A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere [1st ed.] 9783030599683, 9783030599690

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction (Altman Yuzhu Peng)....Pages 1-15
Social Transformation and Digital Cultures in the Post-Reform Era (Altman Yuzhu Peng)....Pages 17-37
The Gendered Nature of China’s Digital Public Sphere (Altman Yuzhu Peng)....Pages 39-62
Pseudo-Feminism and Chinese Digital Influencers (Altman Yuzhu Peng)....Pages 63-82
Debates between Women and Men on Gender Issues (Altman Yuzhu Peng)....Pages 83-103
Stereotyping Women in Powerful Positions (Altman Yuzhu Peng)....Pages 105-123
Conclusion (Altman Yuzhu Peng)....Pages 125-131
Back Matter ....Pages 133-134

Citation preview

A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere

Altman Yuzhu Peng

A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere “A very valuable addition to the literature on China’s vigorous and constantly growing digital public sphere. By bringing in the gender dynamic and engaging with it critically, this book fills a gap in recent scholarship on a vital subject. Strongly recommended.” —Daya Thussu, Professor of International Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong “Benefiting from his professional training as a media and culture researcher and his feminist analytical edge and social conscience, Peng examines the intersection between gender and politics as it is manifested, represented, and reproduced in the Chinese cyberspace. This book is one of the first to study gender construction on the Chinese Internet as an effective lens through which one can get a glimpse at a much larger dynamic field of social reproduction. It offers useful theoretical insight into post-Mao China’s gender culture and politics, backed up with fresh empirical cases ranging from the rise of pseudo-feminism to Internet users’ debate on gender issues and their discursive construction of top female business and political leaders as particular gendered beings.” —Fengshu Liu, Professor of Comparative and International Education, University of Oslo, Norway

Altman Yuzhu Peng

A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere

Altman Yuzhu Peng Media Culture and Heritage Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-59968-3    ISBN 978-3-030-59969-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59969-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

I am so grateful for having the opportunity to write a book on this topic. The book is for my family, friends, and all women and men in the world. As a feminist, I always believe that there should be a true alliance between women and men; together we will overcome gender inequality across the globe in the foreseeable future!

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all my colleagues and friends for your kind help and encouragement. I could never have completed this book without your enormous support. I wish also to express my gratitude to Lianlian Chen, Tong Yao, Xuhui Zhang, and Hannah for their assistance with the data collection. Special thanks go to Camille Davies, Craig Moore, and two anonymous reviewers for their highly constructive feedback. The writing of the book has benefited so much from your insightful comments throughout the production process. I would like to take this opportunity to also thank my parents. Words cannot express how grateful I am for all the sacrifices that you have made on my behalf over the years. You are the best mom and dad in the world. Love you! The book was developed upon my previous works, including Neoliberal feminism, gender relations, and a feminized male ideal in China: a critical discourse analysis of Mimeng’s WeChat posts (online publication date: 13th August 2019) and Alipay adds “beauty filters” to face-scan payments: a form of patriarchal control over women’s bodies (online publication date: 18th June 2020) published in Feminist Media Studies (journal website: https:// www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfms20/current; publisher: Taylor & Francis).

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 An Overview of the Book   1 Feminist Scrutiny of Digital Cultures   4 A Note on Methodology   7 Organisation of the Book  10 References  11 2 Social Transformation and Digital Cultures in the Post-­Reform Era 17 Introduction  17 The Market-Oriented Reform of Chinese Society  18 Improvements and Inequalities  18 The Post-Reform Social Stratification  19 An Overview of Internet Use in Contemporary China  21 The Apolitical Dimension of Chinese Digital Cultures  22 The CCP’s Political Control Over the Internet  24 Participatory Social Media and the Digital Public Sphere  26 Chinese Internet Users’ Digital Civic Engagement  27 Towards an Exploration of the Gender-Politics Axis  29 Conclusion  30 References  31

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3 The Gendered Nature of China’s Digital Public Sphere 39 Introduction  39 A Feminist Cultural Studies Perspective  40 The Revival of Patriarchal Values  41 The Past and the Present of Chinese Women’s Socio-Political Status  41 The Post-Reform Heteronormative Turn of Chinese Womanhood  44 The Ambivalent Gender Power Relations  47 The Shaping of Contemporary Heteronormative Chinese Manhood  48 The Masculine Crisis  49 Approaches to Patriarchal Values in Chinese Digital Cultures  51 A Techno-Feminist Analysis  51 The Limits of Gender  53 Conclusion  57 References  57 4 Pseudo-Feminism and Chinese Digital Influencers 63 Introduction  63 Conceptualising Pseudo-Feminism  64 Pseudo-Feminism in Post-Reform China  66 Case Studies: Mimeng and Ayawawa  67 Targeting Female Chinese Internet Users in Practice  68 Promoting a Contemporary Chinese Male Ideal  73 Conclusion  77 References  78 5 Debates between Women and Men on Gender Issues 83 Introduction  83 The Confusion Created by Pseudo-Feminism  85 Digital Nationalism and Gender-Issue Debates  86 Debates on the ‘Wrongdoing of a Women’s Organisation’ as an Example  88 The Boycott of Women-Focused Digital Influencers and Aversion to Feminism  89 A Nationalist Discourse Distorting the Gender-Issue Debates  93 Conclusion  98 References  99

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6 Stereotyping Women in Powerful Positions105 Introduction 105 Women in Powerful Positions as a Subtype of Women 106 Mingzhu Dong and Angela Merkel as Case Studies 109 Mingzhu Dong as a Female Boss 109 Angela Merkel’s ‘Funny Stories’ 114 Conclusion 118 References 119 7 Conclusion125 Feminist Scrutiny of Chinese Digital Cultures 125 A Note on the Contributions 128 References 129 Index133

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter provides an overview of the entire book by outlining the theoretical approach it adopts to integrate the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere. The chapter also explains the execution of empirical research and discusses the methodological issues associated with the case studies. In this way, it articulates the logic and rationale behind the research design that informs detailed discussions of how the notion of gender intersects with both state and everyday politics in the context of Chinese Internet users’ civic engagement with socio-political affairs on social media platforms. Keywords  China • Digital public sphere • Feminism • Gender-­ politics axis

An Overview of the Book This book assesses the gender-politics axis established in China’s digital public sphere.1 Following Habermas’ (1991) notion of the public sphere and Castells (2009) and van Dijk’s (2006) conceptualisation of the 1  In this book, China refers to Mainland China. In the constitution of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese territory also includes Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. However, these regions are not discussed in this book, because they are subject to different political and

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Y. Peng, A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59969-0_1

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network(ed) society, the digital public sphere describes an abstract venue where Internet users are assembled by their use of digital communication technologies, which provides them with the opportunities to engage with public affairs (Rod and Weidmann 2015). Studies of socio-political trends in the digital public sphere enable us to integrate a wide range of issues associated with imbalanced power relations in our society (van Dijk 2013; Castells 2009). A better understanding of China’s digital public sphere is needed for both academics and the international community, if they are to fully appreciate how issues of identity, liberal values, equality, and diversity shape Chinese society in the digital age (Thussu 2018). In an increasingly globalised world, China has become one of the most important trading partners with Western countries, and cultural trade is a key area of exchange. Given the worldwide reach of digital communication technologies, an enhanced understanding of China’s public cultures on the Internet have the potential to influence a wide range of sectors outside China. Both academics and practitioners in the media, cultural, and the creative industries need to fully account for transnational connections between Chinese people and the world, the cultural exchange of liberal ideas on diversity and equality, and the negotiation of conflicting media, cultural, and Internet policies. Existing studies of China’s digital public sphere have provided relatively comprehensive discussions of how the Chinese government’s political control influences Chinese people’s access to Internet services (Lei 2017; Roberts 2018; King et al. 2017). These studies particularly focus on digital nationalist activist protests against foreign governments in international political and trade disputes (R. Han 2015; Schneider 2018), and political dissident criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)2 domestic governance policies on the Internet (Tong and Zuo 2014). Yet, limited scholarly attention has been paid to the intersection of gender and politics therein (Wallis 2015). This is a major omission because global evidence confirms that politics has always been dominated by men, and thereafter intersected with imbalanced gender power relations (Ross et  al. 2018; Lansdall-Welfare et al. 2016). Reflecting the male-dominance of politics, research shows that there is a wide range of gendered discourses accepted economic governances, and their socio-political trends and people’s everyday use of the Internet are dramatically different from that in the Mainland. 2  The Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP in short, is the political party that has been ruling the Chinese territory since 1949.

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in both China and the West, which promote normative gender norms that require women to adhere to (Baxter 2017; Dolan 2014; Liu 2014). The acceptance of these gendered discourses has led to the rise of patriarchal values and misogynistic voices in the digital public sphere across the whole world (Wallis 2015; Boyle and Rathnayake 2019). Focusing on China as a case study, a handful of studies have discovered how gendered discourses are invoked by both Chinese nationalist activists and political dissidents in debates with their fellow citizens inhabiting the opposite end of the political spectrum (Wallis 2015; Fang and Repnikova 2018). This scholarship reveals the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere, which represents the alignment of misogynist voices, anti-­ feminism campaigns, and political forces. Such an alignment is not only applicable in the Chinese context (Huang 2016) but also reflects a global phenomenon in a recent wave of hostility against feminist scholars and gender studies in Europe, the US, and Latin America (Koulouris 2018; Banet-Weiser 2018). The implications of the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere are grave and wide-ranging. It has greatly influenced how public opinion is expressed by Chinese Internet users (Wallis 2015). Given that the digital public sphere has been utilised by the CCP to test public opinion (Tong and Zuo 2014), this gender-politics axis potentially reshapes China’s policymaking, thereafter influencing the wellbeing of Chinese women and the progress of gender equality in Chinese society. An understanding of the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere also helps us to unfold both the socio-political trends and gender values in the rising power. It ensures that the international community’s perspective on the creative and digital power in China is futuristic, by drawing from a critical appreciation of the intersectionality of politics and gender in China’s cultural and media landscape today. Thus, this book emerges from a feminist perspective and addresses the need for scholarship that facilitates the development of transcultural understandings. This is a much-needed intellectual intervention required to internationalise culture research in the present digital age in which patriarchal values and misogynist voices are on the rise across the globe. Contextualised against this backdrop, the book places the gendered cultural practice of Chinese Internet users at the heart of a ‘connected world approach’ to the male-­ dominance of China’s digital public sphere. In doing so, it scrutinises Chinese Internet users’ digital civic engagement with public affairs, which has prompted recent, intensified discussions about gender equality, gender norms, and the power relations between women and men in the Chinese

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context. It is a hope that this book will contribute to a better understanding of the nexus of gender and politics that matters for both Chinese people and the international community. The outcomes of the book shed light on a feminist cultural studies approach to the digital transformations of patriarchal orders, sexist values, and misogynist voices in China, and their relations to on the outside world.

Feminist Scrutiny of Digital Cultures Today, with the widespread penetration of participatory digital platforms, people can easily contribute to the content circulated on the Internet (boyd 2014). This has a great impact on Internet users’ everyday communications, facilitating the inception of the digital public sphere in which the spread of information is no longer completely controlled by institutions (van Dijk 2006; Castells 2009). An optimistic view suggests that traditional power structures have collapsed in the digital public sphere, which fosters grassroots democracy by providing ordinary citizens with a venue for digital civic engagement (Coleman and Blumler 2009; Jenkins 2006). However, research reveals that freedom of speech in the digital public sphere is suppressed in authoritarian regimes (Rod and Weidmann 2015). In China, for instance, the CCP has controlled the digital public sphere by launching a sophisticated digital censorship system to filter content critical of its policies and by deploying cyber-police forces to monitor political dissidents’ voices on the Internet (W. Chen and Reese 2015). Yet, through a comprehensive analysis of the CCP’s Internet control, King et al. (2013) discovered that its main objective is to prevent mass incidents that target the socio-political infrastructure. Voices not in line with the CCP’s official discourse are sometimes tolerated in China’s digital public sphere as long as they do not challenge the Party-State (King et al. 2013). This, to a certain degree, provides room for Chinese Internet users to discuss political and gender-related topics. While the statistics provided by China’s Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) (2019) show the female-male ratio of Chinese Internet users has gradually become balanced over the years, scrutiny of the gender gap shows that female Chinese Internet users are much less active in digital civic engagement than their men counterparts (Fang and Repnikova 2018). This gender gap provides the grounding for the rise of patriarchal, misogynist voices, which “re-inscribe gender inequality” by placing women in the position of being insulted (Wallis 2015, 235). It is undeniable

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that feminist voices do exist in China’s digital public sphere, given the active use of social media use by Chinese women’s organisations, as well as feminist activists and scholars, such as the Feminist Five and Yinhe Li (X.  Han 2018; Zheng 2015). However, these voices are generally marginalised in mainstream discourses (Huang 2016). Women and femininity are often invoked as a “mythologised label that was deployed by other […] groups to challenge and rebuke [male nationalist users]” in the conflicts between Chinese digital activists possessing differing political views, as evidenced in the so-called “Little Pink” phenomenon in the wake of the 2016 Taiwan general election (Fang and Repnikova 2018, 2164). This neatly demonstrates imbalanced gender power relations in China’s digital public sphere today. From a feminist cultural studies perspective, this book argues that the intersection of gender and politics in China’s digital public sphere is shaped by the on-going male-dominance of China’s socio-economic structures. With the expectation that women become virtuous wives and good mothers, Chinese women have been confined to the domestic sphere throughout history (Marchetti 2009; Evans 2008; Yang 2017). Certainly, these traditional gender norms began to be challenged in the early twentieth century, when socialites returning from the West introduced early feminist ideologies to China’s cities (Wallis 2013). The change was accelerated between the 1950s and 1970s when the government started mobilising women to participate in social production (Rofel 2007). This socialist women’s movement turned “women can hold up half of the sky” into a widely quoted slogan for the promotion of gender equality in China (Liu 2014, 19). However, the movement is also widely criticised by Chinese people today for ignoring women’s free will. Following a collectivist ideology, it advocates a unisex female ideal, whose existence is to serve the development of the country without consideration of her interests (Liu 2014). In contemporary China, this unisex female ideal has become unpopular with women, whose enhanced self-reflectivity in the new era has enabled them to appreciate their autonomy (Rofel 2007). As part of a backlash against the socialist women’s movement, gender differences become celebrated in contemporary Chinese society (Marchetti 2009; E. Y.-I. Chen 2009). This ethos promotes heteronormative gender ideals, which reflect the traditional Chinese concept of a “yin-yang [female-­ male] balance” (Liu 2014, 20). While these gender ideals are largely “constructed in relation to hierarchical differentiation of persons”, they serve as “means of both social control and social distinction” (Liu 2019,

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295). The gender differences are expressed in the CCP’s official propaganda today, which promotes female role models, including “women scientists, entrepreneurs, celebrities and workers”, who constantly manage a home-­ work balance regardless of their career achievements (Liu 2014, 20). These gender differences are also exploited in the business strategies of contemporary Chinese cultural industries (Luo 2017; Talmacs 2017). By positioning Chinese women as naive, sexual beings, women’s bodies are commodified under the male gaze in popular culture (E. Y.-I. Chen 2009). This strategy not only targets men but also reshapes women’s consumer behaviour by tempting them to purchase beauty and fashion products (Wallis and Shen 2018). Cultural industries also create other female ideals, contributing to a diversity of gender identities in contemporary China (Talmacs 2017). However, these gender identities are not equally appreciated, as the market is dominated by heteronormative consumers (Liu 2019). The heteronormative direction urges Chinese women to once again “take on attributes of care, emotionality, communicativeness and gentleness deriving from their role as reproducers and nurturers”, paving the way for the revival of patriarchy in Chinese society (Liu 2014, 20). The gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere reflects what Wallis (2015, 226) terms “China’s post-socialist gender politics”, which describes the return of patriarchal orders in the socio-political trends in contemporary Chinese society. This “post-socialist gender politics” is not only manifest by the patriarchal values fixed in the CCP’s official propaganda and consumer discourses of normative Chinese womanhood (Wallis and Shen 2018; Evans 2008; Wallis 2015), but also by how gender power relations are intersected with Chinese Internet users’ pursuit of socio-political agendas (Fang and Repnikova 2018). Having touched upon this gender-politics axis, Cheng’s (2011) research on Chinese digital racism shows that the notion of gender has been invoked by Chinese nationalist activists to portray African immigrants as threats to Chinese society. This tendency is most notably evident in the activists’ use of slogans, such as “defending Chinese racial stock”, to criticise women who date or have sexual relationships with foreign men (Cheng 2011, 567). Similarly, Wallis’ (2015) study of Chinese political dissidents reveals that the opposite end of the political spectrum may also deploy the concept of gender as armour to propagate voices critical of the CCP. This strategy is accomplished by positioning “the female body and the feminine as the site of subordination, penetration, and insult” (Wallis 2015, 223). These research findings echo Fang and Repnikova’s (2018, 2167) argument,

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which suggests that, within China’s digital public sphere, liberal and nationalist discourses become compatible “when it comes to their vision of women as inherently unequal to men and incapable of expressing a coherent national narrative in Chinese society”. By exploiting and feeding into this pioneer scholarship, this book explores how gender issues are entangled with politics in contemporary Chinese digital cultures by substantiating how the notion of gender is perceived and deployed in Chinese Internet users’ communicative practices. Based on the findings drawn from empirical research, this book explores the transformation of patriarchal discourses and misogynist voices in China’s digital public sphere that shore up the “structures and practices of binary gender difference” in contemporary Chinese society where the male-dominance of socio-economic and political systems has been restored (Evans 2008, 375).

A Note on Methodology This book uses original research data to inform a dialogue between theories and empiricism. Such a dialogue reinforces the arguments with convincing evidence, articulating how Chinese Internet users’ communicative practices demonstrate an intersection of gender issues and everyday politics in the Chinese context. This section explains the execution of empirical research and discusses the methodological issues associated with the design of the research. In this book, the empirical findings are outcomes of a series of case studies conducted between 2018 and 2019 on the Chinese social media platform—WeChat and the Chinese community question-answering site—Zhihu, respectively. Launched by the giant Chinese Internet company Tencent, WeChat is the most used Chinese social media platform, with more than one billion monthly active users (Tencent 2019). The popularity of WeChat enables Tencent to profit by allowing brands and businesses to sign up for public accounts to use its paid promotion services (Y. Peng 2017). This business model also creates start-up opportunities for freelancers, and we have recently witnessed the rise of Chinese digital influencers, who use public accounts to broadcast self-created content in attempting to attract Chinese Internet users. These digital influencers have not only become an important component of the WeChat business ecology but have developed increasing influence amongst Chinese Internet users (A. Y. Peng 2019a). Similar to its English equivalent—Quora, Zhihu

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allows Chinese Internet users to generate original content by asking and answering questions on the site (Peng et al. 2020). Zhihu was mainly populated by high-tech professionals when it was launched in 2011, but the removal of its invitation-only user account registration policy has enabled it to become increasingly popular in Chinese society with more than 160 million Chinese Internet users having signed up for accounts on the site (Smith 2019). Research shows that Zhihu users are typically of middle-class backgrounds with “80 per cent possessing a bachelor’s degree or above” (Zhang 2020, 96). The middle-class population not only upholds the structural stability of Chinese society (Goodman 2014) but also leads the socio-cultural trends in China’s digital public sphere (Y. Peng 2019b). By generating and answering related questions, these middle-­ class Chinese Internet users have been using Zhihu to express their opinion on a variety of socio-political issues. In particular, the answers they generate on Zhihu are usually composed as “informative essays” directly addressing the question asked by their peer users. The community question-answering site, therefore, contains enormous “quality, argumentative and information-rich postings” that are suitable for the studies of digital cultures in the country (Zhang 2020, 96). To collect the original data, a purposive sampling technique (Robson and McCartan 2016), which is similar to “an investigative journalist trying to get at the heart of a story” (Fang and Repnikova 2018, 2167), was employed. On WeChat, I sampled representative digital influencers and collected the posts they shared with their followers. On Zhihu, I used the site’s search engine to locate questions about trending socio-political affairs that interest Chinese Internet users and collected all the answers to the sampled questions. I translated the sampled WeChat posts and the sampled Zhihu answers into English conduct the analysis. In terms of the data analysis, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) method was employed to uncover the gender power relations reflected in the user-­ generated content retrieved from Zhihu. CDA is a qualitative, textual analysis method, which examines the “ways that processes of production impact on what can and cannot be written” (Baker et  al. 2013, 259). Fairclough (2003) has developed a three-dimensional CDA model to analyse textual data at the textual, discursive, and socio-cultural levels respectively. The textual analysis refers to a linguistic description of the text, which explains its features by analysing the use of communicative devices, such as style, naming, metaphor, lexical choice, and rhetoric of any type (Baker et al. 2013). The discursive analysis involves interpretation

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of the relationship between the text and discursive practice, which unpacks the patterns emerging with the processes of textual production (KhosraviNik and Sarkhoh 2017). The socio-cultural analysis then scrutinises the interplay between the discursive practice and socio-cultural processes, uncovering how discourse is contextualised against a specific socio-cultural backdrop (Baker et  al. 2013). Fairclough’s (2003) three-­ dimensional CDA model examines discourse as a socio-culturally conditioned practice, unpacking how the power relations embedded in a discourse construct people’s collective mentality. Fairclough’s (2003) CDA model was adopted to analyse the sampled WeChat posts and Zhihu answers, providing insights into how the notion of gender is invoked by Chinese Internet users to push for their socio-political agendas when they engage with the trending socio-political affairs on Zhihu. The empirical data presented in this book involve digital human data generated through observations of the posts shared by Chinese digital influencers published on WeChat and the answers Chinese Internet users shared on Zhihu. In particular, the latter data may reveal individual Chinese Internet users’ political views, which could be deemed sensitive in the Chinese context (Pfafman et al. 2015), the ethical issues that lie at the very heart of the research were to avoid revealing these users’ personal information. To address the ethical issues emerging with the research, the data were immediately anonymised after they were collected from the community question-answering site. During the data collection, I was the only researcher who could access to the answers collected from Zhihu. The users’ Zhihu IDs was removed from the data set. Each user was provided with a pseudonym when being quoted in the book. The qualitative, case-study nature of the present research determines the research findings do not intend to provide a grand narrative of the gender or political issues within Chinese society. In particular, the empirical data were retrieved from a Chinese social media platform and a Chinese community question-answering site. Despite the two platforms being the most popular of their kind amongst Chinese Internet users, the findings of the research cannot be over generalised to describe all Chinese Internet users, who are of a variety of socio-cultural backgrounds. However, given the importance and significance of the two participatory platforms in the configuration of mainstream Chinese cultures in the digital realm, the findings can still be considered as indicative of the gender-politics nexus in China’s digital public sphere.

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Organisation of the Book The remainder of the book is thematically organised, including two background chapters, three empirical chapters, as well as a final, concluding chapter. Chapter 2 provides an overview of digital cultures in contemporary China, where both political censorship and neoliberal capitalism matter in the shaping of Chinese Internet users’ communicative practices. This chapter identifies a wide range of socio-political issues established in the post-reform era and discusses how these issues feed into Chinese digital cultures on participatory platforms. In this way, this chapter points towards the socio-political grounding for the establishment of a gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere. The chapter helps to illustrate the contexts in which the present research is situated. Chapter 3 provides an overall discussion of gendered digital public culture in China. Based on an assessment of socio-political issues deeply held in contemporary Chinese society, this chapter unfolds how imbalanced power relations between Chinese women and men are established in Chinese society and how these power relations intersect with Chinese Internet users’ digital civic engagement with public affairs on participatory social media platforms. Through a critical review of existing literature, this chapter argues for a feminist cultural studies approach to examining the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere. Chapter 4 is the first empirical chapter, which uses case studies of two women-focused Chinese digital influencers to examine the rise of pseudo-­ feminism in Chinese digital cultures. This chapter integrates how women-­ focused Chinese digital influencers use pseudo-feminist discourse to target Chinese women, and how their practice creates a blurred boundary between feminism and pseudo-feminist patriarchal values in Chinese digital cultures. In doing so, this chapter unpacks how the neoliberal turn in Chinese society reshapes Chinese digital discourses of gender, focusing on the form of patriarchal values that is paradoxically appealing to female Chinese Internet users. This chapter sheds light on how the divides between female and male Internet users are created within China’s digital public sphere today. Following the first empirical chapter, Chap. 5 uses another case study conducted on Zhihu to unfold the divided opinions on gender relationships shared by Chinese Internet users. Specifically, this chapter explores how female and male Chinese Internet users respectively engage in gender-­ issue debates on Zhihu that prompted the recently intensifying public

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attention to gender inequality in Chinese family culture. The analysis highlights how male Chinese Internet users appropriate nationalist rhetoric when they participate in the debates, a phenomenon pointing towards the compatibility between nationalist ethos and patriarchal values. This chapter foregrounds how anti-feminism campaigns and misogynist voices intersect with nationalist sentiments in China’s digital public sphere today. In Chap. 6, the attention turns to Chinese Internet users’ discursive engagement with women’s participation in the business and political sectors. The third case study, which examines the discussions about Mingzhu Dong (the chair of the board at a China-based multinational conglomerate company) and Angela Merkel (the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany) on Zhihu, focuses on how women in powerful positions are stereotypically portrayed in Chinese digital cultures. This chapter highlights the gendered evaluation of women’s career achievements and political participation in the Chinese context and the patriarchal rationale behind such an evaluation. In doing so, it sheds light on the continuous marginalisation of women in China’s business domain and political arena, and its impacts on Chinese Internet users’ perception of womanhood in business and politics. Finally, Chap. 7 provides concluding remarks on the entire book. This chapter offers further insights into the salient points that have been addressed in the previous chapters. It reiterates the contributions to knowledge this book makes by explaining the implications of the gender-­ politics axis in China’s digital public sphere in relation to the wider international community. This chapter also discusses the urgency of addressing this topic in the research agenda of contemporary feminist cultural studies, as well as the future research direction in the field in the Chinese context and beyond.

