On July 8, Dalian Polytechnic University announced on its official website that a female student, identified by her full name, had been expelled for violating Article 19, Paragraph 6 of the school’s code of conduct, which cites “having improper relations with foreigners” and “causing damage to the dignity of the nation and the reputation of the school” as grounds for dismissal.
Within days, rumors began circulating on social media about the student’s alleged affair with the Ukrainian video gamer Danylo Teslenko – known by his handle, Zeus – whom online rumors claimed is a married man. (Teslenko later denied the claim.) Users online expressed moral outrage at the student’s conduct, condemning her as a slut and a traitor who had brought shame not only to herself but also to her family, her university, and her country. It was an honor killing in the digital age.
The student remained silent the whole time. However, a small group of legal experts and media professionals mounted to her defense. Some questioned the legal basis for her expulsion and condemned the university and subsequent media reports for violating the student’s privacy by disclosing her full name. Others turned their criticism toward Teslenko, who allegedly shared an intimate video with the student to his followers on Telegram without her consent. A smaller number of observers even speculated that the scandal had been a convenient political red herring to deflect attention from a recent lead-poisoning case involving 233 children in Tianshui, Gansu.
In recent years, misogyny has become increasingly visible in China and there has been an intensification of online attacks targeting women. At the same time, nationalistic sentiments are on the rise, especially among China’s youth. Frequent online campaigns, whether directed at international brands that refuse to use Xinjiang cotton or “morally corrupt” celebrities whose words or actions were deemed offensive, have reinforced a sense of national unity and an illusion of agency. In what little remains of the civic online space, nationalism seems to have become the only sanctioned form of public participation.
The Dalian Polytechnic incident happens to touch on two of the country’s most sensitive issues – gender and nationalism – so it is no surprise that it provoked such heated controversy. More significantly, the incident reveals an unsettling aspect of China’s modern political culture: women’s bodies remain bound to nationalist narratives and their sexual virtue tied to ideas of social stability and government legitimacy.
Binding Women to the Nation
According to feminist scholars Wang Zheng and Dorothy Ko: “Without the female body, it is difficult to imagine a modern China.” The abolition of footbinding in 1912 after the establishment of the Republic of China is often regarded as a pivotal moment in China’s modernization and struggle for women’s liberation. However, the anti-footbinding movement, which began in the 1880s, was led by a group of male elites whose stated goal was “strengthening the race and the nation.” Influenced by Social Darwinism, reform-minded politicians such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao cast women as mothers of the new Chinese nation. Bound feet, they argued, thwarted the development of a healthy body. Only when the maternal body is healthy could the offspring be strong. Guided by this logic, the future of China became bound, quite literally, to women’s feet.
In addition to their biological responsibility as mothers of modern China, women’s sexual virtue was also seen as essential to improving the nation’s moral character. In 1918, the writer Lu Xun launched a forceful attack on government-led efforts to glorify “virtuous widows” and “chaste martyrs.” In his essay “My Views on Chastity,” Lu Xun linked the practice of female sacrifice to what he perceived to be an outdated Confucian culture rooted in authoritarianism and patriarchy: “The more an emperor wanted loyalty from his subordinates, the more men wanted chastity from women.” He further traced its prevalence to moments of national crisis: “When the country is about to be conquered, there is much talk of chastity and women who take their own lives are highly regarded.”
Behind Lu Xun’s calls for “doing away with all the stupidity and tyranny in the world which create and relish the sufferings of others” lay his belief in the creation of a strong and modern nation-state freed from a long history of authoritarianism. This was precisely the vision underpinning the May Fourth Movement a year later, in which Lu Xun emerged a leading figure.
The Female Body as Battleground
For May Fourth intellectuals such as Lu Xun, women’s liberation was a necessary step toward China’s modernization. Influenced by feminist movements in the West, they advocated for women’s education and for their participation in the country’s political, economic, and social life. As a result, women-led journals and associations flourished, followed by growing calls for women’s rights from China’s newly educated female elite.
An image of the “modern Republican woman” emerged in the ensuing decade: she is well-educated, politically active, and independent. Her hair is cut short and she wears simple Western-style clothing or fitted qipaos, revealing her athletic figure and unbound feet.
However, the “modern woman” soon became the target of the New Life Movement, a state-led campaign that combined elements of fascist militarization, Confucian conservatism, and Christian ethics. In response to rising Japanese aggression and communist insurgency, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government, launched the movement in 1934 in an effort to mold patriotic citizens and rally them behind the Nationalist cause. Women’s bodies were once again conscripted into servicing the nation.
For China’s eugenic goals, women were told to cultivate athletic, healthy bodies. Yet any display of “modern style”– cropped hair, Western dress, exposed legs – was deemed morally corrupt and unpatriotic. Economically, women were recast as model consumers. They are expected to be frugal, yet also willing to spurge on Chinese products to support national self-sufficiency. As scholar Hsiao-pei Yen noted, “during the New Life Movement, the female body was turned into a battlefield where unprecedented state regulating forces operated at the same time to mold the ideal female citizen for China’s regeneration.”
