News Media and the Feminist Movement in China: A Brief History
In 2005, the commentary section of Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报), then one of China’s most prominent liberal newspapers, published a column criticising the anti–sexual harassment legislation introduced as part of amendments to the Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests as unnecessary (Da Shi 2005). About the same time, the paper ran a commentary asserting that the practice of higher admission thresholds for female students at Peking University was ‘not gender discrimination’ (Yan 2005). That same year, a global feminist initiative to nominate ‘1,000 Women for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize’ was framed by some market-oriented Chinese media outlets as a ‘suspected scam’ (Shen 2005).
Twenty years ago, few journalists or readers could have anticipated the seismic shifts in Chinese journalism we see today. The once-dominant high-profile male journalists and opinion leaders have largely faded from the scene, while women now make up more than half of the journalistic workforce in China. Reporting on gender-based violence has become mainstream, and young women have emerged as the benchmark for journalism’s public role measured in terms of serving both ‘the public interest’ and ‘the interest of the public’. Meanwhile, media outlets frequently find themselves at the centre of public controversies over their stance on gender equality and women’s rights. The evolving relationship between feminism and the media stems not only from generational differences in feminist movements and their interactions with the state, but also from the profound influence of feminist movements on audiences and the journalistic community.
An Earlier Generation of Feminist Activists
In 2004, I co-founded a journalist group in Guangzhou that aimed to challenge the blind spots or even hostile attitudes of the journalist community towards women’s rights issues and to enhance the visibility of gender-related topics. This initiative emerged as a follow-up to the ‘Media and Gender’ workshop organised by Sun Yat-sen University Professor Ai Xiaoming in collaboration with the British Council.
From that point, my colleagues and I took on the work of transforming the media and journalist communities, eventually developing this group into a feminist nongovernmental organisation (NGO) called Women Awakening Network (WAN, 新媒体女性网络, also known as New Media Women Network). The organisation operated until 2022, when it was forced to close under police pressure. What compelled me to act—beyond the inspiration of Ai Xiaoming’s call to our generation of Guangzhou feminists, who grew up in the reform era—was the state of the Chinese press at the time: a market-oriented liberal media that supported civil rights and social movements in the country but nevertheless often adopted a reactionary stance towards the feminist movement.
China’s market-oriented liberal media has historically been closely connected with social movements. Buoyed by coverage of landmark events such as the 2003 Sun Zhigang incident, in which a migrant worker died in detention due to police brutality (Froissart 2022), and the Nu River hydropower controversy (Magee and McDonald 2006), liberal-leaning commercial outlets emerged as a critical infrastructure for social movements in China. Journalists actively engaged with rights-based social movements, playing a key role in facilitating public scrutiny of policy decisions and contributing to the process of deliberating on public policies (Lin and Zhao 2008; Zeng and Huang 2013, 2015).
However, the examples at the beginning of this essay reveal that the reformist vision of market-driven media failed to incorporate women’s rights and gender equality. This exclusion stems mainly from the neoliberal tendencies inherent in much of Chinese liberalism, which dismiss gender equality as part of a failed communist agenda. Beyond the hostility or indifference towards feminism among the public intellectuals involved in market-driven media (Li 2021: 157), this dynamic was also shaped by the activism model of an earlier generation of women’s NGOs, most of which were founded in the 1980s and then flourished in the wake of the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. Noted in the West as where then-US First Lady Hillary Clinton proclaimed ‘women’s rights are human rights’, the conference is generally regarded as a watershed moment for the resurgence of Chinese civil society after the frosty years that followed the 1989 crackdown.
I frame this type of activism model through the lens of transactional activism (Petrova and Tarrow 2007; Li and Li 2017). Operating under the constraints of an authoritarian government, these NGOs often rely on their members’ insider positions within government institutions for political cover and to push for policy change. In so doing, they consciously ‘depoliticise’ their efforts, forgoing public mobilisation to engage with policymakers or government entities—typically local governments or the Women’s Federation—as subject-area experts. Their approach centres on problem-solving social actions, with decision-makers as their primary targets of mobilisation. This strategy also explains why women’s NGOs in China had been able to operate within a relatively safe zone until 2015, when a group of young activists known as the ‘Feminist Five’ were arrested.
