Feminist Activism Then & Now, a Conversation with Wanqing Zhang, Lijia Zhang & Jessie Lau
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Hello from London, welcome to the New Voices podcast. I'm your host, Jessie Lau, editor at New Voices and freelance journalist focusing on human rights. Today I'll be co-hosting with Li Jia Zhang, fellow board member and writer, and our guest is Wanqing Zhang.

Wang Ting is a Brussels-based journalist who reports on gender, society, and technology within China. Her articles have been featured in Foreign Policy, Rest of World, Radio Free Asia, Six Tone, and Vice China. She has been honored with the SOPA Award for both investigative reporting and business reporting, and she volunteers at several NGOs that support domestic violence survivors. Hello and welcome both.

Hello. We're so glad you could come and speak with us. Wonderful article, by the way. Loved it. Thank you. Yeah, so I'll kick us off with a couple of questions to Wan Ting, who recently wrote an incredibly deep dive into China's online feminist revolution for the rest of the world. And she interviewed several feminists in the mainland who are engaging with the gender discourses and also building communities on social media. So, Wan Ting, can you maybe give our listeners a brief summary of your piece?

Sure. To be short, it's a piece about China's online feminist movement. It's a 3,000-word piece. In this story, we interviewed feminists who use different social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Douban to practice feminism.

For example, some of them shaved their heads and some of them decided to break up with their boyfriend and some of them joined the Me Too movement. And, you know, through these kind of interviews and also through the voices of experts that we also interviewed, the story talks about how the online feminist movement started in the early 2010 and how it kind of evolves to what we see today.

This is not sort of your first story on gender issues. It's something that you've reported on for a long time. Can you talk a bit about kind of your background on this and why you became interested in it?

Yeah, I probably have wrote dozens of gender stories in my life so far. So my background, I actually have been covering China for the past five years. Topics I'm most interested in include gender, society and technology, and of course, human rights. About how I came up with the piece.

Actually, Rest of War editor Kevin reached out to me to ask if I'm interested in writing a long feature on China's online feminist movement. And, you know, at that point, I was, as I say, I already wrote like dozens of gender related stories. And but it was still like kind of challenging for me because, you know, I've never wrote like 3000 words.

piece only. So like one thing is that, you know, like you feel like, you know, the topic very well. And then I think it's like, you have to summarize everything about the feminist movement in 3000 words. So we decided to, you know, find an angle or the focus.

So we actually decided to focus on voices of ordinary Chinese women in this piece. So including their life experiences, their thoughts, and then, you know, their values, how they get feminist information on social media, and

That's because, you know, we have seen a lot of other media outlets covering China's feminist movement through the voice of experts or through the voice of activists especially. But I think we rarely see the voices of ordinary Chinese women. And I think that's really important.

for us to see a piece like this because, you know, like feminism in China is growing so fast. And one of the astonishing thing of it is that how it's able to grow in such a rapid speed and, you know, spread it to such a big population despite the strong censorship. So that's why we are trying to really focus on a lot of these ordinary women

understand how they get into the feminist ideas and how social media helped them to form their feminist beliefs. I want to thank Wang Qing for writing this fabulous piece, which made me more hopeful about the future of feminism in China. Perhaps I should talk a little bit about the golden age of Chinese feminist movement.

So on that Valentine's Day that year, Li Meiz, a leading feminist and two friends, put on bloody wedding gowns and marched in the street of Beijing to bring awareness to the issue of domestic violence. In summer 2013, I signed up.

to study feminism in China's first ever feminist school organized by Feng Yuan and Lu Ping. I'm sure Wang Qin you know all these names. Quite a few well-known feminists such as Li Maizi and Xiao Meili were all there.

After graduation in September 2013, Xiao Mei Li started to walk from Beijing all the way to Guangzhou to protest against child sex abuse. In that winter, I walked for a week with her in central China's Hubei province.

I think those were the days, these were the heydays of feminists active in China. Then the crackdown came in March 2015. As you know, the five feminists got arrested. The crackdown started, Xi Jinping had come to power.

