Xi Jinping wants to make China patriarchal again, but women are fighting back

Hundreds of millions of people across China are reuniting with their families to celebrate the Lunar New Year — but for some, the festive season is also filled with violence.

Earlier this month, a woman in Sichuan province posted several videos online showing burn injuries on her body. She alleged that her husband set her on fire after many years of domestic violence. Local news reported that the woman had sought a divorce. Earlier this month, the news of a woman being killed by her husband during the “divorce cooling-off period” reignited a heated debate on the Chinese internet over a controversial clause introduced in 2021 that requires couples filing for divorce to wait 30 days after submitting their initial application and then reapply.

In recent years, facing a low birth rate and an aging population, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided that the solution to the country’s demographic crisis is pushing women back home to have babies and assume the role of caretakers. Making divorce harder is just one of the party’s strategies.

Births in China dropped by over half a million last year, accelerating a population decrease started in 2022. The fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.09 that year, half of the 2.1 replacement rate. Some experts suspected that the reality could be even grimmer than the government’s statistics.

But women in China are fiercely fighting back against the government’s plan to strengthen the patriarchy, despite the authoritarian regime’s brutal record of silencing anyone who dares to challenge its rule.

Besides the “cooling-off period” law, Chinese judges are also increasingly less willing to grant divorce. A study by Ethan Michelson of Indiana University showed that 80 percent of divorce petitions filed by women were denied on the first try, often even when evidence of domestic violence was presented; the rejection rate for a second try is around 70 percent.

According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese courts also denied divorce petitions from many trafficked women, even after some endured years of domestic abuse and violence from their “husbands.” The CCP’s one-child policy (in effect from 1978 to 2015) combined with the traditional Chinese preference for boys have created a huge gender imbalance in the country. The difficulty many Chinese men face finding wives has fueled a “bride” trafficking business inside the country and with China’s neighbors.

In January 2022, a video showing a woman chained around the neck in a shed in rural Jiangsu province went viral. A Chinese government investigation later found that the woman was trafficked and sold as a bride twice in the late 1990s. Responding to the public uproar over the tragic event, as well as the CCP’s unwillingness to address this widespread and longstanding issue, authorities censored the video and discussions surrounding it, threatened citizens who questioned the official findings and imprisoned activists who tried to visit the woman’s village.

Since President Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, crackdowns on feminist voices have become increasingly stringent. Online censors have shut down many popular women’s rights publications and removed countless social media accounts and posts. An article that criticized a skit on Lunar New Year Gala, the biggest TV show in China, for its degrading portrayal of middle-aged women was swiftly removed after it started to circulate widely. Offline, authorities have relentlessly harassed and surveilled women’s rights activists, driving some into exile. Huang Xueqin, a journalist and #MeToo activist, has been detained since 2021 on charges of inciting subversion of state power.

Accompanying the censorship and intimidation is the CCP’s constant propaganda promoting traditional values and denouncing feminism. “Extreme feminism has become an internet cancer!” declared the Communist Youth League, the CCP group tasked with indoctrinating Chinese youth. President Xi himself has long urged women to return to traditional roles. In a November speech, he called for government officials to promote a “marriage and childbearing culture,” and to influence young people’s thinking on “love and marriage, fertility and family.”

But for anyone who has been watching the Chinese women’s rights movement over the past decade, it is clear that Beijing’s antics have, for the most part, not worked. The divorce rate in China has continued to rise while the birth rate continues to drop. When Chinese women can no longer safely protest against the patriarchy inside the country, they have taken the movement global. Last month, many people gathered in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the chained woman incident.

“To subvert state power with my sisters, I’m very happy,” one protester’s poster read.

Yaqiu Wang is the research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan at Freedom House.