wolf Warrior types of men) (Song, 2022, p. 80). Urgent proposals suggest that masculinity, particularly the yáng masculinity, has become a blatant official call to action that intends to be drilled routinely into public consciousness.

Recent feminist research on Chinese social media

As a new form of feminist expression, digital feminism has witnessed how young women worldwide use social media and other digital platforms to confront the misogyny, sexism, sexual harassment and rape culture sustained by patriarchal ideologies (Chang & Tian, 2021). Digital feminism has provided a direction for spreading feminism on Chinese social media (e.g. Li and Li’s (2017) case study on the ‘Occupy Men's Toilets’ movement). However, the revival of Confucianism since the turn of the century is a great conservative force that no type of female identity politics can fail to confront and an important source of discursive power to help deliver ‘digital feminism with Chinese characteristics’ (Chang et al., 2018, p. 337). As Chang et al. (2018) state, the goal of young women's self-empowerment is not to ‘burn down the patriarchy’, a distinctly Western slogan, but to take a moderate, rational but firm stance that finds its rightful place in the Chinese ideal of a solemnly remembered ‘harmonious society’.

Despite the progressive social transformation, determined Socialist attempts at gender equality and practical online movement trials, feminism and its ideological landscape are contested and fragmented on Chinese social media. First, the representation and dissemination of women's images on traditional television still show and reinforce stereotypical portrayals and the commodification of women (Wang, 2019). Second, in addition to the traditional role of women trapped in marriage, single and educated professional women in big cities continue to expand on the TV screen. These women's academic and career achievements make them incompatible with the rigid gender norms and gender asymmetrical stereotypes of the Chinese marriage market (Zheng & Xu, 2022), which leads to the so-called ‘leftover women’ phenomenon (Gaetano, 2014; Zheng & Xu, 2022). Third, while neoliberalism sets out the ethos of capitalism that encourages people to take responsibility for their well-being (Harvey, 2007), neoliberal feminism has indelibly scripted its way into being criticised. It has been much argued as a type of pseudo-feminism that underlines women's self-responsibility in striving for gender equality, especially regarding self-care (McRobbie, 2013). Its agenda is to encourage women to pursue an ideal work-family balance, which paradoxically is one of the reasons for the structurally oppressed position of women in Western society (Rottenberg, 2014). Also, this conservative political discourse has often led to the exclusion of those non-Western cultures under authoritarian rule from mainstream feminist inquiry and critique (Chang & Tian, 2021).

Similarly, in the Chinese context, the applicability of such pseudo-feminism has been questioned for several reasons. Firstly, it portrays Chinese women's self-expression of femininity as a crucial means of enhancing their sexual attraction to men and securing a permanent romantic relationship or marriage (Liu, 2014). The eagerness for self-expression, for example, through the consumption of ‘male beauty’, indeed deconstructs dominant gender norms through the female gaze (Chang & Tian, 2021). However, over-emphasising female self-reliance obliterates the fact that gender equality is supposed to be constructed collectively by society rather than existing within a logic of individualism (Liu, 2014). Secondly, although current Chinese culture conforms to certain neoliberal concepts and displays some neoliberal characteristics (Wallis & Shen, 2018), market-oriented reform in China does not indicate that the authoritarian government has loosened its control over society. Therefore, the feminism analysis in this paper is not seen as a Chinese equivalent to the Western neoliberal feminist culture but rather as an inclusive counterdiscourse to resist China's authoritarian political power, Confucian patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity in social media.

Censorship of Chinese feminism

Feminism has been perceived as irreconcilable with Chinese political values in most cases. Women's voices on social media are a discursive engagement with related topics in the public sphere. However, Fraser (1990) points out that the public sphere is merely an unrealised utopian ideal; in fact, it is a masculinist ideological concept that legitimises an emerging form of class domination. In the current Chinese political climate, collective feminist movements are often banned by the regime, and this control has been tightened as they are seen as a potential threat to the government's overarching control of society (Li & Li, 2017). Despite the government's goal of empowering women and protecting their rights, feminist voices in China are increasingly being silenced. For example, some feminist Weibo accounts have been deleted because users have complained that posts contain ‘illegal and harmful information’ (Lindberg, 2021, p. 4).