Established women’s NGOs tend to collaborate with official media, which is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party or government agencies, and believe such partnerships are safer and more conducive to their work. However, this approach poses significant constraints. To motivate officials to support them and their causes, these NGOs expect the media to provide favourable coverage of the effectiveness of their projects and the support provided by the authorities; they also prefer journalists to avoid controversial topics and negative news and focus instead on government achievements and policy promotion.
To secure government cooperation and maintain their roles as advisors and experts within the system, these feminist activists often remain behind the scenes when publicising their achievements, downplaying their contribution. This is in line with the government’s own communication preferences, which favour ‘positive reporting’. This entails attributing project successes to the correct decisions of relevant leaders, avoiding any information that could disrupt relationships between collaborating government departments or threaten social stability—such as exposing serious societal problems.
While these demands often conflict with the objectives of market-driven media, which favours newsworthy and attention-grabbing stories, they align with the priorities of state-affiliated media. These priorities include eliciting directives from leaders, creating top-down pressure or motivation within the system rather than relying on public scrutiny, securing legal and policy changes, and scaling experimental projects to broader implementation (Li 2014). To achieve these aims, these NGOs also often avoid using explicitly feminist language altogether. Taken together, these factors make it difficult for the work and ideas of these groups to reach a broader audience, such as the one to which market-driven media caters.
Guangzhou Feminism
While this older generation of feminist activists primarily operates in Beijing and northern provincial capitals, starting in the early 2000s, they were matched by a new generation of feminist activists most of whom were based on the southern coast, especially in Guangzhou. It is not a coincidence that this is where the most successful market-oriented media outlets were once concentrated.
During the ‘golden age’ of Chinese newspapers from the early 2000s until Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2013, Guangzhou’s two leading market-driven dailies, Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报) and Guangzhou Daily (广州日报), dominated the profitability rankings for evening and metropolitan papers nationwide. Intense competition between these outlets and the city’s relatively open local political climate fostered a strong tradition of ‘supervision by public opinion’ (舆论监督). This ethos, particularly after the high-profile Sun Zhigang case in 2003, helped establish watchdog journalism as a defining feature of the national media landscape. In this environment, a new model of feminist activism began to emerge.
In 2003, the Gender Education Forum was established at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University under the leadership of Ai Xiaoming. It launched its namesake website, which featured sections such as ‘Women’s Rights Advocacy’ (妇女维权行动) and ‘Southern Media Watch’ (南方媒体观察). A year later, WAN was founded as part of a broader feminist agenda to reshape southern media through a feminist lens (Zheng 2018; Wang 2018).
Although both the generation shaped by the 1995 World Conference on Women and Guangzhou’s feminist community have included feminist critiques of the media in their activism, there is a key difference: Guangzhou’s feminist network has been deeply intertwined with market-driven, liberal media circles since its inception. Unlike the World Conference generation, Guangzhou feminists were not affiliated with the Women’s Federation nor initially positioned as ‘experts on women’s work’ within the government. Their efforts were not aimed at advising the state but rather at shaping public opinion and influencing the media directly.
Ai Xiaoming pioneered the Guangzhou feminist community’s distinctive approach of actively engaging with public concerns through the media. By employing diverse mediums such as theatre, documentaries, journalism, lectures, and exhibitions to address gender issues, the community became a vital force in creating feminist space and producing public knowledge within Guangzhou’s dynamic civil society. This active knowledge production is a defining characteristic of the city’s feminist movement.
Among the most notable examples of this type of engagement were interventions in cases like the Huang Jing date-rape case; the Taishi Village (太石村) incident, in which residents of a suburban village in Guangzhou attempted to remove corrupt village committee officials, leading to a government crackdown; the HIV/AIDS crisis caused by the blood trade in Henan Province; and advocacy for victims of unsafe cosmetic implants as well as workplace and campus sexual harassment. Guangzhou feminists consistently sought to leverage public spaces and collaborated closely with the media during critical public incidents, using these opportunities to advocate for feminist demands and intervene in individual cases.
