The #MeToo movement began back in 2006 when American activist Tarana Burke first coined the phrase to encourage women to share their stories of workplace sexual harassment online. It quickly spread internationally and eventually found itself with a growing community in China, where feminists had been working towards a similar moment for a long time. Through an exploration of theoretical relevance of culture, space and state to political geography using Marston’s paper as a theoretical framework and relating it to the Chinese online #MeToo movement, I intend to show how their state is responding to newly emerging spaces of dissidence and demands for justice. This will be done through a detailed analysis of online netizenship and the specific governmental reactions, such as censorship and arresting/detaining of feminist activists.
Since last January, China has experienced a firestorm against sexual predation that reached Universities, media outlets, sports teams, NGOs and even religious temples. More than 20 liberal intellectuals, media personalities and activists have now been accused of sexual misconduct, and several publicly shamed university professors have been dismissed – showing that despite state protestations – the movement is picking up support.
Historically, state theorists considered the relevance of culture to the state beyond the role of nationalism and citizenship in state building to be of relative unimportance. However, it is necessary to be critical of this view. As Marston argues, political geography needs to engage with debate about relationship between culture and state to improve theoretically and empirically. Taking the #MeToo movement against the backdrop of increasing protestation for women’s rights, it is clear to see that her view is well founded. In a climate where new movements are rising from below despite gender inequalities in China, we can see that the importance of culture rises above citizenship. These systemic differences are clearly portrayed in the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, who have a history of prioritising men’s interests over women’s e.g. putting the brakes on implementation of its 1950 Marriage Law offering couples the right to divorce, when too many wives attempted to leave their husbands.
Gramsci argued for the instability of the state, by demonstrating that support for it was attained through the concept of hegemony: a complex form of class domination realised in the form of the state. Contemporaneously, this can be related to other forms of hierarchy e.g. gender and race. He argues for penetrating the hegemonic strategies and practices of the state as consciously and unconsciously, subaltern groups are forced into accepting their subordination. For him, any struggle against the hegemonic configurations of power and domination involves a cultural struggle; a contest over the way in which the state comes to be constructed and represented. In a one-party state were feminist activism and public sphere are increasingly under tight control from the top, we can see clear relevance to his argument. This movement demonstrates the endurance of citizen power at the cost of the states’ through social media story sharing, anti censorship strategies and collaboration between victims, media, lawyers, and civil society. Even where the barriers are significant, in a place where major Western websites are banned, and Weibo and WeChat are heavily monitored and censored, the movement is spreading and gaining traction.
Corrigan states it is not who rules, but how rule is accomplished and how patriarchy, racism, nationalism, homophobia and classism become visible as constitutive features of rule. For China, there is still very much a strong rule over the protests of women to enforce a patriarchal society. In 2012, on the Shanghai subway system an announcement ran to warn young women to dress modestly if they wished to avoid harassment on their commute. In response, several women staged a subway protest with the slogans ‘I can be slutty, but you can’t get dirty’, setting off one of the early debates on sexual harassment. Since 2014, punitive measures on further advocacy have been harsh. For example, arresting and detaining feminist activists for planning the ‘Free the Five’ campaign; handing out stickers and flyers raising awareness of sexual harassment.
In 2016, the CCP passed a law giving the government wide latitude to monitor and control the work of NGOs on Weibo, any and all iterations of #MeToo and groups formed to advocate for women’s rights to avoid using such words as ‘organising’ and ‘action’ to describe their work. Thus, a demonstration such as a Women’s March would currently be out of the question. As a result – groups are pushed to the periphery and mainly operate underground with few public or official organisations and thus we see Corrigan’s thesis to be true. State and society are mutually constitutive so that the state could be confronted less as an abstraction with autonomy from the rest of society and more as a manifestation of the materialised social practices of human agents – based on the very little evidence of resistance that we found pre-#MeToo. However, times are changing and whilst there is a tendency in political geography for most state theorising to assume that human subjectivity can be understood outside of its social and historical context based on: rationality, a propensity to violence or territoriality. #MeToo would discredit this, as it’s motivated by hope – for many women, the burden of keeping their struggle private outweighs the risks of speaking out (e.g. PTSD, clinical depression, suicidal thoughts).