Pervasive content surveillance may lead to another dilemma for Chinese feminism. The censorship of female resistance discourse in the broader environment enables some people to take advantage of the situation and stigmatise feminism. Internet users who are unaware of this contradictory phenomenon, especially male users who have a strong traditional sense of male superiority over women, are prone to disgust, resentment, incomprehension and jealousy when faced with women's seemingly ‘insatiable’ demands for women's rights (Liu & Pan, 2020), thus becoming an essential group in the stigmatisation of feminism.

Although neoliberal feminism does not apply to China, it has caused certain Chinese women's hostility towards men. Hegemonic masculinity is often invoked by liberal feminism, constructing men as the enemies of gender equality (Connell, 2020). Therefore, the usual discursive strategy when discussing issues such as gender injustice is to advocate the transfer of female oppression to men (Du, 2017). Some scholars criticise radical feminism as being characterised by a strong revenge mentality, often triggering online polemics as a result (Liu & Pan, 2020). Therefore, most scholars in mainland China limit themselves to calling for the rational regulation of public opinion or for the All-China Women's Federation¹ to train relevant female professional leaders and organise rational social discussion, thus reducing the discursive space for extreme feminism (Liu & Pan, 2020; Tang & Zhang, 2019).

Gender and political power are intricately interwoven. Chinese femininity and masculinity generate space within a hierarchy that must be read from the perspective of Confucianised politics (Song, 2004). The discussion of Chinese masculinity in this paper adheres to hegemonic masculinity but should be carefully situated in the discourses of Confucianist heteropatriarchy, a hegemonic gender norm that integrates critical features of Confucianism, homophobia, and patriarchy (Chang & Tian, 2021). Moreover, in studying the discursive strategies of Chinese women against men, we claim that the yīn – yáng model is more applicable than the wén – wŭ matrix. The yīn – yáng model here, in particular, is the referent for female/male dichotomy. In these incidents, men advocated violence and attacked women, with strong and intimidating masculinity characteristic of yáng masculinity. Therefore, the discussion of the ‘baby man’ discourse is linked to the yáng masculinity archetype in contemporary Chinese culture.

This paper aims to extend the investigation of the studies mentioned above, contributing to the integrated examination of Chinese feminism, discourse research on social media and FCDA from three main aspects. First, recent advances in adopting FCDA as a framework continue to be Western-oriented. A few studies, such as Shuang’s (2021) seminal work, use FCDA to examine ideological conflicts in the representation of the Chinese wedding dowry on we-media; Peng et al. (2022) apply FCDA to investigate how Chinese male sports fans consume women's sports through posts retrieved from the Chinese sports fan platform Hupu. However, there is still a need to unleash the full potential of FCDA as a theoretical and analytical approach to elucidate the gender ideologies of non-Western, non-white groups (Lazar, 2007). Second, this study prioritises the discursive analysis of Chinese women's irony against male groups on social media. In recent years, gender debates on Chinese social media have been unprecedented. For example, women's discursive strategies towards male groups have been largely overlooked, particularly the use of euphemisms and indirect strategies (e.g. irony) to resist official discourse's emphasis on reconstructing masculinity as a way of challenging censorship and deconstructing patriarchy. Hence the language focus of this paper is significant in gender discussion. Third, unlike other studies that analyse feminism through the female-dominated gaze to reveal gender reversal, this paper represents an initial attempt to look beyond the necessity of a female – male gaze that is within the realm of heterosexuality but rather to revisit gender discourses through a close textual reading from the perspective of the mother – son gaze.

