Podcast: China's #MeToo Momentum

Can we call the #MeToo movement a real movement in China given that the government has a real history of cracking down on anything that looks like collective action coordinated across the country?

This episode of NüVoices podcast looks at the rise of public sexual harassment allegations in China. Hosts Alice Xin and Joanna Chu interview Financial Times Beijing tech correspondent Yuan Yang.

They chart the rise in public discussion of sexual harassment cases in China, noting how the internet has allowed something of a #MeToo movement to establish itself in the country. Internet regulators in China attempted to quash the growth of an online discussion, but as Yang says: “Chinese people are infinitely more inventive than the censors.”

In January this year the English-language hashtag #MeToo was temporarily blocked on Chinese social media platform Weibo but netizens came up with a Chinese language alternative. 米兔, pronounced ‘mi tu’ in Mandarin literally translates as ‘rice bunny’, a homophone for the English term ‘me too’.

Until recently university campuses have been the focal point of #MeToo in China, but this July saw a wave of accusations against high profile public figures including journalists, intellectuals and a prominent environmentalist.

Despite the obstacles to a #MeToo movement gaining momentum in China, podcast host and journalist, Joanna Chu, sees some positives in the Chinese case:

All over the world there is so much misogyny and woman bashing and victim blaming but at least in China, as far as these university students [are concerned], there hasn’t been as much of that. I’ve seen more of a majority of people supporting these women when they come out rather than asking what they were wearing or if they were wearing a skirt.