From #MeToo to "Mitu": how Chinese women circumvent digital censorship

In a long post on Weibo, Luo Xixi, a PhD graduate of Beihang University in Beijing, accused her former supervisor of sexual harassment. Other women followed her example. At more than forty Chinese universities, female students signed open letters calling for action against sexual harassment on campuses. Beihang University dismissed the supervisor, who maintained that he had done nothing illegal.

cici/小居士

January 1, 2018 on Weibo

For many years I regretted not finding the courage to speak out, just to get my diploma. If I had done so, there would not have been so many victims after me. I am probably his first victim of harassment. I owe an apology after my death to all my younger female student colleagues.

#MeToo, excerpt from the first #MeToo post published in China.

Weibo censored the hashtag #MeTooInChina in mid-January. Chinese social media platforms usually do not reveal how or why they make these decisions, but experts told Rest of World that the government takes a hard line. "The rule the Chinese government generally applies to social movements is that it does not want a social force strong enough to provoke an insurrection or cause instability to form," says Huang Qian, assistant professor at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. "They constantly monitor whether a specific hashtag or a specific online event is growing and becoming something bigger."

The #MeToo movement has made the online feminist debate more sensitive. On March 9, 2018, Weibo permanently deleted the account of Feminist Voices for "violation of key regulations." The ban came after Feminist Voices had published an article inviting readers to honor International Women's Day by "remembering rights, rather than going shopping," while Chinese brands and online stores had completely taken over the occasion to turn it into a commercial holiday.

That same day, the organization's WeChat account also disappeared.

According to feminists, the crackdown on the "gender struggle" on social media is one-sided. Baidu, the Chinese technology giant known for its search engine, operates a site similar to Reddit, called Tieba. In May 2023, the platform published a photo that went viral to celebrate awarding one of its "2023 Forum Leader" prizes to the administrator of a community of 3 million users, almost all men, known for spreading sexist comments and sharing explicit images of women without their permission. For Chinese feminists, this was yet another demonstration that misogyny was not a problem for Chinese technology companies.

Neither Baidu, Weibo nor Xiaohongshu wanted to issue statements.

In March 2023, a feminist trend cost a 24-year-old social media manager her job. Wang Qi was reading posts on Xiaohongshu about fumeiyi, the "duty of beauty" (a distortion of "military duty" in Chinese), a critique of the social obligation for women to spend excessive amounts on clothes, cosmetics and hairstyles. Inspired, she went to the hairdresser and came out with very short hair. At the time, Wang had just received an offer to work at a café. When she showed up for work, however, her boss told her that her new look was unacceptable and withdrew the offer. Wang has no regrets. "I have never felt so close to the real me," she wrote in a post on Xiaohongshu with her before-and-after photo. In the past, "when I had to go out, it took me at least two hours to get dressed and put on makeup."

About ten years after its emergence, the influence of online feminism in China is undeniable and ambiguous at the same time. In several areas - high levels of politics, participation in the workforce, income equality - the position of Chinese women has weakened. Posts about #MeToo no longer give rise to hopes of systemic change. Court rulings regularly favor alleged harassers, and no Chinese university has announced measures against sexual harassment.

Support for women's rights issues, however, continues to grow. In terms of numbers, online feminism in China is stronger than ever. Before censorship intervened, the discussions that erupted around the original #MeToo hashtag in 2018 totaled more than 4.5 million views on Weibo, according to the China Digital Times. Today, discussions about news related to gender issues attract even more. In 2022, a woman with mental disabilities, the mother of eight children, was found chained inside a shed. Weibo posts with hashtags referring to the case - often focused on the lack of women's rights, treating women as baby-making machines - were read more than ten billion times.

Since writing "MeToo" on the internet is forbidden in China,

users have adopted the word "mitu", which literally means

"bunny rice" or its emoji equivalent

Note: 米兔 is pronounced mǐtù and literally means more precisely "rice + rabbit"; it is used for its phonetic similarity to "Me Too".