Feminist critical discourse analysis and methods

The analysis of online texts and discourses as social practices concerned with power and ideology is ingrained in the CDA tradition (Fairclough, 2003). Social media users tend to construct their own identities and represent social events in particular ways by generating, negotiating and sustaining power relationships through their discourse, shifting CDA's focus from traditional discourse and textual studies to the ideology, power and relationships on social media. CDA is not only a theoretical approach to the practice of power in critical discourse studies but also a specific qualitative research method that scrutinises the production of media texts in a given sociocultural context (KhosraviNik & Unger, 2016). The CDA model proposed by Fairclough (2003) has three dimensions for discourse analysis: text, discursive practice and social practice. Textual analysis refers to the linguistic depiction of texts and interpretation of the features of textual data by analysing communicative practices such as style of use, naming, referencing, metaphor and lexical choice. A discursive analysis is concerned with interpreting the relationship between texts and discursive practices, which reveals the patterns that emerge in the processes of textual production. The social practice involves sociocultural analysis that scrutinises the interplay between discursive practices and sociocultural processes, examining how discourse is contextually relevant to the wider community.

As an interdisciplinary method, FCDA is essentially the feminist perspective of CDA. On the one hand, it contributes (critically) to a feminist research perspective in language and discourse studies, and on the other hand, it implies the helpfulness of language and discourse studies in addressing feminist issues in gender and women's studies (Lazar, 2007). According to Lazar (2007), gender is ideologically structured and based on a hierarchical relationship. The central concern of feminist critical discourse analysts is to critique the discourses that maintain the patriarchal social order, and FCDA provides a good prism to investigate how hegemonic and asymmetrical power relationships systematically empower men as a social group and exclude and disempower women as a social group either clearly or subtly (Lazar, 2017). FCDA employs analytical tools that correspond with the above dimensions of CDA, and it may specifically emphasise the subtle and implicit gender hierarchy in the text (Baker, 2011). This paper echoes the focus of FCDA on how gender ideologies and gendered power relationships are (re)produced, negotiated and contested in representations of social practices, social relationships between people, specially between texts and conversations about people's social and personal identities.

The data collection for this study is closely related to the three incidents from April to June 2022 on Weibo for four main reasons. Firstly, three incidents occurred consecutively, which lends a certain coherence and ensures the timeliness of the study. Secondly, three incidents were male-dominated, resulting in the development of language and irony against men, the most popular of which is ‘baby man’. Therefore selecting ‘baby man’ for the study is a pivotal prism to examine how Chinese feminism reconstructs gender discourse. Thirdly, gender debates involved in the three incidents are representative. The first incident was the deliberate stigmatisation of feminism by the (male) operator of the CCYL account. The hegemonic ideology export with the official suppression of women's online discursive space represents the official default position to some extent. The second and third incidents were dominated by male perpetrators, which shows that women are also vulnerable to the threats posed by men in reality. Three incidents provide a parallel perspective on the attitudes of both official and grassroots communities towards women. Finally, this qualitative study aims not to generalise its findings to the entire Chinese digital space but to provide insight into how ‘baby man’ discourse is constructed and echoes from the theoretical perspective of FCDA. Given the limited sample size, it is noted that the sample data may not be representative of all social groups. The initial objective of data collection was to collect data from the official Weibo accounts of People's Daily and the CCYL to find their posts in response to these three events. However, both official accounts had set the comments section to ‘the blogger has opened a selection of comments’, meaning the content was censored, and the comments were hidden. This limited the collection of most ‘baby man’ associated with the incidents. Subsequently, the data was targeted using keywords and the ‘#’ symbol to search for the Chinese word ‘男宝’ in these three topics. The three topics searched were ‘#baby man extreme feminism has become a poisonous tumour on the Internet’, ‘#baby man Tangshan violence incident’ and ‘#baby man Shanghai International Studies University drugging incident’.

Findings

A total of 43 textual posts with ‘baby man’ discourses were collected from the keyword search of the three related topics. Drawing on FCDA, this study first examines the linguistic characteristics of these texts. Second, how the male group is represented through ‘baby man’ discursive practices is examined to reveal the patterns that emerge in the production of the texts. Finally, these discursive constructions are then situated and contextualised within the sociocultural conditions of online feminism in China.

The discursive strategy of double irony

Irony was the most distinctive feature of the 43 posts, as they all contained an ironic tone. Irony is a spoken or written form of language or literature, and its true meaning is hidden or contradictory. Verbal irony occurs when the speaker talks about something in sharp contrast to what they actually mean, as ironic discourse is deliberately distorted and not intended to be taken at face value (Fubara, 2020). The irony in the data was twofold: the first was the literal irony of the words ‘baby man’, and the second was the irony in the discourse. Table 1 gives representative examples of irony.

