Working With Women’s Rights Activists in Beijing 

By Cherrie Yu, WIFP

In the summer of 2014, after my freshman year at William and Mary, I returned to China for the first time since I went to college. I spent two weeks at home and then I moved to Beijing, half for the music scene there, half for an organization I found called Women’s Voice. I sent them a personal introduction and my final paper from a gender study class, and ten days later they emailed me asking me to come into the office the following Monday.

The office of Women’s Voice is on the 23rd floor of an apartment building on the northeast side of Beijing’s central area. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a painting of a half naked woman hanging on the wall with the caption “big brother is watching you” (he was indeed as will be proved). There was a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room changed into an office area with four tables pushed against the walls, and two other rooms with a bunk bed, a futon, and more office tables and computers. There are drawings of cat all over the walls as well. Later I learned that this cat is the logo of Women’s Voice, and all the drawings were made by Xiao Meili, an activist and a friend of the organization.  Offices of various other nonprofit organizations were dispersed in the same apartment complex. On the same floor was an open space called Yiyuan that has yoga classes, book club meetings and movie screenings occasionally. On the 26th floor was Beijing LGBT Center that offers counseling service and free HIV testings. In the same building there was also Beijing Gender Health Education Institute.

My job as an intern was mostly updating the website of Women’s Voice, functioning as a media monitor, scouring through major publishers and looking for articles that pertain to gender equality. Two other staff, Xiong Jing and Zhao Sile, took turns to manage the Weibo account of Women’s Voice (equivalent of Twitter), whose followers have risen from twenty-five thousand to fifty-six thousand for the past one year. Ji Hang and Li Furui was working on a program protecting the rights of domestic workers, and Li was also in charge of the finance of the organization. And there was Lv Pin, one of the original founders of Women’s Voice and the editor of the Women’s Voice Newsletter. She usually only came into the office every Monday for a weekly meeting. She talks fast and gets right to the point and it took me a couple of days to learn how to talk to her.

Closely related with Women’s Voice is also a group of women and queers, most of whom born in the late 80s, who are called Bcome. They were initially formed in 2012 for the play The Vagina Monologues. They are famous for combining activism with street performance art. On Valentine’s Day in 2012, Xiao Meili, the designer of the cat logo,  Li Tinging and another college student marched down the crowded street of a commercial district in Beijing wearing bridal gowns splattered with fake blood and carrying slogans that called attention to domestic violence.  Their piece, dubbed “the Wounded Bride,” was followed by another one called “Occupy Men’s Room” led by Li Tingting.  This piece addressed the unfair ratio of male to female toilet stalls in public. In August 2012, Xiao Meili, Li Tingting and two other activists gathered in Guangzhou and had their heads shaved clean in public while reading aloud a letter asking the department of education to explain the double standard in college admission. At the end of 2012, they turned their focus back to domestic violence: Xiao Meili, Li Tingting, Xiong Jing, Ji Hang and a number of other women activists posted semi-naked pictures of themselves covered in bloody handprints online to collect signatures for a petition against domestic violence.

 I was and still am amazed by these activists’ awareness of the body. They brought a new layer of meaning to PARTICIPATION. When the activists’ bodies are brought under the limelight, inspected, judged, teased, and abused by the onlookers, the activists themselves embody the victims that they are trying to call attention to. The participation of the body leaves zero space between the activists themselves and the causes they are fighting for and I think that is real dedication.

The summer that I was working for Women’s Voice, Lv Pin was trying to put together eight weeks of classes that she called “Feminism School” including chapters like Feminist Theories, Gender and Bodies, Feminism and Media Communication, Chinese history of Women’s Rights Movement, Feminism and Culture and more. Lv Pin and Feng Yuan, another women’s rights activist who has been active since the 80s, were the co-principals of the school. Most classes were taught by scholars who were associates of the organization.

On Sunday June 29th, before all the classes officially started, there was supposed to be a first meeting in the office of Women’s Voice, attended by all the enrolled students and the principals. On the morning of 29th, I was with Feng Yuan at a UN related conference about Beijing+20, and I got a message from Li Furui that there was a change of location and that it was not safe to communicate through WeChat (an app equivalent to iMessage) or texts anymore. While I was still confused, Feng Yuan took me away from the conference and hailed a taxi. We ended up on the empty second floor of a restaurant two blocks away from the office and Lv Pin was there. Then I learned that Women’s Voice had received several warnings from the police to not host the classes. Around noon on 29th the police occupied our office to “prevent unlawful social gatherings.” Lv Pin had to give me her laptop because she did not want the police to access her documents in case she got arrested. The rest of the classes of Feminism School were finished but with difficulty considering the pressure that the police exerted.

In March when I heard that five women’s rights activists were arrested, I was surprised but I knew that it did not come out of nowhere. The five women arrested were Li Tinging, who is a member of Bcome and who participated in “the wounded bride” and “Occupy Men’s Room” mentioned above,  Wei Tingting, who works for Beijing Gender Health Education Institute, Zheng Churan, who has been working against sexual assault on campus and employment discrimination against women, Wang Man, who works for Global Call to Action Against Poverty, and Wu Rongrong, who has worked on helping people with AIDs and hepatitis B.

They were planning on handing out flyers and stickers on International Women’s Day to call attention to sexual harassment on public transportation and they were arrested on 7th of March in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou on the grounds of “picking quarrels and creating disturbances”. Even though the women have been released, their legal statuses are still criminal suspects. The police detained them until the last day they could without charging them. Not to discredit the Chinese and international allies pressing for their release, but it seems to me that the police released them mostly because they failed to find concrete evidences of crime to charge these activists. According to their lawyers, they are still under police surveillance. They will have to notify the police wherever they go for the one year to come and the police have the right to arrest or question them anytime.

It pains me just reading about how they were treated in prison. Wang Man suffered from a heart attack when being grilled by the police. Wu Rongrong was initially denied medication to treat her hepatitis B. She was also verbally abused and locked up in a hotel room for eight hours.These women (I’m not only talking about the five arrested but a much larger group) still have a long way to go, and there are bigger prices to pay and more challenges to conquer, but I firmly believe in their strength to fight and their power of endurance.