Feminism: Made in China
Last summer, “Revenge on Gold Diggers” topped sales charts in Chinese gaming. The male protagonist spends hundreds of thousands of yuan on a girlfriend who then disappears. Years later, now a successful businessman, he discovers a secret organization that trains women to be “gold diggers”—and he finds out that his ex was one of them. He starts to hunt them down, one by one, until he destroys the whole group.
In the game, the first love’s name is Chen Xinxin—presumably a nod to a story that became a national scandal in 2017. That September, the IT developer and entrepreneur Su Xiangmao jumped to his death after 104 days of marriage, leaving behind online a detailed note accusing his wife, Zhai Xinxin, of blackmail. His company announced his “murder” by his “vicious wife,” attaching her ID and phone numbers. Internet users launched a crowdsourced investigation and exposed photos of her, information about her past as a model and “Miss Etiquette,” her postgraduate degree, even her romantic history. It appeared she had attended boot camps and joined online groups teaching women how to “fish millionaires” (diao fuhao), allegedly earning millions from that and a previous brief marriage.
The Zhai Xinxin scandal opened an earlier article of ours, “What Is Made-in-China Feminism(s)? Gender Discontent and Class Friction in Post-Socialist China.” We began drafting it in 2014 and published it five years later—after nine rejections from journals specializing in sociology, media, cultural studies, gender studies, and China. China’s gender politics weren’t readily legible on their own terms in global academic conversations.
Are they any more so today? What edge does feminist critique have now against the current backdrop of new political and economic challenges, when the pushback against feminism in China, including in scholarly analyses, increasingly reads individual voices as symptoms of purportedly totalizing macro-level pathologies or, worse, treats them as the cause of a structural crisis?
Labeling
Beyond the Zhai Xinxin case, “Revenge on Golden Diggers”restages several real-life controversies. In May 2024, a 21-year-old gamer known as Fat Cat transferred more than 500,000 yuan (about $70,000) to his girlfriend over time and committed suicide after she broke up with him. In early 2023, a man, after raping his fiancée and causing the engagement to be called off, had sued her in court, demanding the return of the bride price, the transfer of money and property from the groom’s family to the bride’s that formalizes a marriage. In walkthrough videos, the fan community’s sentiments surface through streaming danmu (“bullet curtain”) comments: Viewers identify with the avenging hero, cheer the restoration of “justice” for the male victims, and take notes on how to detect “romance scams.”
The game’s world revolves around what have come to be known as “gold diggers”—women who are said to turn intimacy into financial extraction. This figure characterizes the entrepreneurial strand of what our earlier essay called “made-in-China feminism”(for a public-facing essay, see here).Some academic readers questioned how such a figure could possibly embody feminism. To understand this, one must begin by tracing what gender contentions look like in China—what forms they take, which ones they resist, and what constrains them.
Loaded labels for “feminism” have proliferated on the Chinese internet. There’s “Chinese homegrown feminism” (tianyuan nüquan), “feminist cancer” (nüquan ai), “feminist whores” (nüquan biao), and more recently, “female pugilists” (nüquanshi) and “extreme feminism” (jiduan nüquan). Many of these terms have been imposed; some have then been reclaimed. When a backlash names, it seeks to mock and belittle; when the government names, it creates additional risks for the women who are targeted.
The task instead should be to understand Chinese women’s struggles on their own terms. In our analysis, “feminism” is a signifier—something to which, at specific moments, society attaches certain thoughts and practices, particularly when women agitate in the wake of their own oppression and precarity. (We use the word “women” expansively, to include anyone who identifies as such in Chinese society.) Back in the mid-2010s, we identified two strands of “made-in-China feminism,” or “C-fem” for short.
The Entrepreneurial
The first is the entrepreneurial strand, which supposedly games heterosexual relationships to maximize personal return. Women in this strand are said to leverage sexual attractiveness: not just their appearance, but also the cultivated performance of femininity and domesticity—which requires self-discipline and calculation. Such a tactic might not look very respectable, but it’s worth observing what it does and what it undoes through historical and structural lenses. Put simply, China’s post-socialist government along with unleashed market forces and rekindled traditional patriarchal values have consolidated a particular kind of marriage market. (Chinese state socialism (1949-1976) had not eradicated sexism and essentialist gendered divisions of labor, despite feminist efforts and the state’s rhetoric about class-leveling and “women’s liberation.”) This market institutionalizes women’s sexuality, childbearing, and all-around care work as the most effective route to their economic security. It perpetuates gendered exploitation through ideological subjection—disguising it in the language of romance and natural family duty. Over the past decade, despite diminishing and even reversing gender gaps in education, women’s participation rates in the labor force have continued to decline. Employment data also have become less reliable, partly because of the expanding gig economy, which offers little protection to workers and subjects many women to prevalent employment discrimination and family pressures.