Table 1. Double irony of ‘baby man’.

Posts	Translations
1.她喝的只是假的催情药，男宝丢的可是真学位啊！	What she drank was just a fake aphrodisiac. However, what the baby man lost was an actual academic degree!
2.男宝这么稀少他们当然要报团保护供起来啦！	Baby men are so rare that there should be a specific group to protect them!
3.男宝们有什么错。我们只是想杀个人而已，你们女人就是矫情，乖乖让我们杀了不就得了。	What is wrong with baby men? We just want to kill someone! You women are so pretentious, just be good girls and let us do it.
4.这又是谁的儿子，谁的丈夫，谁家的金贵男宝？	Whose son is this, whose husband is this, whose precious baby man is this?
5.某些男人为什么要帮他们说话呢？因为男宝们要为自己留退路呢！‘今日我若不为他脱罪，他日自己化身禽兽，则无人为我摇旗呐喊’。	Why should certain men speak up for them? Because baby men have to save themselves a way out! ‘If I do not exonerate him today, there will be no one to exonerate me one day when I myself become a beast’.

First, the term ‘baby man’ is ironic in itself; however, the catchphrase ‘baby man’ is not in the same context as ‘mummy's boy’ in the Western context. ‘Mummy's boy’ refers to men who are too closely connected to their mothers during childhood and are prone to become too gentle, compassionate and interested in women's issues as adults. Their attachment behaviour is mostly rewarded with maternal love (Bly, 2001). ‘Mummy's boy’ is associated with the concern that a too-intimate mother-son relationship may result in the boy being ‘castrated’ and becoming too soft or homosexual (Rowland & Thomas, 1996). Moreover, ‘mummy's boy’ may be roughly equivalent to 妈宝男 in Chinese culture. But 妈宝男 contains a more nuanced definition compared with ‘mummy's boy’ in the West. Zhang and Li (2019) state that 妈宝男 is heterosexual and identifies with male dominance in power relations between husband and wife. He is married but lacks initiative in financial, mental or labour matters and is highly dependent on his parents, especially his mother. However, unlike ‘mummy's boy’ or 妈宝男, the new term 男宝 ‘baby man’ refers to men in general and is less focused on the sexual orientation and marital status of men. It is a metaphor representing men as self-centred giant babies coddled by an entire patriarchal society, which satirises a particular preference in the Chinese national psyche for the birth of boys.

The nationwide value of males over females is because men have benefited from China's land and fertility policies. Even after the class struggle of the late 1950s, when rural women were encouraged to participate in overthrowing the ruling class (e.g. landlords) and establish their proletarian citizenship (Hershatter, 2002), women's rights were still diluted and subordinated to the military, political and economic interests, especially the class interests of poor male peasants (Johnson, 2009). Thus, land and property remained male-dominated, with full rights of inheritance. Hoping for a boy is still an enduring appeal for Chinese society, and this phenomenon is particularly prevalent on Xiaohongshu, another widely used social media platform in China. Some pregnant women often interact by making the wish ‘hoping my baby is a boy’ when sharing their pregnancy details or seeing videos of baby boys. Therefore, ‘baby man’ is used ironically to refer to the desire to have a boy and is a nod to the culture of a society that favours the birth of boys.

Second, the term ‘baby man’ is placed in the sentence to enhance irony by using incongruous combinations with other parts of the discourse. This incongruity can be achieved through the following linguistic features: emphasising the contrast between situations (Line 1); in most cases, using positive adjectives to describe ‘baby man’ (Lines 2 and 4); speakers putting themselves in the voice of the ‘baby man’ and pretending to narrate in the first person (Lines 3 and 5).