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boyd, danah M., ed. 2014. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Boyle, Karen, and Chamil Rathnayake. 2019. #HimToo and the Networking of Misogyny in the Age of #MeToo. Feminist Media Studies: 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1661868. Castells, Manuel. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chen, Eva Yin-I. 2009. Shanghai Baby as a Chinese Chick-Lit: Female Empowerment and Neoliberal Consumerist Agency. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 15 (1): 54–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/12259276.2009.11666061. Chen, Wenhong, and Stephen D. Reese. 2015. Introduction. In Networked China: Global Dynamics of Digital Media and Civic Engagement, 1–16. New  York, NY: Routledge. Cheng, Yinghong. 2011. From Campus Racism to Cyber Racism: Discourse of Race and Chinese Nationalism. The China Quarterly 207: 561–579. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S03057410110006. CNNIC. 2019. The 44th China Statistical Report on Internet Development [第44次中国互联网络发展状况统计报告]. http://www.cac.gov.cn/2019-08/ 30/c_1124938750.htm. Coleman, Stephen, and Jay G.  Blumler. 2009. The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy. New  York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Dolan, Kathleen A. 2014. When Does Gender Matter?: Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Evans, Harriet. 2008. Sexed Bodies, Sexualised Identities, and the Limits of Gender. China Information 22 (2): 361–386. https://doi.org/10.117 7/0920203X08091550. Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. New York, NY: Routledge. Fang, Kecheng, and Maria Repnikova. 2018. Demystifying ‘Little Pink’: The Creation and Evolution of a Gendered Label for Nationalistic Activists in China. New Media & Society 20 (6): 2162–2185. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1461444817731923. Goodman, David. 2014. Class in Contemporary China. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Han, Rongbin. 2015. Defending the Authoritarian Regime Online: China’s ‘Voluntary Fifty-Cent Army’. The China Quarterly 224: 1006–1025. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0305741015001216. Han, Xiao. 2018. Searching for an Online Space for Feminism? The Chinese Feminist Group Gender Watch Women’s Voice and Its Changing Approaches

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to Online Misogyny. Feminist Media Studies 18 (4): 734–749. https://doi. org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447430. Huang, Yalan. 2016. War on Women: Interlocking Conflicts within The Vagina Monologues in China. Asian Journal of Communication 26 (5): 466–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2016.1202988. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: New York University Press. KhosraviNik, Majid, and Nadia Sarkhoh. 2017. Arabism and Anti-Persian Sentiments on Participatory Web Platforms: A Social Media Critical Discourse Study. International Journal of Communication 11: 3614–3633. King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E.  Roberts. 2013. How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression. American Political Science Review 107 (2): 326–343. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0003055413000014. ———. 2017. How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument. American Political Science Review 111 (3): 484–501. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055417000144. Koulouris, Theodore. 2018. Online Misogyny and the Alternative Right: Debating the Undebatable. Feminist Media Studies 18 (4): 750–761. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14680777.2018.1447428. Lansdall-Welfare, Thomas, Nello Cristianini, Cynthia Carter, Sen Jia, and Saatviga Sudhahar. 2016. Women Are Seen More than Heard in Online Newspapers. PLoS ONE 11 (2): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148434. Lei, Ya-Wen. 2017. The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Liu, Fengshu. 2014. From Degendering to (Re)Gendering the Self: Chinese Youth Negotiating Modern Womanhood. Gender and Education 26 (1): 18–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.860432. ———. 2019. Chinese Young Men’s Construction of Exemplary Masculinity: The Hegemony of Chenggong. Men and Masculinities 22 (2): 294–316. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1097184X17696911. Luo, Wei. 2017. Television’s ‘Leftover’ Bachelors and Hegemonic Masculinity in Postsocialist China. Women’s Studies in Communication 40 (2): 190–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2017.1295295. Marchetti, Gina. 2009. Gender Politics and Neoliberalism in China: Ann Hui’s the Postmodern Life of My Aunt. Visual Anthropology 22 (2–3): 123–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/08949460802623747. Peng, Altman Yuzhu. 2019a. Neoliberal Feminism, Gender Relations, and a Feminised Male Ideal in China: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mimeng’s WeChat Posts. Feminist Media Studies: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14680777.2019.1653350.

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Peng, Yuzhu. 2017. Affective Networks: How WeChat Enhances Tencent’s Digital Business Governance. Chinese Journal of Communication 10 (3): 264–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2017.1306573. ———. 2019b. Sharing Food Photographs on Social Media: Performative Xiaozi Lifestyle in Young, Middle-Class Chinese Urbanites’ WeChat ‘Moments.’. Social Identities 25 (2): 269–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017. 1414596. Peng, Altman Yuzhu, Ivy Shixin Zhang, James Cummings, and Xiaoxiao Zhang. 2020. Boris Johnson in Hospital: A Chinese Gaze at Western Democracies in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Media International Australia 1–16. https://doi. org/10.1177/1329878X20954452. Pfafman, Tessa M., Christopher J. Carpenter, and Yong Tang. 2015. The Politics of Racism: Constructions of African Immigrants in China on ChinaSMACK. Communication Culture & Critique 8 (4): 540–556. https:// doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12098. Roberts, Margaret E. 2018. Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Robson, Colin, and Kieran McCartan. 2016. Real World Research. 4th ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Rod, Espen Geelmuyden, and Nils B. Weidmann. 2015. Empowering Activists or Autocrats? The Internet in Authoritarian Regimes. Journal of Peace Research 52 (3): 338–351. Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ross, Karen, Karen Boyle, Cynthia Carter, and Debbie Ging. 2018. Women, Men, and News: It’s Life, Jim, but Not as We Know It. Journalism Studies 19 (6): 824–845. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1222884. Schneider, Florian. 2018. China’s Digital Nationalism. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press. Smith, Craig. 2019. Interesting Zhihu Statistics and Facts. https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/zhihu-statistics-and-facts/. Talmacs, Nicole. 2017. China’s Cinema of Class: Audiences and Narratives. Abingdon: Routledge. Tencent. 2019. Tencent Holdings Limited—2018 Annual Report. https://www. tencent.com/en-us/articles/17000441554112592.pdf. Thussu, Daya Kishan. 2018. International Communication: Continuity and Change. London: Bloomsbury. Tong, Jingrong, and Landong Zuo. 2014. Weibo Communication and Government Legitimacy in China: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Weibo Messages on Two ‘Mass Incidents’. Information Communication & Society 17 (1): 66–85.

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van Dijk, Jan A.G.M. 2006. The Network Society: Social Aspects of New Media. London: SAGE. ———. 2013. Digital Democracy: Vision and Reality. In Public Administration in the Information Age: Revisited, 49–62. Amsterdam: IOS-Press. https://doi. org/10.3233/978-1-61499-137-3-49. Wallis, Cara. 2013. Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York, NY: New York University Press. ———. 2015. Gender and China’s Online Censorship Protest Culture. Feminist Media Studies 15 (2): 223–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/1468077 7.2014.928645. Wallis, Cara, and Yongrong Shen. 2018. The SK-II#changedestiny Campaign and the Limits of Commodity Activism for Women’s Equality in Neo/Non-Liberal China. Critical Studies in Media Communication 35 (4): 376–389. https:// doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2018.1475745. Yang, Chao. 2017. Television and Dating in Contemporary China: Identities, Love, and Intimacy. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Zhang, Chenchen. 2020. Right-Wing Populism with Chinese Characteristics? Identity, Otherness and Global Imaginaries in Debating World Politics Online. European Journal of International Relations 26 (1): 88–115. https://doi. org/10.1177/1354066119850253. Zheng, Wang. 2015. Detention of the Feminist Five in China. Feminist Studies 41 (2): 476–482. https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.41.2.476.

CHAPTER 2

Social Transformation and Digital Cultures in the Post-Reform Era

Abstract  This chapter provides an overview of digital cultures in the Chinese context, where both political censorship and neoliberal capitalism weave a tangled web. The chapter identifies a wide range of socio-political issues in post-reform China and discusses how these issues feed into Chinese Internet users’ communicative practices on popular participatory social media platforms. In this way, the chapter foregrounds the sociopolitical grounding for the establishment of a gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere. This chapter addresses the socio-political contexts in which the present research is situated. Keywords  Censorship • Consumerism • Social media • Socio-­ political issues

Introduction This chapter outlines the socio-political trends in contemporary Chines society. Today, China is in a transition period. Significant social changes have shaped both the socio-economic structures and the technological landscape within the country, influencing the everyday life experiences of ordinary Chinese people and their use of the Internet. A comprehensive understanding of Chinese digital cultures cannot be achieved without

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explaining their situation within this socio-cultural context. This chapter begins with an overview of the social stratification of contemporary Chinese society, focusing on the changes taking place in China’s socio-­ political infrastructure in relation to the CCP’s market-oriented reform of the Chinese economy. This discussion facilitates an understanding of how Chinese Internet users’ civic engagement with public affairs is socio-­ culturally engineered in China’s digital public sphere. In this way, the chapter points out the gendered nature of China’s digital public sphere, providing a solid foundation for further discussions in the following chapters.

The Market-Oriented Reform of Chinese Society Today’s China is in an era of transformation. Adjectives, such as “dramatic, rapid, profound, miraculous, amazing, incredible, and spectacular”, are commonly used by the media to describe the rapid socio-cultural changes that have taken place in Chinese society over the past four decades (F. Liu 2011, 15). In general, these changes are associated with the launch of the so-called reform and opening-up project launched after the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1978 (Yeoh 2010). The reform focuses primarily on economic growth and emphasising learning from Western experience (Harvey 2007). Mao’s socialist, planned economic policy has subsequently been abolished, and replaced by Deng’s theory of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Zhao 1998, 293), which include the marketisation of industries, termination of permanent employment, implementation of performance-based employment, adoption of overseas investment, and acceptance of Western management philosophies (Tsui et al. 2004). While the specific approach to reform has fluctuated as the CCP’s leadership has changed, the direction of reform, which attempts to incorporate both planed and market-oriented elements in China’s economic system, remains today (Goodman 2014). The consequence of this reform, and the opening of China to the Western interaction and influence, has created a variety of socio-cultural changes beyond the economic sector. Improvements and Inequalities On a positive note, the reform has greatly improved China’s economic performance. This is evidenced by the rapid growth of the Chinese

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economy, which has turned the once low-income country into the world’s second-largest economy in 2010 (Nolan 2012). The World Bank predicts that China has the potential to surpass the US to become the largest economy in the world by 2030 (Canuto 2019). However, the population’s access to the post-reform economic prosperity has never been uniform (H.  Wang and Huters 2003). Regionally, eastern provinces are much more developed than inland provinces. This is not only because the eastern provinces are closer to the coast, which constitutes a geo-economical condition that enables them to attract more foreign investment, but also because the CCP’s imbalanced economic policy intentionally prioritises the development of the eastern provinces over their inland counterparts (Fleisher et  al. 2010). This imbalanced economic policy creates notable differences between living standards and access to health care and education in eastern and inland provinces respectively (Wang et al. 2019). The imbalanced economic policy implemented by the CCP is also notable in terms of its discrimination against the rural population (Wang et al. 2019). Since Mao’s era, a nationwide Household Registration System (hukou) has been established by the CCP, requiring all Chinese citizens to register with the local authority where they were born (Lui 2016). The Household Registration System creates a rural-urban household categorisation, and it attempts to control the freedom of movement from the countryside to cities by limiting rural residents’ access to benefits and welfare in cities where they do not hold a local household (Wong et al. 2007). This Household Registration System remains active in the post-reform era (Meng et al. 2013). With four-decade state investment concentrating on urban areas, this system has led to a notable divide between rural and urban Chinese households, evidenced by the gap in the average disposable income of rural and urban residents (Song and Chen 2018). Alongside the regional differences between the development of eastern and inland provinces (Afridi et al. 2015), it provides a glimpse into the consequences of the CCP’s implementation of imbalanced economic policy, which breaks its promise of pushing for a communist, equal society by creating increasing social stratification in Chinese society today (Tong and Zuo 2014). The Post-Reform Social Stratification Before the late 1970s, the structure of Chinese society was relatively straightforward. While the party cadres were placed at the top of the social hierarchy, labour workers in state-owned factories and peasants in the

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countryside’s communes comprised the vast majority of the Chinese population (Goodman 2014). Yet, the post-reform economic growth has created a generation of the new rich, which mostly consists of private enterprise owners and senior managers at large companies (Jeffreys 2008). The rise of the new rich is a result of the emergence of private businesses in the transformation of China towards the market-oriented, capitalist economic system (Nonini 2008). Together with party cadres and apparatchiks at senior levels, they form the upper class, who enjoy “a level of welfare, including healthcare, education, and career opportunities” that is “greatly higher than the ordinary citizens” in Chinese society (Yeoh 2010, 261). Although in ratio to the entire population, this strata is relatively small (Goodman 2014), they are the target of global luxury brands because of their ability and willingness to consume (Bartikowski et al. 2019). The impact of their consumer power on the global market has been proved by the continuous increase of the sales of luxury products in China during the global economic recession (Li et al. 2012). The rise of the new rich has left behind huge numbers of the disadvantaged lower-class population at the bottom of China’s social hierarchy, which consists of peasants and unskilled labour workers who were once promised to be ‘leaders’ of the country by the CCP (Li 2008). Amongst the lower-class population, migrant workers are the most vulnerable group, who are socio-culturally and institutionally discriminated in the process of China’s social stratification (Wong et al. 2007). Moving away from the countryside to seize imaginary opportunities for a better life, the migrant workers supply cheap labour in construction and manufacture industries in cities. They make great contributions to the development of urban infrastructure, but their living conditions continue to be disadvantaged by the Household Registration System (Wong et al. 2007). Evidence shows that most of the migrant workers are not employed under legal contracts and have no access to health and unemployment insurances or pension schemes (Qi 2010). The ways in which migrant workers mobilise themselves to protect their rights against “local official corruption and abuse of power” often lead to strikes, protests, and even riots; these mobilisations are defined as ‘illegal’ and are referred to as ‘mass incidents’ by official discourses (Yeoh 2010, 253). Statistics show a consistent increase in the number of ‘mass incidents’ occurring in China over the past few decades, providing a glimpse to the intensified conflicts between the upper class and the lower class in today’s Chinese society (Tong and Zuo 2014).

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Amid the social stratification and the conflicts between the upper and the lower class, the importance of the urban middle classes is on the rise in post-reform Chinese society (F. Liu 2008). The middle-class, urban population largely consists of “[party] cadres and government officials, managerial personnel, private entrepreneurs, professionals, clerical workers [at a senior level], and self-employed people” (Yang 2010, 438). The urban Chinese middle classes are not only defined by the measurement of income and occupation category, but also by their self-identification and consumer behaviour, which distinguish them from the lower-class population (Peng 2019). The purchasing power of the middle-class urbanites has been targeted by multinational conglomerate companies that produce mass consumer products. Nowadays, almost all international consumer brands have readily developed business strategies to address the consumer needs and desires of the emerging urban Chinese middle classes (Hung et al. 2018). Beyond the business sectors, the urban Chinese middle classes have attracted global attention because they act as political ballast by gluing Chinese society together (Goodman 2014). The urban middle-class residents make up less than 30 per cent of the entire population (Li 2014). While this figure is relatively lower than developed countries, they serve as a buffer of “social conflict caused by bi-polarisation of the poor and the rich” (Sonoda 2010, 352). The urban middle-class residents are the beneficiaries of China’s rapid economic growth (Goodman 2014). However, unlike a small number of leading party cadres and private enterprise owners, the urban middle-class residents remain distant from political power and economic privileges. They not only uphold the stability of the current social structure but also lead public opinion in Chinese society, comprising a particular group of people, who are crucial to the shaping of the socio-­ cultural trends in the post-reform era.

An Overview of Internet Use in Contemporary China Scrutinising the socio-political trends led by the middle-class urbanites in China, contemporary scholarship has turned attention to the Internet (Chen and Reese 2015). China’s first computer network was launched in 1987 to support academic research activities (CNNIC 1997). This network merely worked in local areas, enabling distant researchers to share data and exchange emails; it was not connected to the Internet until an agreement between China and the US’s governance bodies was reached in 1994 (Liu 2011). In 1996, China’s Internet service started becoming

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publicly accessible, and it reached approximately 620,000 households (CNNIC 1997). The China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) was also established in the same year to monitor the development of Internet services across the country (Liu 2011). Since then, we have witnessed a two-decade rapid development in China’s digital infrastructure, which now has almost 38  million domain names (CNNIC 2019). In 2019, Internet access was provided to 829 million users, who accounted for nearly 60 per cent of the whole Chinese population and spent an average of 27.6  hours on the Internet every week (CNNIC 2019). Although the Internet penetration rate is still relatively low compared to most developed countries (Pew Research Centre 2018), it is remarkable given that the country with a vast territory has the largest population in the world. As an “information highway”, the Internet has provided an increasingly more important channel for people’s everyday mean of communication (Chen and Reese 2015, 3). However, the diffusion of the Internet in China is not balanced: there are still significant gaps between different groups of people defined by their gender, age, educational background, and residential areas (Chen and Reese 2015). Reflecting the unequal regional development and social stratification of the post-reform era, the Internet penetration rate is highest in urban areas, and amongst those who are aged between 20 and 39 (CNNIC 2019). Research shows that middle-­ class Chinese urbanites comprise the social group leading the trends of Internet usage in the country (Peng 2019; Lyu 2012; Zhang 2020). The digital cultures configured in their everyday use of the Internet provides a window to the mainstream socio-cultural and political ethos in this East Asian rising power (Qiu 2017). The Apolitical Dimension of Chinese Digital Cultures Contemporary research has noted a seemingly apolitical dimension of contemporary Chinese digital cultures (Peng 2019; Chen 2018; Huang and Zhang 2017). This apolitical dimension is most notably exemplified by the adoption of Internet services for entertainment (Liu 2011). The CNNIC (2019) recent report on the development of Internet services reveals that more than 58 per cent of Chinese Internet users play video games on the Internet, with a high proportion of them mainly consuming entertainment-related information, such as popular literature (52.1 per cent), music (69.5 per cent), and TV programmes (79.3 per cent). These

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figures show generally consistent growth over the past decade (CNNIC 2019). In accordance with these findings, Chen’s (2016) study illustrates that entertainment needs comprise an important motive that encourages Chinese Internet users to (1) post updates on personal digital profiles, (2) send instant messages to friends, (3) create or join group chats, and (4) browse news and read jokes on the Internet. As some scholars suggest, the role the Internet plays in Chinese Internet users’ everyday lives is indeed not only the information superhighway but also the entertainment superhighway (McLelland et al. 2017). Existing literature has attributed the apolitical, entertainment-oriented dimension of Chinese digital cultures to the rise of individualist culture in post-reform society (Liu 2011). Owing to the increases in living standards and interactions with the West, there has been a shift from collectivism to individualism in the current ethos of mainstream urban society (Scheid 2002). The core value of collectivism defines each of the individuals as an integrated part of a highly coherent society, while that of individualism emphasises the autonomy and diversity of each individual (Kolstad and Gjesvik 2014). The rise of individualist values in post-reform society has cultivated people’s self- reflexive capacity (Kolstad and Gjesvik 2014), which encourages people to recognise their value to society and appreciate the diversity of individual lifestyles provided by the market economy (Giddens 1991). Moore’s (2005) research, for instance, shows that Chinese university students in the early twenty-first century have already adopted a ‘cool’, individualist-featured lifestyle, which typically consists of the presentation of a pleasing appearance, stylish clothing, and independence. Focusing on this individualist turn in Chinese digital cultures, Hjorth and Gu (2012) discovered that Internet users often share photographs of themselves or places where they have visited as a way of presenting their personal tastes and lifestyles on the Internet. Such findings have been confirmed by similar studies, which reveal Chinese Internet users’ eagerness for self-expression on the Internet (Peng 2019; Seta and Proksell 2015). However, the formation of a seemingly apolitical dimension in people’s everyday lives cannot be separated from the economic system in which it is situated (Bourdieu 1977). Many studies note that the entertainment and interpersonal communication-oriented mode of Internet users’ participation on the Internet is, to a certain extent, an outcome of the CCP’s Internet governance strategy that attempts to boost the digital economy (Fuchs 2015; Poell et al. 2014). The CCP recognises the development of

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the Internet as an important impetus and a symbolic achievement of the modernisation of Chinese society in the digital age; its economic governance strategy encourages investment in the digital sector and considers this as a way to “strengthen the nation through technologies” (Chen and Reese 2015, 3). This economic strategy provides a fertile ground for the emergence of giant Chinese Internet companies, which have a high level of freedom to compete in the market to boost economic development (Peng 2017). These profit-driven Internet companies have, therefore, provided enormous entertainment and personal communication-oriented Internet services to attract Chinese Internet users to ensure survival in the market, showing notable resemblance with their counterparts in Western countries (Fuchs 2015). The CCP’s Political Control Over the Internet What is unique about the economic making of Chinese digital cultures is the political infrastructure upon which it is built (Harwit 2017). As such, the CCP’s political control over the Internet is a factor that cannot be overlooked, given the authoritarian nature of the Chinese political infrastructure (Harwit 2017). The CCP has been strictly controlling access to the Internet since it was launched in the 1990s (Zittrain and Edelman 2003). Over the past few years, the CCP’s Internet control has become more and more sophisticated, developing into a comprehensive, nationwide system (Chen and Reese 2015). This digital political control has influenced almost every aspect of the everyday use of the Internet, shaping how public opinions are digitally expressed by the Chinese general public (Wallis 2015). In general, the CCP’s control over the Internet includes the combined use of different administrative and technological methods, which broadly include (1) regulation, (2) censorship, and (3) surveillance (Chen and Reese 2015). In terms of the regulation, the relevant Internet governance bodies have passed a series of legislative measures regarding state secrets, e-commerce, information services, and Internet security (Cheung 2005; Svensson 2019). This legislation lists different categories of information that are deemed as sensitive, and forbid any group or individuals within the Chinese territory from creating, replicating, retrieving, or transmitting them on the Internet (Yang and Mueller 2019). Violation of the legislation is subject to punishment, such as fines and imprisonment, depending on its influence amongst ordinary users (Liu 2011).

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The CCP’s Internet control also includes a technological censorship system, which is firstly executed at an infrastructural level (Chen and Reese 2015). Within the national territory, only state-owned enterprises, such as China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom, are allowed to build the international gateways to connect the country’s domestic networks to the World Wide Web (Liang and Lu 2010). These state-owned enterprises monopolise the construction and maintenance of Internet infrastructure and license the operation of other Internet services at the next layer (Liang and Lu 2010). All foreign service providers have to install filters to block the content deemed sensitive or undesirable by the Chinese government (Tong and Zuo 2014). Codes of practice have also been launched by China’s Internet Association to prohibit these service providers’ breaching governmental control (Liu 2011). The licence of a website can be removed if its operator fails to cooperate with state censorship (Liu 2011). Such a policy is boycotted by several globally renowned Internet service providers, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, resulting in the revocation of their business licence in China, and consequently their retreat from the Chinese market (Stockmann 2013). In addition to the infrastructural level, the censorship is also operated through launching the so-called ‘Great Firewall’. This consists of a series of information-filtering projects to systematically block certain information from being generated and circulated by people living in China (Chen and Reese 2015). Some initial projects can even be traced back to the 1990s when an early version of the ‘Great Firewall’, namely the ‘Golden Shield’, was proposed in 1993 before the launch of China’s publicly accessible Internet service (Liang and Lu 2010, 106). The ‘Great Firewall’ also blocks information relating to “superstitions, obscenity, pornography, and gambling”, which is considered culturally inappropriate in China (Liang and Lu 2010, 106). Yet, politically sensitive topics, typically relating to Falun Gong (evil cult), the independence of Taiwan and Tibet, Hong Kong anti-establishment protests, Xinjiang terrorism, human rights, and democratic mass incidents, are the filters’ primary target (Stockmann 2013). In particular, the government prefers “misdirection over blocking” by attempting to “make users perceive outright censorship as network error” (Chen and Reese 2015, 106). The enforcement of this technical censorship is selective and sometimes even arbitrary, meaning that the government often decides what information is to be blocked without notifying the Internet service providers directly (Farrer 2007).

