Contemporary Chinese feminism has gained unprecedented popularity through women's digital practices across various platforms, while simultaneously facing growing hostility and contradiction. This article examines the complexities of feminist politics in China through the lens of popular feminism, characterised by grassroots engagement, platformised visibility and negotiated legitimacy. It explores how feminist subjectivities and internal tensions take shape within an increasingly digitalised, commercialised and regulated media ecosystem. The study argues that the political potential of Chinese feminism lies in its ambivalence – its simultaneous complicity with and subversion of platform logics, neoliberal discourses and state power. By foregrounding ambivalence as an analytic, this study illuminates how feminism materialises and circulates in digital spaces. In doing so, it offers a Chinese theorisation of popular feminism and contributes to broader transnational debates in feminist media studies.
Yan Tan (2026) studied this question.