Foreign pulse: #FreeBeijing20Five

Mumbai: This year’s International Women’s Day on March 8 was sullen and solemn. Five young Chinese feminists, Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting and Wang Man were detained by police in an orchestrated clampdown across the three cities of Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou. Their “crime” was planning a nationwide awareness campaign against sexual harassment in public transportation by pasting stickers and distributing leaflets on subways and buses.

In the eyes of the paranoid Chinese state, these spirited women were not pursuing a harmless or uplifting cause. The “Beijing five”, as they have been dubbed internationally, are being held in jail for the last one month without formal charges and absurdly investigated for “picking quarrels”, “provoking trouble” and “creating a disturbance”.

Ms Wu suffers from Hepatitis B, but has been denied access to medication by her captors on grounds that “her condition does not require treatment.” Ms Zheng has poor eyesight but guards have confiscated her glasses. From whatever little news is trickling out about the circumstances of their imprisonment, the five ladies are being treated harshly and are denied access to basic necessities.

Concern is mounting that they will be sentenced to multiple years of incarceration to browbeat the entire women’s and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights movements in China. Sharp retorts from Chinese government spokespersons to international condemnation of the injustice being meted out to the five feminists indicates that we are in an era of heightened official harassment of Chinese women who speak out against sexual harassment, absence of female toilets, and domestic violence.

That such a depressing development is occurring in Beijing, of all places, is poignant because this city was host to the World Conference on Women in 1995, which galvanised an international coalition around the core principles of gender equity. The United Nations has declared 2015 as the year of “Beijing+20”, wherein the ambitious goals set 20 years ago will be remembered to mobilise for advancing social, economic and political rights of women.

Sadly, in light of the victimisation of the five young women, a new phrase is doing the rounds on Twitter with celebrity endorsers like the former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton: “#FreeBeijing20Five”. The UN’s March 8 slogan “Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture It!”, now has a bitter meaning, with Chinese women fighting for justice having to picture themselves behind bars for simply raising their voices against social discrimination.

To some extent, persecution of women activists is not a unique problem limited to China. Since feminists raise fundamental questions that upset conservative morality and espouse wholesale social restructuring, they are universally viewed with suspicion and ridicule by defenders of the status quo. Ostracisation, violent attacks, disappearances and forced confinement of women’s and LGBT rights defenders are routine occurrences in many parts of the world owing to fear that they are upending the “natural” order of male domination and heteronormativity.

However, in the Chinese case there is an additional factor of single-party authoritarianism that makes the plight of feminists distinct from what they face in democratic countries. Under President Xi Jinping, China has resurrected conservative Confucian ideals through a massive state propaganda machine that enjoins Chinese citizens to follow “family values, family education and family traditions.”

Feminist writer Chang Ping has argued in South China Morning Post that “Xi’s ‘China Dream’ may be better described as a ‘Dream of a Patriarchal Empire’”. She contends that even though brave activists like the “Beijing five” do not advocate multiparty elections or liberal democracy, “the way they operate and their sharp criticism of Chinese patriarchy and the authoritarian political regime it props up have put the women in as much danger as other rights activists.”

If feminists are generally derided as seditious “home-wreckers” in a thoroughly gendered nation-state system and world order, they are especially viewed as enemies in a Communist setup that is harking back to pre-Communist philosophies to retain legitimacy amidst rapid socio-economic modernisation of China. A new book by the Indian economist Poonam Surie, China: Confucius in the Shadows, describes at length how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is reviving the cult of the ancient sage from the 6th century BC “as a useful tool to temper the simmering discontent in society.”

In the absence of the fierce radicalism and women’s liberation credos of the Mao Zedong era, interpretations of Confucian thought that emphasise deference to authority and obedience to those higher up in the social hierarchy are now central to the CCP’s hold on power. While Mao tried to eradicate from the Chinese psyche certain Confucian precepts subordinating women to men, the present dispensation under Mr Xi is returning China to Confucian analogies of the ruler as a benevolent male figure who deserves utmost respect and deference from subjects, who are the equivalent of children. Surie quotes a Confucian scholar as follows: “The ruler guides the subject, the father guides the son, and the husband guides the wife.”

President Xi often pays lip service to “severely punishing those who infringe on women’s rights”. But his vision is of the patriarchal and paternalistic state paradoxically assuming the role of protector of women. The phenomenon of Chinese women rising up for themselves through their own initiative is a threat to the CCP’s prerogatives. A Communist state devoid of Maoist revolutionary fervour, like the regime in China today, is thus determined to crush feminist currents that erode its power structure.

After the regressive detentions of the “Beijing five”, women’s rights activists marched in solidarity in Delhi carrying posters proclaiming: “Indian feminists support Chinese feminists”. The battle for equality and safety of women is no less uphill in India as it is in China. In fact, as per the Global Gender Gap Report of 2014, China is ranked 87 out of 142 countries in the level of inequality between females and males, while India comes way behind at 114. Except in the sphere of political empowerment, India is much more backward than China in women’s participation in the workforce, women’s educational enrolment rates and women’s life expectancy. Freeing the “Beijing Five” is thus one symbolic demand within a truly global, multi-dimensional struggle.