Just after noon on December 2nd, dozens of young women gathered on Danling Street, in central Beijing, outside the Haidian District Court, where a high-profile sexual-harassment trial was set to begin. Wrapped in puffy jackets in the freezing cold, some of them held homemade signs: “The history and the people are on your side”; “We are not walking genitalia.” By 1 p.m., several police cars had blocked the narrow, tree-lined street on both ends, but the cluster kept growing, now reinforced by office workers on their lunch breaks. Near the court’s entrance, a crowd of people stood about two hundred feet deep. When the plaintiff, a twenty-seven-year-old screenwriter named Zhou Xiaoxuan, arrived with an entourage of a dozen friends, the crowd swept gently around her. Some supporters began crying.
More than two years ago, under the nickname Xianzi, Zhou posted an essay accusing Zhu Jun, a talk-show host for the national broadcaster C.C.T.V., of making unwanted sexual advances toward her when she was an intern at the network, in 2014. (Zhu has denied the allegations. His lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Since then, she has become one of China’s most visible #MeToo advocates. Although both Zhou and Zhu requested a public trial, the court proceedings took place behind closed doors; on the social-media platforms WeChat and Weibo, tens of thousands of people discussed the case, as censors swiftly deleted the most popular posts. Traditional newsrooms did not cover the trial. Into the evening, confused delivery people carrying meals, bubble tea, and heating pads for demonstrators began to arrive at the courthouse, asking, “Who are ‘Xianzi’s friends’?” “We all are,” voices from the crowd answered.
The hearing lasted more than ten hours, and left Zhou exhausted. “It was painful,” she told me. Her attorney’s requests to present police evidence to the court—including surveillance footage from the hallway outside the dressing room where she was allegedly harassed, and notes from a police interview with Zhu in 2014—were repeatedly denied. Zhou was also subjected to questions about her “sexual morals.” “It brought me back to 2014, like déjà vu,” she said. “They were just trying to stop me from talking about what happened.”
Her attorneys requested the presence of “people’s assessors,” who are citizens selected to decide a case alongside judges; this provision is based on a statute that permits such requests for cases that are likely to have large social impact. (The request was later denied.) The judges then adjourned the trial. “We will continue to ask for an open-door trial, for obtaining evidence, for jurors and for the defendant to be present,” Zhou later told her followers in a statement. When she finally emerged from the courthouse, the hundred or so supporters who remained outside erupted into cheers. “Thank you for paving the road for the future,” a man shouted.
Zhou wrote about her experience at C.C.T.V. in the summer of 2018; a friend shared her essay on Weibo, and her allegations gained national attention. Soon Zhu sued her for defamation. In response, she filed a suit alleging violation of “personality rights,” including damage to personal dignity. These events have made her a pioneer of #MeToo in China, with the movement she represents mostly playing out online—public rallies are essentially outlawed in the country.
Zhou, a native of Wuhan who lives in Beijing and writes scripts for Web series about campus romance, had little previous experience of dealing with journalists or lawyers. She originally appeared in photographs with her back turned to the camera, but, as the case became more widely known, she began to show her face publicly. At first, she spoke to reporters using the pseudonym Xianzi; she later used her real name in English-language publications. “I wanted the public to know that they were not consuming some gossip or abstract social issue,” she told me. “I am a real person.” Pursuing the legal case publicly has come at a cost. Her parents and boyfriend have been doxxed and attacked online, and during pretrial proceedings for her lawsuit, Zhu’s lawyer suggested that she suffered from a “delusional disorder.”
In January, 2018, a few months after the wave of allegations against Harvey Weinstein began in the U.S., a Chinese woman working in Silicon Valley posted an essay about her own past experience of being sexually harassed by her Ph.D. advisor at a university in Beijing. This accusation launched #MeToo in China. Over the next two years, scores of women—mostly students, interns, volunteers, and entry-level employees—came forward with their own experiences of harassment, implicating prominent professors and actors. At universities, such revelations often led to investigations and disciplinary actions against the accused, but, in general, few cases resulted in legal challenges. Accusers mostly posted their accounts on social media, such as WeChat, Weibo, and the Quora-like platform Zhihu, because the press is tightly controlled by the government, which views public complaints as a source of social instability.
As in the U.S., China’s #MeToo movement gained traction particularly among young, educated, middle-class women like Zhou. “#MeToo has created a community for women’s rights in China, and the community is growing in size and conviction,” Lu Pin, who has advocated for women’s rights in China for decades, said. “It got people asking: What kind of life should women live? Should they marry? Should they have children? Should they obey their parents?”
The community built by #MeToo became a basis for discussion of formerly taboo issues, ranging from domestic violence and postpartum depression to menstrual products. In pop culture, themes of gender inequality began suddenly emerging in songs and standup comedy. “When I chatted with people, I realized that many of them only started to pay attention to women’s rights since #MeToo—they were unaware of feminism as a concept before 2018,” a Beijing-based feminist blogger who was outside the courthouse on the day of Zhou’s trial said. She asked to remain anonymous, for fear of retaliation against her advocacy (women’s-rights activists in China are harassed not only by the government but also by online trolls, and have little recourse for such abuse).
Lu Pin, like many other experts, is not optimistic about what will come out of Zhou’s case. “I don’t have much confidence in the rule of law in China,” she told me. “It is very difficult for the #MeToo movement to find a way forward in the legal system.” But a feminist activist known as Xiao Meili pointed out why some organizers may have reason for hope. “The case received national attention,” she said. “She reported it to the police at the time and has lots of evidence.”
Since 2018, only a handful of criminal and civil cases alleging sexual harassment have been filed and reported in the press in China. A few plaintiffs have won nominal relief, such as a formal apology. It was only in 2020 that the Chinese legislature clearly defined sexual harassment in its first civil code; in previous cases, including in Zhou’s suit, alleged victims had to sue instead for “injury of personality rights,” a vague category covering individuals’ rights to health and dignity. Last year, Zhou asked to modify her suit to a sexual-harassment case; the court denied her request.
In practice, the system remains skeptical of cases such as Zhou’s. In a case decided in January, 2021, in which an influential journalist and philanthropist sued his accuser for defamation, the court ruled that the accuser had to prove that the harassment happened “without any doubt”—an unusually high standard for a civil lawsuit. (In China, the usual civil standard is to establish that the allegation is “highly probable.”) “The standard of evidence failed to consider the uniqueness of individual sexual harassment, sexual assault and domestic violence cases,” Li Ying, a lawyer who specializes in family law and domestic violence litigation, wrote on Weibo. “In the dominant conventional view, the society continues to be prejudiced against these kinds of cases and stigmatize their victims.”
In February, when a former journalist wrote about her experience with domestic violence, it quickly gained national attention. The local government rushed to publish investigation results diminishing her complaints, claiming that she never reported abuse to local police and casting suspicion on the fact that she has not yet divorced her husband. “ ‘Believing in the law’ has become a shorthand slogan for this narrative,” Zhou said. “The sexual harassment only happened if the court says it did, and otherwise you are lying.” She continued, “According to the law, only a few sexual-harassment incidents have ever happened in China. Do you believe that?”
Zhou sees her case as something of an experiment. “Is justice a possibility for someone who was sexually harassed in a closed space?” she asked. “Even if the answer is no, I’d like the court to tell me formally.” A tentative date for a second hearing, which will again be closed to the public, has been scheduled for later this month. Zhou fears that, if she loses, it may discourage other women. She chooses, however, to see meaning in even the worst results. “I’d like to question this reality,” she said, “even if just to leave a historic record of our time.”