Line 1 is the speaker's ironic comment about the result of the punishment meted out to the male student at SISU for drugging a female student, as he was expelled from school. The irony in the discourse is implicit. Literally, the speaker believed that the expulsion of a male student was a more severe consequence than that of a girl who was given a drug that triggered sexual desire. There is also intertextuality here. The line is a parody of the novel Dreams Link written by Qiong Yao, a renowned contemporary Chinese writer. The original line is when Luping learns of Chu Lian's affair with Ziling and confronts her, only to be accused by Fei Yunfan: ‘You have only lost a leg, while Ziling has lost her love!’ It is an iconic Qiong Yao belief that love is everything. The underlying meaning, however, is that the girl could have been bewitched and raped, or her life was in danger. Whereas the consequences for the boy, even if expelled, would be far less than the physical and psychological damage suffered by the girl. The speaker uses the strong contrast of situations and intertextuality to satirise the low cost of society's connivance with men's delinquency.

The ridicule of the male university student is also implicitly related to the ‘phoenix man’ (凤凰男) phenomenon. ‘Phoenix man’ refers to grassroots males from rural areas who have access to urban education and employment opportunities and marry urban females (Zheng, 2019). However, the ideological difference between urban and rural areas created by the urban-rural household registration system, the increasing class struggles, and social stratification in Chinese society can easily lead to prejudice, stigma, and discrimination against these undesirable men. As a result, ‘phoenix man’ and males from the countryside have become synonymous with ‘backwardness, uncivilisation and low quality’ (Zheng, 2019, p. 264).

Lines 2 and 4 use positive adjectives ‘rare’ and ‘precious’ to contradict the term ‘baby man’. ‘Rare’ and ‘precious’ refer to something or someone with great value. In Line 2, the speaker asks people to protect such rare men. However, some of them committed a crime and did not deserve to be ‘protected’. According to the seventh national census bulletin released by China's National Bureau of Statistics in May 2021 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021), China's total male population outnumbered its female population by nearly 34 million. This number indicates that men are not rare, and the overpopulation of men has been an issue in Chinese society. Moreover, Line 4 reveals the strong incongruities between the man's multiple identities to enhance the irony. He may be the son of a mother (perhaps well-behaved) or the father of a child (respected by the child), yet he also commits serious crimes.

Speakers also used the first-person narrative, employing self-deprecating language to deliver irony. For example, consider the ‘we just want to kill someone’ in Line 3 and the ‘there will be no one to exonerate me one day when I myself become a beast’ in Line 5. The images of the killer and the beast are self-deprecating metaphors for the narrators. The shift in narrative perspective from the third to the first person would give ‘baby man’ the initiative in the discourse. Borrowing the irony that the speakers want to convey from the baby man's tone creates an incongruity of identity in the readers’ perception, which can deepen the speaker's intent of irony.

The ironic nature of ‘baby man’ dictates that the dogged national pursuit of masculinity is being deliberately devalued by women. The yáng masculinity is no longer represented in ‘baby man’ discourse as a form of positive robustness and strength but is caricatured as negative self-interest, brutality, criminality, and indecency. This negative portrayal of yáng masculinity contrasts considerably with official masculinity propaganda. Here, feminists have seised on these male crimes that go against mainstream Chinese values and social norms to resist the official agenda of a male-masculinity-driven gender ideology.

The representation of ‘baby man’: shifting gender and power relationships through blunt resistance

The resistance to existing gender and power relationships plays a considerable role in analysing how ‘baby man’ discourse is used on social media to challenge and negotiate gender assumptions and hegemonic power from two aspects.

First, the ‘baby man’ discourse has moved beyond the sexual gaze between males or females as sexual objects to a gendered relationship between mother and son. Structurally, this gender order stays dualistic and hierarchical, but the players have been reversed, with females occupying a higher position as mothers and males taking a lower position as sons within the gender hierarchy. Although the relationship between mother and son in China is essentially limited to a patriarchal family relationship in which the mother is subordinate to the father, the traditional relationship between Chinese mothers and sons has been hierarchical (Zhang, 2020).

