The “Me Too” movement was initially founded by American activist, Taran Burke, back in 2006. However, it wasn’t until 2017 that the phrase developed into a worldwide crusade through the use of the #MeToo hashtag on various social media platforms following the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. Although the #MeToo movement emerged firstly in America, many countries had caught on to the importance of the movement immediately. A large number of victims, many of those are women, had taken this chance to publicize their experiences of sexual abuse and sexual harassment which they would have kept silent otherwise in fear of vitriol and being branded as “attention-seeking.” Amidst this widespread discussion about sexual abuse, one country in particular not only tried to stifle any voices speaking up about the issue, but its ruling Communist Party had also actively detained dissidents and activists of the movement, asserting its zero tolerance for collective actions. In this paper, I will discuss the degree of censorship in both China and Malaysia, relating it to issues about women’s rights and minorities.
If you were to type in “#MeToo” on Weibo’s search bar right now and hit enter, this is the only result you would receive: “According to the relevant laws, regulations, and policies, the page is not found.” Netizens were clever enough to change the name of the movement to #RiceBunny (homophones to the words “me too”) when #MeToo was eventually blocked by Weibo, China’s most used Twitter-like microblogging social media platform. #RiceBunny’s discussion page had garnered around 2.2 million views before Weibo intervened again and took it down. Three years ago, Weibo announced that it would pick 1,000 of its users to conduct censorship on Weibo. They were to report on no less than 200 posts that were either pornographic, illegal, and harmful each day. Though the announcement did not further elaborate on the exact definition of “harmful,” netizens will quickly realize what it meant a year later. A Beijing screenwriter named Zhou Xiaoxuan published an essay on Weibo in July 2018 accusing Zhu Jun, a renowned TV anchor, for forcibly kissing and groping her in a dressing room in 2014. In her essay, Zhou called out the lack of women’s rights in China. “We need to make sure society knows that these massacres exist,” she wrote. She did report the incident to the authorities right away that night, but the police asked her to consider Zhu’s “positive influence on society” and dissuaded her from pursuing a case for the sake of her parents’ safety. Her article was reposted 10 thousand times before censors on Weibo took it down and blocked all iterations of the #MeToo movement intermittently, whether in dialect or using homonyms or emojis. The app, backed by the Chinese authorities, also wiped clean the comment section under her post and warned state-run media against reporting her case.
Nevertheless, Zhou’s story inspired many women to come forward with their own stories of abuse. Many of them were published on Weibo, but they were all met with the same ending: censored. A professor of psychology and vice president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong said that this movement struggled because of China’s deeply rooted patriarchal system and the ancient belief to respect the hierarchy, but it’s undeniable that China’s tendency to censor any information about national controversy has something to do with it. In another case, Xa Yalu took to Weibo to recount being groped by a man in Shanghai. Her post wrote that the police refused to take any action even though she had taken photos of the man, saying that he was “too old” to be arrested. Predictably, her blog was overwhelmed with slut shamers, and her post was taken down by the censors.
Even relatively mundane calls for change have been drowned out. Censors had removed a petition calling for seminars on improper conduct and committees to investigate abuse reports at Peking University after student Yue Xin published an open letter detailing the harassment she received for requesting information about a 22-year-old rape case of former student Gao Yan. Ms. Gao committed suicide short soon after that while her rapist only received a warning front he university. In her letter, Yue Xin wrote that the administrators threatened to cancel her graduation should she continue to investigate the case. Angered by the university’s attempts to silence Yue Xin, many students used the hashtag #NotMyAnniversary (blocked eventually on Weibo) to boycott the university’s 120th anniversary celebration. They put up banners across campus as a response to the university’s attempt to bury the case. Titled “In Solidarity with Our Brave Yue Xin,” the banners asked: “What exactly do you fear?” Yue Xin’s name and post were subsequently censored on Weibo.
