China's MeToo movement retreats underground as censorship tightens

Sophia Huang Xueqin walked out of prison on Friday after five years inside. The journalist who had helped spark China's MeToo movement was returning to a country that had systematically dismantled the very thing she had helped build. She had been arrested in 2021 in Guangzhou, a day before she was scheduled to leave for a master's degree at Sussex University on a UK government scholarship. In 2024, she was convicted alongside labour activist Wang Jianbing of inciting subversion of state power. The sentence included four years of deprivation of political rights—a restriction that human rights groups say could bar her from working as a journalist or leaving the country again.

During her detention, Huang's friends received almost no information from authorities. Reports filtered out slowly, carried by other inmates who had been released. They spoke of dramatic weight loss, interrogations that stretched through the night, sleep deprivation that left her exhausted. Months would pass between updates. When she was finally released, her friends still could not reach her. Her whereabouts remained unknown. Activists who had fought for her freedom released a statement on Saturday expressing deep worry about the surveillance she would now face.

The landscape Huang was returning to bore little resemblance to the one she had left. In the years of her imprisonment, China's feminist movement had retreated from public view. What had once been a visible, coordinated force—inspired by the global MeToo hashtag campaign—had fragmented and gone underground. A woman in Beijing who uses the name Jasmine, once active in the movement, now organizes feminist activities by disguising them as art or cultural events. She shares details only in private conversations, never on social media. "When one survivor could speak publicly about her experience," she said, "it could trigger a broader discussion about sexual harassment." That moment had passed.

The state had been methodical. Hashtag campaigns like MeToo and its Chinese language equivalents had been scrubbed from the internet. Eva Liu, a researcher on Chinese feminism at Ohio University, described what younger feminists now faced: "A lot of younger, digital-native feminists today don't know much about those earlier feminist struggles not too long ago, thanks to the state's intentional annihilation of them." The censorship was not crude. It was algorithmic and adaptive. There was, Liu explained, an "encyclopaedia" of feminist words banned by Chinese censors. Staff members were specifically tasked with tracking new terms coined by feminists online and adding them to keyword lists for automated blocking. Some terms were banned before they even became widely used.

Activists had learned to speak in code. They used new expressions designed to slip past the filters. "It's really a cat-and-mouse game," Liu said. In Beijing, Jasmine described the constraints plainly: "If you want to organise a public event, anything explicitly related to feminism or LGBT issues is basically not possible, at least in Beijing. If you advertise it that way, there's a risk the event will be shut down." The workaround was to frame events in neutral language—as cultural or artistic gatherings—and then discuss gender and social issues once the event had begun. Li Sipan, a Chinese investigative journalist and feminist scholar, explained the government's logic: "The Chinese Communist party regards all mobilisation of the public and movements demanding changes from the government as threats. The feminist movement clearly has these characteristics."

Yet activists insisted the movement had not been erased, only transformed. Despite the shrinking public space, MeToo had left marks on Chinese society. Sexual harassment had become a mainstream topic of discussion. Universities had changed their policies. Survivors continued to post about their experiences online, and some had won court cases. Lu Pin, a Chinese feminist activist now based in New York, said: "I believe the achievements of China's MeToo are things that many other authoritarian or even democratic countries failed to achieve. Under very harsh conditions, MeToo greatly raised women's awareness of their rights, especially among young women." But progress had stalled at the courts. The government, in a speech by President Xi Jinping last year, claimed historic progress in women's rights—improvements in health, employment, and economic participation—and promised to strengthen gender equality protections. The claim rang hollow to those who had lived through the crackdown.

Jasmine said she remained in contact with survivors of sexual harassment and believed it was still possible to offer them publicity and legal support, though the methods had to be careful, calculated. She hoped one day to meet Huang, though she was uncertain it would be possible. Lu Pin reflected on what had changed: "People used to have naive imaginations and expectations about the internet, but later realised it wasn't like that, especially for women and feminism." The online environment was fundamentally different now. What had once felt like a moment of possibility—when survivors could speak and be heard—had become something else: a movement operating in whispers, in private messages, in events disguised as something they were not.