Not as weak and docile as other female relations, the mother is an authoritative figure in the mother – son relationship, even though often neglected in Chinese feminism. The ‘baby man’ discourse is achieved by representing the male group as pampered, socially indulged babies who enjoy privilege and affection. Through a gaze that resembles a motherly perspective, pretending to affectionately call out the name ‘baby man’ but exposing the evidence of the crimes committed by men behind the affectionate naming, speakers consciously demonstrate the distaste of and resistance to Confucian and patriarchal gender norms. This discursive construction has moved away from the real-life model of heterosexual relationships, in which femininity usually implies sexual inferiority and docility. The ‘baby man’ also transcends the main concern of postmodern feminism. The concern presents women not as passive objects of male sexual pleasure but as sexually autonomous, active and desirable objects so that these representations are no longer signifiers of women's exploitation but of their empowerment. It depicts a world in which power relationships become reversed, i.e. women, through their sexuality, exercise power over men (Lazar, 2007). Regarding the subtle gender hierarchy in the use of ‘baby man’, men are no longer a patriarchal and superior group but are represented as sons who are generally considered subservient and can be admonished, punished and scolded by women from a mother's perspective. At the same time, men are not sexually attractive, and women seem to eschew sexual desire or the desire to please men. The difference lies, to some extent, in that women are empowered through the shifted identity of mothers, not through subjective sexual objectives. Still, ‘baby man’ has reconstructed a top-to-bottom binary opposition regarding gender hierarchy, with men represented as sons at the bottom. The mother's authority gained through giving birth to a male heir is also part of the patriarchal tradition in history. So, this postmodern feminism irony also relies on the penetration of established gender hierarchy.

Second, the ‘baby man’ discourse resorts to a blatant grassroots expression to resist official authorities and stringent state censorship. Some users directly questioned and satirised the news published on official Weibo accounts about the disposition of the above three cases by utilising the ‘@’ sign to inform official microblog accounts. The representative examples are presented in Table 2 and show that using the ‘@’ sign to signify official accounts was a highly noticeable and direct communication method. Following the ‘@’ sign, netizens used the Chinese reduplication ‘tuantuan’ as an intimate nickname to refer to the CCYL in a sarcastic tone. Furthermore, users employed the second person for narrative purposes. In Chinese, the second-person singular pronoun is an essential linguistic device that enhances the recipient's participation by imitating verbal and interpersonal communication (Biq, 1991). Such a discursive strategy significantly deconstructed the power relationships for the following reasons.

Table 2. Examples of shifting power through ‘baby man’.

Posts	Translations
6.@共青团中央 团团来看看你的男宝。	@CCLY Tuantuan come and see your baby men!
7.@共青团中央 团团你怎么不说话啊？阳不阳刚，极端不极端？看看你亲爱的男宝吧。	@CCLY Tuantuan, why don’t you say something? Are they masculine or not, extreme or not to you? Have a look at your dear baby men!
8.@共青团中央 来看看你亲爱的男宝，这盛世的确如你所愿了呢!	@CCLY Come and see your dear baby men. This prosperous country is indeed as you wish it to be!
9.造成现在这个局面你@共青团中央的不作为要负首要责任。既然敢说极端女权就别说完之后当缩头乌龟,只会开精选评论的你真的很狼狈。要不然就和你所谓的‘极端女权’讨论讨论,别老让男宝为你冲锋陷阵。	@CCLY Your inaction is primarily responsible for this situation. If you dare to talk about extreme feminism, do not be a coward after saying it. You are an absolute mess; only open selected comments. Do not let baby men fight for you while you hide behind them.
10.@共青团中央 @人民日报 这就是你们支持的男宝的阳刚之吗，好了不起哦。	@CCYL @People’s Daily This is the masculinity of the baby man you support. So remarkable!
11.这就是@上海外国语大学分男女不同分数线录取的宝贝男性呢，这就是你降分录取要的男性人才，为你校再一次提高了‘知名度’。	@ Shanghai Foreign Studies University This is the baby man admitted to Shanghai Foreign Studies University with different score lines for male and female. He is the kind of male talent you want to admit at a reduced rate, and he has once again raised the ‘profile’ for your university.