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The technical censorship is paired with a surveillance system, which is based on nationwide cyber police forces to ensure the execution of the CCP’s Internet regulations (Tong and Zuo 2014). The cyber police are police forces specialising in monitoring Chinese Internet users’ behaviour on the Internet (Han and Jia 2018). The establishment of the cyber police forces can be traced back to the early 2000s when Anhui Province set up the first Internet surveillance team in its provincial police department. This initiative was adopted by other provincial governments, and consequentially the state government (Liang and Lu 2010). Nowadays, such police forces are operated in more than 500 Chinese cities (Hunt and Xu 2013). The mission of the cyber police is to investigate Internet crimes, such as spreading pornography and computer viruses or attempting cyber fraud (Liu 2011). Yet, intelligence operations, such as monitoring ordinary Chinese Internet users’ e-mail correspondence, supervising foreignor privately-owned websites, and removing ‘subversive’ digital content, also play a leading role in the agenda of these police units (Wallis 2015). Large numbers of computer experts are employed by the units to deal with technical issues, whilst part-time “information security liaison personnel” are hired to assist these experts in conducting day-to-day surveillance (Liu 2011, 40). Users are also encouraged to report each other’s ‘suspicious behaviour’ to help the cyber police forces find the sources of potentially controversial information (Peng 2017). These cyber police forces, alongside the paid Internet commentators, who are compensated to pretend to be ordinary users to lead public opinions in line with the official propaganda on the Internet, have significantly affected Chinese Internet users’ expression of personal opinion, leading to their practice of self-censorship in their everyday use of digital communication technologies. Participatory Social Media and the Digital Public Sphere As Fuchs (2015) notes, many participatory social media platforms have been launched by giant Chinese technology companies to facilitate Internet users to engage with each other. The most popular ones include the mobile social media application—WeChat (a cross between WhatsApp and Instagram) with over 1 billion monthly active users (Tencent 2019), the microblogging service—Weibo (similar to Twitter) used by approximately 430 million users (China Internet Watch 2018), and the community question-answering site—Zhihu (akin to Quora), which has more

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than 160 million registered user accounts today (Smith 2019). According to Fuchs (2015, 18), participatory social media platforms have been changing Chinese Internet users’ everyday lives through a “threefold interconnected process of cognition, communication, and co-operation”. This process includes: (1) facilitating these users to engage with digital texts “that reflect social contexts in society”, (2) enabling them to communicate with each other at a distance, and (3) allowing them to develop or maintain social networks. The adoption of these participatory platforms in Chinese society provides the grounding for Internet users’ digital civic engagement. Based on Habermas’ (1991) notion of public sphere and Castells (2009) and van Dijk’s (2006) conceptualisation of networked society, contemporary scholarship argues that participatory social media platforms may create a digital public sphere, which describes an abstract venue where the assemblage of citizens is facilitated by their use of the Internet (Iosifidis 2011). Amid the rise of a participatory culture, which encourages Internet users to make original contributions to the content on these platforms (boyd 2014; van Dijck 2013), collective intelligence may be enhanced in the digital public sphere by allowing citizens to share knowledge and exchange ideas in a sensible manner (Jenkins 2006). Given that the spread of information on the participatory platforms is not completely controlled by institutions, an optimistic view, therefore, suggests that the digital public sphere may facilitate public debates on important socio-political issues, which possibly lead to grassroots democracy in society (Coleman and Blumler 2009). This potential of the digital public sphere is partially exemplified by how political activists used Facebook and Twitter to mobilise and organise street protests in the Arabic Spring in the Middle East (Bruns et  al. 2013), the Indignados Movement in Spain (Mico and Casero-Ripolles 2014), and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong (Lee et al. 2015). Chinese Internet Users’ Digital Civic Engagement Certainly, there is conflicting evidence in modern, repressive regimes showing that the grassroots-democracy potential of the digital public sphere is limited because participatory social media platforms are simultaneously used by political forces to practise governmental surveillance, infiltrate protest groups, and even prosecute protesters (Morozov 2012; van Dijk 2006). According to Rod and Weidmann (2015), this is

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especially the case in China, where people’s digital civic engagement is heavily regulated by the state government. However, as Yang (2009, 11) notes, “although the Internet is also under control, its networked features provide numerous nodes of resistance against control”. A variety of methods has been developed by Internet users to evade the censorship system. For instance, by using virtual proxy network servers (VPN), users can surf the Internet beyond the ‘Great Firewall’ (Liang and Lu 2010). Many Chinese Internet users also deploy creative approaches to bypass the technological filters by “separating characters with hyphens and commas”, “using English acronyms or wholesale Romanisation”, or “using Chinese characters with similar pronunciations to the forbidden words”, when sharing original content on participatory social media platforms (Liu 2011, 40). For instance, Pfafman et  al. (2015) discovered that Chinese Internet users may engage with political incidents occurring outside of China as a way of expressing their comments on domestic affairs in a non-­ confrontational manner. This is especially the case when their comments on domestic affairs involve criticisms of the CCP’s domestic policies (Wu and Wall 2019). Chinese Internet users’ employment of these creative approaches has created a unique digital culture, configuring how opposition opinions are expressed in China’s digital public sphere (Wallis 2015). Yet, the tension between Internet users and the government’s suppression of the freedom of speech and freedom of information has been somehow exaggerated (Bolsover and Howard 2018), especially by many Western media outlets, which still follow a Cold-War ideology and which view the communist regime as the evil enemy and assumes that the people are all busy with pursuing the “forbidden truth” outside the ‘Great Firewall’ (Liu 2011, 47). Based on this assumption, China’s digital public sphere is viewed as a battleground for Chinese Internet users to fight for democracy. This assumption fails to consider that, as previously mentioned, Chinese digital cultures comprise an apolitical aspect, meaning that many Chinese Internet users’ interest in digging for serious information has been dampened by strict political control (Schneider 2018). This is evidenced by the fact that a large proportion of Chinese Internet users agreeing with the government’s implementation of Internet censorship, given the need for preventing the spread of pornography, violent content, and slander on the Internet (Liu 2011). Furthermore, the main purpose of the CCP’s Internet control is to prevent collective protests against the Party-State (Schneider 2016). Through a quantitative analysis of millions of user-generated posts shared

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by users on popular Chinese participatory platforms, King et al.’ (2013) study reveals that the CCP still tolerates some criticisms of the Chinese government, as long as these criticisms do not attempt to provoke civic disobedience (King et al. 2013). This selective tolerance of domestic criticisms allows a level of diversity of voices in China’s digital public sphere, which addresses some demands of freedom of information and freedom of speech (King et al. 2013). Such tolerance is due not only because of the limit of technological censorship and surveillance, in which it is impossible to cover hundreds of millions of users but is also based on the CCP’s current governance strategy, which attempts to use China’s digital public sphere as a channel to test public opinion on its policies to prevent political instability (Tong and Zuo 2014). This political milieu consequentially provides Chinese Internet users with a level of freedom to practise digital civic engagement on the Internet, turning China’s digital public sphere into a field site for studying the socio-political trends within Chinese society (Bolsover and Howard 2018). Towards an Exploration of the Gender-Politics Axis In Chinese society, gender issues have long intersected with Chinese Internet users’ expression of public opinions in the digital public sphere (Han 2018; Fang and Repnikova 2018). In the first decade of the twenty-­ first century, we have witnessed the emergence of symbolic female Internet celebrities, who provoked extensive public discussions amongst Chinese Internet users (Liu 2011). These female Internet celebrities typically include Zimei Mu, who “shot to fame […] after starting a blog filled with descriptions with numerous men”, Sister Hibiscus (Furong Jiejie), who “offers narcissistic narratives about her ‘sexy’ body and general ‘personal charm’” (Liu 2011, 49–50), Ah Zeng who self-exposed her experience of being a mistress of rich men (Liu 2017), as well as Yinhe Li, who is a pioneer feminist scholar and public intellectual famous for sharing controversial commentary that discusses gender issues in Chinese society (Farrer 2007). Having become famous overnight on the Internet, these female Internet celebrities have courted controversy (Liu 2017). They are often verbally abused by ordinary Internet users, especially men who advocate patriarchal values (Han 2018). Public opinions surrounding the emergence of these female Internet celebrities, therefore, provide a glimpse into the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere (Wallis 2015).

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The gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere reflects the long-established intersection of politics and gender power relations. According to McClintock (1993, 61–62), “women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation but are denied any direct relation to the national agency” in any country throughout human history. This history shapes politics into a “major venue for accomplishing masculinity” (Nagel 1998, 251). Fang and Repnikova (2018, 2166–2167) argue that this gender-politics axis is also established in Chinese society, and is reflected as the “masculine make-up and appeal” of both nationalist and liberal political discourses spread in China’s digital public sphere. As Fang and Repnikova (2018, 2,167) note “the actors supposedly inhabiting opposite ideological spectrums converge when it comes to their vision of women as inherently unequal to men and incapable of expressing a coherent national narrative in Chinese society”. This gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere provides an angle to scrutinise the practice of imbalanced gender power relations in Chinese Internet users’ everyday engagement with public affairs on the Internet. An understanding of this gender-politics axis can be developed upon a feminist cultural studies perspective, which scrutinises China’s differing process of women’s liberation, as well as the socio-economic and political modernisation of Chinese society that informs Chinese Internet users’ perception of the gender power relations in the post-reform era.

Conclusion This chapter has provided a discussion of the socio-cultural factors within Chinese society that influence Chinese Internet users’ practice of digital cultures and has argued that different types of inequalities are indeed being established in contemporary Chinese society, creating notable social stratifications in Chinese people’s everyday lives today. Within the technological landscape, such inequalities are reflected in Chinese people’s adoption of Internet services, influencing how they engage with public affairs on the Internet. Having been contextualised against China’s political infrastructure, their digital civic engagement is, therefore, reshaped by both mainstream socio-political trends and the CCP’s digital political control over the Internet. This has turned China’s digital public sphere into an interesting case study for the exploration of social issues, which are unique to Chinese society in the post-reform era. In reviewing these issues, the analysis underpins further discussion of how the gendered nature of

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Chinese digital cultures is engineered by the imbalanced power relations between female and male Chinese Internet users, which exploit and feed into the patriarchal definition of gender roles promoted by Chinese digital cultures.

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CHAPTER 3

The Gendered Nature of China’s Digital Public Sphere

Abstract  This chapter provides an overall assessment of gendered digital cultures in post-reform China. Based on a discussion of deeply held socio-­ political issues in Chinese society, this chapter explains how imbalanced gender power relations between Chinese women and men are established in Chinese society and how the gender power relations intersect with Chinese Internet users’ civic engagement with public affairs. Through a critical review of existing literature in Chinese digital cultures, this chapter advances a feminist cultural studies approach that helps to unpack the gender-politics axis established in China’s digital public sphere today. Keywords  Digital civic engagement • Digital cultures • Gender power relations • Chinese Internet users

Introduction This chapter provides a feminist cultural studies analysis of Chinese digital cultures by tracing how the gendered nature of the digital public sphere reflects gender issues in Chinese society. As previously discussed, the Internet has provided Chinese Internet users with room for them to engage with a wide range of socio-cultural and political issues, albeit with the CCP’s political control over freedom of speech in China’s digital public sphere. Focusing on the rise and fall of Chinese women’s socio-political

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status, this chapter discusses how the notion of gender is constructed in Chinese digital cultures. The discussion points towards the establishment of gender inequality in China’s digital public sphere and its relationship to Internet users’ understanding of gender and gendered discourses.

A Feminist Cultural Studies Perspective Across the world, sexual differences have long been considered as naturally ordinated and biologically determined (Rahman and Jackson 2010). These naturalised sexual differences have served to justify gender hierarchy for centuries. For instance, men were perceived as psychologically suitable to the guardianship of the public sphere, whereas women were considered emotionally fragile and therefore situated in the private domain (Braden 2015). Such a biological determinism has rationalised a gendered nature of the public-private dichotomy: while men were empowered to move between different spheres, women were largely confined to the domestic sphere and subjected to male authority therein (de Beauvoir 1972). This biological determinism has historically restricted women’s participation in the public sphere, creating the male dominance of society throughout pre-modern history. Since the late nineteenth century, the first two waves of feminist movements have achieved relative successes in the West. Such improvements of women’s socio-political status have turned gender equality into a normative feature of political, economic, and social dialogue in the West. However, these improvements do not conceal the fact that contemporary socio-economic and political structures are still very much of a patriarchal nature (Friedman 2011). For instance, while more and more women are empowered to enter the workplace, they often struggle with the ‘glass ceiling’ effect, which restricts their career development (McRobbie 2009). This tendency both exploits and feeds into contemporary cultural inertia, which encourages society to place a heavy focus on biological differences between women and men (Friedman 2011). This cultural inertia continues to shape people’s perspectives on women and men’s abilities and is reflected in people’s engagement with gender or gender-related issues on the Internet across the world. Presenting a critique of biological determinism, contemporary scholarship in the field of feminist cultural studies argues for a social constructionist understanding of gender and gender identities (Ross et al. 2018). As de Beauvoir (1972, 301) claims, “one is not born, but rather becomes,

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a woman”. A feminist cultural studies perspective suggests that gender identities are outcomes of people’s everyday practices, which are acquired early in childhood before people can override them (Devine 1989). For instance, based on an observation of early childhood education, Higgins (1981) notes that children are implicitly and explicitly taught to behave in certain ways, dress in certain styles, and play certain games according to their gender. In this educational convention, women are raised to be gentle, caring, and modest, whilst their male counterparts are educated to be assertive, competitive, and independent (Smoreda 1995). Gender identities are thereby constructed and endure over time (Friedman 2011). They reinforce a perception of biologically determined differences between women and men that require them to play different social roles. In this process, women and men continue to be separated following the public-­ private dichotomy, contributing to the social construction of gender and gender identities in our everyday lives (Butler 1988). By tracing the social process of the construction of gender and gender norms, the feminist cultural studies perspective provides a lens to scrutinise the gender-politics axis in the digital public sphere by relating it to the origins of gender power relations.

The Revival of Patriarchal Values From a feminist cultural studies perspective, present scholarship has noted an important aspect of gender issues in contemporary China, which refers to the revival of patriarchal values in current socio-political trends (Wallis 2015). Here, they either take on an explicit form or are presented through a feminist veneer (Meng and Huang 2017). An understanding of this complex phenomenon cannot be unfolded without explaining the rise and fall of women’s status in Chinese society, which is both politically conditioned and socio-culturally constituted. The Past and the Present of Chinese Women’s Socio-Political Status In traditional Chinese culture, the notion of gender was constructed upon a notion of “yin-yang [female-male] balance”, which designated women and men with different social roles respectively (Liu 2014, 20). While Chinese men were required to adhere to a set of social norms associated with ‘yang’, which encouraged men to be outgoing and traverse different social spaces (Louie 2002), their female counterparts were bound by

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conventions relating to ‘yin’, which constructed women as subordinate and confined to the domestic space (Liu 2014). Having been constructed as an important aspect of Chinese traditions, such a notion of ‘yin-yang balance’ is still highly valued in rural areas, leading to the persistence of the male-dominant culture in rural and rural-urban migrants’ communities (Wallis 2013). Compared to their rural counterparts, the socio-political status of Chinese women living in cities has improved (Rofel 2007). These improvements can be traced back to the early twentieth century when pioneer intellectuals returning from the West introduced early feminist attitudes to urban China as a collateral consequence of their attempt to reform the country through educating the female citizens (Fan and Mangan 2001). After the communist revolution, the progress of gender equality in China was further accelerated from the 1950s to the 1970s under Mao’s leadership (Zheng 2003). Amid the widespread propagation of Mao’s statement that “women can hold up half of the sky” (Liu 2014, 19), the CCP began to provide Chinese women with the same legal rights as male citizens (Yang 2017), including employment in social production and equal pay (Hoffman 2006; Zheng 2003). The CCP’s implementation of gender-equal policies occurred not only because it was part of the CCP’s revolutionary manifesto of equality across Chinese society, but also because the liberation of women had a pragmatic functionality, providing an increased supply of labour in post-revolution social construction (Liu 2014). The functional values were tellingly revealed by the CCP’s promotion of neutered-women role models (Marchetti 2009), which required Chinese women to be “asexual”, “self-­ assured”, and “highly committed to the socialist cause” (Liu 2014, 19). These neutered-women role models were often portrayed as a unisex female labour worker wearing a “blue trouser suit and display[ing] strength and gesture no different from their male peers”; their very existence in society was to serve the common good with no consideration of their personal wishes (Liu 2014, 19). This illustrates that the emancipation of Chinese women from traditional Chinese patriarchy came at the cost of an “‘erasure of gender and sexuality’ […] in the public space” (Yang 1999, 41). The CCP’s gender-equal policies were best executed in urban regions, where the improvement of urban Chinese women’s status in the legal system and the labour market have since laid the foundation for the progress of gender equality across contemporary society (Tiefenbrun 2017).

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However, despite improvements in women’s socio-political status in Mao’s era, evidence shows that Chinese women have never occupied the centre stage of power, evidenced by the fact that they have always been disproportionately underrepresented in both the CCP and the Chinese government, and that few female politicians ever reach the most powerful positions in the political arena (Howell 2006). At the national level, female representatives only comprise a quarter of the current members of the National People’s Congress, with none of them serving in the Politburo Standing Committee of the CCP1 (WPL 2018). Even in local government where the CCP has set quotas for women’s political inclusion, female government officials have been mainly tasked with responsibilities for birth control, environmental sanitation, or medical insurance, rather than economic development or infrastructure construction (Song 2016). The reasoning behind this gendered assignment distribution is that these tasks are considered to be ‘feminine’ and, therefore, appropriate for using female personnel (Song 2016). Based on a review of the statistics of women in government by country, the Women Political Leaders Global Forum (WPL)2 ranked China at 62nd globally in 2018 concerning gender equality in women’s political participation, far behind major European countries, such as France, Germany, and the UK (WPL 2018). The male-­ dominance of the political infrastructure aligns Chinese women to the women-interior, yin-yang balance Chinese tradition, which continues to discourage them from pursuing successful political careers (Song 2016). Running parallel to the male-dominance of China’s political infrastructure, the labour market in Chinese society also discriminates against female employees. Even with government guidelines on gender-equal employment in the 1960s, Zheng (2003, 163) suggests that state-owned factories followed “unstated gender lines” for employees between the 1950s and the 1970s, assigning technical tasks to male employees, whilst female counterparts were mainly offered service and auxiliary jobs, regardless of educational background or skill sets. This gendered task assignment model created an apparent employment hierarchy, which confined female employees to the position of subordinate to their male colleagues and 1  The National People’s Congress is China’s national parliament, while members of the Politburo Standing Committee are widely considered as the most powerful positions in the CCP and Chinese politics more broadly. 2  The Women Political Leaders Global Forum (WPL) is an international, independent women’s organisation, which aims to promote gender equality in politics.

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consequently influenced their identification of self in the workplace (Nandi 2019). The post-reform marketisation of industries has further encouraged the subordination of female employees in China’s labour market. While the CCP is still administratively committed to political manifestos, such as the Programme for the Development of Chinese Women, which promises to continue promoting gender equality in Chinese society in the post-reform era, it paradoxically also backs a series of public campaigns to urge women return to the family as a way to justify the disproportionate layoff of female employees during its restructuring of state-owned enterprises in the early reform period (Zheng 2003). Although the qualities that the CCP’s post-­ reform official female role models embody still include hardworking, feminine characteristics, such as caring, empathy, modesty, gentleness, and courtesy, a common emphasis is that these female role models are capable of managing a perfect home-work balance no matter how successful they are in their professions (Evans 2008). Sexist viewpoints, such as women’s lack of technical skills due to their weaker physicality, is even explicitly propagated by the CCP to rationalise the claim that an emphasis on women’s liberation has ‘outpaced’ the capacity of China’s current social productivity (Zheng 2003). These gendered official discourses have led to the trend for Chinese women to “give up work and career and go home” since the 1990s, underlining a significant reduction of women’s employment in the post-reform labour market (Liu 2014, 20). The Post-Reform Heteronormative Turn of Chinese Womanhood Reflecting gender inequality in the political infrastructure and the labour market of China, the post-reform revival of patriarchal values is further manifested in the changing female ideals in urban Chinese society (Song and Hird 2014). The configuration of these new female ideals is a consequence of the shifting ethos in the post-reform era. The acceptance of individualist ethos in mainstream Chinese society has led to a backlash against the collectivism-featured gender ideals promoted under Mao’s administration (Rofel 2007). It has provoked Chinese people’s criticisms of Mao’s propagation of the neutered-women role models for ignoring individual women’s freewill and alienating them from their feminine attributes (Marchetti 2009). These criticisms have encouraged Chinese women to appreciate the diversity of gender identities to celebrate their individuality (Rofel 2007).

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Feeding into the diversity of gender identities in the post-reform era, the cultural industries have created a variety of new female ideals in Chinese society (Luo and Sun 2015). These female ideals include “the ‘busy professional’, the ‘strong woman’, the ‘media celebrity’, the ‘full-time housewife’, the financially comfortable domestic manager, and even the extramarital lover to a rich man”, which together underscore the individualist choices of lifestyle in urban China today (Liu 2014, 20). Yet, Wallis and Shen (2018) note that heteronormative female ideals are the most received type amongst Chinese people, given the still heteronormative nature of Chinese society. These female ideals are promoted by businesses to serve their business interests, a process inscribed by the rise of consumerism (Wallis and Shen 2018). As Swagler (1997) notes, consumerism refers to a capitalist ideology, which defines people as consumers and attempts to reshape their everyday practice to stimulate mass consumption. It has become a global phenomenon, underscoring how cultural industries operate in a contemporary capitalist system. Reflecting the rise of consumerism in Chinese society, the “transformation of the communist ideal of women as producers into the neoliberal image of women as consumers” is now occurring (Xu and Feiner 2007, 310). In this process, representations of heteronormative female ideals, taking the forms of films, TV series, entertainment shows, lifestyle magazines, literature, and advertisements (Chen and Machin 2014), have become an important cultural commodity produced by businesses to target Chinese consumers with differing aesthetic tastes and preferences (Luo and Sun 2015). For instance, through a critical review of the changing design of Rayli magazine between 1995 and 2012, Chen and Machin (2014, 287) discovered that the iconic Chinese women’s lifestyle magazine had gradually adopted “international branding design styles and partly through consumer product influences from Japan […] to recontextualise core Chinese values and women’s identities”. In this process, visual representations of women’s bodies are used to promote heteronormative Chinese womanhood, which is idealised by use of beauty products and consumption of fashion brands (Chen and Machin 2014). This promotion of heteronormative Chinese female ideals has, to a certain extent, encouraged Chinese women to “indulge in the possibilities and pleasures of feminine expressions within a context of greater freedom created by the market, private entrepreneurship and consumer capacity” to enhance the economic gains of businesses (Liu 2014, 20).

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As an outcome of the capitalist system, the heteronormative turn of contemporary Chinese womanhood led by cultural industries involves gender power relations that reproduce inequality (Chen and Machin 2014). In particular, while claiming to liberate Chinese women from the ‘communist yoke’, this heteronormative turn has been reiterating the “yin-yang balance” notion deeply held in Chinese culture (Liu 2014, 20). In this process, a confusing boundary is created between biologically determined sex differences and socio-culturally conditioned gender differences (Rahman and Jackson 2010). The dichotomous social roles for Chinese women and men are thereafter re-established in the post-reform era, requiring the female cohort to maintain feminine qualities, such as “gentleness, dutifulness as wives and mothers and female beauty or elegant appearance based on both inner self-cultivation and smart commercial choice”, and take on “attributes of care, emotionality, communicativeness, and gentleness deriving from their role as reproducers and nurturers” in the home (Liu 2014, 20–21). Amid the widespread penetration of heteronormative womanhood in the post-reform era, criticisms of career women, especially those who have reached senior positions in their professions are well received in modern society, because these career women are considered to have violated gender norms constructed upon the yin-yang balance between women and men (Rofel 2007). The so-called leftover women phenomenon provides a vivid illustration of the hierarchical power relations between women and men in heteronormative, post-reform Chinese female ideals (Wallis and Shen 2018). In Chinese society, leftover women are often well-educated and economically stable women, who do not yet marry until their late 20s either through personal choice or circumstance (Fincher 2014). The emergence of leftover women in official discourse has been conjectured to relate to the imbalanced female-male ratio of the Chinese population (Wang et  al. 2019). Since the reform period, the CCP has launched a series of birth control policies3 to manage the tension between the rapid growth of the Chinese population and the limited social or natural resources available in the country (Chan 2018). Given the notion of “son preference” embedded in traditional Chinese family culture, the CCP’s implementation of the birth control policies over the past three decades has engendered 3  The birth control was known as the ‘one-child’ policy because of its strict one-child quota for each couple. Since 2015, this strict birth control has now been loosened, and is often referred to as the ‘two-child’ policy.

