When Disappointed with the System: Looking at the Emotional Mobilization of "Mi Rabbit" from Shi Hang's Sexual Harassment Incident

Starting from the end of April, Shi Hang's exposure to sexual harassment caused a public opinion storm that lasted for more than ten days. As the "Mi Rabbit" movement enters its sixth year, it is a proud achievement of the Chinese feminist movement to be able to create such momentum despite the government's continued intensification of suppression and siege. Expect to be different. This article is a compilation of an internal roundtable discussion. From the perspective of feminists, on the premise of supporting "Mitu", it discusses the current situation of the Chinese feminist movement and its development and adaptability strategies with regard to the "Historic Incident".

Chinese-style "cancellation": public opinion strategy after disappointment with the system

Under the appeal of followers, many organizations issued statements canceling their cooperation with Heshihang. This is reminiscent of the "cancellation culture" in the United States, but in China, it was previously common for commercial companies with women as their main consumers to respond to their boycotts, and for institutions to publicly cut off a celebrity due to sexual harassment allegations, and on such a scale, It is the first time in China. This undoubtedly reflects the strength of Chinese women's rights. In an environment of censorship and oppression, women's rights activists can still quickly form a broad consensus on sexual harassment and bring it to the entire society, so they can build enough pressure on those institutions. But the premise is that this is still an unstable, internally contradictory space that may close at any time. Feminist power can only be exercised against non-governmental institutions, and only if these institutions are not subject to censorship or other direct or indirect protection from the government.

People have become disillusioned with the system and have given up. Reflected in the "Historic Air Incident", people consciously and consensually avoided legal solutions, and collectively justified their choice not to seek legal remedies. This is definitely not the original direction of “Mi Rabbit”. At the beginning of 2018, China's "Mitu" emerged from colleges and universities, with the initial appeal of establishing an anti-sexual harassment mechanism in colleges and universities, and the reform of the mechanism has hardly been mentioned in the past two years. From 2018 to 2020, Xianzi fought for a long time about Zhu Jun's sexual harassment in order to let the law give a model justice. Now many lessons, including the weak accountability in the "Iron Chain Girl Incident" and "Tangshan Beating People" incident, as well as the failure of some important "Mitu" lawsuits, have made people realize that institutional reform is hopeless, and that legal remedies are not for Designed for women.

It only took a few short years for women to go from seeking legal solutions to realizing that laws cannot reliably protect them, and even meant further violence and punishment for women's rights protection. Some people, like Shi Hang's whistleblowers, refuse to go to court at all; others will complain or call the police, but at the same time seek the support of public opinion to ensure that their appeals can be responded to. And supporters will even prevent women from trying to defend their legal rights in a protective manner, and even do not advocate that women resort to the law, which has become one of the standards for supporting "Mi Rabbit" today.

Social movements once hoped to finally promote a solution within the system through pressure from outside the system, but today they only pin their hopes on demands based on outside the system and appealing to public opinion. The goal is only to make the perpetrators apologize and "community die." However, only the government's ban can make people truly "community dead", feminists do not have such ability. Deng Fei, who won the lawsuit, became active again, and Lei Chuang, who declared that he would surrender himself, has been evading and trying to return. Their allies never really abandoned them. The patriarchal capital held by the perpetrators is still there, but temporarily dormant. Mobilizing public opinion to "cancel" them as the only means of punishment is only a temporary victory.

This is an era when everyone is afraid of making mistakes and becoming the target of cyber violence, whether it is the victim, the perpetrator, or the people and institutions that have been related to the perpetrator. The vulnerability of institutions is that they are often burdened with the "morality" and stability maintenance responsibilities imposed by the government, so they definitely don't want to be the focus of negative public opinion. From this perspective, their separation from Shi Hang is a strategy to withdraw from the vortex of the storm, to preserve their reputation and not be blamed by the government.

The continuous fermentation of the "historical aviation incident" has a certain degree of chance. On the one hand, it originated from an "impromptu anger" against the industry caused by the founder of "One Page" being exposed as having attempted to sexually assault employees, with the attention of literary youth and the promotion of some media people; on the other hand, it may be because of sexual harassment The nature of the incident was not as egregious as rape, nor was Shi Hang's identity in any way sensitive, allowing discussion of the incident to survive censorship. But the influence of the discussion did not spread to other events that were subsequently exposed, or to other more mainstream industries. At the same time, it could all end quickly at any time, because no one knows if and when the police will intervene.