During Guangzhou’s International Women’s Day Centennial Commemoration events in 2010, one standout initiative was a flash mob at a metro station where students protested cosmetic surgery advertisements promoting unhealthy beauty standards and unsafe medical procedures (New Express 2010). This action garnered extensive positive coverage from local newspapers, highlighting the potential of the market-oriented media environment to support feminist advocacy. The success later inspired the organisers of the ‘Young Feminist Action’ training camps, at which Guangzhou organisers were invited to share their experiences and strategies with emerging feminist action groups.
Feminists in Guangzhou established a feminist public sphere rooted in physical spaces and the media environment. Local media became increasingly familiar with and supportive of feminist ideas, and it was common practice for Guangzhou’s media outlets to report on local governance and policy deliberations. Coupled with relatively relaxed social controls at the time, these factors made Guangzhou the ideal starting point for a series of high-profile campaigns in the early 2010s.
The Media’s Darling
In 2012, a younger generation of feminist activists born in the 1990s entered the media spotlight under the banners of ‘youth participation’ (青年参与) and ‘public welfare action’ (公益行动). From the ‘Occupy Men’s Restrooms’ campaign, which called for changes in public restroom planning to address the insufficient spaces for women, to the shaved-head protest against the Ministry of Education over male students being admitted to universities with lower scores than female counterparts, these actions enjoyed substantial media support and positive coverage, even garnering public service awards from the media. This favourable coverage was partly rooted in the Guangdong media’s longstanding openness to youth and civic accountability campaigns, which had gained momentum after 2008 around issues such as hepatitis-B discrimination, cultural preservation, and public budget transparency.
It was in Guangzhou that young feminist activists received the most positive official responses to their initiatives. The city’s media outlets amplified their efforts and created a ripple effect, inspiring coverage in outlets beyond the province. This regional support became crucial in sustaining the visibility and influence of young feminists’ actions.
The supportive coverage from market-driven media can largely be attributed to the strategic differences between younger feminist activists and the earlier generation of activists who had emerged from the World Conference on Women. The younger activists relied heavily on ‘news-making’ as a mobilisation tactic—using performance art, strategic litigation, and public information requests to turn gender discrimination issues into media-worthy ‘events’. This approach secured coverage and brought public attention to discriminatory policies and laws, pressuring the state to respond.
The image of the ‘female college student’ aligns well with the commercial interests of the media, making it a group that journalists are eager to cover. Young feminist activists primarily focused on issues such as gender discrimination in urban planning, the workplace, and university admissions—topics that largely fitted within the market-oriented media’s typical framework of moderate accountability. The media supported issues of equal rights that were already affirmed by existing policies and legal frameworks but remained poorly implemented. The government agencies being held accountable were often the relatively weaker ones, such as the Departments of Education, Urban Management, and Human Resources and Social Security.
One notable exception occurred in 2014, when a young woman sued the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Department (Cheng 2021). She claimed that the department had violated the law when responding to her request for information disclosure about custody and education-related issues. She also sought a legal order mandating that the department disclose the requested information. Despite the sensitivities involved in taking on a powerful government agency, this case still received media attention beyond Guangdong. Additionally, the feminist activists’ willingness to ‘show up’ as stakeholders and share their motives and personal stories aligned well with the media’s storytelling needs.
The high point of this wave of youth-led accountability activism came during the 2013 National People’s Congress. Ten female students from the law schools of eight universities across China sent letters to more than 200 delegates and members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, urging action against gender discrimination in college admissions (Wu et al. 2013). Then education minister Yuan Guiren’s response acknowledging the existence of restrictions on female students in special majors and promising that some of these restrictions would be removed in the following year sparked a flurry of media coverage, amplifying their call for change (Wu et al. 2013).
Young feminist activism capitalised on the final glow of market-driven media in China. About 2012, mounting financial pressures began to strain the newspaper industry (Guo 2013). The honeymoon between mainstream commercial media and feminist movements lasted only two to three years. The 2013 ‘New Year Editorial Incident’ at Southern Weekly (南方周末), in which members of the newsroom protested against the Guangdong Provincial Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party for altering their New Year editorial, ultimately sparking nationwide online solidarity, marked the beginning of an era of extreme tightening of press freedom and strict control of public opinion. The liberal Southern Press Group newsroom was placed under the control of propaganda officials, prompting a mass exodus of seasoned reporters from traditional newsrooms. By 2014, Guangdong’s propaganda authorities had banned coverage of feminist street actions and the national security services had blacklisted some influential feminists. In 2016, the Communist Youth League in Guangdong even enlisted scholars to draft legislative proposals aimed at criminalising the ‘deliberate creation and malicious dissemination of news events’ (Private communication).
