This story is part two in a series. For the full series, go here.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has “exploited” the COVID-19 pandemic to heighten its censorship of LGBTQIA+ content and ban community events, experts tell Crikey.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, LGBTQIA+ censorship was already becoming more draconian, part of a broader censorship trend seen across mainland China and Hong Kong. In 2021 Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy independent newspaper Apple Daily announced its closure after raids.
Between 2014 and 2017, Ausma Bernot worked in Beijing as an LGBTQIA+ activist. She helped start a student body called Diversity, in what she says was a “relatively relaxed political atmosphere”. But in 2017, that all changed.
On January 1 2017, the CCP banned NGOs (non-government organisations) from working in certain sectors in China, including the LGBTQIA+ space. Bernot’s research became censored and police began surveilling and preventing LGBTQIA+ events from taking place.
Bernot tells Crikey the foreign NGO law gave the CCP a “legal basis” for “harassment” and “monitoring”. She says there’s been heightened attention during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration on queer organisations and groups. Although the censorship is digital, Bernot says it’s usually “legitimised by something”.
“They usually invite you to drink tea, which is a euphemism for having a meeting with public security actors,” she says. “And things can escalate from there if you don’t abide by whatever they’re asking you to do.”
Activists tell Crikey that the foreign NGO ban was only one aspect of a multifaceted mission by the CCP to censor LGBTQIA+ people and culture.
In 2021, China’s Great Firewall, a term used for the CCP’s overarching online censorship that dates back to 1998, undertook a digital purge of LGBTQIA+ accounts on WeChat, China’s equivalent of Facebook. Facebook is banned in China, so WeChat, launched in 2011 and owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent, is the most popular form of social media. Unlike Telegram and Signal, messages aren’t encrypted on WeChat, and Tencent shares user data with the Chinese government.
Overnight, 14 of the most prominent queer individuals and organisations were deleted for violating the “internet user public account information service management regulations”.
“Tonight we are all ‘unnamed official account’,” one activist wrote in response to the purge.
Bernot says that over the past five years, the CCP’s online crackdown has become stricter, eventually reaching what she calls a “dire” climate of censorship.
“All of a sudden, you’re not allowed to do a live stream if you’re gay or do make-up tutorials if you’re a trans woman,” she says. “And suddenly, all these WeChat accounts were discontinued for queer youth groups. It’s a sort of repression coming from multiple sides.”
Suspended for ‘spreading homosexual and cult content’
Users can report others to WeChat staff for sharing explicit content or unsociable behaviour, which can result in your account being suspended or banned.
“I came out as a lesbian in a WeChat group,” Mo Hong says. A few days later her account was suspended for weeks.
“It was the only way I could contact my family and friends in China,” she says. “I tried to apply for a review of the reports but WeChat didn’t respond.”
In their book Surveillance State, Josh Chin and Liza Lin claim that Tencent “vehemently denied suggestions that it gives police unfettered access to WeChat’s treasure trove of behavioural data”, but they also note recurring instances in China where activists were investigated after sending sensitive messages on the platform.
One example is Dr Li Wenliang, the COVID-19 whistleblower, who flagged the early signs of the highly infectious coronavirus over WeChat messages to other doctors.
Bernot says WeChat is a “direct window for public security agencies to observe the activities of both informal LGBTQIA+ groups and registered organisations”.
“These agencies even use the collected data to map organisational relationships between activists, according to my recent research,” she says. “No conversation on the app can be presumed to be private — a fact about which no repressed group can afford to be unaware.”
COVID-19 became an “excuse to justify extensive surveillance and police monitoring beyond subjects directly related to the pandemic itself”.
“LGBTQI+ communities — like many others — shifted their activities to the digital space,” she says. “But moving activities online also meant they became more susceptible to monitoring.”
Queer organisations usually have one specific police officer assigned to monitor their online activities “constantly”, she says.
The CCP’s LGBTQIA+ censorship has also taken aim at the film industry, literature and academia. Xie Weizhe says she wrote an essay on the film Farewell My Concubine, which follows a gay love story, starring the late Leslie Cheung, who was a famous gay actor.
“I wrote a post-view from the perspective of gender identity for my high school summer homework,” she tells Crikey. “My teacher told me never to write on this subject again, or I would be punished.”
In 2018, a Chinese author received a 10-year jail sentence for “homoerotic” literature. In February 2022, US sitcom Friends was censored to remove scenes with gay marriage, while films like Call Me By Your Name and Brokeback Mountain are banned altogether.
In September 2022, the paper “Reflections on Psychiatry of ‘Gender Incongruence'” was censored in the published journal Medicine and Philosophy. In 2020 Shanghai’s annual Pride event was permanently cancelled and gay dating app Grindr was banned in 2022.
LGBTQIA+ censorship is CCP policy
The CCP does not hide its ambition to censor LGBTQIA+ content and promote heterosexual gender norms. In 2020, the Ministry for Education publicly rolled out a plan to “prevent the feminisation of male adolescents” in China. The proposal lays out a four-step plan to “strengthen”, “educate” and “track” adolescents.
One year later, the CCP banned “effeminate” or “sissy” men in the media.
Broadcasters must “resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,” the National Radio and TV Administration said, using a slang term for effeminate men — “niang pao”, or literally, “girlie guns”, the Associated Press reported.
There are detailed processes outlined by the Education Bureau on how to “prevent” and “punish” the spread of LGBTQIA+ content. For example, the “notice on special rectification of harmful publications for minors” issued by the Shawan District Education Bureau:
After this investigation and rectification activity, our school has no harmful publications such as ‘Bible books’, ‘pseudo-national studies’ and religious infiltration picture books, ‘pocket book’ cartoons, game cards, illegal publications and pirated copies of LGBT (sexual minorities) themed children’s picture books and teaching materials for primary and secondary schools.
The translation for “sexual minorities” may be interpreted as gender or sexuality traits that stray from heterosexual norms.
Another example is the Wangdu County Education and Sports Bureau launching what it called the “Qinglang Wangdu Yanzhao Clean Net 2022” publicity campaign across its campuses in 2022. It states that it aimed to prevent minors from consuming “LGBT corrupt culture” and “other harmful internet cultural phenomena”.
In many of these government policies, citizens are urged to look out for and report offenders to authorities.
The Woyang County People’s Government’s implementation plan of “anti-pornography and anti-illegality” states that “all villages (residents) and units directly under the town should earnestly improve the ability of network detection”.
In 2022, Freedom House ranked China as the world’s “worst abuser of internet freedom” for the eighth consecutive year. The report called China’s censorship “profoundly oppressive” and said LGBTQIA+ content has been “heavily restricted” since 2017.
Horror Zoo, a Chinese dissident living in Australia, is an aspiring writer. Roberto Bolano and WG Sebald are some of her favourite writers. “I want to become a successful literary fiction writer,” she tells Crikey.
But due to her feminist and queer activism, and public statements about human rights issues in China, Horror Zoo says she can “never return” to China. And even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to pursue her dreams.
“LGBTQIA+ topics are banned for writers in China,” she says. “It’s like everything — we can’t be different there.”