This is not to attribute everything to coincidence. There are a bunch of sexual harassers in every industry who are already on the blacklist of women, and they are whispered "Why haven't they been 'Mitu'". At this moment, Shi Hang became a breakthrough point. There must be other women who are trying to expose other incidents, but they just haven't been able to become Internet hot spots. The feminist movement is being driven increasingly only by outbreaks of individual cases. One incident erupts, people gather virtually in outrage, and then attention fades away, waiting for the next incident to happen. In this mode, movement is not strategic at all. Regardless of whether the outcome of the event itself was positive or negative, there was no organizational advocacy during the process, and no strong collective demands were raised.

Feminist anger is still allowed to exist to a considerable extent, although it is getting closer to breaking point. Anger can have a ground-breaking impact online, but it is absolutely unacceptable to channel that anger into institutional change and accountability. For example, some people organize small discussion activities on the "Historic Air Incident". Even if there are only a few dozen participants, the risk of being tracked and punished by the police is far greater than that of speaking online. Because organizing means establishing mobilization structures for the movement, facilitating the birth of collective action with a common purpose. Only loose Internet public opinion is not a threat. In the age of social media, online surges do not lead to offline changes, forming a social movement "spectacle" with Chinese characteristics.

"Small Composition": The Narrative Mode of Victims in the Era of Cyberbullying

Today, "Mitu" is promoted by the self-reports of victims on social media. Anti-feminists jokingly and contemptuously call this form “writing small essays” to deny victims their subjectivity and deprive them of expression. When it came to the "History Hang Incident", one of the parties directly declared that his article was a "standard short composition". This article has great emotional appeal on Weibo and Moments, although some people think it is too rhetorical.

The expression of the victim does not affect the judgment of the feminists on the incident itself. However, the text still provides insight into the current situation of the "Mi Rabbit" movement: the patterning of accusations and the increasing reliance on emotional mobilization rather than facts to anchor legitimacy.

Since 2018, the writings of the victims of "Mi Rabbit" have been highly typified, which is the result of the two-way selection of online public opinion and victims. For example, Fang Siqi has become a classic literary image, which is used by many victims to interpret themselves in their complaints. Although Fang Siqi's underage does not accurately correspond to the age of most of the voices of "Mi Bunny", she helps people understand in a popular sense how a society full of rape culture forces victims to internalize pain in order to survive. Fang Siqi's weak and innocent "perfect victim" story provides the victim with the most convenient, explanatory and emotionally mobilizing language.

The text of "Mitu" in its early years was simple, but at that time the victims had obviously cultivated their "network sense" by learning from each other and observing public opinion reactions, and learned to tell a story that could be accepted by the public while avoiding their own backlash. In today's harsher network environment, the victim's "little composition" has been tempered compared with a few years ago, and it may have been pre-examined by many eyes during the birth process.

The statists invented the phrase: "Leave the facts alone" - facts don't matter, positions matter. In the era of cyber violence, victory depends on pulling people into line. Whoever can anchor and mobilize the public's emotions earlier and stronger will be able to seal the victory. Feminists are also forced to put the facts aside—it’s not that the victims don’t have the facts or the evidence is insufficient, but they realize that presenting and focusing on the facts will not bring the advantages of communication but the opposite. If they had really done a lot of work presenting the facts, the results might have been worse than what we see today. In an environment where women and victims are under intense scrutiny, exposing the facts means providing access that is questioned by details and traps victims in a dilemma of infinite self-evidence. By refusing to explain the facts and instead resorting to emotion, "Mitu" today has established a wide public opinion in an environment that is extremely harsh on the victims.

There have been too many cases of cyber violence killing women, and today's victims are also extremely afraid of being countersued, so when they go online, they have to be extremely cautious. Feminists look forward to a "Mi Bunny" leader - not only a victim, but also a person who can directly communicate with the public in a personal capacity, and thus strongly symbolize this movement with personal experience. Let go of the entanglement and pain that victims often have, and stand up as an "avenger" and "female warrior", conforming to the expectations of the current feminist community that is full of emotions and needs sustenance.

Feminist activists based entirely on public social media activities are already good at "small composition"-appealing to women's daily life and personal emotional expression. While the direct cause of feminism online is the cramped public space and its many limitations, online feminism does an important job of connecting women's everyday experiences with feminist discourse in order to empower women and strengthen women's alliances . Online, feminists develop an internal discourse that allows them to quickly identify and rally around each other. Everyone is aware that they are in an online gender war, and the only weapon feminists can resort to is collective attacks on social media.

