Chinese rights activists blanketed a hill with hundreds of abusive messages sent to women to highlight sexist trolling on social media. Photograph: @FeministChina

By Helen Davidson in Taipei

13 May 2021 – Late last month, an “unknown hill in the Chinese desert” was blanketed in scores of large red and white banners, flapping vitriol in the breeze. “I hope you die, bitch,” said one. “Little bitch, screw the feminists,” said others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chinese government is trying to rebrand forced sterilization as feminism

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

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

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

WUNRN

The Guardian