The examples given in Marston’s work clearly illustrate that understanding the state as the outcome of struggles over meaning and identity has specific and important geographical relevance not only for state theorising, but also for resistance and change. However, theorists are missing any sense of the geography of this complex relationship and the implications of thinking through how the various constitutive features of hegemonic rule are geographically produced (and possibly resisted) in complex and sometimes even in contradictory ways. In this case, we are opened to the idea of new geographies on the online world, and how their boundaries interrelate with the state. How have cultural questions related to identity about space and the adjudicating role of the state? How do they work to exclude certain identities and relegate them to the margins of dominant cultural practices? In China the answer would be that rule is accomplished through surveillance.
Corrigan calls to investigate specifically how patriarchy, racism, nationalism, homophobia and classism become visible as constitutive features of rule. The Chinese #MeToo movement participants have creatively spread discussions and spread/saved censored information though screenshots and blockchains – avoiding rulers’ censorship. When the hashtag was identified by state censors, Chinese netizens started to use other, less immediately recognisable hashtags ('Woyeshi' and 'Mitu' – which is translatable to #ricebunny, a homophonic of 'Me too' in Chinese with emojis of cute bunnies eating rice). On another top social media app, WeChat, movement participants spread screenshots of victims stories, media investigations and commentaries, at times even posting images upside down to confuse filtering system. These lengths to hide evidence from the government in fear of it being banned show how ingrained patriarchy and gendered norms have become in the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese feminist activists have also been using encryption technologies to further evade the government. For example, supporters of Pekin University student Yue Xin used blockchain, a public open-source technology that holds Bitcoin transaction data to save her censored open letter about the official intimidation she faced for requesting information about a 20-year-old rape case involving another graduate. The letter is now permanently saved and can be accessed by people who look up Bitcoin transactions.
Marston also makes a case for political geographers to make a contribution to the accompanying theoretical debates. She posits the most obvious way to do this is by interrogating the changing spaces of rule – ever more relevant in the modern day because the online world is changing our interactions with space and state. She questions how those spaces are made, remade or altered by the subjects whose everyday practices constitute their production, where state and society converge. As increasing numbers of citizens are online, state censorship – a powerful and historic form of their rule – has had to adapt to cover this new place. This raises the interesting question of where boundaries of state lie in an increasingly online world – are there any spaces where we are left uncensored? For now, the movement eludes government surveillance in China, and is even growing despite obstructions by a sensitive state, indifferent public and misogynist elites.
The Chinese #MeToo movement embodies social and political practices spatially and temporally by employing new forms of media to convey the struggles these women are facing. A new media outlet, Matters, saved detailed information of each sexual harassment case on their blockchain-based website. And several anonymous activists used this tech to build a website called 'snowflakes' to encourage victims to share their suffering by creating virtual snowflakes on the map that represent wounds caused by sexual assault. In providing legal support and mental health counselling, many grassroots groups also use encrypted messaging app Signal and open-source web hosting service GitHub. Cross-group collaboration between journalists, lawyers, victims and social media activists (practice that defined much of Chinese activism for the past two decades) has also played a crucial role in propelling the Chinese MeToo movement.
There must, therefore, be an integral link between meaning making and identity and space/place. The indivisible link between society and space creates a marginalisation of subjects whose representations already operate on the periphery of dominant cultural practice. The law works to authorise some groups while delegitimizing others. Taking the #MeToo movement, the university sphere is a good example. In January, former Beihang University graduate Luo Xixi got support from an independent investigative reporter, Huang Xueqin, and a human rights lawyer, Wan Miaoyan, in preparing her public disclosure of sexual harassment. Huang rephrased the initial post to make it more evidence based and helped Luo filter media interview requests. Miaoyan applied her legal expertise to use this case as a wake-up call to institute new systemic mechanisms to address all sexual harassment cases at universities. Resultantly, Beihang University fired Chen and pledged to consider establishing the anti-sexual harassment mechanism – making it the first of Chinese unis to consider such measures and bringing women further into the foreground of cultural practice.
From below, a world-wide discourse of rights and proliferating demands for new sorts of entitlements has emerged and put increasing pressure on nation-states to respond in often unprecedented ways. Wahneema Lubiano argues the state thinks the subject too – we imagine ourselves and others to be in relation to the world is absorbed into, refracted through and reproduced by state practices – reflect hegemonic notions and beliefs that end up sustaining racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. Perhaps this could explain the silence of so many women for so long. The University sector is not the only one that came under the limelight of cross-sector mobilisation.