The crisis of emotional mobilization is that the other side, especially the patriarchal side, may use darker operations to reverse the situation. For example, Zhu Jun used his network agent to reverse some people's support for Xianzi. When "Mitu" becomes a "small composition" competition, it means that the speaker is walking on the verge of being abandoned and swallowed by public opinion every step of the way. As a group, women have never had the upper hand in the online gender war. The cyberbullying of patriarchs against feminists is even more devastating. Feminists may have to pay a terrible price for their temporary victories.

The violent environment created by patriarchal-authoritarianism defines the boundaries of the feminist movement and profoundly affects the thinking within the community. Today, when the movement is so fragile, people cannot and are not allowed to add to the problems of the movement itself. Opening up the discussion of complexity means exposing weaknesses to the "enemy". What can be implemented is only a stereotyped discussion that conforms to black and white likes and dislikes, and people have no way to embrace the real and contradictory female image.

Loyalty to feminism also keeps people from criticizing feminists who speak out, even if it means not paying attention to facts and infinitely affirming, exploiting and amplifying emotions. Not paying attention to the facts means that the phenomenon of women's rights being selectively or excessively used cannot be fully discussed, including the individual false allegations that appeared in "Mi Rabbit".

Sexual harassment is based on the subjective feelings of the victim rather than the perpetrator. It is undoubtedly axiomatic that women's rights advocates should give the victim the greatest support. But that doesn't mean victims' feelings don't need to be inclusively acknowledged, and their accounts can't be discussed. It is true that some people have chastity thoughts, and some victims may have interests entangled with their perpetrators. Feminists say that "there is no perfect victim", but in order to gain the upper hand in the gender war, they still have to actively or passively shape the perfect victim. In this process, feminist thinking about sex and sexual harassment may be simplified.

From another perspective, the “Mitu” and the construction of anti-sexual harassment discourse have given many women the opportunity to name their encounters, but at the same time they are also limited. Only by borrowing anti-sexual harassment templates can they express their dissatisfaction with the unequal relationship between the sexes.

Women have always been sexualized, demeaned and exploited in the workplace. A young woman enters an industry and is not respected for her professional identity, not recognized as a professional, but seen as prey and a resource. And she must accept and interact with the power structure - the so-called "mixed circle" in order to survive in the workplace. This is the general ecology of many industries today. But even if the inequality of sex and gender is always and pervasive, victims of violence can only successfully sue by describing and attributing a special node of violence and applying the story of an ignorant underage girl.

Gender structures lead women to often enter sexual relationships with a status of vulnerability and potential exploitation, in which "consent" as a criterion is itself inaccurate. Mitu’s claim is that even a seemingly consensual relationship under power can be sexually violent. However, women’s complaints still have to use a set of language that can withstand the interrogation of patriarchy, emphasizing violence and resistance; otherwise, they will be attributed to emotional disputes or “hidden rules” and become ambiguous private issues. Public opinion cannot help women punish "scumbags". The injustice experienced by women is too much to describe and cannot be remedied. In order to avoid a disastrous defeat in the war of public opinion, women cannot admit that they have desires or selfishness, and can only use the existing procedures in this society to label their own experiences. Feminists are also being forced to accept that complex discussions are increasingly impossible.

Seeking an agenda, structure and dialogue for the movement

Women's rights activists tried to punish Shi Hang by boycotting, and once again set a red line for male celebrities, making them realize that women's rights cannot be violated. This is necessary, but the power structures of productive violence in various industries remain. Faced with an increasingly narrow space for action, a violent public opinion environment, and the emotional nature of the movement itself, what is the self-positioning of activists? No one is responsible for the movement as a whole, nor for the words and actions of others in the movement. Under this premise, acknowledging the current difficulties of the movement, what actors seek is always constructive.

Today there are new feminist accounts popping up on social media every day, and people don't know each other and can't keep in line. In a decentralized movement, actors can still set an action agenda when the window of opportunity opens, and strive to transform personal anger against Shi Hang into public discussion and social-level action, even if it only stays on the Internet. Even small discussions and action exercises are building sustainable mobilization structures for the movement.

When the tide of public opinion ebbs and the movement enters a flat period, it is precisely when people are more energetic and eager to think. The collective external “aggression” in the gender wars masks the inherent distrust and potential violence of the feminist community. There is a lack of safe spaces within the community where people are afraid of conflict and it is difficult to engage in in-depth dialogue. The construction of public space requires the willingness to step out of the safe zone in thinking, so as to jointly improve the ability to develop thinking in conflict and pressure.