In one of Li Maizi’s first forays into feminist activism, she “occupied” men’s restrooms in Guangzhou and Beijing to protest a shortage of stalls in women’s public restrooms.
Back then, Xi Jinping was still months away from assuming China’s top office, and the country allowed a somewhat more freewheeling political environment. When Li’s “Occupy Men’s Room” movement drew widespread — and largely positive — coverage in state media, bureaucrats pledged to construct more women’s restrooms.
The demonstrators are making a “legitimate demand,” a deputy to the National People’s Congress said at the time, in 2012, hailing the effort to “effectively safeguard women’s equal rights to accessing the restroom.”
China’s rapid economic growth — paired with a socialist ethos that promoted elements of gender equality — for decades ensured that men and women reaped benefits from advances in education, a growing white-collar sector and a rise in living standards.
But 14 years into Xi’s tenure, Beijing strikes a different tone. Official rhetoric from leadership decries outspoken feminism and women’s rights — even within somewhat established parameters for expression — while tolerating the Chinese iteration of a men’s rights movement online.
The female labor force participation rate, meanwhile, high in China since the era of Chairman Mao Zedong, has dropped drastically since 1990, according to World Bank data.
In 2023, when Li tried to “occupy” the men’s bathroom in Shanghai, she was quickly ushered away by staff at the facility. It’s “unlikely” that such an act could spur change today, said Li, who has since left China for New York.
“The status of women in China is regressing — politically, economically, culturally and socially,” she said. “‘Women’s rights’ has become a completely stigmatized term.”
Economic downturn
As the Chinese economy grapples with the aftermath of a pandemic-era real estate crash, significant demographic headwinds and insufficient consumer spending, women in several ways are bearing the brunt of the downturn.
While the party orthodoxy might still invoke Mao’s aphorism, “women hold up half the sky,” Xi in recent years has emphasized women’s “unique role in carrying forward traditional Chinese virtues and cultivating good family values.”
The shift reflects anxiety among party leadership — little more than a decade after the rollback of the one-child policy — over the country’s dwindling fertility rate, which like in many countries heralds a diminished future workforce. They are not alone: The issue has been taken up globally, including in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and by the Trump-aligned American right.
Around 6.8 million marriages were registered last year in China — down from 13.5 million marriages in 2013, according to China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. And China’s fertility rate dropped to an all-time low of roughly one child per woman in 2025, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 required to maintain the population level without immigration.
China, which has historically demanded that women join the workforce, is now “also expecting them to shoulder the burden of domestic household labor,” said Lü Pin, a Chinese feminist activist who founded the now-banned Feminist Voices publication.
To that end, Beijing has taken steps to reshape laws and social norms around “family values.”
Nana, 29, began having misgivings about her husband just months after tying the knot in 2023, she told The Washington Post. She spoke on the condition that she be identified by a nickname, for fear of reprisal.
Pressured into a hasty marriage by her family in Shandong province — a region that is “not just conservative, but feudal” in its gender attitudes, she said — Nana soon became dissatisfied with her husband’s heavy drinking and online gaming habits.
“I initially saw marriage as a way to leave my family behind, but it turned out to be another hell,” she said.
Nana tried to apply for a divorce. But under the Chinese legal system, one spouse cannot automatically file for a no-fault divorce without involving a court. A lawyer warned that legal proceedings could drag on for years if her husband opposed the divorce, she said.
Instead, under a legal change enacted in 2021, she had to wait out a month-long “cooling-off period” before she could finalize the divorce with her husband’s consent.
“I cried for a whole month — every single day — because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get a divorce,” Nana said.
Such legal provisions — which Beijing implemented in a bid to reduce divorce rates and encourage couples to have children — disproportionately affect women, who initiated 74 percent of divorce litigation in China between 2016 and 2017, according to the People’s Supreme Court.
“The state has made very little progress in guaranteeing actual rights” in legislation while pushing through “clear setbacks,” Lü said, pointing to a 2016 anti-domestic violence law that critics say has done little and the “cooling-off period” law. “Rights may be granted on paper, but when you seek to exercise them, the reality is deeply disappointing.”
Women are also increasingly dropping out of the workforce. China’s female labor force participation rate dropped in the past few decades — from 73 percent in 1990 to 59 percent in 2025.
Chinese women have long tended to retire early, in their 50s, and an aging population has driven up the number of retirements. But the end of China’s one-child policy in 2016 — raising the prospect of women taking multiple parental leaves — has also led employers to increasingly shun women in the workplace.
When Nana interviewed for jobs, prospective employers peppered her with questions about whether she was married, had a boyfriend or planned to have children soon — questions, she said, male applicants would not face.
“Employers worry you’ll marry and have children immediately after starting your job,” Nana said. “Of course, it’s even worse if you’re married without kids, because they worry you’ll get pregnant right after joining the company.”
China’s ‘manosphere’
Young, often jobless men who blame women for taking their jobs and contributing to high unemployment rates are another factor contributing to shifting gender norms.
Exacerbating the dynamic is the former one-child policy, which reinforced a long-standing preference for sons and contributed to sex-selective abortions — a practice that resulted in tens of millions more men than women in today’s China, many of whom will be unable to find spouses or partners.
“The dire living conditions of lower-class men during China’s economic downturn, amplified by social media algorithms, seem to have produced a kind of ‘gender antagonism,’” Jiling Duan, a women’s and gender studies professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, said in an email.
Anonymous social media accounts like Teacher Baobao, which boasts nearly 500,000 followers on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo, espouse views criticizing women’s rights and arguing women’s primary role is childbearing. “Feminist laws and ideology are the sole reason behind the destruction of childbearing and the nation,” Teacher Baobao’s bio reads.
Teacher Baobao’s page has since been scrubbed of most of its inflammatory posts, though the account remains active.
Whereas discussion of women’s rights is quickly deleted from social media, discourse around men’s rights is largely left online in a pattern of discourse that now forms China’s own “manosphere.”
Feminist Voices, the publication founded by Lü, was banned from Weibo in 2018. Li, the activist who led the “Occupy Men’s Room” movement, similarly lost her Weibo account in 2021 after the platform’s CEO singled her out. “He accused me of inciting gender antagonism and stoking hatred, then he banned my account,” she said.
On the other hand, authorities have “a high degree of tolerance” for men’s rights influencers, “given their work aligns with that of the state apparatus,” Lü said.
But now the declining birth rate means any criticism of marriage or discussion of women’s rights is now framed as a national security issue, with authorities issuing frequent warnings that Western, anti-China forces are spreading “gender antagonism” and “professed feminism.”
In September, a Chinese professor was dismissed for “serious violations of professional ethics” after videos circulated online of her questioning during a lecture why the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s seven-member top decision-making body, has no women on it.
Women have never held a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee. The current Politburo, the 22-member wider leadership body, is the first in two decades to not have any women.
But awareness of women’s rights is higher than ever before, even as Beijing cracks down on channels for formal advocacy and policy progress has stalled.
During the “Occupy Men’s Room” demonstrations, “we had funding, an organization, and lawyers, and we would regularly meet to discuss our strategies,” Li said, an apparatus impossible to maintain today.
“Still, the suffering of women won’t vanish,” she said. “Once women’s awareness of their own rights has been awakened to such a broad extent, it’s very difficult to suppress it again.”
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