This is the reality that the entrepreneurial strand of C-fem has been tackling. It takes an unapologetically utilitarian view of marriage and centers on the economic security of the individual woman. It differs from hypergamy, or women marrying “up” often under pressure from a family-centric traditional patriarchy. Precisely because the entrepreneurial “gold-digger” treats marriage as a willful transaction, and does so as a matter of individual choice, she destabilizes the patriarchal order. She is accused of puncturing the supposed purity of love and duty, and her behavior is described as a “cancerous Chinese feminism” (nüquan ai).
The Noncooperative
The second strand of C-fem we identified a decade ago is noncooperative C-fem. Back then we introduced this group with posts from a then-influential Weibo user named the “cold-blooded talented woman.” She wrote: “As a single woman earning a junior faculty wage in Beijing, I say with full confidence: in Chinese cities, the most comfortable life is single and childless—no apartment needed.” Another of her posts read: “To those fools saying, ‘What’s wrong with pursuing love’ or ‘devoting yourself to family’?—luxuries like love and family aren’t for those who can’t afford them. Work hard, make money, be independent, and don’t be a pushover.” Noncooperative C-fem advocated total withdrawal from the marriage market. Instead of leveraging femininity, it championed the pursuit of education and career for self-reliance.
In the mid-2010s, when we were writing, the noncooperative strand was largely ignored in public discourse in China. These women aspired to compete against men, and many outcompeted them. Those men, in turn—especially the ones struggling economically and insecure about their masculinity—jumped to portray such women as none other than the same old entrepreneurial, seductive manipulators, claiming they turned rabid after their femininity had failed to seduce.
A decade later, noncooperative C-fem has become far more visible and more combative. And now some of its proponents are publicly vilified as “femi-Nazis” (jinü, literally meaning “radical/extreme feminists”)—a label many of these women have since embraced. Some on the most radical, zero-compromise edge patrol the Chinese internet and call out other women whom they think are willingly trapping themselves in heterosexual family norms. They dismiss these “cooperative” women as “love-brained” (lianainao), “treasured wives” (jiaoqi), or “marriage donkeys” (hunlü).
The game“Revenge on Golden Diggers” also features a “femi-Nazi.” An influencer character urges followers to watch Good Barbie—a mash-up of the Hollywood Barbie and the Chinese hit Her Story (Good Stuff, in Chinese). Both films center on women’s independence and demystify marriage and romance; the influencer in the game credits them with “revealing the true nature of men, striking a blow against patriarchy.” Both films also rocked the box office, testifying to China’s tremendous women-powered she-economy.
A decade ago, the entrepreneurial and noncooperative strands of C-fem operated largely in parallel but separate spaces. Now, the latter has begun to show open empathy toward the former. When a “gold digger” controversy erupts, noncooperative voices frame it not as evidence of the woman’s moral failing, but as a site for critiquing structural exploitation. While these women still reject heterosexual romance and family norms for themselves, they increasingly see these as being fair game for other women.
True Love or a Scam?
A prime site to observe this shift are the running debates over bride price, which often surface in “gold digger” accusations. The practice itself reveals that the institution of marriage treats women as transactional resources between families. Its closest mirror is organized women trafficking, which has repeatedly shocked urban society as it has been exposed. Rooted in Han Chinese society, going back two thousand years, the practice of bride price was thought to have been extinguished under Mao. It re-emerged in the post-reform era, becoming something of a societal crisis.