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collateral consequences, causing a serious imbalance in the female-male ratio at birth in post-reform Chinese society (Chambers 2012, 146). According to the census statistics released by the Chinese government, the Chinese population currently comprises 700 million men and 667 million women, producing a significant surplus of men (Wang et al. 2019, 3). In addressing social issues, such as the increase of sex-crime rates, which are seen to be related to the imbalanced female-male ratio of the population, the term, leftover women, is used by the Chinese government in its official propaganda campaigns to create a stigmatised label of single Chinese women to coerce them into marriage (Yang 2017). Targeting single Chinese women, the discourse of leftover women has not only been invoked by the Chinese government to tackle social issues, but has also been thematically exploited as fodder for cinema entertainment (Talmacs 2017), TV dating shows (Luo and Sun 2015), and advertising campaigns within the fashion and beauty industries (Wallis and Shen 2018). In mainstream Chinese popular culture, leftover women are stereotypically portrayed as anomalies to customary womanhood, as they fail to take responsibility in the home (Wallis and Shen 2018). Rather than appreciating their career accomplishments, the representations of leftover women have relegated these women to ridicule and as objects of profitability within the post-reform consumer society (Fincher 2014). Through a critical discourse analysis of female participants appearing in If You Are the One, Luo and Sun (2015, 239) found stigmatised labelling of single women as leftover women by portraying them as materialistic beings “who strive for upward social mobility, yet are constrained within the new gender mandate of a market economy”. This stigmatisation of single Chinese women confirms the varied ways in which the Chinese media play a “complicit role in reducing women’s potential to resist new forms of male privilege” in contemporary Chinese society (Luo and Sun 2015, 239), providing a glimpse into the return of patriarchal orders in China today (Fincher 2014).

The Ambivalent Gender Power Relations We should note that the post-reform revival of patriarchal values does not simply target women. Instead, this is a rather complex cultural phenomenon intersected with social stratification and other forms of inequalities embedded in contemporary Chinese society. Within the revived patriarchal orders of contemporary Chinese society, gender power relations are

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ambivalent, meaning that men are not always privileged over their female counterparts (Liu 2019). These ambivalent gender power relations have created differing perceptions of gender inequality shared between Chinese women and men today. The Shaping of Contemporary Heteronormative Chinese Manhood The ambivalent nature of power relations between Chinese women and men is not configured in isolation; it is partially a consequence of the reshaping of new heteronormative Chinese manhood in the post-reform era, which provides men with a new set of social expectations that amplifies the burden laid upon their shoulders (Song and Hird 2014). According to Louie (2002), traditional Chinese masculinity is based on a notion of a wen-wu dyad, which constructs idealised Chinese manhood by highlighting a man’s possession of both intellectual ability and physical prowess. While such a wen-wu dyad model of Chinese masculinity is still relevant today, the contemporary assessment of a Chinese man’s masculine characteristics has become incredibly dependent on his economic capacity and political power (Liu 2019). This trend underscores the changing indicators of masculinity, a social process entangled with social stratification and the unequal distribution of power amongst different social groups in the increasingly market-oriented individualistic culture of the post-reform era (Song and Hird 2014). For Chinese men in business and politics, their masculine performance is now linked to a capacity for sexual conquest, often articulated in the consumption of sex during business-state client negotiations, and in the keeping of out-of-marriage mistresses. For instance, Jeffreys (2008) argues that women’s participation in the Chinese political arena is often perceived as using their immorality in the form of sexual corruption to improve their status in the CCP.  This argument resonates with the findings by Wu (2014) and Chen and Cheong’s (2015) studies, which suggest that corrupt senior government officials’ behaviour, typically including keeping mistresses or seeking sex outside of their marriages, are highlighted by the Chinese media to emphasise their lack of moral fortitude. While the objectification of women as sexual temptations for otherwise reliable senior male government officials is typically employed to indicate the men’s lack of morality, it is the mistresses, who are often revealed as the whistle-­ blowers on corruption and stereotyped as “self-assertive mistresses” in the scandal aftermath (Xiaoyan Wu 2014, 45). In this genre of news coverage,

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mistresses embroiled in political scandals with ‘immoral’ politicians become tainted for politicising their sexual relationships if male politicians do not meet their “demands”, thereby preserving an immoral official’s masculinity (Chen and Cheong 2015). It creates a discourse that excuses these male government officials simply as beholden to their mistress’ opportunism in times of political turmoil due to the access they have to ill-gotten state secrets (Wu 2014). While constructing these male government officials as the ‘victims’ of women’s sexual and political corruption, this discourse masks the simple position of power that senior male officials have to take mistresses or expect sexual exchange from their female subordinates in the first place (Jeffreys 2008), providing a glimpse into the positive correlation between Chinese men’s social status and their sexual attraction to women in the post-reform era. The Masculine Crisis With the definition of an ideal man being dependent upon the social status and economic capital that he has, ordinary Chinese men are facing the pressures of developing a sexual attraction to female counterparts (Song and Hird 2014). As Song and Lee (2010, 176) assert, “[Chinese] men without money simply cannot have sex at all. They are neither able to seduce women outside marriage nor to find wives”. The new masculinity model valued in post-reform Chinese society has notably disadvantaged Chinese men with no significant economic and political power. It facilitates the spread of a “masculine crisis” discourse in Chinese society today (Song and Hird 2014, 8). The formation of the masculine crisis discourse can be traced back to the time of the redundancy of male employees in state-owned enterprises in the early reform period, which saw large numbers of unemployed male labourers’ socio-economic positions in the domestic space being notably weakened (Yang 2010). Contextualised against the post-reform rise of the neoliberal ethos (Rofel 2007), senior state enterprise leaders were encouraged to shift the responsibility of this loss onto individual male employees for their inability to provide for their families within the rapidly privatising labour market (Yang 2010). Since the twenty-first century, the masculine crisis discourse has shown increasing conjunction with the romantic gender relationship culture in Chinese society (Song and Hird 2014). By restricting women’s career ambitions, the post-reform domestication of Chinese women defines their husbands or partners as the main financial

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provider in the home. Together with the imbalanced female-male ratio in the marriage market and the legacy of the CCP’s radical women’s movement, which has freed Chinese women from arranged marriages and provided them with the autonomy to choose their husband (Yang 2017), this social milieu has forged today’s Chinese romantic gender relationship culture, which grants young Chinese women with a seemingly advantageous economic position by requiring a man and his family to be responsible for purchasing a property in order to get married (Yang 2017). With the rapid growth of China’s real estate businesses, the dramatic increase in house prices over the past 20 years has created huge financial pressures in ordinary Chinese men’s development and management of a romantic relationship (Liu 2019). Chinese men, who are unable to afford the purchase of a house, are targeted by the masculine crisis discourse, which leads to the male cohort’s anxieties about the female appraisal of their masculine quality (Liu 2019). Beyond the changing power structure in a Chinese romantic relationship, the masculine crisis discourse has also been amplified by the current socio-political climate (Liu 2019). With the country’s return to the international stage, the responsibility for the restoration of its economic and political power is being once again understood to rely on the quality of Chinese men (Song and Hird 2014). The process of a renewed search for manly men is, therefore, ongoing in the post-reform era, requiring Chinese men to increase their competitiveness in the public domain (Liu 2019). Recently, such a search has also been evident in the “anti-effeminate” campaign, which is endorsed by the government’s official propaganda to boycott effeminate male celebrities (Feng 2018, n.p.). On top of the tangible financial pressures in a romantic gender relationship, the spread of the masculine crisis discourse has heaped heavy social burdens on the shoulders of Chinese men in their everyday lives (Yang 2017). It presents a different perception of gender inequality for Chinese men, encouraging them to renegotiate gender power relations with their female compatriots. Based on the ambivalent power relations between Chinese women and men, the revival of patriarchal values in Chinese society, therefore, faces numerous issues in recent year. Masculinity is aligned to the ability to lead the nation, sexual potency, and economic development, whilst female political and industrial emancipation has been in conflict with the leftover women’s existence as ‘unnatural phenomenon’. Thus, the rise and fall of Chinese women’s socio-political status in contemporary Chinese society is

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a consequence of mixed messaging. Contradictions between the government’s feminist manifestos, the reality of its gender policy, and mainstream consumer culture, leave issues of gender and politics open to continual abuse and critique (Wallis 2015). As such, an understanding of the negotiations inherent in these changing gender power relations helps us to interpret how the notion of gender is understood in contemporary Chinese patriarchal culture and is invoked by Internet users in their engagement with issues situated in the wider society (Song and Hird 2014). It helps us to explain the reproduction and modification of patriarchal orders in contemporary Chinese digital cultures.

Approaches to Patriarchal Values in Chinese Digital Cultures Reflecting the revival of patriarchal values in contemporary Chinese society, the establishment of the gender-politics axis in the digital public sphere provides a glimpse into the process through which female and male Chinese Internet users negotiate changing gender power relations on participatory social media platforms (Wallis 2015). Such a phenomenon can be assessed from two perspectives: the modes of Chinese users’ everyday use of Internet services and the public opinions that they express on participatory social media platforms. Consequently, two representative theoretical approaches, which scrutinise these perspectives, are employed by scholars in the field of feminist cultural studies to analyse the reflections of patriarchal values in Chinese digital cultures (Wallis 2015; Chan 2018). A Techno-Feminist Analysis Techno-feminism helps examine the digital gender divide between female and male Chinese Internet users today (Chan 2018). This approach was originally developed by Wajcman (2006) to address similar issues in the Western context, noting that a review of science history shows that technology has always constituted a masculine field because most technologies were invented by male scientists and designed for male users. In this process, patriarchal values and orders have been institutionalised within technology, turning the capacity for using technologies into a source of male power, which is entangled with male users’ performance of masculinity (Peng 2020). A techno-feminist approach accordingly examines how the

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design and use of particular technologies are engineered to hinder women’s agency in their everyday lives by unveiling the “process of mutual shaping that occurs between [technology usage and gender norms]” (Sikka 2017, 110). As such, techno-feminist literature analyses “not only the position of women in the technology sector but also their interactions with […] technologies” (Chan 2018, 300). Analysing this from a techno-feminist perspective, existing research reveals that “male values have been institutionalised” within the Internet because of the historical digital divide between female and male users (Bimber 2000, 870). While the digital gender gap is closing in Western countries, women, in general, are still less confident in their ability to use the Internet (Park 2015)—a phenomenon similar in China. In 1998, women only accounted for 14 per cent of the overall Internet population but the last two decades have witnessed almost a four-fold increase (CNNIC 2019), amply illustrating how the unequal access to the Internet between women and men is disappearing. However, as Chen and Reese (2015, 3) argue, the dominant and typical Internet users are still well-­ educated, middle-class men living in cities. The disappearance of the digital gender divide does not conceal the persistence of imbalanced gender power relations between female and male Internet users. Chan (2018) and Wallis (2013) have adopted a techno-feminist approach to highlight how changing gender power relations are negotiated with the use of Internet services, although theoretical debates reach differing conclusions. Somehow optimistically, Chan (2018) suggests that some Internet services can be defined as ‘feminist’ technologies, which enable women to challenge the male dominance of society. In particular, by means of a case study of Internet dating applications, Chan (2018) argues that Chinese women may use such services to disrupt the patriarchal order by expressing their sexual desires in seeking sexual encounters, enjoying the pleasure of gazing at the male physique in profile browsing, and reporting incidents of sexual harassment when they happen. These findings resonate with Johnson’s (2010) argument, which illustrates that some technologies that engage feminist potential, which may stimulate the improvement of women users’ socio-cultural status, eliminate gender hierarchy in their social lives, elicit equitable relations between women and men, or simply favour female users. However, as Chan (2018) himself notes, his research findings are largely based on interviews with young, middle-class Chinese women who enjoy a privileged position in their romantic lives. These findings, therefore, might overlook parts of the “structural gender inequality

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embedded in the sexual double standard, marriage expectations, and state policies” in contemporary Chinese society (Chan 2018, 298). Building on an observation of the rise and fall of Chinese women’s socio-political status, Wallis (2013) provides a techno-feminist analysis of how Chinese rural-urban migrant workers adopt Internet-based communication services to navigate the work-personal boundaries in their everyday lives. Opposing Chan’s (2018) optimistic view, the findings of Wallis’ (2013) research revealed that, while Internet-based communication services might enable women migrant workers to transcend geographic barriers to seek romantic encounters, their social mobility is still restricted by the patriarchal social fabrics fixed in contemporary Chinese culture. In this sense, the male-dominance in Chinese culture is reproduced in the use of Internet services by this group of women with disadvantageous socio-­ economic status, limiting their ability to seek liberation from gender oppression (Wallis 2013). Such findings echo Hjorth and Lim’s (2012) analysis of wider society, which confirms the continuity of gender hierarchy in contemporary users’ Internet technology-mediated communicative practices. As a theoretical approach to the “intersecting vectors of gender and technology studies” (Sikka 2017, 110), a techno-feminist analysis mainly scrutinises how the architecture of technology enhance or encumber female Internet users’ agency in seeking freedom from patriarchy (Wajcman 2006). This approach is best used to analyse the behavioural dimension of Chinese digital cultures by comparing female and male users’ adoption of particular Internet services but shows limited applicability at a representational level of discourse analysis. Such an analysis is particularly required, as it helps better understand the gender power relations manifest by Chinese Internet users’ discursive practices in the digital public sphere. The Limits of Gender Different from a techno-feminist analysis, the limits of gender is an analytical framework that specifically focuses on the representational dimension of gender power relations in digital cultures (Wallis 2015). Having been originally developed by Evans (2008) to address gender issues embedded in the Chinese context, this approach, to a certain extent, resembles aspects of Butler’s (1988, 519) performative theory, which conceptualises gender norms and gender identities as the outcomes “instituted through a stylised repetition of acts”. Building upon Butler’s (1988) performative

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theory within a contextualised understanding of Chinese society, the limits of gender specifically examines the ways in which the representations of gender in Chinese consumer culture “exist in a social milieu in which consumption and displays of overt sexuality are seen as expressions of urban, globalised modernity” (Wallis 2015, 226). This approach is particularly useful in terms of assessing the gender power relations in the expression of public opinions in the digital public sphere by Chinese Internet users (Wallis 2015), who have experienced and witnessed their sexual revolution in the post-reform era (Pan 2006). The limits of gender addresses the representations of gender in Chinese digital cultures by understanding these cultures as the results of “the [Chinese] government’s strategic bargain whereby greater consumption and lifestyle choices are offered to the populace in exchange for the suppression of political rights” (Wallis 2015, 226–227). This resonates with Wallis’ (2018, 379) observation of the CCP’s “post-socialist gender politics”, which shows that Chinese women’s bodies have now become a key business-political resource that is subject to manipulation by not only the market economy but also the Chinese government. Focusing on political manipulation, Wu (2010) notes that the CCP’s official propaganda tends to avoid critical discourses of gender. This is because these discourses entail socio-political implications that could provoke wider criticisms of its gender policy, which provides little support to the improvement, as it fails to adequately address the rise of gender-related issues, such as sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence, and discrimination against women in the workplace (Evans 2008). Exploiting this tendency in the official propaganda along with the heteronormative turn of womanhood in Chinese consumerism, contemporary digital cultures tend to invoke the sexualised women’s bodies as an indicator of individual investment and personal achievement in market-oriented society, rather than a “category of meanings that interrogates established norms of gendered and, therefore, social relationships” (Evans 2008, 375). Evans (2008, 375) refers to this phenomenon as the “marginalisation of gender as a category of analysis”. This marginalisation is exemplified by the wide range of post-reform gender representations constructed in mainstream Chinese digital discourses without a simultaneous engagement with the notion of gender “as the social and cultural power relations that undergird conceptions of masculinity and femininity” (Wallis 2015, 227). These gender representations have now become an important cultural factor that supports the practices

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of yin-yang balanced gender norms and upholds the structures of gender inequality in Chinese people’s everyday lives. Building upon an analysis of the limits of gender in a contemporary Chinese context, several recent studies have touched upon the gender-­ politics axis in China’s digital public sphere by examining how gendered discourses are employed by Chinese Internet users to push for political agendas (Fang and Repnikova 2018; Wallis 2015). For instance, Fang and Repnikova (2018, 2162) conducted a digital ethnographic case study to explore the so-called “Little Pink” phenomenon in “the cross-strait memes war of 2016” launched by Chinese Internet users to “challenge Taiwan’s election results”. The findings of their research suggest that Little Pink, which was once understood to be symbolic of Chinese women’s participation in nationalist digital civic engagement, is nothing but a mythologised label reflecting the notion of gender employed by groups of Chinese Internet users inhabiting the opposite ends of the political spectrum to reframe the imagery of Chinese politics. Wallis (2015, 223) conducted a critical analysis of Chinese political dissidents’ discursive practice on participatory social media platforms, showcasing how these political dissidents criticise the CCP by using metaphorical, sexist rhetoric in which women’s bodies and feminine characteristics become “the site of subordination, penetration, and insult”. Resonating with the findings by Fang and Repnikova (2018), Wallis’ (2015) research also underlines the representational dimension of the revived patriarchal values in both Chinese digital cultures and its convergence with wider Chinese socio-­ political trends. Reflecting the shifting gender power relations in the post-reform era, women have also attempted to challenge the gender hierarchy in the digital public sphere (Farrer 2007; Chang et al. 2018). However, within the market economy, such an attempt can be hijacked by the rise of pseudo-­ feminist digital influencers,4 who use feminism as a self-branding tool to target female followers on participatory social media platforms. For instance, Peng (2019) employs a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to scrutinise the content posted by a popular women-focused Chinese digital influencer, namely Mimeng, on the most used Chinese social media platform: WeChat. His research identifies that Mimeng has adopted a discourse strategy similar to their Western counterparts (Pruchniewska 4  Digital influencers are digital business practitioners who utilise social media platforms to engage with followers and then profit from advertising businesses.

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2018). In other words, by using feminism-like language to acknowledge women’s agency in a gender relationship in her content production, the digital influencer has successfully branded herself as a feminist, which helps her develop popularity with the female Chinese cohort (Peng 2019). The seemingly feminist agendas promoted by pseudo-feminist digital influencers in the digital public sphere generally focuses on women’s self-­ enhancement of wellbeing through their daily management of an interdependent romantic relationship or marriage with men (Rottenberg 2018). Without tackling the structural gender inequality embedded in social and national institutions, the emergence of these pseudo-feminist digital influencers poses no real threat to the male dominance of China’s digital public sphere and beyond (Peng 2019). However, while constantly and publicly providing Chinese women with advice on how to achieve a seemingly advantageous position in a gender relationship through manipulating their partners, these pseudo-feminist digital influencers can provoke hatred from the male cohort. With these pseudo-feminist digital influencers’ confusing usage of feminist-like language, their popularity with women has encouraged the male Chinese cohort to boycott feminists, women’s organisations, and women supporters of feminism on the Internet. Under these circumstances, two polarised camps are often created in gender-issue debates in China’s digital public sphere. Such a gender divide is most tellingly revealed by particular male Internet users’ use of extreme slogans, such as “defending Chinese racial stock”, to abuse Chinese women who date foreign men to reclaim their ownership over women’s bodies (Cheng 2011, 567). As Pfafman et al. (2015, 544) put it, “expressions of [extreme views] reveal much about how the speaker views the self in relation to the social and political context”. The ways in which male Chinese Internet users’ express extremely sexist views paradoxically might have revealed their perception of the patriarchal orders of the post-reform Chinese socio-economic structure, which also exploits men in romantic gender relationships. In this sense, the distorted gender issue debates have provided an additional layer of evidence illustrating the limits of gender in the contemporary context, creating a complexity of the changing gender power relations in digital civic engagement.

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Conclusion This chapter has provided a feminist cultural studies analysis of the notion of socially constructed gender in contemporary Chinese digital cultures. By tracing the origins of gender norms and gender identities in Chinese society, this chapter has explored the configuration of gendered Chinese digital cultures through observations of the fluctuation of Chinese women’s socio-political status. With a reference to the revival of patriarchal Chinese values in the post-reform era, this chapter outlines how techno-­ feminism and the limits of gender articulate different aspects of the gendered nature of contemporary digital cultures in China. Given that the book focuses on a representational dimension of analysis, this book adopts the limits of gender as the theoretical approach to explain how women’s bodies and feminine characteristics become the site of insult in Chinese digital cultures, and how this affects Chinese Internet users’ expression of public opinions.

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CHAPTER 4

Pseudo-Feminism and Chinese Digital Influencers

Abstract  This chapter uses case studies of two women-focused Chinese digital influencers to examine the rise of pseudo-feminism in Chinese society. The chapter integrates how women-focused Chinese digital influencers use pseudo-feminist discourse to target female followers on the Internet, and how their practice creates a blurred boundary between feminism and patriarchal values. This chapter illustrates how neoliberal influences reshape Chinese digital discourses of gender, focusing on the implicit form of patriarchal values that target Chinese women. This chapter sheds new light on how the divide between female and male Internet users is constructed within the Chinese digital environment today. Keywords  Digital discourse • Digital influencers • Patriarchy • Pseudo-feminism

Introduction This chapter discusses how the commodification of feminism occurs in Chinese digital cultures and how this phenomenon complicates women and men’s perception of gender power relations in Chinese society (Peng 2019). Such an analysis is built upon Rottenberg’s (2018) work, which highlights the emergence of a form of pseudo-feminism that advocates

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women’s full responsibility for their well-being and self-care in major Western democracies (Rottenberg 2018). This empowerment, however, distracts women’s attention from the structural pressure they have been experiencing (McRobbie 2004). It not only prevents women from collectively challenging the patriarchal socio-economic structures but also provides an instrument that enhances businesses’ profitability (Rottenberg 2018). In China, the rise of pseudo-feminism is arguably evidenced by the employment of market-oriented feminist narratives in popular literature (Tse 2017), and films (Marchetti 2009), as well as digital influencers, who use social media platforms, such as WeChat, to engage with female Chinese followers (Peng 2019). This chapter discusses how women-focused digital influencers employ pseudo-feminist discourse in their social media posting, focusing on the business rationale behind this phenomenon. Based on case studies of two high-profile Chinese digital influencers—Mimeng and Ayawawa, this chapter argues that a key feature of Chinese pseudo-­ feminist discourse refers to its promotion of interdependent gender relationships through the construction of a feminised Chinese male ideal. Such a discourse addresses women’s ‘female gaze’ on male bodies (Cohen 2010), allowing women-focused digital influencers to attract female Chinese Internet users’ attention on social media platforms. This chapter points towards the hijacking of feminist voices by businesses in China’s digital public sphere, amid the significant increase in Chinese women’s consumer power in the post-reform consumer market.

Conceptualising Pseudo-Feminism “When everyone is a feminist, is anyone?” This is a question asked by Jessica Valenti (2014, n.p.), an influential feminist scholar and a columnist of the leading British newspaper—the Guardian. Across the globe, we have seen an increase in digital influencers proclaiming to be ‘feminists’ and creating seemingly feminist content to engage with audiences on social media platforms (Pruchniewska 2018). Pruchniewska (2018) argues that these digital influencers’ use of feminist language is nothing but a self-­ branding technique, which allows them to build their popularity with female followers on social media platforms. Such a phenomenon provides a window to the global penetration of pseudo-feminism, which is symbolic of the commodification of feminist discourses by Western neoliberal capitalism today (Rottenberg 2018).

