As China minimizes Tangshan assault, women say their rights are under attack & More News

As China minimizes Tangshan assault, women say their rights are under attack – The Washington Post.

When a mother was found chained in a shed in the winter in Fengxian, Jiangsu province, authorities blamed mental illness. A few months later, when three women in Tianjin accused professors of pressuring them into sex, they were criticized for not owning their decisions as adults.

This month, a group of men beat four women eating at a late-night barbecue restaurant in Tangshan, in Hebei province, after one did not respond to advances by one of the men. Authorities blamed the attack, which hospitalized two of the women, on the prevalence of gangs in the area.

For years, activists have struggled to highlight the country’s casual attitudes about violence against women only to be told that gender has little to do with it. Grass-roots advocacy for women’s rights, including the #MeToo movement, have struggled in China, where it has clashed with Beijing’s intolerance for activism and been accused of being a Western import. But as the incidents and the outrage mount, it is becoming increasingly difficult to suppress the debate.

More women are refusing to be gaslighted about the prevalence of sexism in Chinese society. “From the woman in Fengxian to the violent beating in Tangshan, the ‘she’ in those situations are all vulnerable. Maybe next time it will be you, or me, or all of us,” wrote a blogger under the pen name Zhao Qiaoqiao in one popular commentary about the incident.

“When one case turns into an incident and when one incident turns into a phenomenon, only then will society pay attention and try to solve this problem,” Zhao wrote.

In an article that was later censored, another blogger asked, “Why is it that with the Tangshan incident they became not just gender blind but are doing everything possible to erase the gender dimension of this incident?”

Video footage of the attack in the early hours of June 10 in Tangshan shows a man approach a table of women and place his hand on one of their backs. The woman pushes him away. After a second exchange, he slaps her. When her friends try to intervene, other men rush to the table and beat them, dragging one outside and kicking her repeatedly on the ground as other diners look on.

Authorities in Tangshan launched a public security campaign and pledged to crack down on crime, with police stationed throughout the city and at restaurants. A prominent sociologist wrote in an essay that this was an “ordinary incident” of threats to public order, arguing that it “stemmed from sexual harassment but does not reflect gender discrimination in society.”

Articles about the incident and gender-based violence were deleted, including one that called on the government and state media to stop avoiding talking about feminism. Weibo, the microblogging website, banned 265 accounts for “instigating gender conflict” in discussing the Tangshan violence.

The response is in line with other campaigns to limit the fallout over such episodes. Support online for a landmark #MeToo lawsuit in which a former intern accused a prominent TV host of sexual assault last year has been heavily censored. An activist who tried to visit the woman found chained outside in Jiangsu, in eastern China, was detained by police in March.

Last year, Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who alleged on social media that a senior official had pressured her into sex, disappeared from public view for weeks before retracting her comments in carefully managed interviews.

In April, the official Weibo account of the Communist Youth League of China published a post saying that “extreme feminism has become a malignant tumor on the internet.”