Yes, thank you Li Jia for sharing this experience. I didn't know you were in one of those works with Xiao Meili. So many like amazing activism and you know, those kind of events back then. It just sounds so surreal, you know, like, like you can never imagine something like this happening in mainland China again.

It's really like a fresh bag that just feels so super surreal. - Yeah, Shawn Miley was also one of the three women who went put on the wedding gown, marched in the streets in February, 2012. - Yeah, actually when I first moved to London,

Li-Zhao and I met there, we did an event where we interviewed Xiaomei Li as well. And so it's really crazy to sort of think about this history. I also wanted to ask Wanqing, do you think the new generation or young generation of feminists that you interviewed, are they aware of this history and this kind of legacy of feminist activism that was in the mainland before? Just because obviously the content and a lot of these protests and events that we're speaking about were majorly censored in the mainland.

That's a really good question because that's exactly the thing that surprised me. So when I asked them,

where you're aware of, you know, there used to be this kind of feminist activism in a few years ago. Actually, it's not that long ago. And they were quite surprised. Like, I remember one interviewing told me, actually, I never heard about that, even if, you know, she spent a lot of hours every day, you know, reading information online about feminism. Like, you were assumed as somebody that is super dedicated in

Feminism will know the legacies and the history of their peers a few years ago. But actually, a lot of them were unaware of it. And I think, as you mentioned, that it really shows how the Communist Party was able to erase and censor feminist activism in a very large scale.

Yeah, I guess also depends where you are, who you are. And I went to China in autumn where I met quite a few feminists in Chengdu. And quite many of them, they are aware what, you know, the history and so on. So yes. And another example is that, you know, after the crackdown, the rest of the five, Feminist Five, in 2013, right? The March 8th. So the...

Quite a lot of people did not know what was happening, signed up to the feminist voice that now had been shut down. And sometimes the official crackdown also made some people more aware of the feminist gender issue.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right in the sense that some people are, it's sort of like, I feel like some people are deeply aware and then others have no awareness. And it's a really interesting sort of disconnect. What do you think are the ramifications of this and how...

I mean, for Li Zhao as well, do you see differences between younger feminists that you meet in the mainland compared to feminist activists who were maybe fighting for these issues in the early 2000s? I was going to save this for later. But anyway, I mentioned the golden age of China's feminist activism, but we won't see the kind of collective activism anymore.

as kind of activism as such and there will be probably more individual thing but then I think people always found a way to get their voice heard for example this online feminism is just a great example and I think the many young people there and I found many of them have become aware of

of the feminist issue. They are better educated now. They're more aware of the international norm. The internet is savvy, so they can express their voice, express their views, or getting together, exchange views. They are very clever. I wouldn't say, you know, the...

feminist movement is thriving right now in China, but it will certainly continue. Speaking of disconnection, this is something that I also feel very strong after doing this piece. I do feel like one of the, you know, the consequence of China's crackdown on feminism issue is that it really makes people very disconnected to each other.

Just to give you an example, another thing that really surprised me during the interview is that when you usually are about to end the interview, I talk to the interviewee, thanking them for their time. But actually, most of the ordinary Chinese families, they all told me, okay, actually, thank you for your time to listen to my stories and to listen to my thoughts. It's actually the first time that I talked with

you know, a real person in life about this kind of issue. Like they never have a chance to talk about it with someone around them in real life. And I think this is just a really sad reality because, you know, as we have seen, the Chinese government have cracked down a lot of feminist groups on platforms such as Douban. So there used to be a lot of such kind of forum or, you know, group.

based on social media. But as they told me, now they have cracked down all those platforms.

you have seen a lot of women's posts on social media. It's kind of hard to really meet someone in real life to talk about this kind of feminist issue. A lot of feminist friends who also told me that they have kind of this feminist WeChat group, but then it got zha hao, which means got censored. So speaking of connection, I think it's really a sad reality that people are kind of

very disconnected with each other so actually in this story I interviewed this person Zirui so after talking to her I realized she is in the city of Nanjing and actually another woman that I interviewed is also based in that city so I actually introduced them to make a tweet out

I'm also from Nanjing. Maybe I can meet them next time. That's amazing that you were able to connect them. I agree. It's really, really sad because so much about feminist activism is about the solidarity. And when you have a state crackdown, which kind of takes away, first of all, the in real life spaces where you can have that solidarity and then coming for the online spaces, it has a really, I think it has a really chilling effect on the entire movement.

