Gender Awakening, Care Crisis, and Made-in-China Feminism

[english] – This podcast is part of the online discussion series China and the Left.

Announcement: In the last decade, the PRC has seen a growing number of social controversies, grassroots campaigns, and cultural phenomena related to gender and women’s rights. While this new wave of “gender awakening” is a decade-long process, the detention of the Feminist Five in 2015 marked a watershed moment in Chinese gender politics. Since then, on the one hand, the state has tightened its grip on political activism, and activists find it harder and harder, if not impossible, to explicitly carry the label of “feminism” to organize campaigns. On the other hand, we have seen the continuation of Internet based, decentralized, and spontaneous activism around issues about women’s rights and gender inequality, and some are even “mainstreamed” and co-opted by government and corporate power. This talk offers an overview of the state of gender politics in China by focusing on the rise of “made-in-China” feminism, that is, Chinese women’s actions and cries that do not necessarily self-label as “feminism” in a political sense. It then analyzes these phenomena in the broader context of China’s widening class inequalities and simmering crisis of social reproduction.

Sponsors: gongchao.org, Made in China Journal, positions politics, and Critical China Scholars.