The average payment has now risen to $10,000, with rich provinces like Zhejiang reporting averages exceeding $25,000. Beyond the rising cost of living, a key driver of this phenomenon is China’s worsening gender imbalance. China’s gender ratio at birth peaked in 2004 at 121 boys for every 100 girls; by 2022, it had declined to 111:100. In 2024, there were about 25 million more men than women, including 17.5 million men of “marriageable age” (20-40 years old). Most will remain single for life. Historically, an excess of involuntarily single men (known as “bare sticks,” or guanggun) has been a recurring threat to social stability and a factor in the collapse of several dynasties. Yet the government has done little beyond trying to rein in the bride price.
Even though bride-price controversies do not concern them personally, noncooperative C-feminists start to find government and societal denunciations jarring. They contend that a bride price can be justifiable—especially when the bride, rather than her parents, gets to keep the payment—as a mechanism that at least forces men to acknowledge that marriage benefits them but costs women dearly. If men get to trap women in long-term hidden exploitation through marriage, this argument goes, men shouldn’t get it for free. Families who practiced sex-selective abortion to ensure they had sons should pay for their collective crimes.
Back to “Revenge on Golden Diggers.” After the game was (promptly) renamed “Anti-Romance-Scam Simulator,” major news outlets and even the Cyberspace Administration of China praised it as an educational tool. And yet the question haunting both the game’s protagonist and its energized fanbase is this: Is the relationship true love or a scam? If the game’s large male following seeks psychological revenge on women whom they believe scam men through romance, for a growing number of Chinese women, the realization cuts the other way: Men have long used romance to scam women.
A social media post goes: “His high education and good job are his own business. He chose me simply because I’m young and good-looking. He thinks my education and work are beneath his, and that I’d have children and do housework without making a fuss. I’ve thought it through—[this relationship] is meaningless.” A comment affirms: “ ‘Love’ isn’t what matters. What really matters is our own ease. If the ‘love’ can’t even give you ease, it’s merely an empty shell. When you think about it, most men are offering nothing beyond the so-called ‘love.’ ”
The notion of “true love” is the scam. Women across the board are coming to see how structural exploitation so often hides behind its name.
The Backlash: Then and Now
The rising use of “gold diggers” and “femi-Nazis” in recent Chinese discourse reflects the same gender-and-class structure we traced in our earlier essay. What has changed is that tensions within this structure have become sharper and more volatile—and so have the conflicts between its different actors, including those who animate the backlash.
Ten years ago, ordinary Chinese could feel class injury viscerally, but they couldn’t always name it. Today, as China’s growth slows, youth unemployment soars, and upward mobility feels increasingly out of reach, critiques of the erdai—the second generation of the rich, the powerful, and the learned—have become routine in everyday conversation. So have phrases like “economic downturn” (jingji xiaxing) and “lying flat” (tangping), a popular coping gesture that signals resignation. Dire economic conditions have led to a systemic crisis in social reproduction—that is, the sustaining or renewal of the labor power and social relations necessary for economic accumulation and political stability. One most visible and oft-quoted symptoms is the plummeting fertility rate, which has sunk to the lowest level on record since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
Unable to see the structural forces shaping their predicament, single men and their families at the bottom of the social hierarchy turn to scapegoating women. In their eyes, morally corrupted “gold diggers” sell themselves to rich men for money, while deranged “femi-Nazis” sabotage the entire marriage system. Women are blamed for destroying men’s shared life plan to righteously work hard and raise a family, dragging the country and civilization down hell.
One remark that circulated widely on WeChat in 2025 goes: “I was born in the 1980s. When I got married, there was no bride price, let alone apartments or cars. Now feminism has even brainwashed some women born in the 1970s into thinking they’re ‘goddesses’ and ‘fairies.’ Policies to boost childbirth are useless. Why not crack down on feminism instead? The problem isn’t young people lacking a little baby-formula money or a small subsidy; it’s feminism’s endless demands! All feminists have something wrong in their heads—everyone should stay away from them.”
Gender antagonism is class-inflected. What we teased out in 2010s China was echoed by Judith Butler in 2024: “To think of the anti-gender movement only as a ‘culture war’ would be mistaken. The movement is clearly responding to economic formations that have left many people radically insecure about their futures, sensing that the conditions of their lives are deteriorating.”
