Social media as a counter-public sphere? Chinese feminist activism empowered by hashtags

Digital feminist activism has rapidly expanded across social media platforms worldwide, significantly enhancing the visibility of gender issues. While this trend has received considerable attention in studies from the Global North, less is known about how feminist actors creatively adapt digital strategies under conditions of heavy censorship. This study examines feminist hashtag activism on the Chinese social media platform Weibo by analyzing seven hashtags that focus on three key issues, namely violence, the economy, and the media, to explore their role in constructing a counter-public sphere. The findings reveal that hashtags serve a dual function. As digital tools, they foster connections among actors, influence agenda-setting and policy responses, and promote the routinization of resistance. As narrative devices, they generate and circulate counterdiscourses through placeholders, cultural jamming, and polyphonic strategies. Despite strict constraints, feminist hashtag activism in China has carved out critical spaces within the intersecting forces of state discourse, platform governance, and commercial logics, thus embodying a localized practice of digital feminism in the Global South. These insights enrich our understanding of how counter-public spheres are generated in non-Western contexts and shed new light on digital resistance in authoritarian societies.