This term refers to five Chinese women activists detained without charges in March 2015 for planning anti-sexual harassment activities on International Women’s Day. Their arrest marked a turning point in China’s feminist movement, signaling the government’s hardening stance against peaceful gender equality activism.

“Women’s Fist-ism” (女拳) is a derogatory Chinese internet term that weaponizes wordplay—replacing “rights” (权) with “fist” (拳) in “feminism”—to portray women’s rights advocates as aggressive man-haters rather than equality seekers. Widely adopted in state media since 2021, it serves to delegitimize feminist discourse.

First introduced by Xi Jinping in 2015 at the Second World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, this term represents China’s framework for international internet governance, advocating for state-led multilateral governance rather than multi-stakeholder approaches — legitimizing China’s vision of cyber sovereignty and government control of digital deve…