Transcript: The #MeToo Movement in China and the Case of Tennis Star Peng Shuai

MeToo In China (Peng Shuai)

00:00:02

Julie Yu-Wen Chen

This is the Nordic Asia podcast. Welcome to the Northeast Asia podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the northern region. My name is Julie Yu-Wen Chen, professor of Chinese studies at University of Helsinki, Finland. Joined with me today to talk about the MeToo movement in China is Dusica Ristivojević. She's actually my colleague and senior researcher at the University of Helsinki. Dusica works in the area of interdisciplinary Chinese studies, media studies and international relations. Recently, she published a journal paper on the MeToo movement in China in the journal called Politics and Gender. The MeToo movement is hitting headlines again in China lately because of a huge scandal. A Chinese tennis star accused a former top Chinese Communist Party leader of sexual assault. The name of the Chinese tennis star is Peng Shuai and on Chinese media she posted a long letter or message describing the assault done by Zhang Gaoli. Zhang is a retired Chinese politician who served as the senior vice premier of China between 2013 and 2018, and he was also a member of the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee – basically, China's highest ruling body between 2012 and 2017. So thank you so much Dusica for waiting to share your insights with us. Maybe we begin by asking, Who are you? What is your research about?

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00:01:46

Dusica Ristivojević

So thank you very much for inviting me. I am very, very happy that we have a very good timing for our conversation because this is really one extremely important moment for the topic that we will talk about and that is the MeToo movement in China. And very, very briefly about me. My name is Dusica, and I am a many, many things at the same time. But for our conversation today, it is important to say that I consider myself to be a socially engaged researcher and teacher. I work on many different things, and one of those basic topics that I’ve focussed on for a long time already is Chinese feminist movement in long term historical perspective, especially paying attention to its transnational links and support networks. So MeToo is one very, very important part, which is at the core of everything that we are going to talk about today, and it's closely related to my latest research, as you just mentioned. So thank you very much.

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00:02:52

Julie Yu-Wen Chen

The MeToo movement in China started in early 2018, so it seems to be a new movement, but what is the MeToo movement in China, exactly? What do the activists in this movement want to achieve?

Dusica Ristivojević

So actually, maybe this is because I am a kind of historian, but it's not solely because of this, I would suggest to really think about a MeToo movement, not as something that all of a sudden, you know, out of the blue it happened in 2018. Even more, I would emphasize that we should really avoid to think about oh, is this a kind of Western thinking and Western influence because it's not. To be very, very, very direct, no, it did not start and fell from the sky in 2018. And when it comes to the US born MeToo movement, it is connected to it, but each has its own very rich history of a series of activisms and initiatives, at least since 1990s that in a way set the stage for something that we are witnessing since 2018. So I would just a little bit talk about these so-called ‘setting the stage’ for what we are now calling MeToo in China and what my colleagues feminists from China, emphasize that it should be called MeToo. We will come back, if there is time, about the importance of naming it MeToo and the danger actually of calling it in this way. So if we really want to talk about the MeToo movement in China, it is really visible that this is a kind of continuation of the movement. So this is not a new movement. I would not call it young because it is at least in this formation since the Beijing - the 1995 conference - and complex dynamics in the last 30 years. But it is definitely a kind of a continuation of the activists collaboration in China and out of China on the issues of sexual harassment. So we have these different namings; sexual harassment to MeToo to domestic violence. But it is very important to think about even the name of all these different yet very similar and interconnected activities of Chinese feminists in the last 30 years. What happened in 2018, if I would somehow name it, is more of a kind of joining of Chinese feminist movement into the global debate, which is called MeToo movement. They choose to call it neutral by choosing the name and by sticking to the name of the movement. They choose to be a part of this global feminist solidarity. It is very dangerous precisely because of its transnational or showing the transnational moment of the movement. So if you want to play safe these years, these last years in China, you say that you are concerned with sexual harassment or domestic violence because these words are still up to the point and in certain contexts, still OK for the Chinese government and for the legal system and for society to accept. However, if you want to use MeToo, you expose yourself in a completely different, highly politicized way to the reaction of the state. So what happened in 2018? Actually, it started with a survey of a journalist. It’s Sophia Huang. She's very important, and she's a journalist who initiated the survey among the Chinese female journalist. She interviewed around 250 female journalists. More than 80 percent of them answered that they had some kind of assault by their bosses. After these surveys went public, one Chinese, but at that time, living in Canada, she opened up the stage for the official, or something that we can call as the official start of the MeToo movement in China, according to university. It was very symbolic. Like the first of January 2018, she publicly described the assault that she suffered during her student days by her very, very famous Chinese professor from the University in China. So this was in a way the first rupture, a first in a line of these stand up women. So in a way, the whole movement is a continuation of previous. What we really can observe is setting the stage for activist groups, gender studies, programs in the universities. All of these would not have been possible without this long background work of 30 years and in the last three years with different intensity. We have individual cases of women who are coming out with their stories. I know they collected a kind of archive of MeToo movement because it is very important to make the archive for them because the Chinese government is censoring, deleting and destroying the memory, actually investing enormous amount of effort in not only suppressing the voices, but also erasing the history of feminist movement in China. So they collected, I think, 2600 pages of online archives, and now I am sure that they will edge much more. Unfortunately or fortunately, this is a very, very continuous movement because it's not a centralized movement. It's very sporadic, at the same time, very fragile because there is no organization behind each individual, but a huge strength lies in solidarity behind it. Among surviving women, they support each other. It's a very, very complex situation for activists because there are no professional activists anymore in China. We can also talk about that, but we are now in a very, very decisive moment, we could even say that when it comes to the MeToo movement in China.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen

So when you say the archive, you mean basically documented cases right?

Dusica Ristivojević

Yes, are there. They find it extremely important to have documentation collected because the Chinese government after the 2018, when they shut down one of the most influential feminist media platform feminist voices. They understand that it is so important to document in the current situation of the hyper control of the civil society and hyper surveillance techniques employed by the government. It is very important to memory keeping, archiving, and since they cannot do it in the physical space in China, they are using the online space so they have so widely and freely available documents of 2600 pages. There is a part in English and a part in Chinese. It is made by a group of volunteers. So it is, we think, and we live in northern Europe, where things function completely differently. So this should be always emphasized in the background of the MeToo. There is no paid position, there is no warm office and they, all the involved supporters of the movement and organizers of the movement, they are volunteers. So even in collecting the archives, there is a group of six publicly signed and we always should understand that not all the participants wants to be named in these movements. So at least we know that these six names could go forward as creators or curators of these 2600 pages document – huge document in the online space.

00:10:38

Julie Yu-Wen Chen

Concerning those activists who have become more public, can you tell us a bit more about them?

Dusica Ristivojević

They are my colleagues. They are... Most of them are out of China. They used to be connected to these so-called – it's a very, very weird way to address it – but professional activists like NGO activists. They were connected to them when it was legal to have a feminist NGO. The situation for the feminist NGOs became extremely hard after 2015, and it was really one hit by another hit. First, it started to be connected with funding. Of course, their set of laws, which gave the whole civil society sector also hit the feminist NGOs, because if you do not have funding, how do you sustain the systematic activism? Even this archive making is a kind of activism that cannot be systematically done, not to mention the monitoring or lobbying connection with the government and the legal team's legal support. So it is extremely important to say that after the 2015, but it got really worse and worse, the most modern and more strict, especially after 2018, there is a whole group of Chinese feminists who are now abroad, and at least for the case of this archive, I know that some of them are my colleagues who are studying working on Chinese feminist history in the US. So we have this combination of academia, especially of history and sociology, political science. So the feminists are now abroad, studying for the degrees. Those who are in China, they are very, very in blocked positions more innovative and more than self-sacrificing and dedicated to what they are doing. Some of them are in the East Asian region, but it is really worth of emphasizing over and over that this is a work of volunteers, which has a big emotional price and material price for these activists.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen

It seems to me that this movement in China has really academic style beyond their activism, but I'm thinking ultimately those documents that they have created, who is the main audience for this? Is this meant for some kind of raising public awareness so that women in China are aware of their rights or is, I guess, is more difficult to kind of send these documents to the government and say, let's do something about it. Right?

Dusica Ristivojević

But I think, how I would somehow observe it… So you mentioned the academic side. Yes, but the feminist academics in China are much more directly engaged in activism than it is the case in the western academia. So the boundaries between academia and activism are very blurred. There is a group of Chinese feminists who are famous professors, filmmakers, especially for these older generations, more experienced generations. So I would agree that academic is here a part of a very, very important support of the feminist movement. But it is a feminist movement in itself. So it's not the separation like we used to have here or we still have here in these other areas of the world. But the archives, I think that the importance of the archives is not only for show for the future generations. The importance of history, the importance of keeping the continuity of history of Chinese feminist movement is extremely important. There are many, many different reasons, but one of the extremely important reasons is they want to write their own history. They want to keep it for the future generations and to minimize the possibility of manipulation and of cutting the feminist tradition in China. Feminist tradition in China is not introduced by the West. It's a not forgotten force like the Chinese government is easily claiming. And all anti-Western nationalism in the world of the easiest way to discredit you is to say you are a foreign force, Chinese feminism and the whole civil society enter this game.