Emerging Feminist Consciousness Through Global Network Society

The emergence of the global network society in the late 20th century led to a significant rise in the global feminist consciousness. In this essay, I aim to examine this fundamental globalisation process by relating it to the contemporary Chinese #MeToo Movement.

The internet as a TCP/IP domain system was a democratic, all-inclusive space which provided women with an equal pedestal to voice their opinions and share their thoughts. Unlike the private and the public sphere, where women’s participation was reduced to the prevailing gender norms, the virtual space helped women create a new identity for themselves. As more and more women ‘logged on’ to the digital world, there was a rise in the global awareness of women’s issues. Platforms became mediascapes, infoscapes and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990), that is, there was an increased circulation of information, media and other feminist content on platforms. The rapid speed at which information was being circulated and the distance it was travelling through created an accelerating global feminist force. In accordance with Castell’s concept of temporal simultaneity, one could observe similar feminist movements breaking out in different regions of the world at the same time.

One example of these social movements breaking out in temporal simultaneity is the contemporary #MeToo movement. From the USA to Japan, the #MeToo hashtag was trending on almost all popular social media platforms. However, the #MeToo movement in China emphasizes the heightened consciousness in particular. Despite the various censors and bans put on it, the #MeToo hashtag, written in English, penetrated the Chinese internet firewall, jumped onto the parallel Chinese social media platforms, and grew enormously in popularity across industries through the joint effort of Chinese feminists who not only managed to participate in the global movement with other countries but also initiate legal action and implement solutions for their cause.

Feminism as a political and social ideology did exist prior to the invention of the internet. The Suffrage movement of the late 19th century involved mass mobilisation of feminists. However, one can argue that the highly globalised modern day feminism emerged only due to the advent of the internet.

Internet technology was developed in the 1970s. However, increased female participation on the internet was only witnessed a couple of decades later. This is because initially, the internet was a military weapon to be used in the cold war. It was only by the 1980s and 1990s that this technology became accessible for all and the price of computers began to plummet. Moreover, the rise of web 2.0 in the early 2000s altered the structure of the internet completely. It facilitated users to not only retrieve information but also actively communicate with one another. It essentially enabled users to form a new virtual identity. This new digital world also facilitated anonymous communication, which women found liberating. Hence, women embraced web 2.0 warmly. Mulyaningrum, Yusof, Ahmad and Sahib’s 2007 work on Cyberfeminism can be quoted here: “As technology becomes more advanced, and full societal access to information technology becomes more widespread, women are becoming liberated from the traditional patriarchal power structures that surround and engulf them. This technology gives women the power to express their ideas.” The emergence of platforms further enabled female users to form communities and groups and made for an ideal space for women to participate and contribute to.

The digital world offered women freedoms that they never had the opportunity to explore before. This key association of the internet with liberation and other factors such as the decreasing price of computers and increasing technical education amongst women gave birth to “cyberfeminism” - a new dimension of the feminist movement which resulted in a raised level of feminist consciousness like never before. Cyberfeminism consisted of three chain reactions. Firstly, women entered the digital world. This increased connectivity brought about the next reaction, increased dialogue. The structure of the platforms on web 2.0 helped build strong communities for women where they could discuss their ideas, share their grievances and discuss solutions. This led to feminism becoming a rapidly accelerating ideoscape. Ideas started disembedding and re-embedding in different parts of the globe. There was an awakening of the feminist conscious like never before and it came at a high speed and travelled global distances.

The impact of cyberfeminism can be witnessed globally. Social media websites have become the fields in which feminist ideas are sown, watered and harvested. They now hold the power to generate awareness, host social movements and even initiate legal action. The rise of these platforms has enabled a deterritorialisation (Appadurai 1990) of feminism: the spread of the ideology completely transcended national boundaries. Women from across the world have been able to connect with each other and raise similar demands, irrelevant of the political boundary. This occurrence most likely took place because these platforms and the manifestations of the patriarchy can be seen everywhere across the globe. It is important to note that this flow of feminist ideology across the globe does not always yield positive responses. Most feminist content available online has been met with severe criticism and hate. Further, there are increasing technologies being developed which try to limit digital protests and movements. There has been a significant rise in surveillance and censorship. Therefore, this deterritorialisation of feminism and rapidly accelerating ideoscapes, technoscapes and infoscapes have many disjunctions and conflict.

The Chinese #MeToo Movement is a direct example of this disjuncture. Similar to the Western movement, victims of sexual abuse and assault in China used social media platforms to narrate their stories and demand action by the government in temporal simultaneity with other regional me too protests. But the Chinese movement was also different from its western counterparts in a very significant way: China has strict internet censorship. The Chinese Communist Party has the right to control what information is accessible by the public on the internet in real time. This is known as the Chinese “firewall”. Often argued as the right to a “Sovereign Internet,” the government has defended its right to filter information by arguing that it wants to block out harmful content for the users. Most popular platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are blocked out of China. Instead, China has developed its own parallel platforms, namely WeChat, Weibo, etc. This direct control over the internet and its content has often excluded the Chinese population from membership in different global phenomenon and movements.