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As an economic term, neoliberalism is mainly used to describe a contemporary, capitalist rationale for governance by economists, such as Friedman (1982), and advocates minimal government and the privatisation of industries and services (Cahill 2011; Dean 2014; Alfredo and Johnston 2005). As Harvey (2007) notes, the emergence of neoliberalism signifies how the market gradually replaces the role that states once played in social governance. Today, the influence of neoliberalism is not limited to economic or political sectors because this governance rationale also “produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behaviour, and a new organisation of the social” (Brown 2003, n.p.). In particular, neoliberalism emphasises individual autonomy and an individual’s self-responsibility (Rottenberg 2018). While advocating people’s full responsibility for enhancing their wellbeing (Larner 2000), it discourages collective movements towards the common good (Chomsky 1999). As such, the acceptance of the neoliberalist rationale by the general public has created a social discourse that “links moral probity even more intimately to self-­ reliance and efficiency, as well as to the individual’s capacity to exercise her or his autonomous choices” (Rottenberg 2014, 420). This facilitates the persistence of various kinds of structural inequality in major Western democracies (Harvey 2007). By using its essence to eviscerate classic feminism (Larner 2000; Aslan and Gambetti 2011; McRobbie 2004), neoliberalism has shaped an emerging type of pseudo-feminist discourse, which is often referred to as neoliberal feminism in contemporary scholarship (Rottenberg 2018). Following neoliberal logic, pseudo-feminist discourse advocates an individual woman’s full responsibility for her life happiness and her “wellbeing and self-care” (Rottenberg 2014, 418), creating “a particular kind of feminist subject”, who adheres to neoliberal capitalist ideology (Rottenberg 2014, 421–422). It defines women as autonomous individuals and emphasises the importance of their self-development but, in the meantime, pays little attention to the systematic and structural oppression that women experience in their everyday lives (McRobbie 2004, 2009). For instance, Rottenberg (2014) critically analysed two ‘neoliberal-feminist’ writers’ publications, namely Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. Her analysis revealed that pseudo-feminist discourse often borrows key terms from mainstream liberal feminism but re-contextualises them entirely (Rottenberg 2018). In doing so, pseudo-feminist discourse presents itself as progressive but paradoxically encourages women to pursue a “felicitous work-family balance”

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(Rottenberg 2014, 422). This approach rejects structuralised and institutionalised gender inequality, recasting the issues of social justice into individualised terms (Rottenberg 2018). In this sense, pseudo-feminism is nothing but an accomplice of patriarchal, chauvinist values, which unfold structural gender inequality across different socio-cultural contexts.

Pseudo-Feminism in Post-Reform China To what extent the CCP’s economic reform has created neoliberal capitalism in Chinese society is an on-going debate in academia (Peng 2020; Zhang 2017; Wallis and Shen 2018). As Harvey (2007) notes, the CCP’s reform of China’s economic sectors includes learning from the Western experience of social governance and adopting aspects of Western management philosophy without changing the country’s political infrastructure. For political economy scholars, such as Nonini (2008) and Wu (2010), this market-oriented reform by no means suggests that the CCP is prepared to loosen its control of Chinese society. Since President Xi Jinping took office, the CCP’s reluctance concerning political reform is evidenced by the adoption of an increasingly more authoritarian style of administration (Lam 2015).1 However, scrutinising Chinese society from a cultural studies perspective, authors, such as Wallis and Shen (2018), suggest that the current socio-cultural trends in Chinese society do adhere to aspects of the neoliberal tenets, although they also contain distinct, indigenous features that are unique to the Chinese context. To a certain extent, their arguments resonate with the works by Rofel (2007) and Marchetti (2009), which unveil the similarities between major Western democracies and Chinese society in terms of the acceptance of neoliberal ethos in everyday social interaction and value. Following Rofel’s (2007) observation of the neoliberal socio-cultural trends in Chinese society, we can see that pseudo-feminism has played an important role in shaping the notion of gender in Chinese society (Peng 2019). This notion of gender advocates the construction of interdependent, complementary relationships between Chinese women and men (Marchetti 2009). It encourages Chinese women to take pleasure in their relationships or marriages with men but proposes that women be 1  In the 2018 National People’s Congress, Xi Jinping even removed the term limits for the president from China’s constitution; such a move is widely considered as a sign of his quest to dominate the country indefinitely (The Guardian 2018).

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“self-reliant” and have “a life of [their] own” because it would be “too risky” for them to completely rely on their partners or husbands for livelihood (Liu 2014, 22). Consequently, the main issue that Chinese pseudo-­ feminism strives to address falls into the discourse of a work-family balance for individualised women, showing a trajectory similar to their Western counterparts. In particular, Chinese pseudo-feminism views women as ‘autonomous modern’ individuals, who are eager for self-expression and self-­actualisation (Peng 2019). Such an emphasis on Chinese women’s self-expression and self-actualisation comprises neoliberal market rationality. In the post-­ reform era, lifestyle magazines and fashion or beauty products that cater to women have proliferated in the Chinese consumer market (Chen and Machin 2014). This offers today’s women a variety of choices that encourage them to “indulge in the possibilities and pleasures of feminine expressions” (Liu 2014, 20). In this way, Chinese pseudo-feminism becomes an organic component of post-reform Chinese consumer culture. While claiming to address gender inequality, which makes it appealing to the female populace, this type of feminist rhetoric assists the profitability of women-focused businesses by creating a socio-cultural milieu in which Chinese women’s daily consumption is encouraged (Meng and Huang 2017).

Case Studies: Mimeng and Ayawawa The rise of pseudo-feminism in Chinese society is most notably evidenced by the emergence of Chinese digital influencers, who use feminist language as a self-branding technique to target female followers (Peng 2019). This chapter uses Mimeng and Ayawawa as case studies to foreground the spread of pseudo-feminism in China’s digital public sphere. Mimeng (real name: Ling Ma) and Ayawawa (real name: Bingyang Yang) are the nicknames of two prominent women-focused digital influencers’ social media accounts. Specialising in the areas of gender relations, how-to-succeed guides, and celebrity affairs, their social media accounts are mainly popular with female Chinese Internet users (Peng 2019; Wu and Dong 2019). The two digital influencers have adopted slightly different discourse strategies to engage with their followers. While Mimeng brands herself as a vocal feminist (Peng 2019), Ayawawa promotes herself as a ‘love guru’, who ‘answers women’s queries concerning their romantic relationships’ (Wang 2018). In 2017 alone, Mimeng’s WeChat account accumulated

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over 8 million followers, and her posts attracted more than 100,000 daily views, representing one of the most influential WeChat accounts among female Chinese Internet users at that time (Peng 2019). Similarly, Ayawawa had 1  million WeChat followers, and her posts also attracted over 100,000 views daily in the same year (Yan 2017). Kantar (2017), one of the most influential international consultancy firms, even used Mimeng to instantiate successful Chinese digital influencers’ businesses in its 2017 annual report on China’s social media ecology. To a certain extent, both Mimeng and Ayawawa are iconic in the emergence of women-focused digital influencers in China’s digital public sphere. By analysing Mimeng and Ayawawa’s social media posting, it can be argued that the core value of Chinese pseudo-feminism shows no differences to patriarchal ethos. To illustrate this point, the posts retrieved from Mimeng and Ayawawa’s WeChat accounts are critically analysed from a critical discourse analysis (CDA) perspective. While these posts represent the principal collection of advice on gender-relationship issues that they offer to the female Chinese Internet users who follow their WeChat accounts, a critical analysis of these posts helps shed light on the interplay between gender power relations and pseudo-feminism in contemporary Chinese digital cultures.

Targeting Female Chinese Internet Users in Practice It can be seen that Mimeng and Ayawawa have adopted a similar rhetorical technique in their social media posting on WeChat. This rhetorical technique is most notably revealed by their frequent use of the second-­ person singular pronoun. The second-person pronoun has two forms in the Chinese language, including a singular form and a plural form. The second-person singular pronoun of ‘you’ (ni) is constantly used by both Mimeng and Ayawawa, as shown in the extract below retrieved from Ayawawa’s post entitled “I Am Praising You, Why Are You Mad”. Ayawawa: Please think from their perspective if you do not believe this. For example, how do you feel if your husband tells you: “Honey, your breasts are huge today!” […] In your subconscious, you were criticising your husband. This is because your words involve implicit criticisms.

The singular and plural forms of ‘you’ are used to provide very distinctive connotations in everyday communications in the Chinese language.

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While the plural form tends to create power relations between addressers and addressees in which the addressers appear to be superior, the second-­ person singular pronoun is often used to reinforce “the addressee’s involvement” to create a non-hierarchical relationship between the pair (Biq 1991, 307). By constantly invoking the second-person single form of ‘you’ to address their followers, both Mimeng and Ayawawa directly engage with them following an oral communication pattern. Using similar communicative techniques to encourage their followers’ emotive responses, Mimeng and Ayawawa, however, have developed slightly different discourse strategies to promote their notion of gender. In the case of Ayawawa, patriarchal values are somehow more explicitly expressed in her social media posts. By acknowledging the patriarchal nature of contemporary Chinese society, Ayawawa’s social media posts advise her female followers on how to use their ‘gender strengths’ to achieve an advantageous position in romantic relationships or marriages. In the extract below, for instance, an explicit form of pseudo-­empowerment of women surface from Ayawawa’s posting, when she discusses how a female manager could become successful in the workplace by effectively using her sexual attractions to male colleagues. Ayawawa: If you have several male subordinates who are willing to provide you with their full support, you […] no longer have concerns about [whether refusing a male colleague’s pursuit] would affect your career progress. […] You only have this kind of concerns when you do not have the charm to attract them.

Different from Ayawawa, Mimeng’s social media posting tends to highlight the progressive trajectory of feminism. The advice that she offers her female followers emphasises the individuality of each woman. Such an emphasis is often evidenced by her frequent mentioning of the word ‘self’ in composing her social media posts. The extract below from Mimeng provides a good illustration of this tendency. Mimeng: Respecting yourself not only helps you to be successful in the workplace but also allows you to develop a wonderful romantic relationship.

The word ‘self’ has an important linguistic functionality, as when it is used to form reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself or yourselves). As shown in the above extract retrieved from the post “I Don’t Flatter the World, I Only

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Flatter Myself”, such a usage of ‘self’ is frequently devised by Mimeng, when she refers to women, to emphasise how they ‘themselves’ should behave in their everyday lives. Within the context of a topic attending to women’s romantic lives, this referential strategy is engineered by a pseudo-­ feminist ideology, which advocates women’s full responsibility for their wellbeing. As shown in the above extract, the quote is representative of the kind of advice that Mimeng provides to her female followers. With a focus on romantic relationships or marriages, Mimeng asserts that women should live for themselves and should not sacrifice their happiness to please their partners or husbands. At first glance, Mimeng seems to evoke a feminist manifesto, as her social media posting follows a “progressive trajectory” of feminism (Rottenberg 2014, 422) to criticise the persisting gender inequality of the Chinese (family) culture, and calling for the liberation of contemporary women from the yoke of patriarchy. On the surface, it appears that Mimeng and Ayawawa have set different feminist agendas concerning women’s empowerment in their social media posting. What Mimeng and Ayawawa share in common is that their constructions of womanhood both relate Chinese women’s achievement to their management of relationships with men. As previously mentioned, the primary emphasis of pseudo-feminism is women’s responsibility for their wellbeing. This discourse does not attempt to resolve the tension between liberal individualism, social justice, and those “social pressures that potentially obstruct the realisation of ‘true’ (gender) equality” (Rottenberg 2014, 428). Instead, it argues that women should not rely on the “government” or on “men as a group” (Rottenberg 2014, 428), emboldening women to “provide for [their] needs and service [their] own ambitions” (Brown 2006, 694). Such a tendency is particularly notable in Mimeng’s posts. As Mimeng suggests, today’s Chinese women are “no longer living in ancient times”, but instead the ‘modernised’ “twenty-first century” (“I Will Buy Lipsticks Myself, What I Want Is Your Love”). Such an assertion is framed in line with a progressive discourse, which claims that the post-reform economic development of Chinese society has provided Chinese women with sufficient career opportunities. Thus, the goal for women is to reach a level of economic independence, which allows them to practise daily consumption without obstructions to please themselves. Yet, women’s achievement of complete financial independence is neither Mimeng nor Ayawawa’s concern. Mimeng propounds that “true love does not exist without money” (Mimeng, 26 January 2017). This resonates

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with Ayawawa’s assertion that “a man does not love a woman if he does not spend money on the woman” (Ayawawa, 23 August 2019). The dichotomous roles for men and women (as payers and spenders, respectively) are, therefore, considered by both Mimeng and Ayawawa as the etiquette to which Chinese people must adhere in their everyday management of romantic relationships or marriages. According to the two digital influencers, Chinese women should enjoy spending money and develop economically interdependent relationships with their partners or husbands. Their promotion of this patriarchal form of male-female interdependence is most notable when they explicitly advocate a masculine-feminine dualism of labour. In Mimeng’s post entitled “Should be Strong but Should Not Be Tough”, she creates a dichotomy between masculine and feminine work, suggesting that women should avoid participating in labour-intensive, traditionally masculine routine employments (e.g. fixing computers or lamps and unblocking drains). Women’s avoidance of these daily routines facilitates their performance of femininity (giving the impression of delicacy or fragility) and allows them to gain from their opposite sex (receiving physical, emotional, or even financial support). Similarly, throughout the sampled posts retrieved from Ayawawa’s WeChat account, the invented scenarios, in which wives undertake household duties and husbands provide financial support for the family, are invoked as hypothetical examples to rationalise her version of normative Chinese family culture. For both Mimeng and Ayawawa, having a career is not a means to secure independence for Chinese women but a way to earn the respect of their partner or husband. In this way, their discourse returns to the objectification of Chinese women that upholds patriarchal gender relations in contemporary Chinese society. Advocating the subordination of women in gender relationships, Ayawawa, in particular, explicitly argues that women should be obedient and willing to satisfy the sexual needs of their husbands or partners. She even suggests that the very foundation of intimacy between couples is based on women’s acceptance of their husbands’ preference in sexual intercourses. Ayawawa: Frequently having sex […], accepting oral sex, or even swallowing [his] semen. All help sufficiently build the intimacy between couples.

In a post entitled “What to Do If You See Husband Masturbating”, Mimeng gives similar advice to female Chinese Internet users by asking

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them to provide their husbands or partners with a ‘prostitute’ style of service to satisfy their sexual needs. As Mimeng puts it, this has become the criterion that defines a ‘good wife’ nowadays. Although Mimeng provides such advice by using a subtle, humorous tone and claims that women should only accept this sexual activity when they can derive self-pleasure from it, she suggests that this activity would help women ensure an everlasting, happy family life. In doing so, women would provide potential homewreckers with no opportunity to undermine their marriage or relationship. Mimeng: What should you do when you see your husband masturbating? The correct answer is to have sex with him immediately.

From the examples mentioned above, we can see that, as a general trend, both Mimeng and Ayawawa claim to value women’s autonomy, but their discourses of Chinese womanhood show no apparent differences in terms of their objectification of women. This tendency resonates with the thinking of post-reform Chinese feminist movements, in which women’s (re)claiming of ‘femininity’ is explicitly encouraged (Liu 2014, 20). Consequently, their discourses of Chinese womanhood not only exploit the neoliberal, pseudo-feminist ethos that Chinese society absorbs from Western capitalism but also reflect the particular history of feminist movements in China (Peng 2019). They depart from the CCP-led feminist movements, which suppressed Chinese women’s natural sex identity and desire between the 1950s and 1970s, and caused Chinese women’s resistance to the masculinised ‘neutered women’ model in the post-reform era (Liu 2014). Certainly, both Mimeng and Ayawawa’s posts are not always supported by consistent arguments. Self-contradictions can be found in many posts of their creation. For instance, Mimeng occasionally argues that women could live freely without a male companion and be fully independent in every aspect of their lives (e.g. a post entitled “Women Make up Themselves Only for Pleasing Men? Bullshit!”). However, a family-work balance remains to be an emphasis throughout both digital influencers’ social media posting. As existing literature shows, the achievement of a family-­ work balance and the emphasis on traditional femininity do not challenge the current, patriarchal socio-economic structure, which favours male dominance (Rottenberg 2014). Following the neoliberal, pseudo-feminist fashion, women-focused digital influencers, such as Mimeng and Ayawawa,

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frame their discourse of male-female romantic relationships by using individualised terms. Like their Western counterparts, they create a particular pseudo-feminist agenda that concentrates on women’s personal development, self-care, and family-work balance management. In post-reform Chinese society, where neoliberal capitalist moralities are well received by the general public, such a posting practice adapts to Chinese women’s worldview, providing the grounding for these women-focused digital influencers’ popularity amongst female Chinese Internet users today (Peng 2019).

Promoting a Contemporary Chinese Male Ideal In Chinese feminist studies, many scholars, such as Marchetti (2009), Tse (2017), and Meng and Huang (2017) have already analysed the compatibility between (pseudo-)feminism and neoliberal capitalism in the context of post-reform Chinese society. However, their scholarship primarily examines this compatibility in the context of Chinese womanhood. Little existing scholarly attention has been paid to the intersection of Chinese pseudo-feminism and manhood. Interestingly, the analysis of Mimeng and Ayawawa’s social media posts also sheds light on a unique feature of Chinese pseudo-feminist discourse, which refers to its attempt to reshape women’s perception of Chinese manhood. Specifically, the current analysis shows that word clusters referring to the male cohort are frequently mentioned throughout Mimeng and Ayawawa’ social media posting. This frequent reference to men forms an important feature of their rhetoric when they tackle romantic relationship-related topics by advising Chinese women on ‘how to cope with their opposite sex’. Mimeng: A romantic relationship means that he [the husband] is in charge of family finances but I [the wife] decide how to spend.

As can be seen in the above extract, at first glance, Mimeng appears to advocate a pattern of gender relationships in which women are seemingly privileged. However, while this discourse emphasises women’s management of such relationships, it paradoxically involves constructing a role model for women that intends to appeal to men. The definition of this female role model conforms to the notion of ‘contemporary womanhood’, as advocated by pseudo-feminism, which centres on the ability of women to build highly interdependent relationships with their husbands

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or partners as a way to ‘housetrain’ him. Chinese pseudo-feminism encourages women to ‘tame’ their male partners to fulfil their expectations of family life, serving the very core value of home-work balance. The legitimisation of this ‘womanhood’ detracts from what liberal feminism has been fighting for decades (Rottenberg 2014). It neglects the importance of women’s independence in the facilitation of gender equality in a given socio-economic structure. Interestingly, in both Mimeng and Ayawawa’s discourse strategies, the construction of female role models is often paired with the construction of an idealised image of Chinese men. Such a male ideal construction is often accomplished by constantly displaying typical images of ‘good’ men and comparing them with ‘bad’ ones, (re)defining post-reform Chinese masculinity for the female gaze (Louie 2012). Traditional Chinese masculinity follows an indigenous ‘wen-wu’ paradigm, in which a balance between martial valour and cultural attainment is emphasised (Louie 2002, 10). While martial valour is centred around a man’s competitiveness, wealth, and socio-economic status, cultural attainment stresses his ability to respect other people (Song and Hird 2014). The ‘wen’ aspect of the indigenous ‘wen-wu’ paradigm nurtures the male capacity for taking the needs and feelings of women into consideration in their everyday lives (Louie 2012, 933). In this sense, the wen-wu dyad model of Chinese masculinity is implicitly intersected with the softness of men’s characteristics, providing the grounds for criticisms of Chinese men being feminine compared with their Western counterparts (Yang 2010). In the post-reform context, such a masculine model feeds into the rise of Chinese pseudo-feminism, in which individual women’s needs and desires are becoming increasingly liberated. Mimeng: There are two men. One earns ¥100,000 but he wants to spend all the ¥100,000 on you [women]. The other one earns ¥1,000,000 but he only spends ¥100,000 on you and saves the rest for himself. Which of them would you date? I would pick the one with ¥100,000 and earn ¥1,000,000 by myself.

By using the annual incomes of two men and the percentage of annual incomes they spend on their wives or partners as a metaphor, Mimeng, for instance, describes a male model that is not highly competitive in terms of career development. This male model is, to a certain extent, feminised as though following a strict, traditional wen-wu masculine paradigm. Yet, he

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becomes idealised when Mimeng highlights his ability and willingness to continuously provide in a marriage or relationship. This idealisation is further emphasised when she compares this ‘good man’ with a so-called ‘salary warrior’ model, who is adept at earning but spends proportionally less of his income on his wife or partner. Mimeng: In fact, Gali [a ‘good man’ character from Mimeng’s viewpoint] is not gay, [although he has many feminised characteristics]. […] He carries hand lotions because Lajiao [the woman whom Gali loves] has to wash lots of cups every day. He takes Band-Aids with cartoon decorations because Lajiao often accidentally cuts her fingers with knives. He brings hairpins because Lajiao often forgets to keep her hair in place when she is busy. He never talks to other women because Lajiao is the only girl meaningful to him.

Furthermore, by romanticising men with feminised characteristics, Mimeng creates a mythologised world in which a man constantly devotes all his attention to his wife or partner’s physical and material needs and is extremely mindful of her psychological wellbeing. This masculine model defines a man’s dedication to caring for women as the most important feature of a contemporary Chinese male ideal, who shares an interdependent relationship with his partner or wife. Although this model still reflects the traditional Chinese wen-wu masculinity paradigm (in that a level of masculine competitiveness still exists), it has been significantly modified to meet the female audience’s expectations of their husbands or partners in their everyday lives (Cohen 2010). Mimeng’s advocacy of this interdependent male ideal corresponds with the agenda of Chinese pseudo-feminism, which encourages Chinese women to tame their husbands or partners to actualise their expectation of an ultimate, everlasting marriage. This agenda contends with women’s everyday life in the home, prioritising women’s strategic management of a family-work balance, which is the very core value of the pseudo-feminist manifesto (Rottenberg 2014). In this way, this agenda is framed in individualistic terms to appeal to Chinese women, whose freedom in their everyday lives is still restricted by the patriarchal socio-economic structures of contemporary Chinese society. In accordance with Mimeng, Ayawawa’s posts collaterally touch upon the desirability of a feminised male ideal in Chinese society, as shown in the extract below.

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Ayawawa: The more handsome a man is, the lower his PU value is […]. If you want to find a man [husband], you should find one who has good looks. A handsome man always has a low PU value.

PU, short for ‘paternity uncertainty’, is a concept used by evolutionary psychologists to explain people’s parenting behaviours (Gilding 2009). In the above extract, Ayawawa borrows the concept to explain her theory of matchmaking in romantic relationships or marriages. In Ayawawa’s term, the lower one PU value is, the more feminine s/he is. A feminised male ideal is, therefore, constructed in her posting to promote her version of a contemporary masculine model in the Chinese context. The attempt to (re)define a feminised male ideal, perceivable in both Mimeng and Ayawawa’s social media posts, exhibits characteristics of pseudo-feminist discourse unique to the Chinese context. It showcases strong parallels with the representations of men promoted by businesses, which measure up to contemporary Chinese women’s aesthetic values (Louie 2012). In this way, the (re)definition of male ideals by Chinese pseudo-feminism has marked how businesses target female consumers, amid the increase of women’s consumer power in the post-reform Chinese consumer market (Wallis and Shen 2018; Meng and Huang 2017). As the above analysis shows, both Mimeng and Ayawawa’s social media accounts provide a good example of how pseudo-feminism is being incorporated in popular women-focused digital influencers’ posting on Chinese social media platforms. According to CNNIC’s (2019) statistical report, female Internet users now account for more than 47 per cent of the 829 million Internet literate population in Chinese society. As Internet use amongst the female population grows, they afford considerable business opportunities. In general, the core values that Mimeng and Ayawawa advocate, as well as the male ideal that they promote in their social media posts, accommodate the desires of female Chinese Internet users, whose lifestyle is greatly influenced by post-reform neoliberal capitalism. In doing so, they specifically target female Chinese Internet users, supplying them with content that addresses their socially organised personal interests. In this sense, the appropriation of pseudo-feminism in women-focused digital influencers’ social media posting has formed a key strategy that underpins the profitability of their businesses. Following the logic of neoliberal capitalism, Chinese pseudo-feminism, similar to other explicit forms of patriarchal values, has intentionally neglected the structural issues that reinforce the inequality between

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women and men in Chinese society today (Peng 2019). For example, the fertility control policy implemented by the CCP is infamous for violating the basic rights of Chinese women in terms of their reproductive choices and bodily autonomy (Wang and Song 2018). The current Chinese legislation on maternal employment is also widely acknowledged to be insufficient, leading to the disadvantageous position of female Chinese employees in the workplace (Attane 2016; Jia et  al. 2018). As the case studies of Mimeng and Ayawawa’s social media accounts illustrate, tackling such structural socio-political issues is never part of the feminist agenda with which women-focused digital influencers’ posting attempts to deal. Their avoidance of tackling these structural issues is, in part, influenced by Xi Jinping’s tightened control over Internet users’ freedom of speech on social media platforms (Han 2018). In recent years, the crackdown on grassroots feminist movements and the censorship of literal women’s organisations’ social media accounts have confirmed that any political activism that targets the current socio-political infrastructure is suppressed by the CCP (Zheng 2015; Li and Li 2017). Without tackling these structural socio-political issues, digital influencers, such as Mimeng and Ayawawa, attempt to sell easily achievable, neoliberal pseudo-feminist manifestos to female Internet without triggering the CCP’s political censorship. In this sense, the rise of pseudo-feminism in Chinese society is also inseparable from the current political climate, showcasing the intersection of gender politics and state politics in China’s digital public sphere today.

