Chinese social media shutdown of LGBT student groups ‘highlights backlash against Western influences’

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7/11/21

The closure of dozens of LGBT student organisations’ WeChat accounts this week may be the result of a larger Chinese nationalist backlash against perceived Western influences, according to cultural academics. “There is a tendency in China for some people to relate homosexuality and LGBT people to Western lifestyles or capitalistic, bourgeois decadence, so this was in line with a moral panic,” said Hongwei Bao, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Nottingham and specialist in queer politics in China. “Especially now, there’s tension between China-West relations, so there is likely to be a heightened sense of nationalism which sees LGBT issues, feminist issues, as Western, as unfit for China.” Aynne Kokas, an associate professor at the University of Virginia and expert on US-China media and technology relations, said the idea that LGBT was a Western imported concept was “particularly troubling” because it could be “mobilised within the context of Chinese national security regulations”. “If it’s Chinese people, then that’s harder to frame as a national security risk, and it becomes more of a government accountability question,” she said. “[But] if it’s outside Western groups that are agitating using LGBT groups, then that can be framed as a national security risk, and then there are a whole host of other laws that can then apply.” The concept of homosexuality has existed in Chinese culture long before the country had any major cultural interactions with the West. In the southeastern province of Fujian, a form of gay “marriage” was prevalent enough that there was even a patron deity of homosexuality, the rabbit. Ancient Chinese poetry also carries many references to homosexual relationships. Acceptance of LGBT individuals has varied historically. In 1979 consensual sexual acts between people of the same sex were banned under a law on “hooliganism”, with punishments ranging from imprisonment to execution. China decriminalised homosexuality in 1997, but same-sex marriage is still illegal and the topic remains taboo socially. In March, a court upheld a ruling that a textbook description of homosexuality as “a psychological disorder” was not a factual error but merely an “academic view”. A report in June found that members of the LGBT community were up to five times more likely to suffer depression than the general public, for reasons including loneliness, employment difficulties and identity anxiety. Chinese state media has reported that around 70 million people in China – or 5 per cent of the population – identify as LGBT, roughly equivalent to the 5.6 per cent in the US, according to a Gallup poll from February.

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