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The #MeToo movement makes a comeback in China but faces hurdles
#MeToo movement has found it hard to gain momentum amid censorship
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This article originally appeared on ABACUS
The #MeToo movement has made a comeback in China, months after the first wave brought down a university professor in January.
This time, it broke out with an anonymous letter from a university student accusing Lei Chuang, the leader of an anti-discrimination activist group for hepatitis B carriers, for raping her during a charity trip. Lei apologized for hurting the woman, but claimed in a second response that he thought they were in a relationship. “We became lovers,” he said, “Or at least to me, we were lovers.” The accuser denied that they were.
Later in the week, an anonymous letter accused noted media figure Zhang Wen of rape, and six others came out saying that they had also been harrassed by Zhang, including well-known writers Jiang Fangzhou and Yi Xiaohe.
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The web was furious about Zhang’s response -- he acknowledged that they had sex but claimed that it was consensual, and said the accuser and the two writers had multiple boyfriends. He also claimed that it’s common for men and women in the media industry to have physical contact after drinking at gatherings.
On Thursday morning, the MeToo topic page on Weibo had over 30 million views and over 17,000 posts. “Me too” was one of the most searched keywords on the site and four of the ten top searches were related to the movement.
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More than 20 women have spoken out in this fresh wave of accusations, but #MeToo-related search results are heavily censored, and now the two posts pinned at the top of the #MeToo topic page are both about sexual assault in South Korea.
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