The medieval era is often characterised as a dark age. But some historians believe that for women in England, it was a golden one. Caroline Barron, for instance, argues that they had social and economic rights that vanished in later centuries. In the 14th century, she says, a widow inherited at least a third of her husband’s property. Women often gained domestic autonomy when they married, living in new households with their husband and children, rather than with their parents or in-laws. And they could keep money that they earned during their marriage.

It was normal to see women in a wide range of jobs. While the most common occupations were in the fabric and clothing trade, in victualling and brewing, and in domestic service, medieval records reveal female blacksmiths, parchment-makers, and ship-owners. Widows often continued their husbands’ businesses, and some women traded as “femmes soles” — in their own right, rather than as part of an entity with their spouse. Matilda Penne, a London skinner, ran a lucrative fur business, employed apprentices, and left a gift in her will for a female scribe called Petronella. Chaucer’s own grand-daughter, Alice (who married three times), lent money to the king, and ended up with land in 22 counties.

Of course, any “golden age” claim has to come with a caveat: women did not have the vote, many were abused exploited, badly paid and they generally died quite young. But while they lived, some medieval women did have surprising independence.

Things declined for women a couple of hundred years later: a change that is reflected in the marked reduction in skilled female labour. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the records are littered with references to female apprentices, who learned a trade and became highly qualified in the course of between seven and 10 years. We can read about Katherine Lightfot, apprenticed to a carpenter; or Katherine Claver, apprenticed to a wealthy female silk worker; or the sisters Alice and Matilda Shaw, apprenticed to a notary or lawyer.

However, in 1570, the Drapers’ Company at first refused to allow Mr Calverley and his wife to take on a female apprentice. Only after advice did it allow them to employ her. Between that year and 1640, of the 8,000 recorded apprentice enrolments in London, none was for girls or women. Women certainly continued to work — for instance as servants — but a more skilled career path was closed to them.

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Many of us would like to believe in progress: that things will be better for our daughters than they are for us. And those who are socially liberal hope that change, even if it is slow, will be permanent. When my parents were born, there was no Pill and no legal abortion. By the time I was born, these things were mainstream. However, history can double-back on itself, as we are seeing in America since the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Major economic change plays a major part in such shifts. In the 14th century, the Black Death wiped out a huge proportion — perhaps even half — of England’s population. In the wake of this appalling pandemic, there were far fewer workers of course. More women entered the work force and moved to towns — and wages went up, for women as well as men. (More than 500 years later, the catastrophe of the First World War likewise propelled many women into jobs.) But by the 16th century, the population was beginning to grow significantly — and women were increasingly pushed out of skilled and more lucrative work.

Their rights declined, too. In pre-Norman Conquest England, wives could hold and dispose of property in their own right. Wills reveal women passing on property to their daughters: around 950, a woman named Wynflaed, for example, bequeathed an estate to her daughter, Aethelflaed, as well as an engraved bracelet and a brooch. But after the Norman Conquest, the idea of “couverture” entered English law, brought by the invaders, who had a different understanding of gender relations. Couverture suggested that a woman’s property became her husband’s after marriage — a wife’s legal identity was “covered” over by her husband. The law was unevenly applied in the Middle Ages and early modern England: women often managed to maintain a separate estate, and even to continue trading as separate entities from their husbands. But it was applied increasingly rigorously over time.

Over the course of the 18th century, judges began to impose a more restrictive understanding of married women’s rights. Scholars such as Susan Staves have suggested that liberal treatment of women precipitated a backlash from conservatives. In 1756, John Wilkes, a radical MP and journalist, agreed a contract with his wife, Mary, by which she could live separately from him and receive £200 a year. In 1758, he went to court in the hope that the law would say that such a contract was unenforceable, but the court upheld it. There are many other similar examples of contracts that allowed married women to hold possessions and income in their own right. But judges became increasingly uneasy: in 1779, Chief Justice De Grey said that a wife could only acquire a “separate character” from her husband through death, or a “civil death” such as exile — not by leaving him. In 1800, Chief Justice Kenyon asserted that husband and wife could not contract with each other because they were not separate people. The nature of English common law, with its reliance on precedent, meant that the position of women with property remained uncertain and unstable for decades.

