Chinese feminists are rebuilding their movement abroad

Two Chinese women sit on the stage of a basement comedy club in Manhattan. They wear matching blazers and speak highly formal Mandarin, just like presenters on Chinese state television. But their “news commentary” is acid. Chinese youths who have recently been making nuisance phone calls to Japan—in protest at the release of waste water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant—have shown “commendable spirit” insists one of the newsreaders, to a guffawing crowd. Despite having “no jobs or incomes” these nationalistic youngsters have “spent their own money on long-distance calls”.The pair are performers at a Chinese feminist stand-up show called “Nvzizhuyi” (a play on words that can be read either as “Women’s Ideas” or “Good Ideas”). It is part of a new, irreverent form of diaspora activism led by young Chinese women. Each month “Nvzizhuyi” invites Chinese citizens, mostly women, onto the stage in New York to say things that they could never utter in public back home. Their routines incorporate stories about coming out to their conservative parents; complaints about sexual harassment or immigrant hardships; and even accounts of detention and abuse by Chinese police. Most of their stories are funny. Many are bittersweet.