On that note, I want to segue a bit and ask Lee Ja to talk a little bit about reflecting back on the early days of the feminist activism movement because

You know, you've been part of this movement where, you know, people were meeting in real life and then you've also gone back to the mainland recently. Can you talk a little bit about what you think has been lost, what you think has been gained and sort of how that trajectory has changed? Sure. So I must mention the fourth World Conference on Women, which was held in Beijing in 1995. It turned out to be a monumental event in China's feminist movement.

I was working as an interpreter and a news assistant for ABC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I was supposed to be an interpreter, but I did not know how to translate gender. Now I know it is called a social gender. That conference was really groundbreaking because it introduced gender.

new concept to Chinese women, for example, gender equality, for example, the idea women's rights are human rights. And from that point, an NGO started up for the first time in China.

So that was then that I joined China's first feminist group called East Meets West Group, where we met up every month to talk about gender-related issues and studied some feminist books. And some of those books had just recently been published.

translated into Chinese and then Lu Ping, Feng Yuan, they were all in the group. I think society compared to today, society was more tolerant then, which allowed

those little seeds of feminism to flourish before the crackdown hit. Talking about, you know, maybe Jessie can talk about some of those recent crackdowns, for example, the trial of Sophie Huang. Yeah, thanks Li-Jia for kind of reflecting on that. I think it's

When we look at Wang Qingyu's article and some of the repercussions that feminist activists face, I think the case of Sophia Huang or Huang Xueqin is probably one of the more serious ends of the spectrum. So for those of you who haven't followed the case, Huang Xueqin is perhaps one of China's most famous MeToo journalists. She pretty much broke many stories at the height of China's MeToo movement.

And she has now been spending two years in detention. She was arrested along with Wang Jianbing, a friend of hers and a labor activist in China in September 2021. And when they were arrested, she was actually on her way to the airport to come to the UK where she was going to study gender studies at the University of Sussex on achieving scholarship.

So since then, it's been really difficult to kind of get any information on her condition, how both have been faring. There was a closed-door trial at the end of September where there was no verdict announced, but both are being charged with inciting subversion of state power, which is a charge that can lead up to five years in prison or more if the case is deemed more serious.

And so for many who are familiar with the case, I think Huang Shui-Ting and Wang Jianbing were pretty much targeted because they held these gatherings where they would take people who were progressive and wanted to talk about like-minded issues and create a sort of physical space, kind of like what we spoke about, where you could talk about feminism, talk about

labor issues, social issues, and they were really trying to create a safe space for people to be able to do that. And unfortunately, that is something that is very sensitive to this sort of state scrutiny. So I worked on the BBC World Service documentary a few years ago called China's Silence Feminists, where we actually charted the journey of Huang Shui-Hsing, her work, and also how she became arrested. And we spoke to a lot of these

friends and fellow activists who attended these gatherings in China, and many of them were questioned and interrogated. And they were made to give false confessions against both of them. And so we interviewed some of these activists, many of them have now moved overseas, and are continuing to campaign both on feminist issues and also specifically for their release. And you can see from, you know, when you speak to these activists, even though they're outside of China, they

very much fear this sort of long arm of the state. And when they're campaigning on these issues, there is a real fear of reprisals against themselves and also against their families, which is really, really concerning. And I think, you know, Wang Ting, for your piece, you talk a lot about this as well, how the government, not just the government, but Chinese companies sort of crack down and kind of work in tangent to kind of censor these types of activities through messaging and also digital censorship.

And so I was wondering if you could also jump in and talk a little bit about the sources that you've interviewed and how they've sort of responded to this crackdown, both online and also offline.

Yeah, maybe I'll also be quite interested if you could share some stories how this online feminist activism changed their life, what they were thinking before and how they have changed. How did the changes come about? I just remember I was actually very surprised when I was interviewing like those women who

about censorship, because I would assume that, you know, when asked question like, how do you feel? Like, you know, like some of the feminist influences post, for example, Lin Maomao, a very influential one in the mainland China, her account basically got

censored completely. There was this one of the women that I interviewed called Zirui. She like basically, Maomao was the person who saved her life. Like she was in a very depressing situation with no support from the family. And she just got a very big traumatic breakup from the boyfriend.