Tellingly, when it comes to C-fem’s two strands, today’s anti-feminist backlash exhibits the same cognitive denial. It refuses to acknowledge that genuinely noncooperative women ever existed. In the game, for example, the “femi-Nazi” influencer is eventually revealed to be a senior member in the Gold Digger organization. Her noncooperation turns out to be just a facade, a perverted strategy for profiting from the attention economy. Moreover, none of the women in the game holds an ordinary wage-earning job. They’re either erotic live streamers, “femi-Nazi”-posing influencers, or shadowy operatives running the Gold Digger organization. In all cases, too, their access to money is mediated through men.
The “gold digger” trope has also become a go-to device to delegitimize the #MeToo movement, which began in China with a single online complaint of sexual harassment in 2018 and has gathered momentum since. One well-covered case is the rape lawsuit against the tech tycoon Liu Qiangdong. During the legal battle, the plaintiff, Liu Jingyao, faced a massive smear campaign that claimed: “As one of China’s richest men, what kind of woman couldn’t Liu Qiangdong get?” “Why on earth would he need to force her to do that?” The backlash sought to reframe #MeToo allegations as xianrentiao (the Chinese equivalent of badger games), where the woman intentionally seduces the offender in order to blackmail him.
In post-socialist China as in much of the world, hegemonic masculinity is defined by wealth and sexual access, embodied by the men accused in #MeToo cases. Yet rallying behind them are men from lower socioeconomic strata in a society with little upward mobility, epitomized by the fanbase of “Revenge on Gold Diggers.” Ironically, of all the game’s endings the most elaborate one features the male protagonist living happily ever after with the first female “gold digger,” by now morally reformed. Pedagogy against “romance scam” winds up being enveloped in a story of “true love”. Painfully aware of their own profound lack—made evident in countless comments on the game’s walkthroughs—men with modest economic means anchor their masculinity in a tenacious belief in “true love” and in their singular ability to provide it (to women deemed worthy).
Finally, working hand in hand with the populist backlash is the government’s recent stance against so-called “extreme feminism.” Manufactured through media campaigns and coordinated online censorship, the official discourse defines “extreme feminism” as women’s attempts to dominate men, an affront to China’s long-standing tradition of “men-women equality” (nannü pingdeng), and it purportedly causes “men-women antagonism” (nannü duili) and plunging birth rates. Such a toxic force, the argument goes, must have been planted by “foreign evil forces,” and they must—and will—be crushed.
The government has also helped popularize the term “gender wars” (xingbie duili), which became widely used to describe China’s gender situations today. This term implicitly values reconciliation at a supposedly respectable middle ground. Such vocabulary, as well as increasingly common formulations like “social media’s polarizing tendencies intensified gender wars,” obscures the structural asymmetries of power and social legitimacy behind the feminist struggle.
“Good Feminism”
When we drafted the initial essay, literature on gender politics in contemporary China—only a fraction of its current volume—cut in two directions. On the one hand, liberal observers often singled out women’s actions and voices that might challenge the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy, paying little attention to the broader terrain of localized, everyday gender contention. On the other hand, many left-wing voices dismissed Chinese feminism as an uncritical adoption of white, middle-class feminism, a pastime of well-off urban women, akin to post–second wave “identity politics” in the West.
This two-pronged filtering persists. The world, for example, took note of women’s leading roles in the “white paper” protests at the height of China’s draconian COVID lockdowns. Far less attention has been paid to China’s vibrant universe of women-authored “boys’ love” (danmei) online fiction—one of the country’s dynamic cultural exports, now embraced by queer communities worldwide. The central government ignores it, as its themes and aesthetics are queer and messy and sit uneasily with the masculine, sovereignty-centered model of soft power that the state promotes. Cultural elites dismiss it as trashy or perverse. Much of the cultural studies scholarship faults it for remaining covertly heteronormative, failing to properly represent homosexuality, insufficiently challenging hegemonic values such as Confucianism and nationalism, or being corrupted by commercialization—as if marginalized cultural production had ever entered wider circulation without being corrupted in the process.
Recently, cash-strapped local governments have begun targeting danmei authors, claiming they are spreading pornography. Many of these women writers come from precarious backgrounds and have to pay heavy fines to avoid prison sentences comparable to those given to rapists and perpetrators of severe domestic violence. The crackdowns have, in turn, sparked large-scale, women-led fundraisers to cover the authors’ legal and living costs.