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Progress, then, can unleash reaction. A recent survey demonstrated, astonishingly, that a majority of Gen Z and millennials think that women’s rights have gone too far. (In older age groups, such views were in the minority.) This is despite strong evidence that things are getting worse for women in some areas. For higher-educated women, for example, the gender pay gap has widened since the Seventies — for mothers in particular. In 1978, higher-educated mothers earned 72% of the wages of equivalent fathers; in 2019, the figure was 69%. Kelly Beaver, the chief executive of Ipsos UK, suggested that people might be pushing back on equality precisely because there has been progress in some areas: “change can often make people uncomfortable and resistant”.

But why is social change so easily reversed? Writing about the end of the medieval era’s so-called golden age for women, Caroline Barron notes that, despite their economic power, women did not manage to increase their political representation. They did not take up positions in the city wards or guilds, let alone in law offices and parliament. The contemporary USA, where the recent decline in women’s rights has been most precipitous, has far fewer women in politics than Scandinavian countries, which are routinely rated as the best for women to live in.

Women are useful workers — particularly in struggling economies. But the opportunity to earn money means little without the opportunity to represent ourselves, in parliaments and the judiciary, in board rooms and financial institutions. Without political change, progress, as we see time and again in history, can easily be reversed.

Go on. You know the answer. We all know which way round this usually works.

This is a problem for our most assiduous egalitarians. Despite more than 50 years of efforts to abolish “gender stereotypes”, the difference between mothers and fathers is still such that it is almost always — as it was in this case, too — Mum who picks up the pieces when Dad takes off. But you can’t pursue “equality”, “progress” and “freedom” to their logical ends, without making men and women functionally interchangeable. And this means that every such pronounced asymmetry between men and women is not so much a natural feature of human nature, as a problem to be solved.

This is surely the most charitable explanation for an apparent ongoing campaign in the New York Times, to denaturalise motherhood. The most recent salvo was the claim last week, to widespread furore, that “maternal instinct is a myth that men created”.

This isn’t an isolated incident: in the past two years, motherhood has been a horror movie, an environmental catastrophe and a recipe for martyrdom. Women who reject it get admiring profiles. And when — unusually — it is Mum who abandons the kids, this isn’t shocking, it is a stimulating challenge to the ultimate taboo. But dig a little deeper, and this apparent effort to undermine the “naturalness” of motherhood reveals a deep progressive confusion as regards women, bodies, and babies. And this, in turn, raises questions about the unexpected implications of pursuing equality to its logical conclusion — questions that should give many feminists pause.

Despite what the Grey Lady may say about maternity being male-chauvinist propaganda, there’s no shortage of evidence across many species that there actually is something unique about the bond between mothers and their young. There are field birds who will let a tractor roll over them before they will leave their clutch of eggs. Mother bears are proverbially protective of their cubs. Anyone who’s seen footage of a mother elephant mourning a dead baby, or cows bellowing after their calves are taken away, can see that there’s something there.

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There is a straightforward evolutionary explanation for the maternal bond: it increases the chance that young animals will survive until they are able to take care of themselves. It would be strange if humans were the only animal species for whom this were not the case. But nor is this bond wholly universal, or wholly automatic. It can be interrupted. There are anomalies, such as mothers across many animal species who sometimes kill their babies. In the human world, some women don’t want babies at all, or feel nothing after they’re born.

This, in turn, points us toward feminism’s favourite hunting-ground: the boundary between nature and nurture. For the truth is that maternal behaviour is both natural and social. In her 2021 book on “the science of moms”, Mom Genes, science writer Abigail Tucker cites studies that show new mothers are more sensitive to babies’ cries. We’re better at distinguishing cries of distress. We think about our babies more. And a great deal of this is primed during pregnancy, as gestation transforms women’s brains in distinctive ways.

