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,” one said.
“Little bitch, screw the feminists,” others said.
Illustration: June Hsu
They were all actual messages sent to women, an act of harassment anonymized by social media. They were sent during weeks of intense debate about the treatment of women on Chinese microblogging sites, sparked by the abuse of Xiao Meili (肖美麗), 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 materialize 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 fervor, with people criticizing 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 such as 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, along with a lot of my peers who study Xinjiang.” Chinese-Australian researcher Vicky Xu (許秀中) told Australian TV’s Q&A program last month.
Xu said a report she produced with colleagues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which implicated more than 80 international brands in forced labor, prompted the Chinese government to “go on the offensive.”
She became a trending topic on Sina Weibo, with one story clicked on more than 9.2 million 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,” the Global Times said Xu was endangering Chinese people in Australia.
Fake nude images of Xu have circulated online, her past relationships doxxed 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 spoken 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 (成蕾) and Chinese journalist Haze Fan (范若伊), who have been detained in China over undefined national security suspicions.
“Every time nationalistic sentiment runs high, a woman is cyberbullied, from Fang Fang (方方) to Tzu-i Chuang (莊祖宜), from Vicky Xu to Xiao Meili,” journalist Shen Lu (沈璐) wrote 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.”
In response to the waves of harassment against feminists who defended Xiao, Weibo shut down about 20 accounts — all owned by the victims.
Sina Weibo said that the pages were shut down for publishing “illegal and harmful information.”
At least one of the women is suing.
A study by Taiwanese research group Doublethink Lab tracked online attacks on Chuang Tzu-i (莊祖宜), the wife of the former US consul general in Chengdu.
It found they were largely driven by reports in state media such as the Global Times that were picked up by other government-controlled outlets in subsequent days and “amplified the focus of patriotic [Sina] Weibo users and key influencers.”
Doublethink Lab said that it found two main motivations behind influential accounts fanning the pile-ons: profit and ideology.
“You see the state actors targeting a specific incident or narrative that could help to spread their nationalistic ideology,” it said.
A sociology professor at Fudan University, who declined to be named, said it was not clear if accounts were targeted or shut down under official direction or not, but “it is clear there are no social platforms in China that are friendly to women and women’s rights issues.”
He said the politically tinged targeting is related to rapid changes in China’s online environment and the growing commerciality of Chinese media’s need for traffic.
On the receiving end, the motivation matters little. Many women the Guardian spoke to declined to go on the record, for fear of retaliation or escalation of the online abuse.
One said that the attacks on her appeared coordinated, or at least driven by a particular set of people with large online presences, who quickly organized to target her family and friends as well.
Xu is choosing to draw strength from it.
“Before this saga, I think few on [Sina] Weibo spent much time thinking about Uighurs or forced labor,” she said last month. “I’m receiving this much hate because people were feeling righteous. Imagine if they had access to more information about the plight of Uighurs.”
Yaqing said she hoped that people who saw the artwork reflected on the treatment of women, and that other women could take some comfort from it, but it took a toll.
“We found almost 1,000 comments and we didn’t use them all, but now looking back, I don’t want to look back at the files. It makes you feel upset and your heart beats really hard,” she said.
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