Conclusion By analysing Mimeng and Ayawawa’s social media posting, this chapter has demonstrated how pseudo-feminist discourse is appropriated by popular women-focused digital influencers in their discussion of gender issues in the Chinese context and how this discourse promotes core values that are highly similar to an explicitly patriarchal one. As the above analysis reveals, pseudo-feminist discourse, at first glance, promotes a seemingly feminist manifesto. However, this feminist manifesto merely advocates women’s responsibility for their happiness or wellbeing and emphasises women’s management of interdependent gender relationships in their everyday lives. This discourse constitutes little criticism of the socio-­ economic foundation that supports the patriarchal orders of contemporary society. On the one hand, the emergence of the pseudo-feminist ethos

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in China accords with the particular history of pre-reform feminist movements in China. It descends from the pre-reform, communism-­ characterised ‘gender-equality’ campaigns, which neglected to acknowledge Chinese women’s wellbeing and social needs (Liu 2014, 20). On the other hand, the popularity of this ethos at present is also augmented by the consumerisation of post-reform society, where the self-reflexivity and individualism of women and their lifestyles are on the rise (Marchetti 2009). The popularity of women-focused digital influencers exploits and feeds into the rise of pseudo-feminism in Chinese society, showcasing how businesses deploy pseudo-feminism as a discourse strategy to attract the profitable attention of female Chinese Internet users on social media platforms. An interesting feature of Chinese pseudo-feminist discourse that this chapter has identified refers to its attempts to define a feminised, contemporary Chinese male ideal. The construction of this feminised male ideal represents an important aspect of the Chinese pseudo-feminist agenda because it constitutes the basis of pseudo-feminist ideology in the Chinese context, advocating interdependent relationships between women and men, to make itself appealing to female Chinese Internet users. With Chinese women and men’s relationships being defined as interdependent, the emergence of pseudo-feminist discourse promoted by Chinese digital influencers contributes to the multi-dimensionality of masculine models in contemporary Chinese society (Peng 2019). However, Chinese pseudo-­ feminism, as an implicit form of patriarchal ideology, poses no threats to the continuity of the patriarchal orders of the Chinese socio-economic structures. Instead, the rise of Chinese pseudo-feminism diverts the attention of female Chinese Internet users from the battle against the structural gender inequality of the country to the control of their partners or husbands in the home. While having been masked with a feminist semblance, it has confused both female and male Chinese Internet users, engineering gendered perceptions of gender power relations in Chinese society and, thereby, complicating the debates on gender issues between women and men in China’s digital public sphere. Such complicated gender-issue debates are discussed in detail in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 5

Debates between Women and Men on Gender Issues

Abstract  This chapter uses a case study on the most popular Chinese community question-answering site—Zhihu to reveal the divided opinions on gender relationships shared by Chinese Internet users. In doing so, this chapter explores how female and male Chinese Internet users respectively engage in gender-issue debates on Zhihu that have prompted the recently intensifying public attention to gender inequality in Chinese society. In particular, the analysis highlights male Chinese Internet users’ appropriation of nationalist rhetoric in debates. This phenomenon points towards the compatibility between nationalism and patriarchy. In this way, the chapter provides a better understanding of how anti-feminism campaigns and misogynist voices converge with nationalist sentiments in Chinese digital cultures. Keywords  Digital nationalism • Gender-issue debate • Misogynism • Zhihu

Introduction This chapter discusses the complication of gender-issue debates between female and male Chinese Internet users in relation to the rise of populist nationalism in China’s digital public sphere. Across the West, populist nationalism has been on the rise, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s victory

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in the 2016 US Presidential election (Ott and Dickinson 2019; Grossberg 2018), the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (Postill 2018; Davis and Walsh 2017), as well as the rise of nationalist politicians in many European countries (Johns et  al. 2012; Iveson 2017; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). A similar phenomenon can be seen in China, although it shows notable localised characteristics (Zhao 2014; C. Zhang 2020; Zeng and Sparks 2020). Since the 1980s, the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, alongside the CCP-led nationalist propaganda campaigns, has led to the rise of populist nationalism in contemporary Chinese society (Tang and Darr 2012). Nationalism not only advocates individuals to strongly identify with an imagined national community (Anderson 2006) but also encourages their conflict with foreign nationals and ethnic minorities (Cheng 2011; Pfafman et al. 2015). Such a phenomenon is also found in China, evidenced by a series of Chinese Internet users’ nationalist demonstrations in recent years (Zeng and Sparks 2020). Existing studies about Chinese nationalism mainly focus on nationalist Chinese Internet users’ digital protests against foreign governments in political or trade disputes, and discrimination against the ethnic minorities of their own country (Cheng 2011; Schneider 2018; Fang and Repnikova 2018; Pfafman et al. 2015). Little scholarly attention has been paid to the intersection of digital nationalism and gender politics in China’s digital public sphere, and this chapter now considers how male Chinese Internet users engage with their female counterparts in gender-issue debates by invoking nationalism as a discourse strategy. As Enloe (1989, 44) notes, nationalism is gendered in its nature, as this ideology is constructed through “masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation, and masculinised hope”. Mirroring the gendered dimensions of Western popular nationalism (Iveson 2017; Johns et  al. 2012), Chinese nationalism is predominantly popular with male Chinese Internet political activists (Fang and Repnikova 2018). The gendered nature of nationalism makes this ideology compatible with patriarchal values, which provides the grounding for digital nationalism’s distortion of gender-issue debates, a process which is often considered to be one of anti-feminism (Correa 2017). By using a case study of the gender-­ issue debates occurring on Zhihu, this chapter illustrates how Chinese nationalism is invoked by male Chinese Internet users to boycott feminism and women’s organisations. In this way, this chapter sheds light on the illuminating intersection of digital nationalism and gender politics

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in China’s digital public sphere, helping us to better understand how gender politics and state politics are entangled in Chinese digital cultures.

The Confusion Created by Pseudo-Feminism As discussed in the previous chapter, the divide between Chinese women and men on their understandings of feminism has been complicated by the rise of pseudo-feminism promoted by women-focused Chinese digital influencers (Peng 2019). On the one hand, the rise of pseudo-feminism has appropriated the voice of feminism in Chinese society, encouraging Chinese women to concentrate on cultivating their parental skills. On the other hand, as an accomplice of consumerism, Chinese pseudo-feminism has been escalating women’s consumerist desires by defining the exercise of consumer power as an important way to accomplish women’s liberation (Wallis and Shen 2018). Following this trajectory, Chinese women are ‘empowered’ to “indulge in the possibilities and pleasures of feminine expressions”, which encourage their everyday consumption of fashion and beauty products (Liu 2014, 20). In particular, Chinese pseudo-feminism is mainly promoted by women-focused digital influencers, who often advocate an interdependent gender relationship in which a man’s willingness to satisfy his wife or partner’s consumer desire is seen as a measurement of his emotional attachment to her (Peng 2019). By legitimising this gender relationship, Chinese pseudo-feminism seems to privilege women in the domestic sphere and is, therefore, unwelcome in the eyes of many Chinese men. A number of stigmas, such as Chinese rural [dog] feminists1 (zhonghua tianyuan nvquan) and fake feminists (wei nvquan), have been invented by Chinese Internet users to criticise women-focused digital influencers and their female supporters (Erguang 2017). Given the feminist semblance of pseudo-feminism, the emergence of these women-­ focused digital influencers has, consequently, influenced many male Chinese Internet users’ perspective on feminism. In particular, showing notable Western influences, Chinese pseudo-­ feminism has been glocalised in terms of what Rofel (2007, 111) refers to as “cosmopolitanism with Chinese characteristics”. The modernity of 1  “Chinese rural [dog] feminists” is a term used to stigmatize women-focused Chinese digital influencers by likening them to Chinese rural dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), an unfavourable species, which is associated with the underdevelopment of the rural areas. For more on this, see the analytical discussion below.

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Chinese society emphasises a Western-Chinese hierarchical dualism in which the West often represents the advanced while China represents the underdeveloped. It engenders a contextual, ambivalent attitude towards the West shared by Chinese people (Cong 2009). For instance, Rofel (2007) argues that this cosmopolitanism has constructed an imaginary, desirable Western society. This aspirational Western fantasy is constantly compared to a Chinese ‘reality’, which is associated with undesirable traditions (Rofel 2007). Such a hierarchical dualism encourages Chinese women to evaluate the “quality of Chinese men” against that of Western men (Liu 2019, 5). This evaluation often provokes Chinese men’s resistance. It complicates the debates on gender issues between Chinese women and men, giving the grounding for the interference of nationalism.

Digital Nationalism and Gender-Issue Debates Nationalism is often viewed as a masculine concept (Nagel 1998). According to McClintock (1993, 61–62), “women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation but are denied any direct relation to national agency”. There is no nation in the world providing women and men with the “same access to the rights and resources of the nation-state” (McClintock 1993, 61). The achievements of a nation, often measured in terms of relative economic and military strength, are also associated with its national institutions, which are generally dominated by men (Nagel 1998). These hierarchical gender power relations shape nationalist politics into a “major venue for accomplishing masculinity” (Nagel 1998, 251). Similar to its Western counterparts, Chinese nationalism is constructed upon a gendered discourse of its modern history, although this discourse involves notable indigenous characteristics (Fang and Repnikova 2018). From the Four Great Inventions2 to its vast territorial control, the narratives of Chinese history highlight the symbolic, masculine achievements of its ancient national institutions to emphasise Chinese civilisation’s hegemony in the past (Yu 2014). These glories are contrasted with the century of humiliation the country suffered as a result of Western and Japanese military invasions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Zhao 2014). This comparison emphasises the urgency of the country’s renaissance 2  The Four Great Inventions—the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing—are considered symbolic of ancient China’s technological contributions to the world.

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(Cong 2009). Nowadays, China has unquestionably become “a strong state that has the power to impact global affairs” (Z. Wang 2014, 4). Yet, the nationalistic discourse of China discourages its people from moving beyond this past humiliation (Tang and Darr 2012), which instead forges a notable aspect of their national identity, providing fertile ground for cultivating nationalism in contemporary Chinese society (Talmacs 2020). Since the late 1980s, the diffusion of nationalism amongst Chinese people has been accelerated as the Chinese government uses this ideology to justify the legitimacy of a Party-State in the post-reform era (Tang and Darr 2012). The neoliberal reform has significantly increased Chinese people’s living standards (Steele and Lynch 2013). However, this improvement has not been without associated social problems, such as official corruption, wealth concentration, and social stratification (Yu 2014). The emergence of these social problems challenges the founding ideology of the CCP, threatening the government’s authority in the eyes of the Chinese population (Yu 2014). As the national identity of Chinese people emphasises the country’s renaissance, national pride represents an “important value shared by the regime and its domestic critics” (Steele and Lynch 2013, 443). Nationalist propaganda campaigns are, therefore, deployed by the government as an “unedifying” strategy to reaffirm its authority (Steele and Lynch 2013, 443). The Chinese Dream campaign presents a recent example of the government’s nationalist propaganda (Mahoney 2014). The campaign exploits Chinese nationalist discourse by underscoring the urgency of restoring China’s national greatness (Z. Wang 2014, 3). Alongside a series of related propaganda campaigns laying weight upon the West’s antagonism, the Chinese Dream campaign argues that the ultimate goal of China’s renaissance cannot be achieved without a harmonious society led by the CCP (Mahoney 2014; Zou 2019). This campaign is being well-received in increasing numbers, who embrace a nationalist worldview, as evidenced by the emergence of Chinese digital nationalism (Schneider 2018). Chinese digital nationalism concerns Chinese Internet users’ radicalised expression of national identity (Schneider 2018). Nowadays, the widespread penetration of participatory social media platforms has turned the Internet into a digital public sphere where citizens assemble to perform public debates (Koc-Michalska and Lilleker 2017). In China, the digital public sphere is unavoidably restricted by the regime’s political censorship (Rod and Weidmann 2015). However, despite this censorship, the Internet is “endowed with a liberalising potential in China, creating channels for

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more pluralistic and critical discourses to emerge and spread” (Fang and Repnikova 2018, 3). In this way, Chinese digital nationalism is “marred in contradicting forces of globalisation, cosmopolitanism and China’s complex history and culture” (Fang and Repnikova 2018, 5). Unlike paid commentators employed by the CCP, digital nationalists are voluntarily organised (Schneider 2018). As such, their existence in China’s digital public sphere presents a “double-edged sword” for the Chinese government. While often fuelling support for the regime, digital nationalism may also turn against the regime when “it fails to meet the radical demands of nationalistic voices” (Fang and Repnikova 2018, 2163). In this sense, digital nationalism is indeed an “interactive, dynamic, and inherently messy” phenomenon established in Chinese digital cultures (Fang and Repnikova 2018, 2164). Although there seems to have been an increase in Chinese women’s participation in digital nationalism (H. Wang et al. 2016), a detailed ethnographic study of Chinese digital activists conducted by Fang and Repnikova (2018, 3) reveals that this increase, in fact, relates to a “mythologised label that was deployed by other […] groups to challenge and rebuke [male Chinese nationalists]”. Mirroring the masculine nature of nationalism, Chinese digital nationalism is still predominantly associated with male Chinese Internet users and entwined with hierarchical gender power relations in Chinese society (Fang and Repnikova 2018). Cheng’s (2011) case study of digital racism has touched upon the manifestation of nationalist rhetoric in male Chinese Internet users’ invectives against African migrants living in the country. This nationalist rhetoric invokes the masculinity of nationalism by defining transnational marriages between a Chinese woman and a non-native man as a form of foreign invasion and calling for the preservation of “Chinese racial stock” (Cheng 2011, 567). These findings provide a vivid example of the interplay between gender and nationalism in China’s digital public sphere.

Debates on the ‘Wrongdoing of a Women’s Organisation’ as an Example The analysis is based on a case study that investigates an incident of two influential male Internet users asserting their discovery of a women’s organisation that ‘deploys feminism to brainwash Chinese women’. The influence of these users seems to be attested by them both having

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approximately 20,000 followers on Zhihu. Their claim, which was communicated in a post of March 2018, led to a flood of posts circulating on Zhihu concerning gender-issue debates between female and male Chinese Internet users. A ‘snapshot’ approach was adopted to provide a window to Chinese Internet users’ opinions on the incident. Specifically, this chapter sampled two of these questions, both of which attracted thousands of followers and hundreds of answers. The two questions are WO1: What do you think of [one of the influential Zhihu user’s] article on the 15th of March entitled It Seems I Made Them Angry: Are They Fake Feminists or Brothel Owners? (1300 followers, 744,733 views, and 213 answers) and WO2: Why did no feminists condemn the women’s organisation for their involvement in prostitution businesses? Some [feminists] even defended the organisation and smeared Chinese men by suggesting that they are sexually incapable in comparison to foreign men? (5254 followers, 4,291,017 views, and 944 answers).3 The other questions, which received few if any answers, were excluded from the analysis.

The Boycott of Women-Focused Digital Influencers and Aversion to Feminism As a CQA site, Zhihu provides a highly contextualised milieu for Chinese Internet users’ engagement with socio-political affairs. The user-generated content on the site takes an answer format, which is generally posted in response to a question asked by other Chinese Internet users. In the present case, the sampled answers were retrieved from questions, which explicitly referenced two influential Zhihu users’ claim of the discovery of a women’s organisation’s wrongdoings. While the organisation was labelled as a ‘feminist’ one in the claim, it is not surprising that the answers have been largely redirected to a generalised debate of gender issues beyond the context of the original incident. A close reading of these answers reveals an attempt to distinguish the so-called ‘real’ feminists and women-focused digital influencers in some Chinese Internet users’ posting on Zhihu. In this regard, the example below provides a good illustration.

3

 Posted by 136 female users, 767 male users, and 254 anonymous accounts.

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WO1-A115, woman: Isn’t it a bigger mistake to indiscriminately attack feminists without differentiating them? Rural [dog] feminists are the enemy of our society, but real feminists are always fighting for gender equality.

As the above remark shows, female user WO1-A115 employs a referential strategy by referring to self-proclaimed ‘feminist’ digital influencers as “rural [dog] feminists”. Rural dogs are a particular mixed breed originating in China and are widely kept by rural households as guard dogs. The word ‘rural dog’ (tianyuan quan) has no literal connection with feminism. However, through its partial homonymity, the word is phonetically related to the word ‘feminism’ in the Chinese language (nvquan). Such a phonetic relation between ‘rural dog’ and ‘feminism’ is culturally linked to the commonness of the breed, and its relationship with rural households. In China, rural households are generally low-income due to the CCP’s economic policies that concentrate on urban development (Afridi et al. 2015). As a result, the word ‘rural’ holds a range of negative cultural connotations, which are opposed to the cosmopolitan values and lifestyle appreciated by the urban Chinese population (Rofel 2007). By exploiting this phonetic-cultural axis of the word—‘rural dog’, user WO1-A115 invokes a representative stigma for women-focused digital influencers established in Chinese digital cultures. This referential strategy helps the female Zhihu user, who appears to be a supporter of feminism, to differentiate between the agendas of pseudo-feminism and liberal feminism by rhetorically linking them to women-focused digital influencers and feminist women’s organisations, respectively. The above female user’s dichromatic frame of feminism and ‘fake’ feminism is not an isolated example but can be found throughout the posts by female supporters of feminism who commented underneath the two questions. Such a framing strategy has touched upon the academic conceptualisation of pseudo-feminism in existing feminist cultural studies literature (McRobbie 2004; Rottenberg 2018). In contemporary China, the rise of pseudo-feminism has converged with the revival of patriarchal values in its promotion of a pseudo-feminist agenda, which serves women’s seemingly privileged status in the home (Peng 2020). Such an agenda seems to be apolitical, as it deviates from the objectives of liberal feminism, which are based on collective mobilisations of women to overthrow the patriarchal, socio-economic structure (McRobbie 2013). The above-cited female Internet user’s employment of the dichromatic frame is part of a discursive pattern, in which supporters of feminism, who are often women, engage

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in gender-issue debates by defining the emergence of women-focused digital influencers as an unwelcome consequence of the capitalisation of pseudo-feminism by businesses. The validity of this argument is supported by existing studies (Pruchniewska 2018; Peng 2019), which show how pseudo-feminism is appropriated by digital influencers to engage with women on social media platforms in both China and the West. As discussed in the previous chapter, though it has a feminist semblance, the seemingly apolitical agenda promoted by women-focused Chinese digital influencers is, largely confusing for both women and men (Peng 2019). On the one hand, this agenda is indeed appealing to some Chinese women, whose understanding of their own disadvantageous socio-political status in Chinese society is confirmed by their everyday life experience (Liu 2014). On the other hand, it diverts public attention from the structural gender inequality of China’s socio-economic system, leading to many Chinese men’s misunderstanding of liberal women’s movements. Such a misunderstanding provides the reasoning for Chinese men’s criticisms of feminism, explaining how the present debates on Zhihu create divided opinions between female and male Chinese Internet users. WO2-A2, man: Caring for women but giving them no political rights, this [principle] is the wisdom of mankind accumulated in the past thousands of years. The Western countries are doomed for failing to follow this [principle]. […] Chinese rural [dog] feminists’ flake of [men’s] virginity obsession discourages men from taking responsibility and getting married. […] Marriage is rooted in male’s sexual desire; […]it addresses a family’s need for offspring and [parents’] needs for late-life caring.

As shown in the above extract, as a general trend, male Chinese Internet users’ criticisms of feminism on Zhihu also highlight the neoliberal capitalist nature of pseudo-feminism by employing the same referential strategy—the image of the Chinese rural dog—when describing women-focused Chinese digital influencers. However, these male Internet users, as evidenced in male user WO2-A2’s posting, tend to intentionally blur the boundaries between women-focused digital influencers and liberal women’s organisations by capitalising the word “feminism” embedded in the stigmatised term “Chinese rural [dog] feminism”. In such cases, the feminist semblance of women-focused digital influencers is intentionally highlighted. The distinctive pseudo-feminist agendas promoted by these women-focused digital influencers and feminist women’s organisations are

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reconstructed as an insignificant, internal divergence between two subcategories of the same group. What results is a unification of liberal feminism and pseudo-feminism to promote a conspiratorial discourse that suggests ‘all feminists’ share a ‘secret’, ultimate goal, which is to legitimise women’s privileges. The different agendas that feminists and women-focused digital influencers profess to advocate are accordingly reinterpreted as a way to ‘bewitch’ both their female followers and male critics. Following this idea, feminism and women’s organisations are conspiratorially accused of causing the divide between Chinese women and men. It should be noted that exceptional cases do exist on Zhihu. There are occasional examples of women defending anti-feminism values, and occasionally male feminists argue against these values. Yet, the general trend on the CQA site is male critics of feminism engaging in disputes with female supporters of feminism. In the absence of reconciliation between the two camps, multiple portrayals of feminism are discursively constructed, leading to divides between female and male Chinese Internet users on their perceptions of feminism in the Chinese context. Interestingly, it became apparent from the sampled answers that the debates on gender issues between female and male Internet users have been complicated by a hierarchical Western-Chinese binary frame of reference. This dualistic way of thinking frequently references the uniqueness of the Chinese society to shed light on an interplay between the debates on gender issues and a rhetoric separation of the Chinese society from the rest of the world (especially the West). WO2-A434, woman: In the 1990s, [Chinese] feminists fought for [women’s] basic human rights […]. At that time, many women did not even have basic human rights; female infanticides and domestic violence against women were serious social issues. [Chinese] women’s status has certainly improved in recent years. However, do you not see the imbalanced sex ratio of second children, the discrimination against women in the workplace, and sexual harassment at universities?

As the above observations reveal, female user WO2-A434’s post stresses the gender discriminatory nature of Chinese society by highlighting both the graving consequences of patriarchal Chinese culture and the on-going gender inequality of contemporary Chinese society reflected in Chinese academia and the workplace. This contextualised discussion of gender issues in Chinese society is supported by her use of a rhetorical question to

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emphasise the localness of gender inequality in China’s socio-economic structure. Such rhetoric strategically facilitates an affective comparison between China and the outside world. WO2-A250, woman: In foreign countries, feminists and career women have together pushed the revolution of the [once patriarchal] workplace. Taking Australia as an example, many mothers choose to work in a part-time position […]. Feminism indeed originated in the West.

In remarks that develop those of user WO2-A434, female user WO2-­ A250 explains the development of feminism by explicitly referring to its Western origin. This explanation is accomplished, by citing Australia as an example of a country where ‘true’ feminism and feminist movements are practised. A mythologised, progressive imaginary of Western societies is, therethrough, depicted. According to Tang and Darr (2012), the modernity was originally introduced to China from the West by means of military invasion and cultural exchange throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Tang and Darr 2012). As a progressive modern concept in Chinese society, feminism is generally understood to have been imported from Western thinking (Spakowski 2011). Such an understanding reinforces the Western-Chinese dualism embedded in contemporary Chinese culture (Rofel 2007) and reaffirms the need to tackle gender inequality in Chinese society by learning from the experience of Western women’s movements (Han 2018). The mythologisation of the West is consistent with the Western-Chinese dualism established in the modernisation process of Chinese society, supporting a dualistic frame constantly invoked by the female supporters of feminism to criticise patriarchal Chinese traditions on Zhihu.

A Nationalist Discourse Distorting the Gender-Issue Debates Interestingly, the Western-Chinese dualist frame is not only used by female supporters of feminism but also exploited by male Chinese Internet users’ criticisms of feminism to facilitate a nationalist distortion of the current gender-issue debates. As the quotation from male user WO2-A557 exemplifies, a nationalist undercurrent surfaces from the way in which his argument against feminism is developed: having employed a labelling strategy, female supporters of feminism are described as unpatriotic and accused of

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practising selective misandry characterised by a prejudiced estimation of the quality of Chinese men. Such a labelling strategy highlights the national boundary of this misandry, as it reconstructs the agenda of Chinese feminism by referring to cross-cultural romantic encounters between Chinese women and foreign men. In this way, it metaphorically relates the scenario of Chinese women dating Western men to being submissive to Western power. This rhetoric intentionally invokes the nationalist sentiment of Chinese men, which redirects the focus from gender issues to international politics in the present debates. WO2-A557, man: Feminists are hideous. It is alright if you hate men or hate getting married because this is your personal choice. The disgraceful part is that [some women] feel they become more valuable when they are together with a foreign man. […] This is the hatred of men from their own country […]. It is actually a form of reverse nationalism.

Following the contemporary, normative Chinese male ideal, sex represents a masculine achievement associated with men’s wealth and status (Song and Hird 2014). In this way, gender power relations become entangled with national identity in a discussion of transnational sexual or romantic relationships in the Chinese context (Cheng 2011). On the one hand, pairing a Chinese man and a foreign woman represents a form of national pride, for it exemplifies the attainment of the man and the male Chinese cohort that he represents. On the other hand, pairing a Chinese woman and a foreign man is perceived as an act of submission to foreign powers and a belittlement of Chinese men’s sexual attraction to Chinese women (Cheng 2011). This gender-nationalism axis upholds the objectification of women’s bodies, which are viewed as the property of men, who themselves by extension are assumed to have ownership of the country according to Chinese patriarchal values (Wallis 2015). This gender-nationalism axis educes the competitiveness of hegemonic masculinity, affectively infusing a nationalist sentiment to the gender-issue debates between women and men on Zhihu. WO2-A293, man: This proves that women’s organisations are anti-China. They have three characteristics: 1) reactionary, depicted as working closely with other external enemies to serve their anti-Chinese boss. Although they have not done anything concrete yet, they would eventually do so […]; 2) anti-China, depicted as belittling the men from their own motherland, and

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smearing the traditional culture […]; and 3) anti-social, depicted as […] encouraging women to have affairs and exploit men, and promoting misandry to create conflicts between lovers and family members.