Dads, meanwhile, also bond with their offspring. But they do so later, and more slowly: paternal interest ramps up about a year after birth. And developing it is conditional on contact with a baby. Tucker quotes a Michigan State University maternal behaviour researcher who states flatly that while fatherhood also changes men’s brains: “The magnitude [of hormonal change] that you see in a mother is nothing like you see in any person at any other time.” And as Tucker puts it, while new moms are hormonally primed to seek out experience with infants, dads need the experience to get the hormone hit: “To become a father, the first thing a guy has to do is stick around.”

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In the NYT article that triggered all this fuss, Conaboy notes this hugely important and permanently transformative biological aspect of motherhood only in passing. While all parents experience brain changes, she says, “the biological mechanisms for change are quite different for gestational and non-gestational parents”. Her focus is on the nurture side: for as Tucker would agree, mothering isn’t purely “natural” or instinctive. It’s also a skill, learned in part from our own mums and from our wider social circle.

She’s not wrong to argue that “maternal instinct” greatly over-simplifies a complex sociobiological process. Nor is she wrong to point out how politicised it has become. For by treating it as wholly “natural”, this complex process can be generalised from a descriptive to a prescriptive norm: not a question of what usually happens, but one of what should happen.

And being told what you should be doing, based on the shape of your body, is anathema to a modern liberal. No wonder: for the story of the modern world is one of political and technological struggle against limits of every kind. And motherhood really does impose particular constraints on women, constraints which have, throughout history, shaped the work we do, the lives we lead and our social and political relation to men.

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Unsurprisingly, then, a central facet of the women’s movement, from the 19th century on, has concerned our relation to pregnancy and childrearing, whether individually or at scale: whether we can refuse pregnancy, how we deal with unwanted pregnancies, and which provisions are in place for raising children, to name but a few.

Today, our tech-enhanced pursuit of parity between the sexes is well advanced. Why, then, shouldn’t we pursue absolute equality, in the name of progress? From this perspective, evidence that the maternal bond has a learned component is manna from heaven. Perhaps, it suggests, this means we can stop noticing the far-reaching neurobiological effect gestation has on mothers, and in the process find a way to break free of yet another limit.

For while we still experience any constraints of any kind on doing exactly what we want — even biological constraints — someone is bound to be oppressed. And this includes absolute freedom to configure families any way we like: even the faintest suggestion that there’s something special about mothers oppresses not just those women who don’t want to be mothers, but also, as Conaboy puts it, “the rights and recognitions of same-sex couples and transgender and nonbinary parents”, whose “ability to care for their children is often questioned”.

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The solution is to lean hard into the nurture, while downplaying the nature, and imply that with a bit of diligence we can thus make parental bonding egalitarian across gestating and non-gestating “parents” alike. New research on “the parental brain” shows, Conaboy says, that “the idea of maternal instinct as something innate, automatic and distinctly female is a myth”. Instead, if only we Do The Work, “scientists now believe the outcomes may be similar for anyone — including fathers, adoptive parents and nonbinary parents — who truly invests time and attention in caregiving”. If parents other than gestational mothers can only be induced to try hard enough, then, the results “may”, she says, be “similar” to those experienced by gestating mothers.

Perhaps. But “similar” and “identical” are, well, similar rather than identical. “Truly” is also doing some heavy lifting here, as is “may”. Conaboy’s thesis, at least as filtered through the NYT’s relentlessly anti-maternal editorial lens, doesn’t have anything to say about those non-gestating parents who are disinclined to Do The Work. And I would venture to suggest that these are the cases where the enduring sexed asymmetry between mothers and fathers becomes visible — and gets entrenched in popular understanding, albeit in over-simplified form, via the term “maternal instinct”.

On the surface, Conaboy’s almost-blank-slatism is simply an argument for widening the scope of who may be considered important as parents — as though anyone disputes the obvious truth that there exist a great many devoted adoptive parents. But in effect, and seemingly unnoticed by the author, it’s an argument against granting any special meaning to maternity as an embodied experience or particular type of relationship.