With the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, women’s violated bodies became a powerful trope in anti-Japanese propaganda. This symbolic appropriation of women’s experiences effaced the specificity of their suffering, subsuming the female body entirely within the discourse of nationalism. This tension between individual experience and nationalistic narrative is at the heart of Ding Ling’s 1941 short story “When I was at Xia village,” published in Communist-occupied Yan’an.
The story tells of a young village girl, Zhen Zhen (her name literally means “Chastity”), who was raped by Japanese soldiers and later recruited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as an informant and sent to work as a prostitute inside Japanese camps. As a leftist writer bound by CCP expectations, Ding Ling portrayed Zhen Zhen as a patriotic heroine, sacrificing her body and sexuality for the revolution. In return, the party redeems her with promises of medical treatment for her venereal disease and a new life in Yan’an.
Yet, Ding Ling’s feminist sensibilities disrupted this neat revolutionary narrative as she repeatedly dwelled on Zhen Zhen’s physical sufferings: “her insides were rotting away”; to deliver intelligence, she “walked alone in the dark for ten miles” and “every single step was painful.” These details reveal an uncomfortable truth: Zhen Zhen’s body was exploited by both the enemy and the revolution that claimed to save her.
During the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1958, the character Zhen Zhen – along with her creator Ding Ling – came under fire from leftist literary critics. How dare Ding Ling, decried one critic, glorify someone who is “a military prostitute,” “a shameless woman who has lost her chastity and moral integrity.” As scholar Louise Edwards observed in her study of the story’s reception over seven decades, through their attacks on Zhen Zhen, Maoist-era critics sought to construct a new historical reality: the Communist Party would never exploit women by sacrificing their bodies for intelligence work. In this process, the CCP emerges as “the defender of a stable (sexualized) social order” and female chastity becomes “a synecdoche for good governance.”
Although Ding Ling and her works have since been rehabilitated in the post-Mao era, subsequent interpretations and adaptations of the story in film still fall under the party’s narrative of collective national victimhood. In these retellings, Zhen Zhen is recast as China’s first fictional “comfort woman” – a proxy for the countless sex slaves forced into service by the Japanese military. Stripped of any agency, she becomes a helpless victim of foreign aggression, while the Communist Party, through its self-professed military triumph over Japan, is reaffirmed as the protector of women’s chastity and by extension, the guardian of the nation’s integrity.
From “Shanghai Baby” to “A Beijing Man in New York”
During the first two decades of China’s economic reform, a new generation of urban female authors began reclaiming the female body and expressing their sexuality in a literary space long dominated by male voices. Among them, Wei Hui’s 1999 novel “Shanghai Baby” set off a cultural storm with its bold depictions of female desire, igniting fascination and fierce criticism.
The novel’s protagonist, Coco, an aspiring young writer in Shanghai, finds herself torn between two relations: her artistic Chinese boyfriend, who offers her spiritual solace but is impotent and addicted to drugs, and a married German businessman whose virility brings her physical satisfaction. The design is deliberately allegoric: Coco’s divided loyalties symbolize the tension experienced by many living in a post-socialist China where an already weakened and fraught local culture is confronted by an increasingly dominant Western economic and cultural presence. Coco’s loud cry at the novel’s end – “Who am I, indeed? Who am I?”– speaks to more than just a crisis of identity. It also unsettles nationalist ideas rooted in masculine pride and claims of cultural supremacy, exposing its fragility through the very body of a woman.
It is no surprise that the novel was banned just a year after its publication for being “decadent” and “corrupted by Western influence.” With that, the burgeoning wave of women’s body writing in urban China was abruptly silenced.
By contrast, the 1993 television drama “A Beijing Man in New York” remains one of the highest-rated series in China. The show follows Wang Qiming, a violinist from Beijing who abandons his music career in pursuit of the American Dream. After many trials and hardships, Wang eventually finds success as a businessman in New York. In one memorable scene, he hires a voluptuous, blonde prostitute and vents his pent-up frustrations on her. As he thrusts himself onto the prostrate prostitute, Wang showers her with one-dollar bills, demanding her to cry out “I love you.”
For the sinologist Geremie Barmé, this scene “has a certain paradigmatic significance” in China’s century-long encounter with foreign powers. The drama aired at a time of rapid economic growth, when there was growing anger among Communist Party authorities and a small number of the population against what they perceived to be China’s inferior position in a U.S.-dominated global order. As Barmé puts it in an essay aptly-tiled “To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic,” Wang’s action “represents the coming of age of Chinese narcissism, and it bespeaks a desire for revenge for all the real and perceived slight of the past century.”
Such revenge, is of course, also deeply gendered.
This patriarchal nationalism, manifested dramatically through Wang Qiming’s actions, is the key to understanding the incident at Dalian Polytechnic University – from the university’s seemingly “medieval” code of conduct to its hyperbolic response to a student’s private affair.
It also helps to explain many of the apparent paradoxes of in contemporary Chinese society: a diplomatic discourse steeped in “wolf warrior” style provocations and yet coupled with insistence calls for respect; a digital sphere filled with hatred toward the West but perpetually fixated and easily offended by Western opinion; the glorification of Chinese men who marry foreign wives alongside the public shaming of Chinese women who enter into relationships with foreign men.
To liberate the female body from the grip of patriarchal nationalism is not simply a question of gender equality. It is the necessary first step for deconstructing the hyper-masculine nationalism that underwrites the Chinese state itself.