On the one hand, if the hierarchy between official and grassroots is high to low, the discursive strategy of using the nickname and second person brings the official accounts and social media users closer, at least to the same hierarchy. On the other hand, in six examples, there was very intensive irony (Lines 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11) and condemnation (Line 9) rather than a submissive, flattering and positive response to traditional official discourse. In this regard, netizens engaged in the following three areas that had the effect of subverting official authority. First, they debunked the inconsistency between the CCYL's rhetoric against extreme feminism and the reality that most criminals were males, not women. Second, they poignantly questioned the gender reporting bias of the official media by breaking the stereotypical view imposed by the party's monolithic voice; that is, the official media did not promptly report when confronted with male crimes but deliberately closed the comments section to control the discussion among netizens. Finally, they expressed their indignant condemnation of the difference in the National Tertiary Entrance Examination scores required for male and female students in Chinese universities. These denunciations contained some offensive words to strengthen their resistance to official actions. These evaluative statements also helped constitute the power relationships (Guo, 2019) defined by powerful classes as suppressing and depreciating resistance from the lower classes.

As two critical platforms for presenting the established order and universal truth of the communist regime, the daily articles from the CCYL and People's Daily have become direct channels for the grassroots to keep up with official activities. The above discourse analysis shows that the official image is not seen as a sacrificial authority that conveys convincing speech but as an object that can be directly satirised, condemned and abused by random passers-by. Speakers regard official accounts as detestable accomplices in advocating and inciting gender inequality. Official accounts are more accessible on social media than in reality, but through the blunt condemnation of the three official media accounts, users resisted the established official hegemonic discourse, where power relationships and ideologies were challenged and confronted.

The fertility policy wound

Some cynical female netizens used the adverse impacts of China's one-child policy as direct leverage to challenge and resist the official narrative. In the 1990s, it was too dangerous to question such a radical policy openly, but nowadays, Internet users have become adept and more daring in using acerbic and disapproving words to criticise past government-promoted policies as wrong, especially from a female perspective. Some examples are given in Table 3.

Table 3. Examples of fertility policy criticism.

Posts	Translations
12.真好真好，烧烤摊打人的男宝都是共和国的皇位继承人。	It is so excellent. It is so great. Baby men who hit women at the Grill restaurant are the heirs to the Republican throne.
13.团宝(不报道男宝)就只报道极端女权呗! 极端女权！你们只能在家生孩子！	CCYL will just report on extreme feminism (not baby men)! Extreme feminism! You can only stay at home and have babies!
14.觉得世界只属于男宝吗？可惜女性不是少数派，是二分之一，是人类的一半。不过现在不是了，这是多年来的堕女胎的福报！	Do you think the world belongs only to baby men? Unfortunately, women are not a minority, and they are one-half of the human race. However, they are not anymore. It is the blessing of years of female foeticide!

Since the early 1980s, the official narrative of the population problem has been that China suffers from a severe overpopulation crisis and that only the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) one-child policy and birth planning can save the country from inevitable doom. This description of the extent of and correct solution to China's population problem is the main legitimising narrative of the one-child policy. As such, it has the status of official and unquestioned dogma (Greenhalgh, 2001). However, the harm caused by the population control policy today far outweighs the benefits. The underlying problem is that birth control policy does not begin with the needs and interests of women but with the needs and interests of the state. The detrimental effects of this objectification extend from women's health to their socio-economic security (Greenhalgh, 2001). There is compelling evidence that the one-child policy has led to significant gender imbalances in China. Parents under stricter birth control have low fertility rates and high sex ratios at birth, suggesting that parents engage in sex selection to satisfy their dual interest in complying with the fertility policy and having at least one son (Ebenstein, 2010).

The feudal ideology of the preference for sons (sarcastically referred to by netizens as the honoured heirs of the Republic in Line 12) and the remark about the painful period of female foeticide and female infantilisation in Line 14 suggest that these long-standing hostilities have been replaced with prevailing vituperation in the ‘baby man’ discourse. One can discern women's sense of betrayal in that they are shunned from compensation after being sacrificed by the state's fertility policy. This indignation has escalated along with the state's eager promotion of the two/three-child policy and the official recalling of masculinity. Instead of eschewing serious topics, these posts seem to seise an opportunity to seek justification for baby girls who were ignored in the grand narrative and excluded from the national census. In Line 14, the ‘blessing’ of a declining female population has, at least for now, left China's population exposed to several severe consequences, including accelerated population ageing, a distorted sex ratio and a declining working-age population that will later threaten economic growth (Zeng & Hesketh, 2016).