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For confusingly, even as the thrust of her argument takes aim at the idea that motherhood should merit any particular distinction, Conaboy seems to suggest that this nonetheless adds up to a case for improving maternity provision. Barely two paragraphs after claiming that anyone can synthesise a mother-like bond if they try hard enough, she’s arguing that this means Americans should demand better perinatal services, and address America’s (frankly barbarous) lack of federally mandated maternity leave.

And while this is true, it also reveals the central, irreducible liberal mummy-issue. For, on the one hand, feminists may wish to empower mothers to flourish — which, you might think, would mean thinking about mothers’ specific needs and the policies that might meet them. But if, on the other hand, we want everyone to be equal, that means opening the maternal experience beyond mothers: that is, denaturalising those facets of maternal experience that are arbitrary, evolved, embodied and — yes — at least partly instinctive. And this militates against acknowledging mothers’ specific needs.

The result is a hopelessly muddled argument. It claims, based on historic variations in how men and women rationalise our sexed differences, that nothing underpins those differences except power. Then, almost in the same breath, it acknowledges that these differences exist and have a biological substrate, and that this has real policy implications.

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But we can’t simply throw up our hands and say this confusion is yet more evidence of a malign plot by men to psyop women into being docile housewives. We can’t have it all ways: we can’t both demand special provision for pregnancy and childbirth, and suggest that the absence of such provision is evidence of patriarchy. Not if we’re also going to suggest, as Conaboy does, that celebrating mothers’ embodied experience as unique and worthy of special protection is also evidence of women’s oppression, because the aim is to set women apart and constrain our social role.

In the bitter ongoing battle between gender-critical feminism and trans activism, it’s common for the former to accuse the latter of “erasing women” — that is, replacing any mention of women as a sex with the unfalsifiable category of women as inner identity. But it might be more accurate to say equality is erasing women. If you pursue the logic of absolute parity between the sexes all the way down, you hit a brick wall of evolved sociobiological differences, that has emerged over millennia in connection with historically distinct roles in raising kids.

Of course, contra what the cartoon-conservative position might claim, such instincts aren’t deterministic. How they play out varies immensely, depending on culture and material context. There is plenty of feminist scope for adding to that variation by questioning and modifying how we inhabit our embodied sex differences.

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But experience should have taught us by now that making something “inclusive”, that was previously ringfenced, is tantamount to abolishing it. And noticing that there’s a lot of wiggle room in our instincts isn’t the same as declaring that the instincts themselves don’t exist, or can be overridden if we only Do The Work. Once we make that claim, in effect we’re saying mothers as such don’t exist.

And this is not an argument for better perinatal provision. It’s an argument for making such provision available to everyone, whether or not you’re a mother — because there’s nothing distinctive or important about being the “gestational parent”. We should ask ourselves how feminist that actually is.

That the industry had a diversity problem was impossible to argue with: “an analysis” of the gender makeup of the New York Times list shows how heavily it once skewed male — and how, in the last decade, a massive push to diversify publishing has enjoyed no small amount of success.

But God help any writer bold enough to say so.

When James Patterson noted in an interview last month that older white men weren’t getting writing jobs as easily as they used to, outrage ensued. After being savaged for a week online and in the media, Patterson apologised (not that this mollified his critics). This week, Joyce Carol Oates kicked the same hornet’s nest, writing on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested”. This state of affairs, she added, was “heartbreaking for writers”, particularly those with the self-awareness to be duly aware of “their own privilege”. But the response from within the literary community was not sadness, but fury.

The outpouring of replies were split between people who argued that Oates’s assertion was false and people who argued that it was true but not heartbreaking, and in fact a real and unmitigated good. And then there were the people who argued both of these things simultaneously, sometimes even within the same breath. For whatever reason, this type of self-refuting argument is particularly ubiquitous on Twitter; the fallacy, which some have termed The Law of Salutary Contradiction, is best summed up as: “this isn’t happening, and also it’s good that it’s happening”. One representative reply read: “I am a literary agent. This is not so. And why ever would we invest our hopes in the continued success of white men in an industry which persists in shutting out queer and BIPOC authors?!”

