Thirty years after the landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, promised to advance women’s rights and empowerment worldwide, governments are once again gathering in Beijing to mark the special anniversary.
For China, the U.N. summit on October 13-14 is the final, triumphant act of a yearlong show of force from its diplomatic and media mouthpieces seeking to center its “historic achievements in women’s development” and position China as a global model for women’s rights protection.
Yet as officials trumpet their “30 years of progress” to assembled dignitaries, the voices of the country’s own feminists will be conspicuously absent.
That’s because many are in prison, while others face threats and harassment intended to keep them silent – whether they still live in China, or have had to flee abroad.
China’s self-congratulatory narrative on women’s rights has been pushed not just at home, but also abroad: from the halls of the United Nations to the pages of local embassies and media markets in, for example, South Africa, Tanzania, Liberia, Ghana and Grenada. Last month, state-run press even published two compilations of Xi Jinping’s speeches in English for the explicit purpose of “help[ing] international readers gain a deeper understanding of Xi’s views” on women’s rights and much more ahead of the U.N. meeting in Beijing.
But far from partaking in a glorious march toward gender equality, many of the Chinese women we have spoken to see their roles in society increasingly constrained, with support for conservative “family values” rising and women’s choices sidelined in the face of a pro-economic growth, pro-natalist push.
And Xi’s views are clear on one point: that shutting down space for critical voices and public discussion on human rights, including topics of women and gender, are essential matters of national security.
Over the last decade, the Chinese state has continued to implement laws and policies that suppress feminist activism – and in doing so has convicted women human rights defenders one by one.
In 2013, activists including feminist Ye Haiyan and veteran rights lawyer Wang Yu took on the case of six elementary school girls who were allegedly sexually abused by their principal. Nearly a decade after the incident, Ye is in self-imposed exile in rural northwest China, after she and her daughter faced eviction and harassment, while Wang Yu has had her license to practice law revoked. She is also prevented from leaving the country and is regularly subject to short-term detentions to penalize her rights work.
The five women made famous by their 2015 criminal detentions for advocacy on International Women’s Day continue to work in civil society and to push for policy change – but they are careful to do so in ways that keep them and their families safe. Following their detentions, the costs of speaking out publicly have only risen. For four years, #MeToo activist and journalist Huang Xueqin has been locked up for “inciting subversion of state power” for her social media posts and her efforts to learn about and discuss non-violent movements.
Many other women activists – such as Li Qiaochu, Chen Jianfang, Xu Yan and Zhang Zhan – have languished in prison based on similarly spurious convictions. Vaccine safety advocate He Fangmei was convicted of “picking quarrels” and (absurdly) bigamy in 2024; when she’s released in 2027 she will have spent seven of the last eight years in detention. Her family doesn’t know where her daughters – the youngest one born while she was in detention – are located.
The prevailing political winds, as well as legal barriers like the 2015 Foreign NGO Management Law, have contributed to a hostile environment for civil society groups working on these issues. Over the past decade, a range of organizations doing vital work on women’s and LGBTQ people’s rights have been shut down. And the same approach is being taken online: online media site China Digital Times documented three closures of high-profile feminist-oriented WeChat (social media) accounts in just the last month.
Chinese courts – working less to administer the law than to enforce adherence to Chinese government and ruling Chinese Communist Party policies – have been so busy going after activists that they seem to have failed to adequately prosecute gender-based violence, or even ensure effective implementation of the country’s Anti-Domestic Violence Law.
In the jaw-droppingly inhumane 2023 case of the “Chained Woman,” the victim of human trafficking known as Xiaohuamei was found chained by the neck in rural Jiangsu province by a man who allegedly locked up, raped, and tortured her. But when the trial concluded, convictions focused on those at the “bottom of the chain” without more sustained investigation into potential criminal responsibility by local officials.
Meanwhile, the government touts its purportedly progressive policies on the global stage, when in reality it has failed to implement recommendations from U.N. women’s rights experts to meaningfully address deep-rooted gender inequality, in particular in the workplace and in government and CCP leadership.
When Chinese officials wax poetic about the country’s progress on women’s rights, it is essential to remember that this is not the whole story. The government postures on anti-discrimination, locks up women defenders, and criminalizes feminist activism – all out of fear that the system the CCP has built might come crashing down on their heads.
Let’s be clear. Space to celebrate multilateral success at advancing women’s rights has value. It may be that some of the states likely to show up in Beijing have increased women’s political participation or elected women leaders at the highest rungs of political power. Many human rights activists and feminists have spoken fondly about how their journeys in activism and organizing started as a result of that conference in 1995.
But if the Chinese government truly wants to honor the spirit of the Beijing Declaration, it should give a voice to its own women activists, rather than silencing and persecuting them.