Policing and Patriarchy: Feminism’s Abolitionist Nature and Its Implications for Activists in Post-Covid China

• In Event: Poster Group 5
  In Poster Session: Policing and Patriarchy: Feminism’s Abolitionist Nature and Its Implications for Activists in Post-Covid China

Proposal

In late 2022, the A4 Movement has brought about nationwide protests resisting China’s notorious zero-Covid policies. Police also heightened their activities to suppress dissent and punish protesters. With the illegitimate arrests of young women and feminine-presenting queer protesters like Cao Zhixin, Zhai Dengrui, and Yang Zijing (“Dianxin”), the law enforcement intensified its hostility towards the feminine power of defiance. I must underscore the gender-based policing and surveillance that culminated during this unprecedented incident. Through its criminalization of feminism and queer activism as “social dangerousness,” the police attempts to fortify patriarchy in the name of stability maintenance. If policing – or the Chinese party-state altogether – premises upon patriarchy, feminism is thus an abolitionist tool. Derived from radical black feminists, abolition feminism can potentially inform aspiring scholar-activists in post-Covid China.

Abolition feminism is an intersectional and internationalist politics. Gender-based violence must be addressed together with the carceral system, for these two forms of oppression share the same foundations and mechanisms. Women and queer people are forced in an abusive relationship with the patriarchal state perpetrating gendered and racialized policing and imprisonment. Such relationship is translated into China’s context as women’s disenfranchisement under Xi’s “strongman authoritarianism.” Reforms are impotent as they only remedy a faulty system, leaving the patriarchal core unshaken. Resonating with “the personal is political,” the parallels between domestic and systemic violence projects women’s lived experience at home onto public life. When the A4 Movement extended to radical political transformation, Chinese women and queer activists should be at the forefront of dismantling systemic patriarchy.

As China’s feminism becomes more decentralized and deinstitutionalized, activists and the academia must strategize innovatively to empower communities and deconstruct carceral logic. Scholars studying the A4 Movement should elucidate its gendered implications and feminists’ active involvement. Comparative analyses with other authoritarian regimes will help contextualize abolition feminist theories in non-western countries. The academia should also leverage its platform to host panels or speeches with the A4 Movement activists. Scholarly work provides the knowledge necessary for direct action. Without a formal NGO network, activists have to organize from the margins with greater mobility. Transnational allyship with abolitionists abroad will introduce useful tactics for localization. Building online archives for protests and arrests will establish collective memories and more importantly provide valuable data for scholarly inquiries. Strengthening transnational scholar-activist alliance garners the energy to problematize policing and voice support for the persecuted. Small individual efforts matter too. Posters, slogans, performance art, and letters and postcards to detainees can mitigate the feelings of isolation among the incarcerated. Presented as a poster, my work is in itself a protest. I hope to utilize this opportunity to deliver this powerful message from the A4 Movement – Totalitarianism will never end until the death of patriarchy.

Author

• Shuhan Li, Columbia University Teachers College