China’s feminists protest against wave of online abuse with ‘internet violence museum’

Late last month, an “unknown hill in the Chinese desert” was blanketed in scores of large red and white banners, flapping vitriol in the breeze. “I hope you die, bitch,” said one. “Little bitch, screw the feminists,” said others.

They were all actual messages sent to women, a direct act of harassment anonymised by social media. They were sent during weeks of intense debate about the treatment of women on platforms such as Weibo, sparked by the abuse of Xiao Meili who posted video of a man who threw hot liquid at her after she asked him to stop smoking.

Some artists and activists established a temporary physical "Internet Violence Museum" to show how online violence on the Internet in China brutally attacked feminists. This project responded to the recent persecution of feminists by nationalist trolls and major online platforms. pic.twitter.com/PbNVbtH98a

— FreeChineseFeminists (@FeministChina) May 9, 2021

After collecting more than 1,000 of the abusive messages posted to feminists and feminist groups, a group of young women artists stuck them on a hill, creating a temporary “internet violence museum”.

“When the Xiao Meili incident happened, a lot of feminists were being trolled, including myself,” said one of the artists, Yaqing, who did not want to use her real name. “We wanted to make the trolling words into something that could be seen, touched, to materialise the trolling comments and to amplify the abuse of what happens to people online.”

Much of the abuse has been driven by a growing nationalistic fervour, with people criticising or drawing attention to China’s human rights issues becoming targets of major online pile-ons, or worse.

Some women who have put themselves in the public eye to draw attention to human rights issues like the abuses in Xinjiang have been targeted with faked nude photographs, threats, accusations of being traitors, separatists, and paid actors, and harassment of family members. The attacks have come from regular citizens online as well as government officials and state media.

“I was lynched in the Chinese media,” Chinese-Australian researcher Vicky Xu told Australian TV’s Q&A program in April. “Along with a lot of my peers who study Xinjiang.”

Xu said a report she produced with colleagues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which implicated more than 80 international brands in forced labour, prompted the Chinese government to “go on the offensive”.

She became a trending topic on Weibo, with one story clicked on more than 9.2m times, calling her a demon and a race traitor. In an article headlined “Bewitched Vicky Xu who fabricates Xinjiang story stokes anti-China sentiment in Australia: observer”, state media tabloid the Global Times said Xu was endangering Chinese people in Australia.

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Fake nude images of Xu have circulated online, her past relationships doxxed and dissected to slut-shame her, and her family and contacts in China harassed, detained and interrogated – an accusation echoed by most of the women the Guardian spoke to for this article.

A WeChat post that published some of the more offensive claims about Xu later published another hit piece on Australian broadcaster Cheng Lei and Chinese journalists Haze Fan, who have been detained in China over undefined national security suspicions.

“Every time nationalistic sentiment runs high, a woman is cyberbullied, from Fang Fang to Tzu-i Chuang, from Vicky Xu to Xiao Meili,” said journalist Shen Lu on Twitter. “Ethnic Chinese women are seen as the state’s property; whenever they’re deemed to have strayed from patriarchal values, they are damned.”

Every time nationalistic sentiment runs high, a woman is cyberbullied, from Fang Fang to Tzu-i Chuang, from Vicky Xu to Xiao Meili. Ethnic Chinese women are seen as theState’s property; whenever they’re deemed to have strayed from patriarchal values, they are damned. https://t.co/cwlRolETQU

— Shen Lu (@shenlulushen) April 9, 2021

In response to the waves of harassment against feminists who defended Xiao, Weibo shut down an estimated 20 or so accounts – all owned by the victims. Sina Weibo said the pages were shut down for publishing “illegal and harmful information”. At least one of the women is suing.

Driven by state media

A study by Taiwan research group, Doublethink Labs, tracked online attacks on Chuang Tzu-i, the wife of the former US consul general in Chengdu. It found it was largely driven by reports in state media such as the Global Times which were picked up by other government-controlled outlets in subsequent days, and “amplified the focus of patriotic Weibo users and key influencers”.

The organisation said they found two main motivations behind influential accounts fanning the pile-ons: profit and ideology. “You see the state actors targeting a specific incident or narrative that could help to spread their nationalistic ideology”.

A sociologist professor at Fudan university, who declined to be named, said it was not clear if accounts were targeted or shutdown under official direction or not, but “it is clear there are no social platforms in China that are friendly to women and women’s rights issues”.

He said the politically tinged targeting was related both to rapid changes in China’s online environment and the growing commerciality of Chinese media’s need for traffic.

On the receiving end the motivation matters little. Many women the Guardian spoke to declined to go on the record, for fear of retaliation or escalation of the online abuse. One said the attacks on her appeared coordinated, or at least driven by a particular set of individuals with large online presences, who quickly organised to target her family and friends as well.

Xu is choosing to draw strength from it.

“Before this saga, I think few on Weibo spent much time thinking about Uyghurs or forced labour,” she said in April. “I’m receiving this much hate because people were feeling righteous – imagine if they had access to more information about the plight of Uyghurs.”

Yaqing said she hoped people saw the artwork and reflected on the treatment of women, and that other women could take some comfort from it. But it took a toll.

“We found almost 1,000 comments and we didn’t use them all. But now looking back, I don’t want to look back at the files. It makes you feel upset and your heart beats really hard.”