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Is it happening? With more than one extremely high-profile person flat-out accusing Oates of lying, it’s worth surveying the statistics. This is only an informal snapshot of the data, but one that still tells a story: of the 100 most recent debut book deals listed on Publisher’s Marketplace, 83 went to women. Of the remaining 17, 12 went to white men — ten of whom appear to be under the age of 40, and thus young by literary standards. It’s not a total shutout, of course, but it’s also not parity. And the same trend can be observed in terms of not just who’s published, but who’s celebrated; for instance, of the 13 books on the Booker longlist, released this week, three are by white men, none of whom are under 45 (one is the oldest ever recipient of a Booker nomination).

Of course, there are additional layers of data here that could surface additional meaning: how big the deal, what genre the book, whether the author had previously published as a poet or essayist or journalist. And of course, those who get book deals have always represented only the tiniest fraction of aspiring novelists: if the uphill battle for young white men is marginally steeper now, it was plenty steep before.

But when Oates’s agent friend reported that, “he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers”, it’s hardly far-fetched to think he was telling the truth — if not literally, then directionally, in the sense that an exasperated parent might report that they cannot get their toddler to put his shoes on. “I can’t get editors to look at these books” is a cultural observation, not a statistical one. It’s about the vibes, the gossip, the buzz, the discourse, the things that agents hear from editors and authors hear from agents. It’s about an industry veteran’s general sense of which way the wind is blowing. And on that front, when it comes to debut authors getting book deals, it is certainly blowing more favourably in the direction of non-white non-straight non-men.

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Frankly, it would be weird if it were otherwise. From the moment that diversity became an industry cause, it enjoyed widespread, vocal support. In 2014, sparked by the revelation that white authors and characters absolutely dominated the YA marketplace, the We Need Diverse Books movement was born — and since then it has only gathered steam. Pitching contests were established for marginalised writers. Literary media pivoted to focus heavily on those writers. Submission guidelines were updated to explicitly ask for work from queer, gender-nonconforming writers of colour. Publishers announced that they were committed to diversifying their lists. Editors announced their intention to buy more books by marginalised writers. Agents publicly bemoaned how sick they were of reading submissions by white guys.

All of these sentiments were expressed vehemently, repeatedly, and in public, and all of them seemed to convey a consensus truth: an individual white man might still do okay in publishing, but categorically? White men were over, the rules had changed, and the anecdotal evidence seemed to support this. Did you hear about the guy whose book was yanked back on the eve of submission when his agent realised that his racial identity didn’t match the race of his protagonist? Or the white poet who couldn’t get published until he adopted a female Chinese pseudonym and won accolades — at least until he was found out?

The truth is, even if the data didn’t bear out the substance of Oates’s tweet, publishing culture matters when it comes to aspiring authors hoping to get a shot. Back when the problem was a lack of diverse books, it was known that the dearth of minority authors was at least in part a problem of preemptive discouragement: many promising writers, expecting the door to be slammed in their face, simply didn’t bother trying to get through at all. And yet, among those who advocated hardest for diverse books, it’s all but verboten to suggest that the movement has gained any meaningful ground, cultural or otherwise.

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Why, after all this progress, do publishing’s gatekeepers resist any suggestion that diversification has been a success? It’s a paradox of the moment that a person is supposed to want this sort of change, demand it even, but also fly into a frothing rage at the notion that the desired change might in fact be happening. Maybe it’s that the survival of any progressive movement requires that you continually shift the goalposts, lest your organisation problem-solve its way into obsolescence. Maybe it’s a sense that however much has been accomplished, there’s work yet to be done. Or maybe it’s just the cognitive dissonance that always accompanies initiatives like this: everyone wants to say they’re hiring for diversity, but nobody wants to be seen as a diversity hire.