Yet, 2014 to 2016 also marked a peculiar window of opportunity. Before the Southern Weekly incident, social media platforms such as Sina Weibo had already become spaces where news and social movements interacted and resonated with each other. However, the subsequent purge and censorship of the newspaper industry drove journalists to shift to new internet-based news production platforms, especially mobile news apps. At the time, these commercial platforms offered double the salaries and benefits, along with the promise of faster and broader possibilities enabled by new technology. As traditional print journalists migrated to the internet, the burgeoning online news landscape—vast yet understaffed and, at the time, not strictly barred from publishing original content—created a demand for content producers outside the conventional media ecosystem.
When traditional media faced increasingly strict censorship, news apps and Weibo, enabled by smartphones and mobile internet, offered a more flexible space for expression. During this period, WAN produced a series of reports and commentaries that sparked nationwide media follow-up, achieved through collaborations with the content production teams of major internet portals such as Netease (网易) and Phoenix News (凤凰网). Notable examples include the exclusive coverage of the sexual harassment incident involving an archaeology professor at Xiamen University (Li and Luo 2014; Li and Hua 2014), and the Gao Yanmin case, in which a woman who was trafficked to a remote village was promoted by the local government as a moral role model because of her involvement in rural education. The former incident prompted the Ministry of Education to issue its first-ever anti–sexual harassment directive, while the latter raised public awareness about and advocacy for legal reforms addressing the trafficking of women. Similarly, during the advocacy for China’s first domestic violence law in 2014 and 2015, we at WAN partnered with nearly all major news portals to host roundtable discussions and expert Q&A sessions, using these platforms to inform the public about women’s organisations’ legislative proposals.
A Shifting Demographic
In 2016, state media outlets were compelled to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party leadership, with President Xi suggesting ‘the media must bear the party’s surname’ (Associated Press 2016). This move underscored a tightening grip on journalistic institutions, particularly traditional media outlets, under the Chinese Government’s propaganda apparatus. The shift diminished the media’s capacity to resist censorship. Investigative reporting on corruption and judicial injustice—hallmarks of watchdog journalism—suffered a significant decline as some seasoned journalists in these areas were purged from the industry.
About the same time, the crackdown on feminist activism that had begun in 2014 with reporting bans and the blacklisting of some feminists became routine. The 2017 Foreign NGO Law further intensified these pressures and cut off key funding sources for feminist advocacy groups. As a result, the feminist movement shifted from organised actions to a dual form of ‘networked’ activism, transitioning from formal organisations to informal networks and substituting online advocacy for traditional on-the-ground efforts.
The social media void created by the crackdown on civil rights movements and public intellectuals was quickly filled by young women. In 2016, the ‘Reject Girls’ Day, Celebrate Women’s Day’ (反三七, 过三八) online campaign, spearheaded by WAN, unexpectedly drew widespread participation from strangers across the internet (Wang and Driscoll 2019). That same year, the assault of a young woman who fell victim to unprovoked violence at a hotel in Beijing, widely known as the ‘Wanwan Incident’ (弯弯事件), generated enormous online attention, to the point that it was flagged in user reports on Weibo for its overwhelming traffic (Fan 2016).
Young women influenced by the feminist movement have become the dominant demographic on social media, shaping the trajectory of journalism at a time when its watchdog function has already been severely weakened. The 2018 ‘Tang Lanlan incident’ (汤兰兰事件) is a telling example. The case involved the sexual assault of a young girl by multiple perpetrators more than a decade earlier. Individuals who by then had completed their sentences were calling for the case to be retried, claiming they had been wrongfully convicted due to brutal coercive interrogations. News outlets predominantly framed the case as a miscarriage of justice, which triggered significant backlash among female audiences on social media. The controversy revealed how female-driven public opinion prioritises issues of sexual violence while demonstrating less understanding or concern for one of traditional investigative journalism’s core themes—procedural justice (Xiao 2018).