Since July, courageous victims and outspoken outlets (e.g. Beijing News, China Newsweek) continued to expose a series of sexual harassment cases involving activist Lei Chuang, environmentalist Feng Yongfeng etc. It seems to be a snowball effect, as Wahneema states, whereby with the first women stepping out, far more following suit. Victims first disclosed their stories on social media, and media outlets verified the facts and kept the public updated by interviewing informed sources and checking documents, identifying patterns of sexual harassment and investigating the systematic forces behind the individual cases. Other than helping expose abused, civil society collaboration facilitated post-trauma healing and prevention training. NGOMeTOO, NGOCN and Orange Umbrella are among the grassroots that offer psychological and legal support for sexually harassed women, organised anti-sexual harassment seminars, and shared self-protection strategies
The joint efforts in the fight against sexual harassment evolved from individual requests for fair treatment into a public reflection on its power dynamics, attracting party and state's attention to its regulatory loopholes. The Chinese MeToo movement manifests the perseverance of China's societal struggle against officially endorsed patriarchal norms, the movement also exposes fragilities in bottom-up mobilisation. State's response has featured unyielding coercion as they censored the majority of posts with the hashtag, temporarily blocked some victims on Weibo and permanently shut down Weibo and WeChat accounts of Feminists' Voices, an NGO that promotes gender equality. Whilst, public awareness about sexual harassment is rising, it is still primarily centred in elites circles. Anti-sexual harassment debates most often spread among well informant elite intellectual groups, while the general public is more attentive to issues like vaccine scandals that carry more tangible and immediate implications on their daily lives. Even liberal intellectuals push back on this movement as potentially disruptive of social order and exaggerating of the influence of male-dominated power dynamics.
Famous public intellectual and politics professor, Liu Yu, for instance, has warned that this movement might trigger false claims of sexual harassment and advised participants to try legal approached before voicing concerns on social media. Media practitioner, Zhang Wen, publicly accused of starting non-consensual sexual relationships with female co-workers, responded that it is culturally appropriate for Chinese people to hug and kiss when drinking at large social gatherings. These implicit and explicit denials and justifications by China's prominent intellectuals signal that Chinese society has still a long way to go in building a systematic gender equality agenda.
States worldwide accomplish their rule in different ways but it is necessary to unveil the authoritative frameworks within which subjects are required to operate in order to rework the subjectives and discrimination that they endow. For example, the presence of bribes, whereby citizens obey to get their basic needs met (e.g. extending a water pipe to a village). The state establishes the socio-spatial parameters around which cultural meanings can be made and contested and this can still be seen as true in China. Even where collective action has worked, the measures taken are still fairly limited. Most of the exposed institutions fired accused individuals but some have tried to downplay the issues and bypass systemic responsibility. San Yat-sen University decided to dismiss one professor facing allegations of sexual misconduct, the Uni attributed the punishment to his 'violation of the teachers' code of conduct' rather than sexual harassment. Anti-harassment measures advocated by universities focus solely on the punitive regulations rather than on pre-emptive initiatives in overhauling the gender norms that are at the heart of the issue
In conclusion, as Sunder argues, state control is created by ‘granting absolute power to create and maintain meaning to some groups at the exclusion of others' (1996, 2). Culture is not negotiated and transformed through the public give and take of changing ideas and meaning systems in a changing world – state constructs its own cultural narrative about how the world should work and it is a narrative that empowers one group and oppresses another. Nonetheless, even such limited responses should be celebrated in a society that's undergoing a political crackdown. China's Ministry of Education has pledged to implement institutional mechanisms to prevent sexual harassment at universities and the country's top legislative is considering adding protections against sexual harassment into the civil code. Seeds of activism planted in the pre-Xi era continue to grow, albeit, often obstructed by a sensitive state, an indifferent public and misogynist elites. Additionally, the #MeToo movement in China presents the internet as a positive space for feminism – social media presents itself as a way to unite and get the job done, rather than encouraging small and bitter arguments as it so often can do in the Western world. However, we must still be wary in the wider sense of treatment of the internet as citizens. It is, at the end of the day, a hostile environment that we must use but not trust, nor put our trust in it saving us.