Media as a core political resource: the young feminist movements in China

In 2012, a group of young activists changed the landscape of the Chinese feminist movement. These activists placed women’s rights in the mainstream public discourse by drawing the media’s attention to their “performance art”. This study compares the intergenerational differences between China’s first generation of women’s NGOs, which were mostly founded or flourished in the wake of the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, and a new generation that burst on the scene in 2012. The study argues that their main differences lie in their mobilization models and their ability to access key political resources, both of which were heavily influenced, and even decided, by their relationship with the state. Moreover, the change in the relationship between the state and feminist movements is reflected in the differences in the relationship with the media of the two generations of feminist movements. Because of the differences in their organizational models, resource conditions, and status, the two generations of feminists adopted different media strategies in their promotion of women’s rights. Using the “performance art” of the “Occupy Men’s Toilet” campaign as an example, we examine the media strategies employed by young feminists and illustrate how they legitimated the movements, aroused public attention, imposed pressure from the outside, and finally gained policy responses from the government. The study proposes the tripartite relationship between the state, media, and the two generations of the women’s movement in China, and concludes that the relationship between media and the women’s movements examined here was influenced and even decided by their respective relationships with the state.