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This is why the fact that an English hashtag, the concept of which was introduced by the West, on social media platforms different from the ones it was trending on was so surprising. On top of that, its fast-growing popularity across different users from different industries, socio-economic classes and age groups made the #MeToo movement in China a very interesting phenomenon to study. Not only does it emphasise the power of the growing global feminist consciousness, but it also explains the relationship and disjuncture amongst ideoscapes and technoscapes.

As the hashtag began to trend on social media portals, the first response of the government was to censor any content containing the hashtag. The government went on to temporarily block accounts of victims who accused prominent figures in Chinese society and even banned virtual discussion groups like Feminists’ Voices. Activists often faced punishments for simply calling attention to sexual harassment. A group known as the “Feminist Five” faced extreme punishment for advocating against sexual harassment on the Beijing Subway. One of them was held in a detention centre for 37 days, while another received a 10-year ban from leaving the country. In another example, Zhu Jun, a prominent television host was accused of forcibly kissing and groping an intern who went to deliver a fruit basket to his room. Ever since the alleged victim has released her story, she has faced extensive cyberbullying and threats. Even the police authorities warned her of considering the positive impact that Zhu Jun has brought to Chinese media channels before filing an official complaint.

This extreme response of the government to feminist activism raises questions: To what extent was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) based on the concept of equality for all? Although Chairman Mao Zedong has been famously quoted, “women hold up half the sky,” the CCP has barely followed through with this principle. From limiting female agency over her own body by introducing policies like One Child Policy or restricting the spread of the Me Too Movement in China, the CCP has violently opposed its own principle on countless occasions. Another important observation to make is that most of the victims who shared their stories maintained an anonymous identity. This highlights how although this movement took place in 2018, women haven't been able to merge their real world identities with their virtual ones. They are scared to link these two facets of their identity due to societal and political backlash. This would explain why there were no #MeToo related protest marches or demonstrations in China.

But this anonymous identity didn’t stop the activists from retaliating strongly against the government imposed censors. When #MeToo was censored, activists began using the hashtag #MiTu. In Mandarin, ‘mi’ means rice and ‘tu’ means bunny. The strategy was to use a similar sound as a tool against the government, as it would be nearly impossible to censor #ricebunny. Another form of dissent was simply rotating the photos which shared their political and social agenda, making them undiscoverable by the surveillants.

Ultimately, the Chinese activists were able to gain some victories. Although China did have a law against sexual harassment, the Chinese government announced that it was considering amending the civil code to allow the victim to file a civil suit against someone who exploits another sexually. It would also require employers to file a complaint against an employee who has sexually harassed another. Another victory, in my opinion, would be the fact that people were able to accuse prominent figures on the internet and gain support from the community. It reveals the truly democratic nature of the internet where everyone is equal.

The emergence of a western movement on a parallel platform and the endeavour to keep the same globalised hashtag #MeToo alive captures, in a nutshell, the kind of impact that cyberfeminism has had on global feminist consciousness. It highlights the weight of this newfound awareness which ties women across the world, no matter under which political circumstances, into one sisterhood.

But the contemporary Chinese #MeToo movement allows us to make some other observations. The relationship between the internet and the movement in China appears to be paradoxical: while it could exist and popularise only through the internet, it was also heavily restricted because of it. How are the sovereign internet and the growing global network society related? In an age where the internet has become the primary means of communication and information, who should have control over the information that the common people can access - the state or the platforms? Is the concept of the Chinese internet firewall actually a means for the Chinese state to protect its citizens from what it calls, “western hostile forces, or is it simply a means to limit freedom?

Additionally, the movement makes one question the impact of cyberfeminism. While feminist ideas and beliefs have been spread throughout the virtual world, Chinese feminists were unable to reveal their real life identity and were simply monikers on a screen. Does this reveal that women still haven’t been liberated in the public and private spheres? Is cyberfeminism a tool only for the elite and educated on digital platforms, or can its ideals somehow penetrate the real world in the same speed and fashion?

There are some key facts we must consider when studying this globalisation process: feminism is a dynamic, heterogeneous and non linear movement. It is not without its own internal politics and contradictions. Also, the feminist movement has existed in China prior to the emergence of the network society. But, it was the emergence of the network society and advent of the internet technology which enabled us to witness the manifestations of the feminist movement in China the way we do today. The network society has not only raised levels of feminist consciousness, but also altered the very mode of the movement by making it globally more homogeneous.