China – #MeToo Activist Among those Arrested in China’s Widening Crackdown on Civil Rights
Author: Administrator
Date: November 18, 2021
China #MeToo (source: NuVoices)
Guangzhou police revealed that one of China’s most well-known #MeToo activists, Sophia Huang Xueqin, has been detained along with labor activist Wang Jianbing. This news comes two weeks after the pair were reported missing under suspicious circumstances. The two activists disappeared on September 19, one day before Huang was supposed to fly to the United Kingdom for a university program.
Huang became one of China’s leading women’s rights activists when she helped plaintiffs in an alleged case of sexual harassment at Beihang University in Beijing in 2018. Since then, the #MeToo movement has grown in China, and was further ignited in 2018 when Kris Wu, a Chinese-Canadian pop star, was arrested on suspicion of rape and denied the charges. While enthusiasm for #MeToo waned after 2018, it was revived a month ago after an Alibaba employee accused her boss of sexually assaulting her after she was pressured to drink at a work event.
As enthusiasm for #MeToo picks up, crackdowns on online activism have too. Earlier in 2020, nationalist commentators accused Chinese feminists of working with “foreign forces.” In addition, WeChat blogs dedicated to LGBT awareness were shut down. The arrests of Huang and Wang are evidence China’s crackdown on the rising feminist movement.
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