China’s Female Revolt

Two years ago, Zhang Zirui had an epiphany. While browsing Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter), she happened to stumble upon the account of feminist influencer Lin Maomao. As she scrolled through posts urging women to put their own needs before those of their partners and families, it was as if a door had suddenly swung open in her mind, and a new road lay before her. “For the first time,” she told journalist Wanqing Zhang, “I knew women could live differently.”

Zhang Zirui shaved her head, smashed her cosmetics (“toxic beauty standards”), split up with her violent boyfriend, dropped out of the teacher-training course her parents had mandated for her, and applied to study physics at university (a subject her family had forbidden: “not for girls”). Now she posts aphorisms online, preaching the word to all Zhang Ziruis who suffer in silence: “Tolerance is not a good virtue for women, anger is.”

In the unique context of China’s Confucio-Leninist culture, which has always crushed the rights of the individual, and especially of the female individual, we might see Lin Maomao’s call for selfishness as a necessary corrective. If it is to succeed, a counteroffensive against millennial misogyny can hardly be timid—and as will become clear, we are talking about the visceral, brutal, real-world breed of misogyny, not the fairytale kind dreamed up in certain other cultures today.

Zhang is far from an isolated case: indeed, it’s astonishing how widely such attitudes have spread in just a few short years. In China, women’s-rights-related hashtags score millions of clicks. “I feel like today, every [Chinese] woman who uses social media is a member of the feminist community,” says one 28-year-old #MeToo accuser. Ten of China’s 40 most popular podcasts now focus on examining women’s role in society. These podcasts deride “marriage donkeys” and the cultural focus on heterosexual love: positions which hardly bode well for the current generation’s demographic prospects. Anecdotally, nearly all Chinese women known to me view marriage and childbirth with disdain; in a trend unthinkable only 10 years ago, a small majority profess bisexuality.

This augurs a momentous shift, a point of no return. Marriage and birth rates have already sunk to historical lows, while the country’s divorce rate has been climbing for decades, stymied only by a 2021 law making it more difficult for couples to split. China’s uncompromising new feminism is sure to exacerbate these trends.

How has this happened? Recall the violence inflicted by Zhang Zirui’s ex-partner. There will be multiple components at play, of course; multiple reasons why a woman living in China in 2023 might reject the prospects of marriage and children. The failing economy, the ever-greater expense of raising a child, the forbidding competitiveness, the lack of security in a society where the authorities can lock everyone down at a moment’s notice. But it was domestic abuse that provided the trigger, the decisive factor.

This problem is ubiquitous in modern China. According to the CCP’s own statistics (usually manipulated to downplay the extent of problems), some 35.7 percent of Chinese women endure violence at the hands of their partners. The Communist Party has spent its long and inglorious history peering into private lives, and yet domestic violence is the consistent and curious exception to this rule. The treatment a man metes out to his wife is the one thing the Party does not want to know about. Keep it behind closed doors, couples are told: resolve it among yourselves, don’t bother the courts. A harmonious life will guarantee a harmonious nation, the president likes to preach. He worries about the destabilising element of divorced and single men, as he squints down at China from his lofty throne, trying and failing to understand the people he governs.

In her 2022 book Violent Intimacy, researcher Tiantian Zheng has documented the grim reality of Beijing’s “harmonious” approach:

In a 2019 case in Shandong, teachers, schools, relatives, family members, court mediators, police, and lawyers were all aware of the severe violence a wife and her daughter had suffered, but no one reported or interfered in the matter, leading to the sixteen-year-old daughter being beaten to death by her father. In another 2019 case in Hunan province, the residential committee, the All China Women’s Federation, the Public Security Bureau, the employers of both the abusers and the victim, and the family members were all aware of the violence, but no one offered any help, leading to the victim being beaten to death by the abuser. In a 2016 case in Inner Mongolia, dozens of family members and relatives of the wife were aware of the violence perpetrated by the husband. Not only did no one interfere, but they also advised her to continually endure the violence. She was later beaten to death by her husband.

Zheng’s work lists numerous cases of chronic and extreme household violence in recent years, of women being beaten to death, of police indifference, of outright hostility from courts toward victims. And at the root and heart of the violence, of course, we find politics. In a totalitarian state, the people have no reliable means of voicing their many grievances. They are bound, muzzled, neutered. In his home, a man may act with virtual impunity. From the Party’s perspective, the home also plays an instructive role for citizens—it is a microcosm of the state, with an absolute authority ruling over his subjects.

At one time, the average Chinese woman would have silently endured her abuse for a lifetime. But in the age of the internet, shared stories have a galvanising effect. Two reports, in particular, have brought us to this moment—lurid catalysts that changed everything. The first occurred in January 2022, when an alarming video went viral. A toothless woman was shown chained to a wall by the neck in a derelict outhouse in Xuzhou, eastern China. This was the mother of eight children (in a billion-strong nation, there are many exceptions to every rule and every social trend, and this was always true of the one, two, and three-child policies). Rumour hinted that hers had been forced pregnancies.