So she was like very isolated, very sad. And it was that period of time that when she read Lin Maomao and then basically like her words really inspired her and then like kind of encouraged her to move to a bigger city and started her new career. And when I asked her, oh, how do you feel when, you know, when you see Lin Maomao suddenly disappear and all of the posts were gone?

And, you know, like she was telling me, oh, you know, if Li Mao Mao, if one Li Mao Mao, you know, disappeared, there would be thousands of Li Mao Mao rising up.

So I feel like she was actually quite optimistic than me, like probably than like a lot of feminist friends that were older, you know. I think for us, we have this negative idea of Chinese censorship. We believe it's something that is like very bad. But of course, they also believe it's bad. But I think for the younger generation, they really believe this is something that they are used to it.

So I think they are just so used to the fact that, you know, stuff you read on social media could just disappear immediately. I think they don't see it as something that is like, you know, as surprising as we do nowadays, which is quite surprising for me. And, you know, as she was actually speaking about censorship, she was actually talking to me like actually this week that she was, you know,

writing a post on Xiaohongshu, which was actually a very funny story. You know, there were those men spreaders on the subway that they opened their leg very often. She was basically saying that day she was sitting next to a man spreader and just to fight back, she spread her legs up also next to him. And then she shared this experience on Xiaohongshu and that post got super popular. There were like 6,000 likes or something.

But then this post was disappeared. This post just basically disappeared. I don't know why, probably because it was reported by some people or just Xiaohongshu didn't like the post.

So I think that really says about China's censorship. First of all, it's kind of getting tighter and tighter. In this article, we talk about, you know, before the red line was basically that you cannot talk about sensitive, politically sensitive things. So, for example, we have seen MeToo being largely censored. We have seen, of course, those highly political issues such as sexual harassment case of Peng Shuai.

Or as Jesse mentioned, the case of Huang Xueqing, those kinds of things were super hard to find on the Chinese mainland social media. But you see even those kind of lighter things or those kind of small things that you don't find sensitive now can be the new target of the censorship.

So I think first thing that I would like to mention about censorship is really that, you know, the red line is keep being changing and there is never a clear answer of what you can talk about and what you cannot talk about, which is, again, really sad.

And of course, beyond censorship as well, and beyond having your accounts suspended or blocked when you post this type of content, you also face a lot of harassment from these vigilantes. And you talk a lot about that in your piece, you know, the doxing campaign by, you know, nationalist influencers, right?

And also, you know, some of these sources have even lost their jobs, their livelihoods on these sort of crackdowns. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so just you mentioned that it's not just about the government censorship, it's also about those kind of trolls online that they start to target more and more on Chinese feminists on social media.

So especially platforms such as Douyin or probably Kuaishou or WeChat, and also Weibo, sorry, that's the most toxic place. And you can see a large kind of army of especially...

men who are kind of like having this collective strategy of targeting Chinese feminists. There is this very famous account on Weibo called Ziwu Xia Shi. He is very famous for posting like a lot of, you know, anti-feminist content, a lot of feminist activists that we mentioned before. For example, Xiao Meili, Li Maizi, Lu Ping, they have

all been the target of Zilu Xia Shi. So yeah, this is really something that is like another challenging thing for Chinese feminists because not only they have to cope with the state censorship, but also they have to cope with this kind of, you know, online harassment.

And one of the things that really shocked us, as we also mentioned in the story, is that it's not that these kind of trolls, they are only targeting on those kind of, you know, feminist activists, high-profile pickers. They also start to target those ordinary women as well. So there is this woman that I mentioned. She didn't accept our interview, but she gave us a quote. That's why she rejected us.

So basically her story is that she was just an ordinary Weibo user. She has like 200 followers and she was like basically posting random men hating thing. Like she mimicked that men are like mushrooms,

like their penis like mushrooms and those kind of things. And then this weibo was picked up by this Zhiyu Xia Shi. And you know, like he basically like troll all of her previous weibo posts and discover from like one of the picture that she was actually working for government bureau.