In accordant with user WO2-A557, male Chinese Internet user WO2-­ A293 also ‘underlines’ an imaginary connection between feminism and the West to portray the former’s threat to Chinese traditional values. Interestingly, user WO2-A293’s post involves a referential strategy, which draws parallels with the Party-State’s political propaganda. Moving beyond a focus on relationships between Chinese women and foreign men, feminism, which challenges Chinese men’s ownership over women’s bodies, is constructed as a symbolic accomplice of Western, masculine invasions. An imaginary threat to the very existence of the male-dominated nation-state is, therefore, rhetorically created. This nationalist rhetoric foregrounds the negativity of feminism by conspiratorially validating a connection between the operation of Chinese women’s organisations and the plotting of “external enemies”, a term invented by the official propaganda to describe Western hostility towards the renaissance of China (Leibold 2010, 546). WO1-A87, man: Chinese rural [dog] feminism and the hatred between Chinese men and women […] etc.; these messes have now become aspects of the “show-the-way party” and the “hating-the-country party”4, turning into a profitable business […]. The enemies with whom you fight are no longer a few Chinese rural [dog] feminist ‘Big Vs’, but organised gangs whose members share the same interests (with external enemies).

It emerged from the sampled answers that a nationalist referential strategy, which relates Chinese women’s organisations to the “external enemies” of China, has been explicitly invoked by many male Chinese Internet users to boycott feminism, as evident in the extracts from users WO1-A87 and WO2-A293, amongst others on Zhihu. Based upon China’s unique historic perspective, which signalises both the Middle-Kingdom glories and the century of humiliation, Chinese nationalists are generally characterised by their advocacy of a renaissance discourse, which emphasises the urgency of restoring the country’s once leading role on the world stage (Z.  Wang 2014). This nationalist ethos is still built upon a hierarchical Western-Chinese dualism, although it comprises a more ambivalent 4  In general, both terms are stigmas invented by digital nationalists to describe their compatriots, who tend to criticize the current regime.

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attitude towards the West, which significantly blurs the hierarchal dualism. Though male Chinese nationalists acknowledge that the West represents the highest level of industrialisation, meaning that in certain respects it is comparatively advanced, they also believe that the Chinese society has its own rich history and prosperous present, which engenders a unique cultural system superior to the West (Cong 2009). This hierarchical dualism has been exploited by the Chinese government’s political propaganda to portray the West as being hostile to China’s renaissance, based on an assumption of the threat to Western supremacy in international politics that this renaissance carries (Leibold 2010). This propaganda mythologises ‘external enemies’, whose influences are not only dangerous but also pervasive (Leibold 2010). This mythologised ‘external-enemies’ concept is well received by Chinese nationalists, who are predominantly men and generally inhabit the pro-regime ideological realm (Fang and Repnikova 2018). When situated within the gender-issue debates on Zhihu, this concept is also adopted by the critics of feminism to unify the male cohort. Male Chinese Internet users’ deployment of this concept positions female supporters of feminism as opponents of the entire Chinese society, which facilitates a collective, masculine boycott of women’s movements and feminist thought of any kind. As the above analysis highlights, the diversity of its user demographics and the participatory nature of its technological design have turned Zhihu into a platform for Chinese Internet users to offer their opinion of various social issues (C. Zhang 2020). Against this backdrop, debates on gender issues between female and male Chinese Internet users can be prompted when relevant questions are raised on Zhihu. Through the analysis of the sampled answers, this chapter has noted a general consensus among Chinese Internet users on Zhihu that women-focused Chinese digital influencers have largely hijacked feminist voices in contemporary Chinese society. However, this hijacking is interpreted differently by female and male Chinese Internet users based on their views of feminism and women’s movements: while most female Internet users strive to differentiate the contrasting agendas of liberal feminism and pseudo-feminism, their male opponents tend to intentionally confound the two. These male Internet users’ discourse strategy feeds into the masculine construction of a conspiratorial discourse, which associates women-focused digital influencers with women’s organisations to stigmatise feminist thoughts of any kind. This notable gender-ideological divide creates two gendered camps of users who largely talk past each other, with few congruities between them.

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The gendered division of the two camps in gender-issue debates is unsurprising. In post-reform China, the revival of patriarchy not only discriminates against women in the public domain but also exploits men in their everyday lives (Wallis and Shen 2018). Advocating interdependent gender relationships, women-focused Chinese digital influencers promote a set of patriarchal gender norms that take a feminist semblance, yet never release Chinese men from their traditional duty of being the financial provider in the home (Peng 2019). Furthermore, by encouraging women’s consumer desires, these businesses assist the consumerist creation of ‘female’ expenses, which are always passed on to men who share an interdependent relationship with their wives or partners. The consumerist, patriarchal nature of women-focused digital influencers means that the pseudo-feminist ideology they promote may be appealing to some women, but receives scant support from men, whose economic interests and gender hegemony in the home are threatened. By exploiting certain Chinese men’s aversion to pseudo-feminism, a conspiratorial interpretation of feminism has been deployed by male supporters of patriarchy to induce their peers’ boycott of any threats to the perpetuation of male dominance. Such a conspiratorial discourse has distorted the debates on gender inequality in China’s digital public sphere. Men’s conspiratorial discourse of feminism has notably coincided with the rise of digital nationalism in contemporary China, a phenomenon pointing towards the gendered nature of nationalism, which has historically been considered ‘masculine’ and continues to be bound with manhood in modern Chinese society (Fang and Repnikova 2018). Although some scholarship suggests an increase in the number of Chinese women participating in pro-regime demonstrations on the Internet (H.  Wang et al. 2016), there is surer evidence that a high level of overlapping remains between the male cohort and digital nationalists (Fang and Repnikova 2018). In particular, with the government’s return to the international area, the country’s “economic and political position” on the world stage seems to be “once again constructed upon the quality of Chinese men” (Liu 2019, 5). Such a scenario encourages a renewed search for ‘manly’ men, which contributes to most Chinese men’s anxiety about the appraisal of their quality by Chinese women (Song and Hird 2014). Nationalist rhetoric capitalises this anxiety by infusing the nationalist sentiment of male Chinese Internet users into their debates on gender issues with countrywomen. This nationalist rhetoric potentially facilitates the unification of the male cohort in the debates.

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Displaying a noteworthy resemblance to the official propaganda, the nationalist distortion of the gender-issue debates on Zhihu provides a glimpse into the post-reform regime’s nationalism-assisted governance, which has consequences that should not be underestimated (C.  Zhang 2020). By disseminating nationalist propaganda, the Chinese government has sought to direct public attention “from internal difficulties toward perceived external threats” (Tang and Darr 2012, 811). This attempt marks the government moving away from its revolutionary identity and redefining itself as the “guardian of national pride”, who promises to continue enhancing the “collective image of Chinese society while providing political stability and economic prosperity” (Steele and Lynch 2013, 443). National pride generally forms an important consensus between the party-­ state the people who fall within the pro-government spectrum, and opponents of the regime, who yet retain a sense of pride in their country (Schneider 2018). Nationalism-assisted governance has proven to be a strategy for social bonding and has been increasingly used by the current leadership (Zeng and Sparks 2020). Despite its differing degrees of reception by different social groups, this governance has led to a nationalist colouring of the political discourse circulated in China’s digital public sphere, as attested by the scale of Internet activists’ participation in recent anti-West or anti-Japan demonstrations (Dixon 2014; Guo et  al. 2019; S. I. Zhang 2019). Thus, the nationalist distortion of gender-issue debates showcases the role that nationalism-assisted governance plays in China’s digital public sphere, despite digital nationalism being a complex phenomenon, which is by no means fully controlled by the CCP.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an in-depth analysis of the gender-issue debates taking place in China’s digital public sphere by unpacking how digital nationalism distorts such debates in which female and male Chinese Internet users largely inhabit the opposite opinion spectrum. Through a case study of one of such debates occurring on Zhihu, it becomes apparent that a conspiratorial discourse, which links Chinese women’s organisations to the external enemies of the country, has been increasingly employed by some male Internet users to stigmatise feminism in the Chinese context. This conspiratorial discourse involves notable nationalistic characteristics,

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exemplifying the compatibility of nationalism and patriarchal values in post-reform China. While such a phenomenon certainly speaks to the masculine nature of nationalism, which exists in different cultural circles across the world (Enloe 1989), it is also contextualised within contemporary Chinese society, wherein digital nationalists and male supporters of patriarchal values show a high level of overlapping (Fang and Repnikova 2018). Existing studies on Chinese digital nationalism has toted the appropriation of gender as “convenient arm” by nationalist Chinese Internet users in “pushing for their political agenda” (Fang and Repnikova 2018, 2166). From an opposing angle, this chapter has discussed how a nationalist discourse is appropriated by male Chinese Internet users advocating patriarchal values, to distort the debates on gender issues. This serves as a basis for a deepening exploration of the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere.

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CHAPTER 6

Stereotyping Women in Powerful Positions

Abstract  This chapter examines the discussions about Mingzhu Dong (the chair of the board at a China-based international conglomerate company) and Angela Merkel (the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany) on Zhihu, focusing on how women in powerful positions are stereotypically portrayed in the Chinese digital environment. This chapter highlights the gendered evaluation of women’s career achievements and political participation in the Chinese context and the patriarchal rationale behind such an evaluation. It sheds light on the continuous marginalisation of women in China’s business domain and political arena, and its impacts on Chinese Internet users’ perception of womanhood in business and politics. Keywords  Angela Merkel • Mingzhu Dong • Women in powerful positions • Zhihu

Introduction This chapter discusses how women in powerful positions are stereotypically portrayed by Chinese Internet users. As discussed in Chap. 3, resonating with the on-going gender inequality across the world, both politics and business sectors are dominated by men in the Chinese context (Howell 2006; J.  Song 2018; Nandi 2019; Hung et  al. 2007). Reflecting the

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male-dominance of the masculine fields, women in powerful positions are often portrayed by the media as a particular stereotypical category of women, or namely, the subtype of women, who do not adhere to traditional gender norms that require women to be feminine and submissive to men (Schneider and Bos 2014). The gender stereotyping of powerful women presents ‘successful’ female role models, such as female politicians and female managers at multinational conglomerate companies, as an ‘abnormal’ cohort of women, alienating them from femininity and womanhood (Baxter 2010, 2017). This gender stereotyping has greatly affected the perception of womanhood and women’s social roles by the general public, showcasing how patriarchal values discourage women from pursuing career successes and prevent them from challenging the male-­ dominance of the world (Schneider and Bos 2014; Hung et al. 2007). Focusing on the contexts of business and international politics, this chapter uses Mingzhu Dong (a high-profile female Chinese businessperson) and Angela Merkel (the current Chancellor of Germany) as case studies to demonstrate how gendered portrayals of women in powerful positions are established in Chinese Internet users’ discursive practice. This chapter argues that the gendered portrayals of powerful women showcase aspects of the revival of patriarchal values in Chinese society, which is engineered by the specificities of gender politics in the post-­ reform era. Such gendered portrayals form an important type of semiotic resources in Chinese digital cultures. They are used by Internet users, who advocate misogynist views, to justify the achievements of women in masculine fields and negotiate the hierarchical gender power relations in wider Chinese society. In this way, the findings add another layer of evidence that illustrates the rise of misogynist voices in the digital public sphere from a representational perspective.

Women in Powerful Positions as a Subtype of Women Having been through two waves of feminist movements, gender equality is now firmly embedded in social consensus amongst Western democracies (Rottenberg 2014, 2018; McRobbie 2004, 2013; Banet-Weiser 2018; Zuckerberg 2018). There is an increasing number of successful female businesspersons, with the latest Fortune 500 List showing that that 33 of the world-leading multinational conglomerate companies have female CEOs in 2019 (Zillman 2019). In the political sphere, we have also witnessed the rise of female national leaders, such as Angela Merkel (Germany),

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Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand), and Mette Frederiksen (Denmark), who have secured the most senior offices in the state governments of major Western countries (Steckenrider 2013; Ferree 2006; Clark 2018), as well as high-profile female politicians, such as Hilary Clinton, who participated in presidential elections as prominent candidates in major Western democracies (Neville-Shepard and Nolan 2019; Lee and Lim 2016). Yet, these achievements do not conceal the fact that Western societies are still subject to male-dominance (UN Women 2017; Baxter 2010). Contextualised against the patriarchal socio-politic status quo, women and men are portrayed differently in mainstream popular cultures. For instance, male businesspersons and male politicians are often portrayed by the media as a subgroup of men, who share similar masculine traits with the whole male cohort (Schneider and Bos 2014). On the contrary, their female counterparts generally constitute a subtype of women, meaning that they have become a new category of women, who are somehow abnormal because of being “so different from women in general” (Schneider and Bos 2014, 245). Such gender stereotyping has been accepted by the general public, facilitating their rationalisation of the existence of women at powerful positions, which remains unusual or exceptional until today (Baxter 2010, 2017). Baxter (2017) distinguishes between five different stereotypes of women in powerful positions in the mainstream, popular discourses of womanhood, including (1) the Iron Maiden or Battle-axe, (2) the Seductress, (3) the Mother or School Marm, (4) the Pet, and (5) the Queen Bee. The Iron Maiden or Battle-Axe refers to a highly masculinised stereotype of powerful women. This stereotype is represented by a woman’s aggressive behaviour and is perceived as “‘scary’, ‘tough’, ‘mean’, ‘hard’, ‘bullying’, ‘calculating’ and perhaps ‘bitchy’” (Baxter 2017, 26). The Seductress is a hyper-sexualised stereotype of women. A female politician of this stereotype is sexualised; she is considered to have capitalised her sexual attractiveness to excel in the male-dominant business domain or political arena (Baxter 2017). The Mother or School Marm and the Pet represent two stereotypes of women, who comprise a notable feminine appearance and show a degree of semblance with heteronormative female ideals (Baxter 2017). These two stereotypes position women as powerless and vulnerable. The fifth stereotype, the Queen Bee, is particularly interesting because this stereotype comprises “aspects of the other four” (Baxter 2017, 32). The Queen Bee stereotype is represented by a female politician or a female businessperson, “who has worked hard to achieve a very senior

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position […] yet is reluctant to help other women to reach equivalent seniority” (Baxter 2017, 32). A Queen Bee woman has a dual face, which is constituted by her masculine behaviour and feminine appearance (Muhr 2011). This dual face allows the woman to consolidate her senior position by developing “fan clubs” of male colleagues, who are both afraid of and attracted to her (Baxter 2017, 32). Through an analysis of Theresa May’s image constructed in the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times, and the Guardian’s reports about her inaugural day in Whitehall, Baxter (2017) reveals that the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was stereotypically portrayed by the British press as both a hyper-masculine leader and a sexualised woman. The aforementioned five stereotypes of female Western politicians are “readily identifiable” in the media portrayal of May in the UK (Baxter 2017, 32). Mills and Mullany (2018) suggest that Baxter’s (2017) approach has offered a useful analytical tool for critically examining the discourses of women in power through a gendered lens. It is undeniable that Baxter’s (2017) categorisation of the stereotypes of women is developed upon her close reading of limited volumes of textual data retrieved from the Western media. Yet, this categorisation has been largely confirmed by Caldas-Coulthard’s (2018) review of how women in powerful positions are portrayed and perceived in Brazil, which not only demonstrates the merits of the approach but also showcases its applicability beyond the context of major Western democracies. Baxter’s (2017) analysis of gender stereotypes is appealing, as it provides a useful conceptual account of how gender representations and gender power relations intersect in discursive practices. Such an account is consistent with a Foucauldian perspective, which considers discourse as a form of implicit power exercise (Foucault 1977). It captures a socio-­ cultural constitutive and mentally cognitive dimension of everyday practice, which is established in people’s mediated communicative practices (Fairclough 2003). According to Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), discursive practice is of a semiotic nature, which relies on the use of semiotic resources. Semiotic resources could either take the form of visual signs/ symbols or language codes depending on the scenario (Chen and Cheung 2020). Yet, common to all is that they “produce, reproduce, and contest ideologies, and sustain relations of privilege and oppression” in mediated communication (Xu and Tan 2019, 3). In this sense, stereotypes represent a widely used type of semiotic recourses, which influence discursive practices by shaping people’s cognitive understanding of the outside world.

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Yet, evidence shows that stereotypes “do not so much aid understanding but aid misunderstanding” (McGarty et al. 2002, 4). While often enduring over time, they configure people’s “collective mentalities” of the outside world by informing their misperception of a specific social group (KhosraviNik 2014, 512). In this way, an account of how gender stereotypes intersect with gender power relations helps unpack the representations of powerful women in Chinese Internet users’ discursive practices (Peng et al. 2020).

Mingzhu Dong and Angela Merkel as Case Studies In light of Baxter’s (2017) account of gender stereotypes, this chapter sampled two questions on Zhihu relating to Gree Electric’s1 current chair of the board—Mingzhu Dong and the current Chancellor of Germany— Angela Merkel, respectively. The two questions are MD: What do you think about Gree’s female boss Mingzhu Dong? (346 followers, 514,717 views, and 83 answers2) and AM: What are the funny stories about Merkel? (1196 followers, 272,573 views, and 50 answers3). While explicitly referencing the names of the two high-profile, powerful women, the questions prompted extensive discussions about them on Zhihu, providing a glimpse to how the personal traits of these powerful women are perceived and evaluated by Chinese Internet users. A critical analysis of such evaluations helps articulate how the gender-politics axis is established in the digital public sphere of China.

Mingzhu Dong as a Female Boss As discussed in previous chapters, female employees are disadvantaged in the post-reform Chinese labour market (Croll 1983, 1995; Owen et al. 2007). Reflecting the gender discrimination in the workplace, glass-ceiling effects for Chinese women are found across different industries, evidenced by the statistics, which show that “[t]he occupational structure of women against men across various levels of jobs in Chinese 1  Gree Electric is a world-leading air-conditioning manufacturing company based in China. According to the company’s annual report for stakeholders, Gree has achieved a turnover of ¥ 2005.1 billion (approximately £ 1766.5 billion) in 2019 alone (Gree Electric 2020). 2  Posted by 13 women, 48 men, and 22 anonymous accounts. 3  Posted by 11 women, 37 men, and 2 anonymous accounts.

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businesses viz, technical, clerical and managerial stood to 5.07 per cent, 1.30 per cent and 1.81 per cent respectively” (Nandi 2019, 73). This is not to mention that only 1.81 per cent of female Chinese professionals are “heading some kind of department within those businesses” (Nandi 2019, 73). Given the very low numbers of successful women in China’s business sectors, a few high-profile female businesspersons holding managerial positions at multinational companies have inappropriately high levels attention placed on them by the media and broader society. Such public attention often ensues in China’s digital public sphere. The sampled question, entitled ‘What do you think about Mingzhu Dong as Gree’s female boss’ is representative of public discussions about high-­ profile female Chinese businesspersons taking place on Zhihu. With reference to Dong as a “female boss”, the question encourages Chinese Internet users’ assessments of her successes, which are often based upon their use of gender stereotypes as semiotic resources to scrutinise female managers from a gendered perspective. Such a trend is revealed by their discursive engagement with the topical issue, which often highlights the novelty of Dong’s successful career at the world-leading air-conditioning manufacturing company—Gree Electric. In this regard, female user MD-A12’s post provides a typical example of this kind. MD-A12, woman: This is an iron lady I found very charming […]. Two years later, the 65-year-old chair of the board at Gree—Mingzhu Dong once again entered Forbes’ list for most distinguished female Chinese businesspersons. She might have also become the first female Chinese professional manager ever appeared in the World’s Billionaires published by Forbes.

As the above extract reveals, the uniqueness of Dong’s successes is linked to her gender in the female Internet user’s posting. Confirmed by much existing literature (Owen et al. 2007; Tu et al. 2006; Nandi 2019; Echeverri-Carroll et al. 2018), women are the gender minority in the business sector both within and outside of the Chinese territory, and the promotion of successful female professionals to senior managerial positions remains an unusual phenomenon (Nandi 2019). This gendered phenomenon, in Schneider and Bos’ (2014) terms, frames female businesspersons in powerful positions into a particular, subtype of women, who are dramatically different from their heteronormative peers. Such a tendency can be found in male user MC-A27 and female user MD-A11’s posting.

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MD-A27, man: Although she is not a beauty in a traditional sense, she always projects a high-wattage aura, and this makes her ‘charming’. MD-A11, woman: Without a beautiful face, she sometimes even looks a bit formidable, but her eyes always tell you how determined she is. While appearing to be a bit aggressive sometimes, she always performs her tasks impeccably at work.

As the above extracts show, to construct Dong as a unique imaginary of successful women, Internet users’ posting often deploys a wide range of adjectives, such as ‘formidable’ and ‘aggressive’, words which traditionally are not used to describe women. Such a lexical choice is rhetorically invoked in association with an emphasis on Dong’s appearance, which denotes a physical distance between her personal traits and heteronormative womanhood. MD-A67, woman: To most people, Mingzhu Dong is […] an iron lady. She dares to challenge Jun Lei. When she stands next to Yun Ma and Jianlin Wang, her aura is not at all weaker than these men.4

The distancing of Dong from heteronormative womanhood continues as some Zhihu users, such as female user MD-A67, devises a comparative frame to compare Dong with other high-profile businessmen. The juxtaposition of Dong and these male businesspersons indicates that they are comparable and, therefore, implicitly suggests that they belong to the same social segment. A de-gendered, masculinised image of Dong is accordingly constituted through this rhetorical tactic. The juxtaposition of Dong and male businesspersons, in female user MD-A67’s posting, is used in association with a referential strategy, which refers to Dong not by her name but by a designation phrase—the ‘iron lady’. This referential strategy, in particular, is highly contextual, as it has a special cultural connotation in Chinese discourse of womanhood. In the West, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1979–1990)— Margaret Thatcher, who was representative of the masculinised stereotype 4  Jun Lei (the founder and the chairman of a rising Chinese high-tech company—Xiaomi), Yun Ma (known as Jack Ma; the founder and the chairman of an international high-tech company specialising in e-commerce—Alibaba), and Jianlin Wang (the founder and the chairman of Dalian Wanda—the largest real estate development company in China) are three of the currently most high-profile male businesspersons in China.

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of women in powerful positions, was widely known as the ‘iron lady’ by the general public (Baxter 2017, 42). By invoking such a referential strategy, the masculinised stereotyping of Dong has, therefore, been discursively linked to the cultural connotation of the ‘iron lady’ in Chinese society. In particular, dramatically different from that in the West, the symbolism of the iron lady in the Chinese context contains a generally positive connotation, representing a serious and powerful female politician, who is capable of making tough decisions despite the ‘limits’ of her gender (Zhu 2013). Such a positive light in which the iron lady is viewed in China is, in part, a result of the CCP’s propaganda campaigns, which portray Thatcher as a pioneer reformer saving the UK from economic recession and associate her neoliberal governance of the UK with the Chinese authority’s reform of the country’s economic sectors in the 1980s (Wang 2013). Against this background, the masculinised, iron-lady stereotype of powerful women symbolises progressive in the Chinese context. In the present instance, this positivity and progressiveness of the iron lady are devised in Zhihu users’ discursive portrayal of Dong, framing her a symbolic role model, who sets an exemplar for her fellow female businesspersons by being able to excel in the competition with her male counterparts. However, the positive portrayal of Dong by no means suggests that female businesspersons’ successes in the masculine business field are endorsed by Internet users on Zhihu as a whole. Instead, their assessments of Dong still largely fall in a patriarchal logic, which implies a negative association between women’s career achievements and their feminine personal qualities. As revealed by female user MD-A67’s posting, even highly positive commentaries about Dong may exhibit such a tendency. MD-A67, woman: When accepting interviews, she wears an elegant shirt and a floral dress with enchanting colours […]. This reflects who she is deep down in her heart. It is simply because life did not give her much choice. She has to hide her feminine side to be prepared for tough challenges.

With a highlight on Dong’s dressing style, a traditional heteronormative Chinese womanhood frame is invoked in female user MD-A67’s commentary. This frame is constituted by awarding the powerful female businessperson with a dual face, which she devises in the workplace and her everyday life. While suggesting that feminine characteristics inscribe her ‘true self’ and masculine traits represent her performative professional side, such a heteronormative womanhood frame discursively links the

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career successes of the powerful woman to her capacity for rejecting her biologically determined feminine traits. In this way, the portrayal of Dong as a successful, powerful female businessperson has alienated her from the larger female cohort. It is consistent with the existing patriarchal discourse of the relationship between gender and workability, which places female professionals at a position subordinate to their male colleagues (Higgins and Sun 2007). DM-A34, man: As a single mother, Mingzhu Dong devoted a total of 26 years of her life to steering Gree. She has never considered her marriage again after her husband passed away […]. We see how successful she is today without knowing that the efforts she made behind the scenes are beyond our imagination. DM-A45. man: We should have no doubt about it. As a businessperson, she is successful—at least more successful than anyone who shared their comments on Zhihu. Yet, as a mother and a daughter, she does not meet our social expectations for women.