Or maybe the problem is that even a diverse publishing world will still never be fair — because this game has never been just about identity, or talent, but about timing, and resources, and pure dumb luck. If young white men aren’t the hottest commodity right now, it’s not just because publishers have convinced themselves it’s a moral imperative not to hire them; it’s because the industry follows the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist of the moment is deeply invested in identity. The debut novels bought in 2022 thus far are not just overwhelmingly written by women, but overwhelmingly focused on race, gender, sexuality, or class.

Is this annoying? Maybe. But is it more annoying than the state of play ten years ago, when publishers were falling all over themselves to find the next sexually-charged teen dystopian-fantasy series about a merman and a werewolf fighting over a girl who doesn’t know she’s beautiful? Well, that’s a matter of taste. And like all literary trends, this one won’t last forever. Eventually, some new, attention-arresting thing will come on the scene, and the identitarian reckoning of 2020 will be yesterday’s news. Whenever that happens, and whatever it is, a handful of lucky writers will get swept up by the cresting wave of the zeitgeist and carried to glorious high ground, while everyone else looks on and makes grumbling noises.

So far, so inoffensive. And yet over the past month, the Code, which is now the binding authority over all civil disputes in China, has become the subject of fierce internal criticism. Its origin? China’s increasingly outspoken new generation of feminists, who are furious at its introduction of a one-month “cooling-off period” before a divorce is finalised.

During that time, a husband and wife now have the power to revoke a divorce application without the other’s consent. That may seem like a mere technicality, but for China’s feminists it represents an infringement on women’s freedom to divorce, as well puts the victims of domestic violence in a potentially dangerous situation. They are also concerned that the ultimate purpose of the “cooling-off period” is to remedy China’s decreasing birth rates by keeping marriages afloat. In essence, they argue, it treats women as resources instead of rights-bearing individuals.

Since it was first mooted last year, Chinese feminists have launched a number of anonymous online social media campaigns against the move. And while they would seem to have failed, they have certainly succeeded in making their presence felt. Whether China’s ruling Communist Party (CCP) likes it or not, over the past year the country’s nascent feminist movement has become a force to be reckoned with.

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Indeed, Beijing was so rattled by this new feminist opposition that in recent months it has felt compelled to call in in legal experts to cite foreign precedents to the “cooling-off period”, as well as to emphasise that in extraordinary circumstances such as domestic violence, either side of a marriage can file a divorce lawsuit. Suffice it to say that these explanations did not convince China’s feminists, who pointed out that divorce is not easily granted by Chinese civil courts — not to mention that disadvantaged women may not be able to afford the lawsuits.

And so, last October, President Xi decided to take matters into his own hands — and in doing so, inadvertently assured China’s feminist movement a place in the history books. “Gender equality is China’s basic national policy,” he said in a speech to the nation. “Women are the pioneers of human civilisation and the promoters of social progress, and they have written extraordinary achievements in all walks of life.” Although he did not directly comment on the “cooling-off periods”, a clear attempt was made to placate China’s feminists; Xi identified gender equality as a principle in China’s post-pandemic recovery plan, and promised that the government will provide concrete help to females affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Xi’s response, as well as the recent opposition to his new Code, raise two important questions: just who are China’s feminists? And how did they become such a powerful force?

The typical Chinese feminist is, to put it simply, the embodiment of a new progressive activism which is often — and some might say paradoxically — rooted in support for the CCP and its scepticism towards capitalism. To make a direct comparison with today’s Western feminist movement is, to say the least, a frustrating, near-impossible task. China’s feminists are, after all, the product of not just a different culture, but an entirely different political system.

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What both movements do share, however, is youth. According to sociological research, Chinese feminists are predominantly born after the 1980s. It’s telling that this coincides with the country’s one-child policy, which was a binding rule in China between 1980 and 2016. Without having to compete with any brothers, these young women were usually well-educated and privileged. In terms of where they live, my own research has found that 57% of the feminist advocates on Chinese social media are from major economic centres in China. This partly explains why they tend to hold conscious or unconscious contempt for men from poorer regions — though this is partly a result of the boy-favouring traditions in those places. In the eyes of young feminists, such traditions are backwards, and often lead to the cruel treatment of women and girls.