Local authorities sought to quell public outrage. Everything was fine, they said: the woman (still known only as “Yang” at this point) was the legal wife of the main property’s owner, one Dong Zhimin. She suffered from a psychological disorder that apparently required her to be chained up like a rabid dog. And one thing above all was certain—she had definitely never been the victim of human trafficking.

Then, in the face of continued uproar, officials began to tell a different story. The woman, they said, was actually a beggar who had been taken into the family by Dong’s father, and her violent outbreaks necessitated the iron chain. Netizens were not satisfied, and two citizen journalists travelled to Yang’s home to conduct their own investigation. They were quickly swallowed into police custody. Finally, the authorities released a third account, and this one confirmed the public’s initial suspicions. Yang had, of course, been trafficked and twice sold as a bride. She suffered from schizophrenia: it was unclear whether or not this might have resulted from her ordeals.

A total of six prison sentences were handed out. Beijing presumably hoped that would be an end to the matter, but Yang (real name Xiaohuamei, meaning “Little Plum Blossom”) went on to dominate social media for months, and completely overshadowed the Beijing Winter Olympics. For China’s dissident voices, she became “Iron Chain Woman”—like Tank Man or Bridge Man, a potent symbol of the darkness in communist China, a weighty meme.

Xiaohuamei represented a hidden class: the trafficked women scattered throughout cities and villages in every part of the country. It’s a class created by the gender imbalance that results from female infanticide, a problem largely caused by the Communist Party’s one-child policy. Some of these women were sold by poor families while still very young. Some were already adults with full-time jobs, until they were snatched away with fraudulent offers of high-paid positions in far-off provinces. All were now silently living new lives with new partners under new names.

A Brief History of China’s One-Child Policy

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QuilletteAaron Sarin

The only story big enough to eclipse Iron Chain Woman would be another viral snapshot of sexist violence. On the evening of June 10th, 2022, in Tangshan, near Beijing, a man named Chen Jizhi approached several women sitting together at a restaurant table. He placed a hand on one of the women, then leaned in and said something. As she pushed him away, he grabbed her then slapped her face and wrestled her out of her seat. One of the woman’s friends hit Chen with a bottle, at which point other men began spilling into the restaurant to attack the women: kicking them, punching them, and battering them with chairs.

The first victim was dragged outside by her hair, and a group of men surrounded her, taking turns to stamp on her head. One male voice was captured giving the instruction: “Beat her to death.” The woman and three of her friends would be hospitalised that night. Security camera footage was quickly posted online, once again tapping a vast reservoir of national anger. It took fewer than 24 hours for a single Weibo hashtag about the incident to gain 2.8 billion views and two million comments. Many had suppressed their emotions after experiencing or witnessing similar incidents in the past (the number of Chinese women who have been physically assaulted will be orders of magnitude higher than the number who have been trafficked), and this proved to be the breaking point.

China’s authorities are alarmed at the depth of feeling—police now watch for suspicious gatherings of women in bars and bookstores. The expansion of any social group is terrifying to them, whether it is religious, democratic, or even Marxist. Like Herod, the CCP dreads the birth of a successor. Society must be atomised. But unlike all infants slain in the crib thus far, this new movement actually poses a genuine threat to Beijing’s long-term plans. It’s not simply impotent anger at misogynistic violence: people are acting on their anger. What becomes of the “Chinese Dream of National Rejuvenation” when women refuse both husbands and children?

Unfortunately for the authorities, there is no indication that they have the slightest understanding of what they are dealing with. At the very moment when growing numbers of women are seeking to escape stifling expectations, the Party is re-emphasising those expectations. Women are being encouraged to jettison both education and career in pursuit of a Confucian mother/wife ideal. In an attempt to make the latter the only viable choice, certain universities now require female applicants to score one hundred points higher than males on their entrance exams; consequently, Zheng’s research finds that the acceptance rate for some of these institutions is 98 percent male, two percent female. While women lap up feminist podcasts that mock “marriage donkeys,” authorities urge citizens to “pass on the red gene”^—a phrase that is beginning to assume a new and non-ideological implication.

The discord is as much cultural as political. In China, the victims of domestic abuse are sometimes “consoled” by family members with the assurance that men tend to stop beating their wives once a child is born. The tone-deaf and manipulative nature of such assurances has no bearing on their accuracy as social observations. Indeed, studies have demonstrated that men’s testosterone levels drop by about one third in the first few weeks after their children are born, a change likely to make them less aggressive and more nurturing. Risk-taking behaviour declines and emotional regulation improves. This implies that the higher rates of childlessness encouraged by China’s nascent feminism could lead, indirectly, to higher rates of domestic abuse. The calming effect of fatherhood will be felt in fewer homes.