The trauma of the fertility policy has also made women aware that their traditionally diminishing power is exercised through fertility. For example, in Line 13, ‘extreme feminists stay at home and have babies’ ironically refers to patriarchal societies that exclude women from political and economic spheres, confining them to the domestic sphere for reproduction (Kostas, 2021). It is a condemnation of the polarised structures of femininity and masculinity regulated by the gender binary of the weaker woman versus the muscular/strong man. It also satirises the CCYL's normalisation of the discursive gender binary that women must be silent to give birth and only men can talk about politics. These poignant comments, therefore, are intended to focus on patriarchal discourses or practices that disempower and disadvantage women under fertility policies and challenge the indefensible official narrative.

Conclusion

This article places the prevalence of the ‘baby man’ context in contemporary Chinese social media and explores its implicit inquiry in a wider political and social background. Focusing on the heinous crimes against women between April and June 2022 in China, the article uses FCDA as a theoretical and analytical framework to examine how Chinese women use ‘baby man’ to resist, negotiate and reconstruct gender and power relationships regarding text, discursive strategies and sociocultural contexts on Weibo. The analysis demonstrates that, notwithstanding the sensationalism of online censorship, ‘baby man’ is extensively circulated on Weibo in a more complicated manner. Specifically, the analysis shows that based on a ridicule-related communicative style, ‘baby man’ has developed three aspects that constitute a discursive strategy, which concerns the double irony of ‘baby man’, the blunt resistance against both gender and power relationships and contempt for the nation's past and current population policy.

The ‘baby man’ discourse breaks some shackles imposed by long-held gender hierarchy where men find themselves with a repugnant name. The name and image of ‘baby man’ represent a reversal of the hegemonic male gaze on women through the lens of the maternal hierarchy that represents men as babies spoiled by employment opportunities and reproductive priorities in modern Chinese society. Although censorship could be crucial in eliminating gender debates by deleting more radical posts and comments, the ‘baby man’ discourse is no longer concerned with the scope of censorship involved in speech, nor is its satirical approach a euphemism for presenting direct insults to avoid censorship. This light-hearted playfulness is a deliberate backlash against gender inequality. The analysis demonstrates and supports that Chinese feminist resistance to the yáng masculinity through using ‘baby man’ is an integral part of the overall public resistance to all forms of oppression and persecution, aided by the state-sponsored Confucian cultural norms designed to maintain socio-political stability through the promotion of traditional family values (Chang & Tian, 2021). The research results contribute to the emerging literature on FCDA in the Chinese context.

The phenomenal ascent of ‘baby man’ has treated men as a new subordinate group. However, this is not systematically substantiated in the material reality of gender relationships. The power reversal depicted on social media is hardly accompanied by a fundamental shift in social relationships between women and men outside the virtual world (Lazar, 2007). ‘Baby man’ is a critical interrogation of men, which may not be embraced as a favoured way to promote gender equality. While this study finds indications of feminist counterdiscourse among some Chinese netizens, it does not imply that feminism is widespread across Chinese social media. This study is restricted to publicly accessible posts on a single platform (Weibo), and the small sample size cannot be considered representative of all Chinese social media users. Further quantitative studies would be required to determine how feminist discourse is spread in the context of Chinese social media.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship funded by the Australian Government.

Notes on contributors

Yifan Chen

Yifan Chen is a PhD candidate at Curtin University, Australia. Her current research focuses on pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, and media study.

Qian Gong

Qian Gong is a senior lecturer at Curtin University, Australia. She has a PhD in media and communication and has mainly published in the fields of Chinese media and popular culture.

Notes

1 The All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) is a people's organisation that unites women from all ethnic groups and communities in China and fights for their further emancipation and development (ACWF, 2022).