Consider four women in your life. Now consider this: in China in 2010 government statistics stated that one in four married women in the country had experienced some form of violence within their relationships. More alarming still, feminist activists believed these numbers were understated.
 
For the women trapped in these violent relationships, speaking about it was often not an option. It could bring retaliatory violence from their partner, scorn from family and friends and the police wouldn't necessarily listen or act. There was no legal framework to protect them.

"A female officer said to me, 'You and your husband are both good people, just calm down a little, go home, everything will be fine.' Barely able to see clearly, I pointed to my swelling forehead and said, ‘Does this look fine to you?’ I was trying to file a report against my husband for assaulting me, but as far as the police were concerned, no crime had occurred" wrote an American, Kim Lee, in a searing New York Times piece from 2014 about the extreme abuse she had suffered while living in China. At the time Lee was married to Crazy English founder Li Yang, a beloved household name. 

Such a situation would be an embarrassment for any nation and particularly so for China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded along Marxist-Leninist lines, committed to female liberation from the get-go. Mao Zedong famously pledged "women hold up half the sky". By the 1970s, China had developed the largest female workforce in the world. 
 
But almost a century after the CCP's founding women were still suffering within a heavily patriarchal system. Then there was a breakthrough. Lee became the face of China's anti-domestic abuse crusade and together with other feminist activists she helped pave the way for the introduction of China's first domestic violence law. Enacted in 2016 it prohibited any form of domestic violence, including psychological abuse, it streamlined the process for obtaining restraining orders, and it mandated education and awareness efforts in schools and in the media.
 
All good, right? Not quite. As feminist scholar and activist Feng Yuan said in a 2021 interview with Sixth Tone, the year 2016 was the peak for articles on domestic violence. Court verdicts, which were put online in the 2010s, were later systematically removed from open access by the Chinese state. There was change, but it was patchy, localised and far from seismic. 

And elsewhere those engaged in the women's movement were being silenced.

One of the most famous examples was in 2015 when the "feminist five" were arrested. Then, when the #MeToo movement reached China, the search term was promptly banned online. Chinese women showed remarkable fortitude. To avoid censorship they used hashtags with bunny and bowl-of-rice emojis, "rice bunny" being pronounced mi tu in Mandarin. Women continued to campaign. 
 
But for any social movement in China, popularity is the kiss of death and so it has been for feminism. Prominent individuals have disappeared from the public space, such as Peng Shuai, whose tennis career was brought to an abrupt end when she publicly alleged a leading Chinese official had raped her. And Sophia Huang Xueqin. After spending years in prison, today the prominent #MeToo activist, who won the Index award for journalism in 2022, was handed a five-year jail sentence for "subversion against the state". Labour activist Wang Jianbing was also sentenced to three years and six months in prison.

Huang reported ground-breaking stories about sexual abuse victims, including personal accounts of the misogyny and sexism she faced in Chinese newsrooms. Huang was simply trying to say "enough", the violence and discrimination must end. For this she won't see freedom for another five years. To say her sentencing represents a dark day for the women's movement in China is an understatement. Today my thoughts are with her, her family, her friends, her network. Above all, they're with China's women who for too long have been told to put up and shut up. 

Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO
 
PS In other China-related news, six prominent Hong Kong activists who live overseas have had their passports rescinded. Beijing really does live up to the phrase there are many ways to skin a cat.