And they decided to, you know, ask his fans to, you know, collectively sending letters and having calls for that bureau's office and telling them to fire her. And the reason is really ridiculous. Like I can understand when they say, oh, one of the reasons that she is anti-man, like she's using those kind of vulgar languages, whatever. But the reason, which I found super funny, is that she posts things

stuff on social media when it's a working hour. So you can really tell these kind of trolls, what kind of efforts they have put to harass ordinary Chinese women, even if she just had 200 followers. And I think that really has a huge impact on

on China's feminism movement because you know if you have this constant fear of whatever you post online even if it's something like not political it's just something you know innocent but as long as some men who found it like

they would just call your employee and give them the pressure to fire you. So eventually, a very sad thing is that she was kind of forced to leave her position and she rejected our interview because she kind of wanted to have a peaceful life. So that's just to say, yeah, so this is really another super challenging thing for the Chinese families to cope with apart from the state censorship.

Can I just jump in? Just a story about the feminists in China having a difficult time because the term translated as 女权主义者, you know, in China, anything to do with, you know, rights, you know, 女权 is a female right. In China, the word 权, you know, rights, it's just loaded.

I remember back in 2013, when I first graduated from the feminist school, it just happened I went to some American embassy function there. I met a guy and I said, oh, I was just joking. I just got a certificate as a feminist. He said, are you a feminist?

I dressed up and I wear my flowers in my hair. And he said, you don't look like a feminist. I think, what do you think a feminist looks like? I mean, I think probably many people imagine feminists should be ugly, should men hate us.

I think this account now, I think in China, the word 女权主义者 become even more loaded, sometimes have negative connotation among the general population, especially men. For example, the government tried to encourage people to believe that those Chinese feminists...

have been used by the hostile force from the West. So now, there are men who associate feminists, female feminists, as men-haters who oppose marriage, who oppose having children.

So now some even blame feminists for China's falling birth rate. Yeah, I think it's really it's something that you see also, I think, globally, right, where people react to feminism or women's rights as sort of like, well, that means you're anti-man. And it's it's.

It's really interesting because you see this as well, I think, in Wang Qing's article where you reported on a lot of these companies and Chinese tech companies in general saying that they're reducing this content or firing their employees for producing this type of content because they want to reduce tensions between men and women. Can you talk a little bit about some of these examples that you spoke to? I think you had one about Baidu and also one about the China's Communist Youth League.

Yeah, the Chinese Youth League actually posted a very interesting post. They actually say the spread of radical feminism has had a negative impact on women's individual beliefs and desires regarding childbirth.

So you can really see that how the state is kind of blaming women for, you know, the super low birth rate and high divorce rate thing. Like it's all your feminism fault that you're kind of polluting our innocent young women and then you make them against men and we cannot use your womb to produce more babies, basically.

Yeah, so I think it's really that, like, the state react to the issue in this way, rather than, you know, thinking about improving women's life experience, for example, you know, providing better laws and services.

social systems for them, for example, a better environment for them to have babies for those women who are in their career. And as you say, also tech companies, I think they're also very responsible for this kind of anti-feminist discourse. So as you were mentioning that Baidu, actually one of the biggest volumes in China, they actually awarded one of the toxic masculinity reviews

which is called Sun Xiao Chuan Forum. So basically in that forum, a lot of men were harassing women, like having a lot of sexist comments about women and those kind of thing. But they awarded that forum as one of the best forum leader of the year or something like that. So I would say...

not only the Chinese government, but also the Chinese tech companies, they are also participating in this kind of anti-feminism crackdown. Yeah, I totally agree. I actually wrote a piece, opinion piece for the New York Times in the form of a video about the tech companies

how their sexist behaviour. You know, they're a tech company. This should be kind of a modern forward thinking. They should play a better role in kind of promoting gender equality. Like, as you say, a lot of tech companies, like they are doing the opposite of what they are supposed to do.

For example, we've seen Weibo having this new kind of reason of censor post, which is about you are promoting like gender opposition, meaning that, oh, if a post like you are too anti-man or like supposedly also too anti-woman, your post can be deleted or censored.

