'We have new women but no new men': feminist evolution unfinished in China, scholar says
In this file photo taken on Dec. 2, 2020, Zhou Xiaoxuan, front, a feminist figure who rose to prominence during China's #MeToo movement two years ago, stands amongst her supporters as she arrives at the Haidian District People's Court in Beijing, in a sexual harassment case against one of China's best-known television hosts. China's #MeToo movement has stumbled in the face of swift internet censors, a patriarchal society and a legal system that places a heavy burden on the claimant. AFP-Yonhap
More than a century ago, the world of Chinese women was a private one. Bound by a rigid patriarchal order and Confucian codes of propriety, hierarchy and submission, they were confined to the inner chambers of the home to be virtuous wives, self-sacrificing mothers and dutiful daughters, while men ruled the outer world.
That began to change in the May Fourth era early in the 20th century, which marked a period of unprecedented intellectual and cultural awakening in modern China.
Reformers sought to abandon "man-eating ethics" — a denunciation of oppressive moral codes drawn from Lu Xun's 1918 story "Diary of a Madman" — and the weight of traditional culture, and embraced Western-inspired concepts such as science, democracy and individual freedom.
For women, the transformation was equally revolutionary. Women activists and reformers — inspired by Western first-wave feminism centred on suffrage, education and legal rights — launched a transformative wave that challenged the gender stratification of Chinese society and advocated women's emancipation in an open and systematic fashion.
The modernisation of China over the past century could, in many ways, be read as the modernisation of its women, said Wang Zheng, professor emerita of women's and gender studies and history at the University of Michigan.
Many women redefined their roles as educated professionals, gained economic independence from men and became increasingly active in political and public life.
Women have long since said goodbye to their assigned and enforced domestic seclusion in premodern times, acquiring a new understanding of and expectations for their lives, according to Wang.
But the historian, who specialises in the history of China's feminist movement, said that a century after the pioneers' efforts, the revolution remained unfinished in China, with women's "newly shaped subjectivities" unmatched by men, who remained bound to traditional expectations of success and authority.
"We now have new women," Wang said, speaking on the sidelines of a series of seminars during her visit to Hong Kong in mid-October. "But no new men."
"The birth of the new woman is a revolution of the heart and mind. As women's material lives have changed, so too have their inner worlds ... But without the emergence of the new man in the 21st century, the liberation of women will remain incomplete."
Her remarks came a few days after China held the global women's summit in Beijing on Oct. 13-14 to mark the 30th anniversary of the groundbreaking United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
While China has made significant progress in women's rights, laws and social attitudes to promote gender equality, feminist activism has been the subject of sweeping crackdowns, feminist voices are often stigmatised or censored, gender-based violence persists and women's political representation has stagnated.
Authorities continue to promote traditional family values, urging women to marry and bear children amid a demographic crisis.
The "new man" would be willing to "relinquish gender privilege", treat women as equal human beings with dignity, and reflect on the harms of patriarchal values and join new women in breaking hierarchies, Wang said.
She argued that there was a widening gap in "gendered subjectivity" — the ways in which men and women perceive their identities and roles in society — in China today despite the advances.
This was the "real issue" beneath the growing conflict between men and women in China, and it also contributed to the declining marriage rate, the 73-year-old said.
While "new women" were no longer confined to traditional gender roles, conventional expectations persisted among men, and a stagnant gender discourse continued to objectify women, denying them dignity and agency, she said.
"Hegemonic masculinity still defines male success in terms of power, wealth and access to women, forming the dominant template of manhood, much as it did over a century ago," Wang said.
Many young men today, facing low employment rates and the pressures of consumerist values, increasingly found these ideals unattainable, leading to deep frustration that could manifest as anger and misogyny, a trend that was increasingly visible in voices online, she said.
Despite growing public awareness of gender issues, the topic has become increasingly sensitive in China in recent years. Open advocacy of feminism and the rights of sexual minorities has been suppressed under a strict government radar, and online debates around gender-related topics are highly polarised.
Authorities and state media often frame feminist discussions they deem radical or unacceptable as "extreme feminism", "gender antagonism" or even linking feminists to "hostile foreign forces" as destabilising factors.
Discussion on TV programmes, talk shows, news and video games - with topics that range from sexual harassment and gender-based violence to claims of women as "gold-diggers" — often portray broad feminist criticism of misogynistic mainstream culture, while many men push back, calling it "man-hating" and "gender antagonism".
In recent decades, Beijing has become alert to feminism's mobilising power, as shown in earlier street protests by feminist activists, the vibrant growth of women's rights NGOs, the #MeToo movement ignited in 2018, and waves of public outcry sparked by cases such as the chained woman incident and the so-called MaskPark scandal.
In 2022, a viral video showing a mentally ill woman chained in a rural shed sparked one of China's biggest online outpourings in years. The woman, later identified as "Xiaohuamei", or "little plum blossom", had given birth to eight children. The father of the children was later sentenced to nine years in prison for abuse and illegal detention.
