The Moral–Procedural Straitjacket: Moralization, Securitization, and Authoritarian Legitimation in China's #MeToo Movement

• In Event: Gender and Human Rights: Social Movements, Feminism, and Global Transformations

Abstract

This monograph chapter analyzes the Shen Yang Incident at Peking University (PKU) and Nanjing University (NJU) in April 2018 as a revealing site for examining the dual logics of moralization and securitization in the Chinese party-state's management of contentious politics. In 1998, Shen Yang, then a PKU professor, allegedly sexually assaulted his student Gao Yan, whose suicide went under-investigated and unpunished. Twenty years later, public accusation by Gao's friends and family ignited a wave of campus #MeToo activism that rapidly escalated from online moral outrage into organized collective action.
The chapter asks how and why the party-state simultaneously co-opted and repressed this activism. I argue that local party-state agents operate within a moral–procedural straitjacket of authoritarian repression shaped by two concurrent imperatives from the Party center: compelled by Xi Jinping's political and ideological campaigns to perform openness and accountability for regime legitimacy, they are equally bound by the national security regime to prevent contention from escalating into broader political challenges. This tension animated two phases of the repression–dissent interaction. Initially, university authorities responded with swift moral gestures—releasing statements, disclosing disciplinary records, and dismissing Shen—signaling responsiveness while deflecting institutional responsibility. The critical turning point came when PKU students repurposed the university's own open-governance regulations to submit formal information disclosure applications, transforming individual grievances into rule-based collective mobilization. This procedural escalation triggered securitization: the crisis was reclassified as a stability emergency, political counselors summoned students for coercive "tea chats," and coordinated censorship extended beyond campus. Ironically, this coercive turn radicalized the movement, shifting its focus from anti-sexual harassment reform toward a broader rights-based critique of state power.
The chapter makes three contributions: (a) it advances a granular process-tracing account of repression–dissent interaction as emergent rather than episodic; (b) it situates university governance within a historically sedimented institutional architecture that produces the moral–procedural straitjacket; and (c) it theorizes moralization and securitization as mutually constitutive mechanisms through which the party-state strategically appropriates proceduralism as an instrument of performance-based legitimation.

Author

• Ruanzhenghao Shi, University of Chicago