But I think from my experience, I've read a lot of posts that they deleted. And I think most of these posts were targeting women rather than the other side. You know, we've seen a lot of women's posts disappear. Xiao Mei Li, Li Mai Zi, Lin Mao Mao. We have seen like...

accounts like Ziwu Xia Shi still getting super popular on Weibo. He's even having a lot of like advertisement from products. So he's actually making money from this company. It's actually business for him. So you can really see the tech companies, they are really responsible for this kind of anti-feminism crackdown. And I would also like to address that it's just so hard for Chinese families to find a safe space on social media because of

their reliance on these kinds of social media platforms. Because a very big reason that we are talking about the online Chinese feminist movement is that they are mainly happening on social media because offline activities are strictly restricted.

So meaning that whatever they do, they have to rely on social media, meaning that they have to rely on technology companies. So before we were talking about the old golden age of Weibo, there was a lot of free space for the families to speak out their voices and raise their campaigns. But now because of the censorship, also because of the tech companies,

rules also because of the harassment you really see like a lot of feminists dropping up Weibo they start to kind of do a retreat to a more women friendly platform such as Douban and then we see a lot of Douban feminist groups got censored again so they kind of all then they retreat to today's Xiaohongshu which is

a very popular social media platform. But then you see that even for places like Xiaohongshu, as the example that I mentioned to you before, if you post something like, oh, you are anti-men spreaders in the subway, and then they can also delete your post. So probably I'm a very pessimist person, but I really don't know what is the next platform people will escape to.

I know that there are a lot of tech companies trying to create kind of those women-only apps for women that you have to, like when you register, you have to kind of show your face to show that you're a woman. But I'm not seeing any of them that is getting popular or something. So I really don't know where is the next safe space for Chinese women. Thank you, Wang Li. I agree. I think it's very pessimistic to think about. And I feel like when you...

look back at the scope of the challenges that the movement is facing, it's incredibly daunting. But I think when I was reading your piece and also just speaking to Chinese feminists in the mainland and overseas, what strikes me is really the resilience of these communities and the way they're able to adapt and evolve to these different challenges. I think it's incredibly inspiring.

On that note, I was hoping both of you could maybe speak a little bit about what you see as like the future of the feminist movement. Perhaps not just the challenges, but also maybe perhaps like the optimisms or, you know, kind of like positive things that you see moving forward.

I think the problem is Chinese society today is still steeped in the traditional patriarchal culture and the hungover of the Confucius ideology, which regarded women as inferior. In a patriarchal system, women only have obligation but no rights.

But having said that, I feel cautiously optimistic and I say there's a crackdown. Yeah. But I just think women will continue to find interesting, creative ways to get their voice heard. Yeah. As Wang Ching, you pointed out, you know, I think of the online feminism is probably just the example. So that made me feel more hopeful.

I think eventually, if I think about it, even if we talk about a lot of sad realities for the feminist communities in China, I do believe that as we have seen, this feminist population is really, really big. And I really do believe that as we can see from the data, the drop in birth rate, the

lowest marriage rate and high divorce rate, you can really see women's resilience on their own body to fight against the system. As I was talking in the article that it's kind of getting harder and harder for Chinese women to kind of having systematic changes, or for example, it's hard for them to ever have another MeToo movement or have those kind of the golden age campaigns.

or anything that kind of like revolution like things that to you know really change the company's patriarchal system but I do believe in the individual level and in the personal level I do believe women have grown a lot because of this online feminism movement even if it has been super challenging so for example all the examples I mentioned about in the story so such as women shaving their head women stop to

wear makeup, women start to do more sports, women who are brave enough to break up with the boyfriend despite the society's expectations, women who are brave enough to ask for a raise, women who decided to fight back when they receive unfair treatment.

I think those kind of things eventually are really, really inspiring. And for me, the most important thing of practicing feminism is really about women's life. It's about self-fulfillment. I really feel women kind of find their own self through this kind of movement.

That even if it's just a small change of hairstyle of today, I don't want to wear makeup anymore. I don't want to wear a bra anymore. I think those kind of things could be really, really in power for women in the very individual level. So I still have a lot of hopes for that aspect.