More recently, in July, public outrage erupted after it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of Chinese men were involved in groups for sharing non-consensual and explicit photos of women, including their relatives and partners. The scandal drew comparisons to South Korea's Nth Room case.
The 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing prompted remarkable growth in the number of feminist NGOs in China — once seen as government partners in social advancement — before Beijing largely cracked down on those organisations.
The crackdown was a result of mounting suspicion in Beijing that Western governments and institutions were intentionally advocating ideas of social equality, such as feminism and minority rights, within China to provoke social turmoil and potentially trigger a "colour revolution" — Beijing's language for the transformation of a political system, usually pushed by widespread demonstrations.
Portraying issues such as delayed marriage, childlessness, reproductive harm to women or opposition to traditional family norms is seen as harmful to addressing China's demographic challenges.
Even under tightening control and backlash, feminist consciousness among women has only grown stronger. Female voices have grown louder — in literature, film, comedy and social media — to challenge everyday sexism and gender stereotypes, winning applause. Digital platforms have become vital arenas for expression and solidarity.
These voices reflect real, measurable progress in women's rights and social standing in China.
In a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the summit last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping praised the "historic achievements" of women's rights and gender equality in China. He highlighted the dramatic drop in maternal mortality rates, gains in reducing poverty for women and the growing role of women in economic and social life over the past 30 years.
According to Wang Zheng, Xi's speech at the summit explicitly referred to xingbie pingdeng, or gender equality — a concept only translated into Chinese around the 1995 conference by Wang herself and a group of scholars — showing that the government has embraced the modern feminist discourse inserted into Chinese discourse.
She said that before the term was introduced, the most frequent expression in China was nannu pingdeng, or equality between men and women, a Chinese rendering for "sexual equality" that had been used since the turn of the 20th century and appeared more than half a century before feminist theorisation of "gender."
China increasingly positioned itself as a leader in global women's rights initiatives, transitioning from a recipient of international aid to a host and key contributor shaping discussion around gender equality, claiming a moral high ground, said Wang, who took part in the parallel NGO forum of the 1995 conference.
Hegemonic masculinity still defines male success in terms of power, wealth and access to women, forming the dominant template of manhood, much as it did over a century ago.
Wang Zheng, professor emerita of women's and gender studies and history at the University of Michigan
Critics, however, argued that this year's summit, compared with the 1995 gathering, was more of a platform for major-power diplomacy, with grass-roots feminist representation all but absent.
In China's elite political circle, there have been no women sitting on the Politburo since 2022 — an imbalance not seen for two decades.
Wang pointed to three major Chinese feminist organised activities since 1995: nationwide anti-domestic violence efforts; a gender and development network promoting the social and economic development of women in poverty-stricken areas; and the promotion of women's and gender studies as an academic discipline in higher education, which she had worked on.
In 2016, the government enacted China's first national Anti-Domestic Violence Law, although implementation on the ground has been patchy.
Although the space for grass-roots women's organisations in China had been drastically cut, Wang said, the passage of the Anti-Domestic Violence Law and the inclusion of anti-sexual harassment in the civil code — the results of more than two decades of collective efforts by both institutional and grass-roots feminists — exemplified China's achievements in promoting gender equality and "gender mainstreaming" in the official system. Gender mainstreaming is a strategy to integrate a gender perspective to improve the quality and efficiency of public policies, programmes and projects.
Wang said the emergence of so-called new men would be much more difficult than the emancipation of women.
"Women's emancipation aligns with our own interests - we gain from it ... as women were the deprived group in the traditional Confucian hierarchy of male superiority and female inferiority. But for men, it is not about gaining more benefits, but about consciously realizing the harms of male privileges and willingly giving them up," she said.
She noted that few men in China today prepared for this, despite there being more feminist-minded young men.
"We are still far from achieving a critical mass [of the new man], so the path to women's emancipation in China remains long and arduous."
Born in 1952 in Shanghai and raised during the Mao era, Wang went to the U.S. in the 1980s, where she initially studied American women's history before focusing on Chinese women's history.
For her book Women in the Chinese Enlightenment — which tells the life stories of five Chinese women activists born just after the turn of the last century - she uncovered a long-overlooked history of Chinese May Fourth feminism.
That history disrupts the Communist Party's official claim of being "the saviour of Chinese women" and reveals that those educated women in the 1910s and 1920s had been actively seeking self-liberation.
Her original work was completed in 1995 and a Chinese revised edition was published this year.
"I wouldn't describe the women's movement in China as being 'at a low ebb'. Rather, the modes of action have shifted," the academic activist said, noting that many practices had moved online or into everyday life.
"It's not that only performative actions or street protests count as feminist activism ... More often, feminist actions happen through practices in the routines of everyday life."
Setbacks and challenges were just part of a process where downturns and upswings coexisted, and feminism was no exception, she added.
"History repeats in this way. Progress comes with setbacks as conservative forces push back, and no social reform ever moves forward smoothly.
"My advice to young people: learning from history empowers you, and only by strengthening ourselves can our actions gain real force."
Read the article at SCMP.