Much of the criticism directed at these women-made cultural forms resembles the anti-pornography side of feminist debates in the US in the 1970s and 1980s—marked by an intense policing of desire and fantasy, and an insistence that those align with what are perceived as correct and respectable political ends. What’s being brushed aside are the everyday practices and lived experiences of the women who create and inhabit these cultural spaces, along with the fundamental question of how gender and sexuality are configured in relation to concrete political and economic power.
Discursive Reductionism: Neoliberalism All the Way
Although anti-feminist backlash discourses label the entrepreneurial strand “feminism,” the fast-growing scholarship on Chinese feminism has found little relevance in the “gold digger.” Instead, academic attention has largely centered on the “femi-Nazis,” who are treated as feminists or post-feminists and yet are swiftly criticized for being neoliberal, if not reactionary.
This literature draws on Western feminist critiques (of twentieth-century white, middle-class feminism) that foreground intersectionality and interrogate consumerist and neoliberal tendencies, applying them wholesale in China. We have challenged this move since our earlier article. For example, one study of childfree women’s self-narratives on RedNote identifies themes of “self-empowerment that prioritizes personal autonomy; economy-smartness that rejects childrearing’s financial burdens; present-focused living that values current experiences over familial or generational futures,” collectively making a “feminist counter-public” and “a neoliberal space.” Another study describes “a local expression of neoliberal feminism centered on self-confidence, a willingness to articulate and satisfy personal desires, and heavy use of social media,” arguing that its “pro-work attitudes affect these professional women’s family lives.” Such feminism, the study concludes, “cannot provide systemic betterment for women” because it “focus[es] only on individual accomplishments.”
As such, the critical scholarship runs up against what we call “discursive reductionism”: The empirical material—overwhelmingly, social media posts and individual interviews—is readily taken to represent Chinese feminism, while analysis centers on identifying, within this material, discursive symptoms of widely recognized macro-level problems. The go-to suspect is neoliberalism. And the result is a familiar conclusion: Chinese feminism exudes neoliberalism, or worse, functions as its handmaiden, because the sampled women’s expressions reference class hierarchy, meritocracy, individual freedom, and personal choice.
As a widespread analytical approach, discursive reductionism is deeply misleading. When US neoliberalism took off in the 1970s, family values were mobilized as a key ideological component of its hegemonic formation: Emphasizing kinship responsibility helped justify the retrenchment in the provision of state welfare. In the struggle between family values and sexual choice, many left-leaning feminist critics diagnosed sexual choice as ethically individualistic and therefore “neoliberal.” As the political theorist Melinda Cooper points out, this seemingly leftist critique of neoliberalism ended up aligning with the very neoliberal policy turn it sought to oppose.
Family values have now become the face of rightwing politics around the globe, from the US to China—where C-fem asserts its unwelcome presence. But not all vocabularies of economic value, not all demands for compensation for unpaid labor or moral injury, and not all calls for individual autonomy are “neoliberal.” Under China’s hegemonic gender/sex system and political institutions, everyday women take these vicious renegotiations of value and meaning as a last resort to disrupt the status quo and re-distribute resources.
This is also a moment of unlikely convergence. Whereas ordinary Chinese citizens have little capacity to influence legal, fiscal, and policy decisions or their implementation, academic inquiry and state governance—despite their divergent politics—likewise gloss over these institutional realities and the openings those do offer. They exhibit nearly identical discursive reductionism. To state our main point again: Individual voices are seen as symptoms of purportedly totalizing macro-level pathologies or as the cause of structural crises. To move beyond this predicament requires rigorous, historically grounded analyses of political economy—analyses that tease out the structuring forces shaping the equation, that spell out distinct processes and mechanisms step by step, and that explain how specific cultural formations operate within these unfolding structures.
Who is a feminist? In today’s China, the answer is more expansive than ever before. While feminism has become increasingly politicized and censored, the number of ordinary women identifying with the term has drastically spiked since we first coined “made-in-China feminism” a decade ago. From young stand-up comedians to the road-tripping auntie, contemporary Chinese women have made their voices heard, poignantly or subtly, by unapologetically participating in every sphere of public life. In a system that displays growing signs of political suppression and economic depression, the vital energy they generate is among the most hopeful.
Angela Xiao Wu is an associate professor in media, culture, and communication at New York University
Yige Dong is an assistant professor of sociology and global gender & sexuality studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo.
