Weibo Feminism examines the rise of radical feminism on China's most popular and heavily censored microblog platform, Weibo. The spectrum of radical feminism encompasses various aspects, from prioritizing female interests and rights to creating women's words and expressions, distancing oneself from proposals of reforming within the current system to improve gender equality, protesting the male-dominated LGBTQ+ movement paradigm and neoliberalism, and rejecting nation-state-family institutions. The grassroots feminism approach captured in the book critiques elitist feminism, even though many Weibo feminists are highly educated (e.g. PhD students with transnational experiences). The book describes how the emergence of radical feminism in China incorporates distinct Chinese characteristics, while echoing feminist movements in present-day South Korea and showing parallels with global radical feminism in the 1970s.
Weibo Feminism covers a broad range of issues, including the subjugation in representing women in history and in contemporary China, reproductive questions such as single women's preference for having offspring and the problem of surrogacy, women's property rights, the naming politics of children, the anti-marriage movement, the betrayal by male counterparts who sacrifice feminist agendas for other activist goals, women's desires and imaginaries, and new feminist strategies of online contestation. The book is organized with five main chapters on themes and/or theoretical threads: digital feminism responding to the COVID-19 and its control; feminists contesting online discourses on women; reproductive rights contestations; feminist contestations on the concept of intersectionality; and feminist contestations on the use of Chinese language. Weibo Feminism provides rich data and insights into grassroots feminist contestations within China's limited public sphere, focusing on the Xi era.
This review situates Weibo Feminism's discussion of new grassroots feminists in the conceptual question of “who are Chinese intellectuals” in the Xi era. Public intellectuals, citizen intellectuals (as discussed by William A. Callahan and Timothy Cheek), citizen intelligentsia (as researched by this reviewer) and minjian grassroots intellectuals (as researched by Sebastian Veg) are iconic figures having life-long social influence through print, digital and other new types of media such as independent documentary films. Unlike them, the mass Weibo feminists are ordinary Chinese who have become activists and online influencers. Weibo feminists emerge through direct engagement and contestation with the public and the state. They are new grassroots activists and intellectuals in China's tightened public sphere, democratizing the paradigm of studying the public sphere, both intellectual and activist, by addressing feminist agendas with women as the main leaders and participants in public life. The anarchist feminist approach of radical feminism can be dated back to the theories of He Yinzhen, the birth mother of Chinese feminism, as discussed by Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl and Dorothy Ko in The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia University Press, 2013).
Unlike older generations of contemporary Chinese feminists working on gender equality and women's rights, Weibo feminists openly confront misogyny – a system of morality. Establishing a form of morality is the highest level of immorality according to ancient Chinese philosophy (p. 37), which continues to govern Chinese people today. Misogyny defends sexism and patriarchy as it attacks challengers and perpetuates gender discrimination (see Kate Manne's Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny [Oxford University Press, 2017]).
Despite facing censorship, grassroots feminist voices are possibly and widely heard only in this era of self-media (zimeiti), a modern digital form of the grassroots Chinese tea house. For instance, a Weibo feminist's questioning and reshaping of the official propaganda anime figure, Jiang Shanjiao, garnered over 10,000 replies and 100,000 reposts before its deletion on the second day (p. 26). Even the illiterate Ma Panyan managed to type and write her story on social media. She had been deprived of family property, forced into child marriage, and sexually and physically abused, which led to her giving birth to two children. Her writing reveals the conspiracy of relatives, village fellows and grassroots officers who wove a network to trap Ma (pp. 156–158). Apart from on self-media, misogynistic intellectual and activist communities, influenced by authoritarianism and patriarchy, tend to agitate, exclude and erase such grassroots, occasionally “vulgar” and “violent,” “radical” and subversive expressions of feminism. This underscores how women are trapped in the misogyny of literacy in the Chinese language, exemplified by cases like that of Lin Yihan, who tragically committed suicide after completing an autobiographical fiction which detailed her struggle with sexual abuse by her senior Chinese literature teacher, disguised rhetorically as her “first love” (chapter five). In publications discussing Chinese feminism under (self-)censorship (such as the 2021 Introduction for the forum “Chinese Feminism Under (Self-) Censorship: Practice and Knowledge Production”) and forthcoming research on the question of Chinese feminism and Uyghur women's liberation, this reviewer argues that some feminist scholars might also distance themselves from the affiliations of “radical feminism,” as shown in how they have cut connections with feminist activists in the rights defence movement of the 2000s and remain silent on feminist issues in current ethnic contestations.
Weibo Feminism is written with the rigour of radical feminist activism, legitimizing women's anger in China's contexts. The meaning of exploring women's anger is discussed in Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Weibo Feminism does not follow the convention of English academic writing. Considering the political economy of knowledge production in the global North and situated knowledge production in China, readers can further develop the complex dimensions of interpretating the rich data provided in this book. The authors are encouraged to provide their data for open access and further research. To enhance the book, contextualizing its data reports and engaging with scholarship for a deeper analysis with multiple theoretical dimensions would benefit readers such as undergraduate students. Additionally, the book should have explained the puzzle of what contributes to the rise of radical feminism amidst the state's increasing control over all aspects of Chinese society. Furthermore, Weibo Feminism does not explicitly outline its methodology. The book relies on critical discourse analysis of rich text data fetched from Weibo, including content quickly deemed censored.
Considering the above-mentioned features and potential improvements, I recommend Weibo Feminism to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of China studies, gender and sexuality, cultural studies and media studies.