As violence rises, so will women’s rage. The movement will be strengthened; the cycle will be perpetuated. And so we can see the emergence of a clear trend. China’s “harmonious society” is nothing of the sort—instead, it is a widening gyre. Subcultures are pulling away from the centre, growing more distant, speaking new tongues. There will be no reconciliation. We could be witnessing a unique moment in Chinese history: the large-scale rejection of a woman’s traditional lot in life, spurred by Iron Chain Woman and the Tangshan assaults, and facilitated by the cross-country alliance that the internet now makes possible. There is no real precedent for this, despite the fact that misogynistic violence has plagued the culture for thousands of years.

Women in the region we now call “China” have endured lower-caste treatment in all eras. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, a man could beat, abuse, and kill his adulterous wife with impunity. Any woman who attempted to escape an abusive husband would be lashed a hundred times with bamboo strips and then sold, while similar punishments were mandated for those who had failed to sufficiently resist while being raped. Widows were required to remain chaste for the rest of their lives. The penalty for violating this law was death.

With the collapse of the last dynasty (in 1912) came the first true flowering of intellectual freedom in China’s long history, and the briefest moment of hope. A variety of social movements began highlighting women’s oppression, and the thousand-year practice of foot-binding finally came to an end. No longer would young girls suffer the breaking of their arches and the slow necrotising of their flesh in pursuit of a lifelong disability considered “beautiful.”

But the abuse of adult women proved harder to change; indeed, it remained endemic. In her bestselling memoir Wild Swans, Jung Chang tells the story of her grandmother, who was a warlord’s concubine. He warned her not to engage in affairs with male servants during his long absences. Another concubine had made this mistake, he explained, and after having the servant shot, the warlord had subjected the concubine to a significantly more terrible fate: she was tied to a bed with a gag stuffed into her mouth, and raw alcohol was dripped onto the cloth, suffocating her slowly.

Sadistic treatment was not limited to women living in society’s upper echelons. Tiantian Zheng reports that in 1929, 57.46 percent of all suicide cases in the whole of Republican China occurred as a result of domestic abuse. From May to September 1925, 40.6 percent of all criminals sentenced to death were women who had killed their abusive husbands in desperation or self-defence. Before it could take its first step, China’s hesitant proto-feminism had already been crushed by the millennial weight of Chinese culture.

A communist revolution was no help at all. Despite Mao Zedong’s pithy promise that women would “hold up half the sky” in socialist China, the CCP often treated women worse than animals. From the earliest days of Mao’s rule, public “struggle sessions” were used against wives seeking divorce: they would be stripped in front of the community, humiliated, beaten, and sometimes killed. As always in China, the dangers to women came from both home and state, from within and without. One woman attempting to leave an abusive husband had her left eye gouged out and her legs removed with an axe and chaffcutter; another was burned to death with a fire rod. The majority of husbands faced no consequences. For the average Chinese woman, life in the year 1960 was really no different to life in the year 960.

Even post-Mao, China’s misogynistic culture would lose none of its savagery. In his memoir Red Dust, political exile Ma Jian recalls joining the crowds on a dusty Beijing road to watch a condemned woman being dragged to the execution ground by a wire hooked between her vagina and anus. (The male prisoners were hooked at the shoulder blades.) This scene, so redolent of the long-dead ancient world, of the Assyrians or Persians or Romans, occurred in the 1980s—within living memory for most of us.

Over the past few decades, China’s full entrance into the international community has brought exposure to liberal ideas, and some things have changed. But that same thread of brutality running through the nation’s history remains in evidence today. This is still a society in which unconcerned bystanders will watch as a man whips a woman in the street.

China is still a society in which the prisons heave and groan with women who have killed their abusive spouses—in 2013, such cases accounted for 80 percent of the inmates at one female prison in Fujian. There are women in these jails who shot their husbands in pure desperation, in order to protect their newborn babies from being strangled to death. As a result, they face life sentences or death sentences. (Men who murder their wives, on the other hand, are more likely to be handed wrist-slapping three-year sentences, if they receive any punishment at all.)

The Communist Party has always protected abusers, and it always will. Collectivist to its core, it has zero interest in the hidden suffering of the individual woman, trapped in her home for years and decades with a belligerent man-child. Such torment is unimportant in the context of the grand quest for national glory. Clearly, for as long as this Party continues to rule, Chinese women will never be safe. It’s not clear how many people understand this point. There is no evidence that some great political revolution is in the offing. But a crucial psychological switch has occurred: the CCP has lost the compliance, if not the allegiance, of an untold number of Chinese women. They may well be Party members; they may have imbibed the propaganda on any number of political issues. But they will not settle down, and they will not give birth.