As one might expect, it is the habits and interests of Chinese feminists which sets them most apart from their Western counterparts. Brought up in a culture that places an extraordinary amount of existential capital on the internet, they are huge fans of online shopping and are the driving force behind China’s $670 billion ‘sheconomy’. They also spend a lot of time cultivating a robust digital presence — in particular by browsing online forums dedicated to TV shows, films and ACG (anime, cartoon and games) fandoms. More recently, their craze for yaoi — female-oriented anime with a focus on fantasy erotic relationships between men — has made them natural allies of China’s LGBT community.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that China’s feminists content themselves with passing their time on online frivolities. When feeling threatened or attacked, the young feminists can quickly turn into a highly organised force. In this sense, at least, today’s well-educated, liberal-minded feminists draw inspiration from activists in the West, such as Emma Watson. And they are not afraid of challenging the CCP’s policies. In fact, the recent battle over “cooling-off periods” represents just one area in which they are starting to campaign.

Only last year, China’s feminists led a protest campaign against the disturbing rise of media monopolies in the country. It all started on February 27, when the fans of Xiao Zhan, a poplar Chinese actor and singer, reported the global fanfiction sharing website Archives of Our Own (AO3) to the Communist Party because one of its stories portrayed him as a cross-dressing sex worker who falls in love with a teenage boy. Xiao’s fans felt that the fictional portrayal tarnished their idol’s image and complained to the Chinese authorities about AO3 “showing pornographic content to underage audience” and “promoting child pornography”. The Chinese government responded by blocking access to the foreign site, as well as several other Chinese fanfiction hubs.

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Concerned that this violated authors’ freedom and constituted an attack on China’s LGBT community, China’s young feminists quickly mobilised. Together with other subculture groups, they launched a series of campaigns on Weibo — only to find that their posts were being suppressed: even though one thread had 700 million hits, it was somehow excluded from Weibo’s “trending stories” list. Meanwhile, supportive messages for Xiao topped the list almost every day.

Believing that Weibo was kowtowing to Xiao’s management company, feminist campaigners urged the Party to control media monopolies and impose stronger regulation on China’s wild “idol economy”. After facing a barrage of online protests, the Chinese government finally stepped in, and fined Weibo for “manipulating the display of information”. Its “trending stories” list was also taken down for a week as punishment.

No doubt China’s feminists chalked it down as a step in the right direction, although the CCP is yet to heed their calls to bring back AO3. What is particularly interesting about this emerging movement, though, is its symbiotic relationship with China’s ruling party: it both puts pressure on the CCP to enact change, while also embodying many of its values.

Take the feminists’ recent campaign against commercial surrogacy, for example, which is inextricably linked to the CCP’s antipathy towards capitalism. Commercial surrogacy is prohibited in China, though wealthy would-be mothers tend to get round this by travelling to the West to find a surrogate. Only last month, Chinese actress Zheng Shuang was effectively “cancelled” by the feminist movement after it was reported that she’d had two surrogate children through overseas services, whom she later abandoned. But while her treatment of her children was, of course, a source of criticism, it was the method of their conception which attracted the most ire.

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For while some members of the LGBT community support surrogacy — largely because they cannot conceive naturally— China’s feminists refuse to stand with them. One post by an anonymous user on social media platform Zhihu summarised their concerns: “Let’s use some imagination. What will happen if surrogacy becomes legal in China? The giant e-commerce companies will lead the price war. They will try to attract customers by promising the best surrogate mothers and the desired gender of babies. What do you think they will do to keep the promises? Don’t think I’m talking nonsense. Capital will trample on all human laws for profit.”

It was a comment typical of today’s generation of feminists in China: in many ways, despite feeling empowered by consumerism, much of their ideology is also rooted in the CCP’s political project. No doubt that will sit uneasily with a number of Western feminists. But just as Western women are a product of their culture, so too is the case with Chinese feminists. And while their priorities are certainly rooted in a different world, it is increasingly becoming clear that they do have the power to change it.