As the above extracts reveal, an alienation of Dong from the female cohort may be accomplished by presenting a dichotomic choice for career women, implying that being successful at work equals scarifying family lives. In traditional Chinese gender norms, women were assigned with the tasks of offspring reproduction and the role of family service providers (Liu 2014). Aspects of these gendered traditions have persisted into contemporary Chinese society, amid the revival of patriarchal values in the post-reform era (Wallis 2018). Under these circumstances, the achievements of Chinese women are still assessed against patriarchal, chauvinist criteria, which define female professionals’ career successes as crippled without them managing a perfect home-work balance in their daily lives (Peng 2019). While suggesting that sacrificing the family is inevitable for a career woman, this discourse indeed discourages female Chinese professionals from pursuing great successes in masculine fields that may challenge the male-dominance therein. In this sense, the gender stereotyping of Dong on Zhihu has provided a good illustration of how women in powerful positions are alienated by popular discourses of womanhood in Chinese digital cultures, despite them being occasionally prized by Chinese Internet users.

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Angela Merkel’s ‘Funny Stories’ Similar to the business sectors, politics is also traditionally viewed as a masculine field (Garcia-Blanco and Wahl-Jorgensen 2012; Lee and Lim 2016). Yet, discussions about female Chinese politicians are largely missing in the Chinese context. This is not only because of the general absence of senior female politicians in the CCP and the Chinese government (Howell 2006; Y. Song 2016) but also because discussions about senior Chinese politicians are censored on participatory social media platforms based in China (Fang 2020). However, this absence of discussions about female Chinese politicians by no means suggests that the general stereotyping of politically active women does not exist in China’s digital public sphere. There are a number of high-profile female Western politicians, such as the Chancellor of Germany—Angela Merkel, who is active on the world stage and are freely and extensively discussed by Internet users. On Zhihu, the question about “Merkel’s funny stories” has prompted Chinese users’ discussion about the characteristics of the German Chancellor. The discussion is largely dominated by men, evidenced by the fact that almost 74 per cent of the answers were generated by male users. An emphasis on Merkel’s gender and her ability to utilise this in a sexualised manner is constantly found in their discussion about the German Chancellor. Such an emphasis is firstly manifest though by the referential strategy used by Chinese users to identify Merkel first and foremost as an “auntie”. AM-A11, woman: ‘Auntie Merkel’ (MoDama) has a cutie girlish heart.

As previously mentioned, a referential strategy involves designating people not by their names but by words/phrases that implicitly highlight their particular characteristics (Peng 2019). When referring to public figures, Chinese users often invent nicknames for them by collocating a character from their names with a word, such as “auntie” (yi or dama) or “sister” (jie) for women and “uncle” (jie) or “brother” (ge) for men, to connote their gender. Such a referential strategy is gendered in its nature, as it highlights gender as a defining aspect of the public figures. In this case, Chinese users invoke this referential strategy to sub-textually place Merkel within a gendered familial role, providing the grounding for the gender stereotyping of the German Chancellor.

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As the leader of Europe’s largest, and the world’s fourth strongest economy for over ten years, Merkel is an example of a successful woman politician, who challenges the traditional understanding of women’s leadership ability in Western societies (Latu et al. 2013). Given that China has rarely had women serving at the top of the political hierarchy, Merkel’s political successes are novel to Internet users. Thus, the emphasis on Merkel’s gender may serve to over-inflate her achievements in the male-­ dominated political arena. User AM-A44’s answer provides a good illustration of this tendency. AM-A44, man: I have read a news report from the UK’s Guardian […]. I found [Merkel] is so funny, [because she] is so similar to my grandma: […] ‘I still buy something as soon as I see it, even when I don’t need it. It’s a deep-seated habit stemming from the fact that in an economy where things were scarce you just used to get what you could when you could.’

As shown in the extract, the punch line of the male user’s story is created through metaphorical framing. Metaphorical framing represents an important discursive tool, which invokes a metaphor to frame an object (often a person or an issue) by mentioning another (Boeynaems et  al. 2017). By explicitly suggesting that Merkel’s “grocery shopping habits” is similar to his “grandma”, this answer has devised the metaphorical framing to compare Merkel to a generic grandmother-type woman, often referred to as “auntie” by non-family members. Such a discursive practice personalises the image of Merkel from a heteronormative womanhood perspective. In the women-interior Chinese traditions, heteronormative womanhood confines women to the domestic sphere by encouraging them to be responsible for household management (Peng 2019). The women-interior traditions have been restored, amid the post-reform revival of patriarchy (Liu 2014). This social milieu turns grocery shopping into a ‘feminine’ household affair, which is considered women’s duty. As such, the user’s metaphorical framing of Merkel that emphasises her grocery habit shows a tendency of stereotyping the Western women politician in line with a Chinese notion of femininity by underscoring the compatibility between her behaviour and a heteronormative Chinese woman. The portrayal of Merkel through the ‘auntie’-referential strategy and the ‘grandmother’-metaphorical framing discursively constructs a humorous, down-to-earth image of the Western women national leader, who is feminine and ‘deviant’ on the masculine, international political stage. On

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a positive note, a female leader, who falls into this stereotype appears to be approachable (Schneider and Bos 2014). Yet, masculine traits, such as being able to make tough decisions, are traditionally considered to be an important leadership quality enabling a politician to handle complex political issues (Koenig et al. 2011). Having been reconstructed in relation to heteronormative womanhood, this stereotype of Merkel has detached masculine traits from the woman politician’s personal characteristics, showcasing notable similarities with what Baxter (2017) identifies as a Mother/School Marm stereotype of women leaders in Western media discourse. As Baxter (2017, 29) notes, rather than being “reliant upon professional expertise”, a Mother/School Marm is “warm”, “caring” and “approachable”; she features socio-emotional attributes, and is “expected to provide the service of comforter and sympathiser to colleagues” (Baxter 2017, 29). This stereotyping endows women politicians with powerless roles in politics. It portrays women as objects unsuitable for national leadership positions because they are not expected to stand firm for the national interests (Schneider and Bos 2014). Being compatible with the Mother/School Marm stereotype of women politicians in the Western context, the femininised image of Merkel constructed on Zhihu functions to downgrade the seriousness of the Western women politician’s political achievements in Chinese digital political discourse. Yet, the gender stereotyping of the German Chancellor also provides the grounding for Chinese users’ patriarchal rationalisation of women’s positions of power beyond the Western democratic systems. This rationalisation is often redirected to the Chinese context by defining Merkel as a female politician, who is unable to escape the limits of her gender. This tendency is most tellingly revealed by male user AM_A3’s storytelling of Merkel’s career path in German politics, which discursively links her career path to a Chinese (mis)perception of women’s political participation. AM-A3, man: Kohl was then German Chancellor. He facilitated the German Reunification, becoming a high-profile politician, who was considered to be a national hero. Thus, he was keen to promote a ‘political vase’ in the party to showcase his achievements. Merkel is not only from East Germany but also an intellectual. More importantly, she happens to be a woman; therefore, is perfect [for being the ‘vase’].

As the above extract shows, the term “political vase” is explicitly deployed by the male user to describe the role in which Merkel played in

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Kohl’s government. The political vase is a term commonly used in the mainstream Chinese media discourse to imply the limits of women politicians’ actual working ability by describing that the promotion of women in the political hierarchy merely serves to balance the female-male ratio of government officials (Li and Mo 2010). By restating this term in the answer, user AM_A3’s lexical choice exploits the notion of the limits of gender in existing Chinese discourse of women’s political participation, associating Merkel’s early career progress to her alliance with Helmut Kohl, a former German Chancellor from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to which Merkel belongs. It suggests a positive correlation between Merkel’s gender and her promotion under Kohl’s leadership, emphasising that the support Merkel received from her senior male colleague is abnormal. Such a discursive practice creates another layer of the stereotyping of the German Chancellor, which features an implicit sexualisation of her personal image that has a local grounding unique to the Chinese context. The sexualisation of Merkel’s image becomes more explicit in the extract below from male user AM-A1’s answer, where a pair of particular referential strategies were applied to refer to Merkel and Kohl to implicitly connote the linkage between their relationships at professional and personal levels. AM-A1, man: Kohl often joked that Merkel was his “girl” and surprisingly promoted Merkel, who had no experience back then, to the Minister of Women and Children in 1991 […]. There are similar unwritten rules in Chinese politics […]. With her gandie’s help behind the scenes, Merkel was promoted with astonishing speed.

In the Western media sphere, Merkel was famous for being publicly referred to by Kohl as “my girl” in her earlier political career (Steckenrider 2013, 245). With the global exchange of information based on the Internet, such a referential strategy has been accepted by Chinese users and is intertextually invoked in male user AM-A1’s answer. Interestingly, the user’s employment of this Western referential strategy is juxtaposed with another referential strategy, which names Kohl as Merkel’s “gandie”. Gandie is a localised Chinese term, which was once similar to ‘godfather’ in the Western context but now shares more in common with the concept of a ‘sugar daddy’. The juxtaposition of the two referential strategies connotes a sexual relationship between a young woman and a powerful man.

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Having been both invoked in the answer, this discursive practice invents imaginary, sexualised reasoning behind Merkel and Kohl’s political alliance, which is then exploited to further a localised objectification of women politicians in the Chinese context (Jeffreys 2008). In combination, the gender stereotyping of Merkel and the sexualisation of her early political alliance with Kohl on Zhihu remove discussions about female politicians from Western political origins. As male user AM-A1 literally suggests, “there are similar unwritten rules in Chinese politics”. The discourse of Merkel has been appropriated in a highly localised context, where a (mis)perception of women’s political participation has generally shaped the representations of women in Chinese digital political discourse to promote a biologically determinist understanding of gender differences by associating women politicians with sexual corruption (Wu 2014). The logic of this (mis)perception underscores a Chinese patriarchal rationalisation of how women politicians excel in the competition with men peers by repeatedly stressing their use of sexual attractions to senior men colleagues (Jeffreys 2008). Having been raised in the discussion about Merkel, this rationalisation serves to legitimise the hierarchical gender power relations in China’s political arena in which women continue to be subordinate to men. As such, rather than simply reflecting Chinese users’ portrayal of a particular Western political figure’s personal image, the gender stereotyping of Merkel we identified on Zhihu reveals an appropriation of the limits of gender in Chinese digital political discourse to legitimise the existing gender hegemony of China’s domestic political arena.

Conclusion This chapter has explored aspects of the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere by exploring Chinese Internet users’ discussions about high-profile, powerful women on Zhihu. The analysis shows that a gendered lens is generally adopted by Internet users when they portray women in powerful positions. The images of these women are discursively reconstructed in Chinese digital cultures in line with aspects of the gender stereotyping in post-reform gender politics, which is accomplished through rhetorically highlighting to powerful women’s feminine characteristics and behaviours to explain their achievements in business and politics (Peng et al. 2020). This gender stereotyping serves to rationalise the scarceness of women in powerful positions and the unsuitability of

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femininity and womanhood in business and politics. This rationalisation confirms that women in powerful positions are targeted in popular cultures in both the West and China, “because they are highly visible as people who are different and whose appearance and behaviour do not conform to heteronormative expectations of leadership” (Baxter 2017, 24). In particular, Chinese Internet users’ rationalisation of Merkel’s achievements is upheld by cultural factors unique to Chinese society. Rather than addressing the original incidents in international politics, male Internet users’ rationalisation of the Western woman’s political achievements is mainly invoked to interpret domestic gender issues. This rationalisation enables Internet users, who advocate chauvinist patriarchal values, to justify their perception of gender inequality within Chinese society and legitimise their discrimination against the women with whom they share the same nationality. Thus, the gender stereotyping of female Western politicians identified on Zhihu reveals a Chinese imaginary of Western democratic politics, which has limited relevance to its original context. This gender stereotyping reflects the appropriation of gender as “convenient armour” by Internet users in “pushing for their political agenda” (Fang and Repnikova 2018, 2166). It exploits and feeds back into the discourse of “yin-yang balance” emphasised by traditional Chinese culture, which continues to advocated by male supporters of patriarchal values to argue against Chinese women’s pursuit of success in the public domain (Liu 2014, 20). In this way, this chapter points towards a future research trajectory on the interplay between gender stereotyping and women’s socio-political status through exploring Internet users’ digital engagement with discussions about powerful female public figures.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Abstract  This final chapter provides a concluding discussion. It offers further insights into the salient points addressed in previous chapters and reiterates the contribution to knowledge this book makes by illustrating how the implications of the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere concern the wider international community. This chapter also discusses the urgency of addressing this topic in the research agenda of contemporary feminist cultural studies, as well as the future research direction in the field in the Chinese context and beyond. Keywords  Digital public sphere • Feminist cultural studies • Gender-­politics axis • Research agenda

Feminist Scrutiny of Chinese Digital Cultures Nowadays, Chinese people living in the post-reform era are provided with the opportunities to experience and appreciate a diversity of cultures, identities, and personal choices. In particular, the innovation of digital communication technologies plays a pivotal role in shaping this ever-­ changing new era. The advent of the Internet has not only changed how Chinese people communicate with each other but is also reshaping how they engage with social and political affairs. Among the different types of Internet-based technologies, participatory social media platforms are the

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ones setting the trends. A variety of different types of participatory social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and Zhihu have been launched in the Chinese market. These Internet users’ active use of participatory social media for personal expression has created a digital public sphere, which facilitates Chinese Internet users’ digital civic engagement (Fang and Repnikova 2018; Wallis 2015; Fang 2020), despite the continuity of the CCP’s censorship over freedom of speech on the Internet (King et al. 2017; King et al. 2013). Within China’s digital public sphere, gender issues have been found to be increasingly prominent in Chinese Internet users’ engagement with trending socio-political affairs both within and outside China’s borders (Huang 2016; Han 2018a; Xu and Tan 2019). How the notion of gender comes into force in such a form of digital civic engagement has constituted an emerging research field in feminist cultural studies, which requires further intellectual intervention (Fang and Repnikova 2018; Wallis 2015). Against this backdrop, this book presents a timely analysis of the gender-­ politics axis established in China’s digital public sphere. Through a comprehensive review of China’s current socio-political trends and an in-depth analysis of up-to-date case studies, the book reveals how gendered values are manifest in Chinese digital cultures and how they are informed by deeply held ambivalent gender power relations in Chinese society today. Chapter 4 identifies a feministic form of patriarchal control over Chinese women’s bodies established in Chinese digital cultures. This is most tellingly revealed by women-focused Chinese digital influencers’ appropriation of pseudo-feminist discourse to engage with their female followers on social media platforms. The emergence of this feministic form of patriarchal control is contextualised against the backdrop of neoliberal capitalism hijacking the voices of liberal feminism in Chinese society. Nowadays, feminism and femininity have become increasingly aligned with the agenda of women’s movements in the West, showcasing the diversity of feminist voices in late-modern society (Kennedy 2018). However, this compatibility has been exploited by businesses to propagate pseudo-feminism to target female consumers (Rottenberg 2018). Such a rise of pseudo-feminism is particularly dangerous, as the feminist rhetoric makes patriarchal values appealing to women, implicitly hindering women’s pursuit of success beyond the domestic sphere by requiring women to adhere to aspects of traditional gender norms (Wallis 2018; Peng 2019; Marchetti 2009). Nowadays, the hijacking of feminist voices by pseudo-feminism is on the rise in China as a result of women’s rejection of the past, communist

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feminist movement that attempted to alienate them from conventional womanhood (Evans 2008). The popularity of pseudo-feminism among Chinese women has reshaped the dynamics of debates on gender issues between female and male Chinese Internet users. Specifically, Chap. 5 shows a general consensus about pseudo-feminism’s hijacking of feminist voices shared by both female and male Chinese Internet users, when they engage in discussions about feminism and women’s organisation. Yet, such a phenomenon is perceived differently by female and male Chinese Internet users based on their differing perspectives on and perceptions of gender power relations and informed by their differing experiences of gender inequality (Liu 2019; Spakowski 2011). While female Chinese Internet users tend to distinguish between the contrasting manifestos of feminism and their neoliberal, pseudo-feminist analogues, their male peers often intentionally confound the two. Exploiting and feeding into the latter trajectory, male Chinese Internet users often invoke a conspiratorial frame of feminist thought to boycott threats that challenge male dominance of the socio-­ economic structures of Chinese society. It is not surprising to see divided opinions on feminism among female and male Chinese Internet users. Contextualised in relation to the widespread penetration of pseudo-feminism, Chinese men’s misperception of feminism has been on the rise, as a result of the ambivalent gender power relations in the post-reform era (Meng and Huang 2017). Such an aversion to feminism has been exploited by male misogynists as a discourse strategy to provoke the whole male cohort to reject any attempt to improve women’s socio-political status in ways that threaten their dominance of the overall socio-economic structures. Such a phenomenon is not exclusive to Chinese digital cultures but reflects aspects of the current socio-­ political climate across the world, as exemplified by a global wave of misogynist campaigns that are aligned with populist politics (Banet-Weiser 2018; Zhang 2020; Correa 2017; Zuckerberg 2018). In this sense, the gendered organisation of gender issue debates in China’s digital public sphere, where misogynist voices are extremely widespread, has endorsed Zuckerberg’s (2018) argument which suggests that the advent of participatory social media platforms has created toxic digital cultures by enabling patriarchal, chauvinist voices to reach a larger audience. In China’s digital public sphere, gendered values are not only manifest in gender issue debates but also persist in Chinese Internet users’ discussions about female celebrities. In particular, Chap. 6 shows that Chinese

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Internet users often invoke gender stereotypes when they discuss women in power positions. When it comes to elite female businesspeople or female national leaders, their career achievements are often assessed following a masculine, chauvinist logic, which defines feminine traits and womanhood as unsuitable for participation in the business domain or political arena. In this way, the male dominance of China’s socio-political and economic structures is justified, showing how gender power relations intersect with Chinese Internet users’ gendered engagement with business- and politics-­ related topics in the digital public sphere. It is undeniable that such a tendency is sometimes rejected by Chinese Internet users from the pro-­ feminism political spectrum, and this is especially the case when the Internet users are women themselves. However, the voices of the latter cohort are largely marginalised in such forms of digital civic engagement. This once again proves the masculine assumptions of Chinese digital cultures, which has been identified by an emerging body of literature on the studies of Chinese digital civic engagement (Wallis 2015; Fang and Repnikova 2018).

A Note on the Contributions Amid the revival of patriarchy in Chinese society (Evans 2008), volumes of existing literature in the field of feminist cultural studies have paid attention to how gendered values are reflected in Chinese digital cultures (Wallis 2018; Han 2018b; Xu and Tan 2019; Chang and Ren 2017). As previously mentioned, such a process can be explored from two angles, offering two distinctive research trajectories, examining gendered values from a techno-feminist and a representational perspective, respectively. While a techno-feminist perspective scrutinises how gendered dynamics are configured in Internet users’ daily interactions with digital communication technologies (Wallis 2013; Chan 2018; Duffy and Pruchniewska 2017; Peng 2020), a representational approach examines how gender power relations are practised in their mediated communication with each other (Wallis 2015; Li and Li 2017; Huang 2016). The latter research trajectory is particularly appealing as it reveals the dynamic interplay between Internet users, socio-political trends, and participatory social media platforms in the digital age. Focusing on the representational research trajectory, this book provides an insightful feminist analysis of the gender dynamics within China’s digital public sphere, a cultural phenomenon, which is ubiquitous and cannot be neglected if we wish to achieve a

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comprehensive understanding of the persistence of gender inequality in Chinese society. In this way, the book makes an important and original contribution to the studies of digital cultures in the Chinese context. Existing studies in the field often do not seek to achieve an in-depth, gendered understanding of China’s digital public sphere. This is, in part, because these studies are largely based on theoretical approaches developed upon the Western experiences of capitalism, democracy, and national identity formation, which tend to emphasise the conflicts between grassroots democracy and authoritarianism in Chinese society. As Zhao (2010) notes, such a research trajectory is notably affected by Western-centric or Western-Chinese dualistic research paradigms. This book, adopting a feminist cultural studies approach, re-evaluates Chinese digital cultures by exploring how the cultural phenomena in China’s digital public sphere converge with the historical development of gender equality and the indigenous evolution of gender politics in Chinese society, where capitalism and authoritarianism weave a tangled web (Peng 2020). The discussion, thus, provides new insight into the rise and fall of Chinese women’s socio-political status, as well as its dynamic interplay with the historical formation and contemporary communication of gender identities. The outcomes of the discussion help us to revisit the transformations of patriarchal cultures in Chinese society from the perspective of digitally mediated communication and advance a feminist cultural studies approach to re-examining the field of communication and media studies from a Chinese perspective.

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Index

B Business businessman/businessmen, 111 businessperson, 106, 107, 110–113 businesswoman/businesswomen, 11, 110 C Censor/censorship, 4, 10, 24–26, 28, 29, 77, 87, 126 China/Chinese, 1, 17, 39–57, 63–78, 83, 109, 128, 129 Community question-answering (CQA), 7–9, 26, 89, 92 Critical discourse analysis (CDA), 8, 9, 55, 68 Culture, 2–11, 17–31, 39–42, 46–57, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 85, 88, 90, 92, 93, 95, 106, 107, 113, 118, 119, 125–129 cultural studies, 4, 5, 10, 11, 30, 39–41, 51, 57, 66, 90, 126, 128, 129

D Debate, 3, 10, 11, 27, 52, 56, 66, 78, 83–99, 127 Digital digital culture, 4–8, 10, 11, 17–31, 39, 40, 51–57, 63, 68, 85, 88, 90, 106, 113, 118, 125–129 digital public sphere, 1–11, 18, 26–30, 39–57, 64, 67, 68, 77, 78, 83–85, 87, 88, 97–99, 106, 109, 110, 114, 118, 126–129 digital technology/digital technologies, 2, 26, 125, 128 Discourse, 2–7, 9, 10, 20, 30, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53–55, 64, 65, 67, 69–74, 76–78, 84, 86–88, 92–99, 107, 108, 111, 113, 116–119, 126, 127 F Female, 4–6, 10, 29, 31, 41–53, 55, 56, 64, 67–78, 83–85, 89–93, 96–98, 106–114, 116, 118, 119, 126–128

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Y. Peng, A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59969-0

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INDEX

Feminism feminist, 3–7, 10, 11, 29, 30, 39–42, 51, 52, 56, 57, 64, 65, 67, 70, 72, 77, 78, 85, 89–97, 106, 125–129 feminist studies, 73 G Gender gendered, 97 gender norm, 3, 5, 41, 46, 52, 53, 55, 57, 97, 106, 113, 126 gender relation, 67, 71 gender studies, 3 Germany/German, 43, 106, 109, 114, 116, 117 M Male, 5, 6, 10, 11, 31, 40–43, 47–53, 56, 64, 69, 72–78, 83–85, 88, 89, 91–99, 107, 108, 110–119, 127, 128 Man/men, 2–4, 6, 7, 10, 29, 30, 40, 41, 45–50, 52, 56, 66, 70, 71, 73–78, 83–99, 105–107, 109, 111, 113–118 Media, 2, 3, 18, 28, 47, 48, 106–108, 110, 116, 117, 129 N Neoliberalism, 65 neoliberal feminism, 65 P Politics, 2–7, 11, 30, 43, 48, 51, 55, 77, 84–86, 94, 96, 105, 106, 114, 116–119, 127, 129 politician, 43, 49, 84, 106–108, 112, 114–119

Power, 3, 4, 20–22, 43, 48–51, 64, 76, 85, 87, 94, 108, 116, 128 power relation, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8–10, 30, 31, 41, 46–56, 63, 68, 69, 78, 86, 88, 94, 106, 108, 109, 118, 126–128 Public sphere, 1, 40 R Representation/representational, 45, 47, 53–55, 57, 76, 106, 108, 109, 118, 128 S Social media, 5, 7, 9, 10, 26–28, 51, 55, 64, 67–70, 72, 73, 76–78, 87, 91, 114, 125–128 Stereotype/stereotyping, 105–119, 128 T Techno-feminism/techno-feminist analysis, 51–53, 57 W WeChat, 7–9, 26, 55, 64, 67, 68, 71, 126 Weibo, 26, 126 West/western, 2, 3, 5, 18, 23, 24, 28, 40, 42, 51, 52, 55, 64–67, 72–74, 83–87, 91–96, 106–108, 111, 112, 114–119, 126, 129 Woman/women, 3, 30, 39, 63, 83–99, 105–119, 126 Z Zhihu, 7–11, 26, 84, 89–96, 98, 109–114, 116, 118, 119, 126