In mid-April 2020, #姐姐来了(It roughly translates to “Your sister or comrade is here.”) began trending on Weibo following an accusation made by 18-year-old Li Xixing against her adoptive father, Bao Yuming, for raping her since she was 14. The intention of the hashtag was to bring attention to the prevalence of sex crimes committed against children in China. Yuming is the Non-Executive Director of telecom giant ZTE and Vice President of an oil company, Jereh Group. He, of course, denied those allegations. Instead, he claimed that they were actually in a “romantic relationship,” vowing that he would “marry her when she grew up” and chastising Xingxing for “biting the hand that feeds her.” Despiting having recorded videos of Bao raping her and watching child pornography, the police eventually closed the case and cited the lack of evidence behind her claims. Celebrities poured in and denounced Bao for his appalling deeds. But the censorship in China made it difficult for the child rapist to be brought to justice. Angered by this apparent ignorance of justice from the authorities, netizens in China tried to keep his name trending by publishing content with the #DontLetBaoYumingStopTrending. Unsurprisingly, it was blocked shortly after that, but they came back with #DontLetBaoYumingStopTrending2.0. Now the movement has continued with the 3.0 hashtag, though it has lost its standing as a trending hashtag. It turned out that all the hashtags on Weibo can be bought with a price. If someone doesn’t want a hashtag to trend, all they need to do is buy it out from Weibo. Needless to say, Bao is protected behind the wads of cash he’s made from his career as an executive. He remains a free man to this day.
China’s penchant for censorship is especially forceful when it comes to the coverage of Uighurs mass detention centers in Xinjiang. It’s old news that the Chinese authorities are keeping its Muslim Uighurs population under constant surveillance and had thrown more than a million of them into concentration camps. Those who had successfully fled outside of the country (mainly to Turkey) do not dare to contact their relatives trapped in China whose phones are being monitored by the police to make sure they have no plans to escape. In November 2019, The New York Times exposed leaked documents from the Chinese government which listed the guidelines on how to tell Uighurs children about the disappearance of their family members. The document also included an 11-page investigation into an official named Wang Yongzhi who allegedly ordered the release of 7,000 Uighur prisoners. “He refused,” said the report, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.” The news sent many Chinese citizens leaping over the internet firewall to read about the leaked documents. News of Yongzhi’s arrest made it to Weibo, and users reposted the news with the keywords “HE REFUSED.” Weibo, acting under the government order, hid the comment section of the article and removed the option to repost immediately. Not only that, but the University of Toronto had also found in 2016 that WeChat was censoring its users by monitoring their keyword usage. Anything relating to Uyghur and Islam is likely to arouse official suspicion. Many have since then developed a code of some sort with emojis to evade the authorities: a half-fallen rose - someone has been arrested, a dark moon - someone has been sent to the camps, a sun - “I am alive.”
It’s a relief that the degree of censorship in Malaysia is not as extreme as China. But that doesn’t mean censorship from the government is something Malaysians are completely ignorant about. The restrictions we normally face in Malaysia are towards the depiction of sexual content and the LGBTQ community on screen. When the Disney live-version of Beauty and the Beast was released 3 years ago, Malaysia’s censors had requested a supposedly gay scene to be cut out from the movie so it can be shown in Malaysian cinema. The government had also expressed their intention to censor certain movies (like Bohemian Rhapsody) on Netflix. Like China, the #MeToo movement did not receive a fervent response in Malaysia either. Many news outlets posit that is due to the traditional values that are instilled in most Malaysians which discourages them from speaking up, especially when it comes to sensitive issues like sex. Similar to China, victims of rape in Malaysia are threatened to have their careers ruined if they are to pursue a case. Complaints about sexual abuse have fallen to dead ears. A poll conducted by Speak Up in 2017 showed that as much as 60% of Malaysian workers had been sexually harassed in their workplace. Women’s rights have gained considerably large support these past few years. Many Malaysians were seeing the importance of speaking up and equal rights for men and women, especially in the workplace. It seemed like the only other thing the Malaysian government saw a need for censoring is the political “fake news.” UK-based website, the Sarawak Report, was blocked in 2015 for breaking the story about the prime minister being involved in the largest political scandal in Malaysia’s history after an investigation into a Malaysian investment fund. What’s remarkable about it is that the government had openly acknowledged their doing of blocking the website. If we are to compare Malaysia’s degree of censorship to China’s, Malaysians do enjoy much more freedom of speech in the sense that we are still allowed to discuss all social issues openly while China bans literally all discussions on anything that is controversial, striving to keep up a pretense that they have everything under control for propaganda.
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