Yeah, I definitely agree. And for me, also one thing to add on top of what you both said, I think I also noticed a lot of Chinese feminists also engaging in other social issues. So, you know, whether it's thinking about racism or labor issues, I really see Chinese feminists as a group of a community who are building solidarities with other communities. And in a way, these groups can kind of

like help each other and kind of influence one another. And I think that's one of the more positive things I see moving forward as well as these young women and people becoming more educated and building solidarity together.

Before we hop off, let's share some of our recommendations for self-care tips and also other recommendations you can do a book, movie, anything you want. So I'll start. I recently read Our Missing Heart by Celestine, which is an amazing book. It's a

bond of a mother and a child in a dystopian US society, which is consumed by fear and anti-Asian sentiment. I think she wrote it during COVID-19 and she was very influenced by the anti-Chinese sentiment globally. So I definitely recommend it. Bit of a tearjerker, but very good read. For self-care, I recently attended a Butoh workshop. Really niche for those of you who don't know. So Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theater. And so I had never heard of this or really engaged with it before. And I

went. It was really, really grounding and it was like a lot of different poses but also emphasising stillness and I felt really quite grounded and clear afterwards so I definitely recommend it. I would recommend a film called Past Life. It's a South Korean film about a pair of childhood sweethearts who

reconnect in their 30s and I found it very subtle, heartbreaking, beautifully performed. The lead character is a Korean woman writer who migrates to the US and she's someone I can relate to. She's driven, hoping to make something of herself but also longing for love and deep connection. I saw the film twice recently and each time I cried.

Highly recommend it. I thought as well. I thought it was so moving. Yeah, yes. And as regarding self-care, I take very good care of myself because I love food. So I exercise a lot. I go to the gym four or five times a week, do fitness exercise, spin class. I do yoga. I swim. I go hiking over the weekend. So I keep myself busy.

That's so impressive you two. For me, I would actually recommend a book called the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook by Matthew McKay. It's actually a book about DBT, which is a dialectical behavior therapy. So the aim of this DBT is to help you understand and accept your difficult feelings and, you know, to learn skills to manage those kinds of negative feelings. And many of the tips that I found are really helpful.

And I just want to say on top of that, especially for people like you, Jesse, Lijia and me, we both work a lot on, you know, those gender issues. And, you know, a lot of time can be quite emotionally consuming, especially like, for example, when Jesse, you did a piece about it.

Huang Shixing, like you feel very depressed to seeing that they are in such a horrible situation, but there's nothing you can help with. I used to struggle with this kind of feeling a lot that, for example, after I talked with sexual abuse survivor, I used to feel like super bad about it. But then eventually this year, I met a woman who,

who is also a feminist. She works in the EU Parliament on Women's Rights and she's also like super busy at work and at some point she was like burning out. And she told me that one day she just told herself, look, I've done enough today and I need to rest. When I'm sleeping, there will be those...

those kind of women like me who will be taking care of these issues. And I just found this quote like super empowering and super like beautiful that, you know, we are already doing a lot. Like it's an emotionally exhausting thing, but we do it for our passion. We do it for our belief.

It's really important to learn when to rest. It's really important that you take care of yourself. I really admire your lead job when you say you really take care of yourself very well. I think it's super good.

I also, I remember one time when I was joining the therapy session and she told me that you need to learn how to swim before you help someone who is drowning. And I think I put this quote in my desk. I think it's really important that you always have to remember to take care of yourself before you're taking care of other people. So those quotes are for you too and for all those like future fellow journalists who are

are interested in writing human rights and oh no you know the gender related issues that could be depressing I definitely agree thank you both so much for taking the time to come on to the podcast and I'm it was a very energizing conversation and I'm really excited to continue to read and follow both of your work and I hope that both of you get lots of rest thank you so much

You've been listening to the New Voices podcast with me, Jessie Lau, and Li Zha Zhang. Our production team is Saga Ringmar and Kyle Lund. Our editor is Megan Cattell. Intro and outro music is by April Zhu. Follow us on Twitter at New Voices and on Instagram at newvoices underscore network. Also, please support our activities via Patreon.

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