Operators of some media platforms have told me that more than 70 per cent of their readers are women. This demographic shift helps explain why, even as feminist and LGBTQI+ accounts are routinely censored on social media, topics such as women’s marital property rights, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and the relatively ‘less politically sensitive’ activism of the veteran feminist generation are receiving increasing attention in Chinese media.
As journalism in China continues its decline, the profession faces two contrasting trends: a shrinking pool of reporters, particularly younger ones, and a growing proportion of women in the field—now exceeding half of the media workforce (All-China Journalists Association 2022; Shi 2022). This figure does not even account for the non-fiction platforms that lack formal news-gathering and editing credentials, where women dominate many of the fragile yet determined outlets still committed to in-depth reporting.
This generational and gender shift can be traced to structural changes in the media industry. Once the state reined in previously market-driven and semi-autonomous news organisations, journalism lost its appeal as a profession that offered high salaries, a sense of personal heroism, and individual acclaim. At the same time, the boom in internet startups absorbed many male journalists as they left the newsroom for other business ventures. Another factor is the sensitivity of commercial non-fiction platforms to audience markets. Female journalists, inspired by feminist activism, are often more motivated and better equipped to produce content that resonates with women audiences—a demographic increasingly central to these platforms’ survival.
#MeToo and Its Aftermath
During the #MeToo movement that swept China between late 2017 and 2018, as mainstream news organisations reverted to their role as state mouthpieces, they also often failed to cover feminist online collective actions or ‘politically sensitive’ sexual harassment cases. More troublingly, after losing their mass readership and respectable market revenues, some official media outlets went so far as to aid information manipulation in favour of e-commerce mogul Richard Liu during his lawsuit in the United States, attacking the survivor of his alleged sexual assault in Minnesota (Li 2023).
In contrast, the outlets supporting survivors and promoting accountability were largely alternative media and non-fiction platforms that lack formal press credentials. One journalist told me she ‘saw every journalist I know’ at a public rally ahead of a #MeToo case hearing: female reporters, inspired by the movement, showed up as chroniclers of this pivotal moment. Despite the suffocating censorship, some room for discussion of feminist issues and action remains compared with other more sensitive topics. This allows journalists covering feminism in China to maintain a sense of professional autonomy and accomplishment, motivating them to continue writing and reporting.
In an increasingly constrained media environment, reporting driven by women journalists and catering to predominantly female audiences continues to uphold journalism’s watchdog role. One example is People (人物) magazine and its online platform, whose readers and reporters are essentially all women. At the onset of Covid-19, the magazine highlighted the stories of female healthcare workers, addressing social media users’ demand to ‘make women workers visible’. These narratives not only resonated with a growing female user base but also subtly revealed critical public information about the early days of the pandemic. One such report about Ai Fen, the emergency room director who was among the earliest to disclose the outbreak and was later reprimanded by the police, even became a meme for internet users resisting censorship during the crisis, showcasing the enduring power of storytelling in challenging authoritarian constraints (Kuo 2020).
In the mass murder incident in Zhuhai in November 2024, when a motorist rammed his vehicle into an unsuspecting crowd, killing dozens (Ng et al. 2024), I witnessed in a social group for women journalists how they encouraged each other to go to the scene and seek out the truth. The moment of sisterhood marked a stark contrast with the so-called golden age of journalism more than a decade ago, when the organisers and opinion leaders within the journalist community were exclusively male.
During the Zhuhai incident, independent female journalists provided the earliest on-the-ground reporting. I would like to close this essay with a comment that a woman journalist posted on WeChat in response to the Zhuhai report: ‘Don’t let the authorities define what it means to do journalism, nor institutions or leaders … We determine for ourselves how to honour our professional training.’ The feminist movement’s journey to reach the public has been a long and deliberate effort. The younger generation it has nurtured will play a crucial role in sustaining the resilience of journalism, ensuring the public’s right to be informed even in the face of harsh censorship.
Feautured Image: Woman, Source: Canvas Blank (CC), Flickr.com
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