ABOVE: Peng Yanzi. Photo via LGBT Rights Advocacy China.
A prominent LGBTQ equality rights legal advocacy group has indefinitely suspended operations Nov. 5.
LGBT Rights Advocacy China, co-founded by Peng Yanzi and AQiang in the city of Guangzhou in 2013, focused its efforts on securing legal rights for LGBTQ individuals through strategic lawsuits in China’s legal system.
After the announcing that it was suspending its advocacy work on China’s two leading social media platforms of Weibo and WeChat, as well as halting all legal activity around the country, the group communicated via WeChat: “We are grateful for all your companionship and support over the years. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.
“There may still be many uncertainties in the future, but we look forward to the day when the clouds have dispersed and we can see the blue sky again.”
The group advocated for same-sex marriage and fought workplace discrimination by helping individuals sue their former employers. In one high profile case that brought global attention in 2014, Peng Yanzi went undercover to a facility that claimed it could “treat” homosexuality with electroshock therapy. He sued the company and won the Associated Press reported.
In 2020, the group helped an LGBTQ+ activist identified only as Xixi, who at the time was a university student in Guangzhou, sue an academic publisher for describing homosexuality as a “psychological disorder” in a widely available textbook the South China Post reported. The court ultimately ruled in the publisher’s favour.
A person familiar with the situation who lives in China and speaking with the Blade after requesting anonymity, pointed to this past year’s crackdown by the national government in Beijing targeting online LGBTQ+ student groups, LGBTQ+ support and advocacy groups, as well as several leading LGBTQ+ Chinese activists. ” LGBT Rights Advocacy China faced censorship by the government and having its voice stilled on social media,” they said.
In July, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) ( Chinese: 国家互联网信息办公室) permanently disabled and deleted dozens of LGBTQ student organizations WeChat accounts ( Chinese: 请在电脑浏览器上访问) across China.
The accounts, which were primarily managed by students, advocate LGBTQ and gender equality, and providing support to LGBTQ students on university and college campuses.
The pages of those accounts now display the message: “According to internet regulations, we have screened all content and suspended this account.” The names of the accounts have been changed to “Unnamed.”
The censorship sparked immediate outrage by some LGBTQ groups while others fearful of escalation remained silent. Two of the groups affected issued separate media statements posted to the Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo ( Chinese: 新浪微博).
“Our activities will not stop due to the closure. On the contrary, we hope to use this opportunity to start again with a continued focus on gender and society, and to embrace courage and love,” Fudan University’s Zhihe Society Fudan University’s Zhihe Society said.
Tsinghua University’s Wudaokou Purple said that although it was “frustrated” that its “years of hard work” had been “burned” at one go, it has only made them closer. The schools are rated as two of China’s top universities and colleges.
A human rights activist from Hong Kong who spoke on the condition of remaining anonymous, pointed out that in recent years the government has moved towards becoming more intolerant and homophobic towards LGBTQ people.
Acceptance of LGBTQ individuals in China has varied historically. In modern China, homosexuality is neither a crime nor officially regarded as an illness in China. For decades, the legal status of consensual same-sex activity between men was ambiguous- although at one point consensual sexual acts between people of the same sex were banned under a law on hooliganism in 1979 with punishments ranging from imprisonment to execution. That was cleared up in the revised criminal code of 1997 as China moved to decriminalize homosexuality.
In 2001, the Chinese Society of Psychiatry removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. This is consistent with the consensus of global medical associations that homosexuality is not a medical condition. But same-sex marriage is still illegal and the topic remains taboo socially.
Chinese government officials increasingly push the narrative that LGBTQ+ culture is an imported “Western” idea, while expressing concern that the country’s big tech platforms are spreading subversive views and ideas that could upend traditional ideas of gender.
In September, in an action promulgated by the government of President and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping this week, China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) ( Chinese: 国家广播电视总局) ordered broadcasters to “resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics.”
In the directive, the NRTA used the term “Niang pao (Chinese: 娘炮)” which means “girlie guns” — more commonly translated as “sissy” an offensive description of effeminate men. The directive is seen as taking direct aim at the idols of the Chinese music industry who tend to be in their late teens to mid twenties, are thin, and dress in what could be loosely deemed an androgynously ambiguous manner.
This latest move is seen by some China-watchers as another in a decades long battle by Beijing to combat Western influences on the younger generations of Chinese.
Conservatives in Chinese society and government charge that young Chinese youth are turning into ‘soft boys,’ reflecting concern that the Chinese pop stars who have embraced the pop-culture phenomenon in part due to the influence of the South Korean pop music and all-encompassing genre known as K-Pop, are failing to encourage China’s young men to be masculine enough.
In some government circles the source told the Blade its seen as overtly homosexual and targeting young Chinese males. One area that has raised the ire of officials is video games.
In September rules that took effect that limits anyone under 18 to three hours per week of online games and prohibits play on school days.
Game developers already were required to submit new titles for government approval before they could be released. Officials have called on them to add nationalistic themes, the AP reported.
“There is a tendency in China for some people to relate homosexuality and LGBT people to Western lifestyles or capitalistic, bourgeois decadence, so this was in line with a moral panic,” said Hongwei Bao, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Nottingham and specialist in queer politics in China.
“Especially now, there’s tension between China-West relations, so there is likely to be a heightened sense of nationalism which sees LGBT issues, feminist issues, as Western, as unfit for China.”
