In 2004, Luo Xixi, a young Ph.D. student at Beihang University, in Beijing, tried to say no when her adviser asked her to drive with him to his sister’s apartment. But the adviser, a forty-five-year-old professor named Chen Xiaowu, who was a prominent academic and the managing director of the China Computer Federation, an organization of academics and experts, insisted. He wanted her to tend to his sister’s houseplants while she was away, Luo said, because it was a task that “women should be intuitively good at.” Once they got to the apartment, however, Chen locked the door and told Luo that he and his wife were incompatible in bed, because his wife was “too conservative.” He lunged at Luo, who pleaded with him to stop, and relented only when she said, through tears, that she was a virgin. Luo said that he told her that he had been testing her “moral conduct,” and warned her not to mention the incident to anyone.
Inspired by the #MeToo movement in the United States, where Luo now lives, she wrote a detailed account of her experience in an open letter that she posted under that hashtag earlier this month on Weibo, the popular Chinese social-media platform. Within a day, it received three million hits. Last fall, after allegations of abuse surfaced against Harvey Weinstein, a whisper network had formed in chat rooms on Chinese social media, where female students had anonymously put forth complaints of sexual harassment and assault against Chen. Reading those posts gave Luo the courage to go public, she wrote. Her letter drew the most attention, likely because it was signed. Several of Chen’s other former students then went on the record with their own allegations. He denied any wrongdoing, but, two weeks ago, the university reportedly dismissed him from his posts.
In the United States, the public conversation about harassment has provided catharsis, but it has also revealed the pain of disclosure. The long-delayed litany of allegations has shown that women often fear losing their financial stability, their professional standing, and what some may perceive to be the respect of their peers as much as they fear their predators. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the investigations is not the abuse itself, which, in some cases, was long suspected, but the structures that a powerful man may erect to protect himself even as he ritualizes the abuse.
In China, where a far more determined sense of patriarchy and hierarchical order exists, that structure can reach considerably higher. “In China, if you are a Ph.D. student, it’s difficult to overstate how much your supervisor determines your fate,” a Chinese feminist activist named Liang Xiaowen, who is now attending law school in the United States, told me. “Deference to authority is paramount to your survival as a student.” Since last fall, thousands of students and alumni have written letters to some thirty universities across China, calling for the institution of firm policies regarding harassment, and Liang made the same demand in an open letter she wrote to her alma mater, the South China University of Technology. Even the official language used to describe sexual harassment, she noted, hints at moral equivocation. “They don’t call it ‘harassment’ or ‘assault’ on school documents,” Liang said. “In Chinese, the term is ‘inappropriate teacher-student relations,’ as if to suggest that the inappropriateness could be the fault of both parties. In the abstract, people are saying it is wrong, but perpetrators are not really harmed.”
Last year, after the Weinstein story broke, the state-run China Daily published an online piece stating that the virtues of Chinese culture insured a comparatively low incidence of sexual harassment. The piece met with a backlash on social media, decrying the falsity of the claim. (A survey conducted in 2017 by the Guangzhou Gender and Sexuality Education Center and the law firm Beijing Impact found that nearly seventy per cent of Chinese university students had experienced sexual harassment.) But its publication suggests a narrative that the government has a vested interest in selling to the public. “The Chinese government has become much more sophisticated in propaganda than it used to be, but it needs to project a certain image,” Leta Hong Fincher, the author of a forthcoming book, “Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China,” told me. Women’s-rights groups are treated with hostility by the government, which tends to cast them as agents of Western interference.
When I spoke to Fincher, who lives in New York, she pointed out that feminist activism represents a real threat to the Chinese government, which, above all else, is concerned with maintaining social stability, to safeguard its own political legitimacy. Collective action taken on behalf of any cause is reason enough for suspicion and, sometimes, a criminal charge of subversion. “The fact that #MeToo spread so quickly in such a short period of time shows that the message of feminism has broad appeal, and that it resonates with ordinary people,” Fincher said. “Since the democracy movement of 1989, when was the last time that there was any sort of collective action across so many provinces?”
Like women in this country, women in China are grappling with how to convert the momentum of a fledgling protest into concrete action. But, unlike this country, China lacks a clear definition of sexual harassment. (A law passed in 2005 banned workplace harassment, but any concrete sense of what harassment means was left too vague for implementation to be truly effective.) In the workplace as well as in schools, there are no standardized guidelines on how to handle sexual assault. On social media, phrases like “anti-sexual harassment” have been erased, and online petitions are intermittently deleted. The use of the “MeToo China” hashtag has also been blocked, forcing members to use creative homonyms, in order to evade censors.
At the moment, the movement is primarily composed of young, educated women, living in cities or abroad. For every woman who has come forward many more remain in the shadows. Not long ago, I spoke to a Chinese woman in her mid-sixties who did not know what to make of #MeToo. Like many people of her generation, she still faithfully reads the Chinese state media and finds much of what is happening among the younger generations baffling. The woman, who has lived in New York since the nineteen-nineties, had counted herself as a member of China’s privileged class (her parents were cadre leaders during Mao’s revolutionary years), but she told me about an incident that she was still hesitant to discuss, decades after it occurred. When she was sixteen and living in Nanjing, she had a charismatic Chinese teacher who took a liking to her. “He made me the class monitor,” she said, and her classmates teased her about being the teacher’s pet.
Then, one day after school, as she was erasing the chalkboard—the duty of a class monitor—in the empty classroom, the teacher grabbed her hand. “I didn’t know what to do. I ran from the classroom,” she said, but she remembered an inexplicable feeling of guilt, as if she had forgotten the lines of a play that she had been assigned to perform. The teacher never mentioned the incident to her, but for the rest of the year he no longer praised her essays in class, as he used to. She told no one, not even family members, what had happened. “It seemed like something I dreamt up,” she said. “But what I think of most is what a classmate said to me, sometime after we graduated. She told me that, for a while, I was the envy of the class for being the teacher’s undisputed favorite. She said, ‘We all thought it was unfair that you alone were so well-liked by the teacher.’ ” The friend laughed and added, “You were so lucky.”
