by Benjamin Law
A woman with a no-nonsense haircut, thin-rimmed glasses, a big smile and a large black t-shirt that said ‘San Francisco’ came out of a meeting to greet me.
‘You must be Xian,’ I said, extending my hand.
‘And you must be Benjamin.’
Xian was in her late thirties, one of the city’s most prominent lesbian activists and coordinators, and among the first people in China to have gone online. She was also possibly the first Chinese woman to have made contact with other lesbians using the internet.
Xian and I went out for lunch and talked over a meal of steamed river fish that was full of bones. She worked full-time for Common Language, a lesbian group she’d co-founded, which ran summer camps and a phone hotline, conducted research and lobbied for legal changes. Like most queer groups in China, almost all of Common Language’s funding came from overseas organisations, as Chinese government grants weren’t available for sexual minority groups. In its five-year history, Common Language had scored only one grant from inside China: a domestic violence initiative, where the funding was used to address violence against lesbian and bisexual women, mainly inflicted by their parents.
‘Wait, these women get assaulted by their parents?’
Xian nodded. It was a pretty common thing. ‘The highest rate of violence towards gay women is from their parents. In China, parents punishing children is a common practice. If your parents think you’re doing something bad, they think it’s totally reasonable for them to punish you. On gay issues, sometimes the punishment can be really absurd. Parents will use extreme ways trying to stop their daughter from being bad.’
‘How extreme?’ I asked.
Xian remembered one woman in her late twenties, whom I’ll call Lucy, who lived in Beijing and worked in a professional job. Like most Chinese adults who’d moved to the city for work, Lucy would wire money back to her family. In Beijing, Lucy had a live-in girlfriend, but she was closeted to her parents, who were pressuring her more and more to marry. On the phone, her parents’ questions intensified. So did the nagging. In the Spring Festival, when people from all over China travel back home to their families, Lucy dropped two conversational bombs on her folks. First: she never wanted to get married. Second: she already had a partner – a female lover, she took pains to emphasise. Her parents were aghast. Who had ever heard of such a thing?
Lucy’s conversations with her parents alternated between awkward questions and heated arguments, tear-streaked pleading and hostile silence. On Chinese New Year, Lucy returned to Beijing, shaken. She had no idea that her parents were following behind her. When her parents arrived in Beijing, they moved into her apartment. Together they drove Lucy’s lover out and, after they’d dusted off their hands from that task, sat Lucy down and laid down the new rules. Number one: Lucy was to cut off all communication with her girlfriend. Number two: Lucy had to meet boys – with the intention to marry within a year.
Lucy contacted Common Language, distraught. What Xian and her team of phone counsellors could offer was pretty limited. They gave her legal advice, like calling the police to protect her and her girlfriend.
‘Also,’ the counsellors said, ‘if the apartment was paid for by you and your girlfriend, your parents have no right to drive your girlfriend away. Parents can’t force their daughter into certain behaviours.’
They also emphasised communication. In Western countries, Xian said, it might be an option to sever all ties with your family or even bring your case to court. In China, your identity was completely bound up with your family. And when you were an only child – like most young Chinese people born under the one-child policy – your parents were the only family you had. In Chinese culture, it wasn’t possible to turn your back and run.
‘In the West, when children become financially independent, they don’t really have to care about the parents. If the parents don’t like the lifestyle, they can just go separate ways,’ Xian said. ‘That rarely happens in China. Mentally, for the children, they will feel strange. They can’t cut off that relationship. There are social traditions. So it remains a very challenging issue for us.’
Eventually, Common Language lost all contact with Lucy. Xian had no idea what had happened to her. Common Language still ran its phone counselling service, but it kept encountering a fundamental conundrum: people rang the hotline to discuss their options, but Common Language often had to concede that there weren’t any.
It was even harder when Xian was a young woman. She sought out books about lesbianism before the arrival of the internet, but found that such titles scarcely existed in China. In college, she’d found a few books in the library but they were pretty obscure. One was an oral history book on lesbian nuns in the United States. She also found literature reviews of feminist writers and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, an infamously bleak and suicide-inducing 1928 lesbian novel by Radclyffe Hall, in which lesbians dressed as men and led miserable lives that ended in either solitude or death.
Then in the late ’90s, towards the end of Xian’s college degree, the internet arrived in China. Modems were a rarity, even in universities, but her campus’s computer lab had managed to score the latest gear. The internet Xian logged onto was unrecognisable by today’s standards, a still-developing slug of a thing called the Gopher protocol: a text-oriented system of cascading information where people could contribute to common-interest newsgroups.
‘The worldwide web – the three Ws technique – was still under development or something,’ Xian said. ‘So I joined a newsgroup, and a newsgroup could also search. “Search” is such a powerful tool.’ For me, trying to imagine the internet before its “search” function existed was as difficult as trying to imagine the boundaries of the universe. It felt as if my brain would melt from the effort.
Xian would stare into her university’s small, bottle-thick glass monitor, and it didn’t take long to find a newsgroup for lesbians. Her heart beat faster. Without even thinking, she posted an English message, shooting out a single bleating request into the abyss:
I’m in China and I’m looking for LGBT information. It’s so isolated here.
She had no idea whether anyone would respond. ‘I wasn’t really asking for help,’ she said, ‘but communication.’ To her surprise, people from around the world started replying. One American publishing house specialising in queer titles posted her books, which Xian devoured. But on reading those American titles, she found a disconnect between Western perspectives on lesbianism and her life in China. How could something like the Stonewall Riots happen in China, where there were no gay bars to shut down? How could a vocal queer rights movement start here, when no one even spoke about gays or knew what they were? It’s one thing to be actively persecuted, another to feel that you don’t even exist.
So Xian started looking for real people in her country. Through Gopher newsgroups, expatriate Chinese lesbians and gays gave Xian contacts for people back home who were probably as lonely as her. Nervous and giddy, Xian phoned them, wrote to them and arranged to meet in Beijing’s bars. For most, it was the first time they’d met other people who were gay and lesbian. And here they were, having lived in the same city all along. For Xian, it was mind-blowing.
At that stage, the Chinese government hadn’t yet started to censor the internet, presumably because it didn’t know there was anything to censor. Then, around 2000, the internet took off throughout the country, and with it, gay and lesbian websites and message boards. People found quiet corners in internet cafés, logged on and started finding each other, answering and posting personal ads for romance and hooking up for casual sex. They listened to each other’s stories and formed support groups.
‘The real turning point in my life,’ Xian said, ‘was the internet.’
It was the last thing I expected to hear: that in a country renowned for its draconian web-monitoring regime, it was the internet that had given birth to modern gay consciousness.
In 2008, China quietly leapfrogged the United States to become
the world’s biggest internet-user population. At last count, 420 million people were regularly online in China, about a third of the entire population. By the time you read this, that figure will be well out of date: China’s growth in internet use is far too rapid to pin down in something as static as a book.
With that many people online, monitoring and censoring the internet – in its sprawling, multi-tentacled mutant glory – required the resources of fourteen government ministries and an estimated 30,000 state employees to keep watch around the clock. Workers were charged with different tasks, from creating automated software that scanned blacklisted search terms to logging into chatrooms and posing as regular citizens to steer online conversations back to government-approved lines. It was a blend of the high-tech and the comically primitive, or what the New York Times once bitchily described as ‘part George Orwell, part Rube Goldberg’.
Here was the surprising thing: most people in China were in favour of internet censorship. When surveyed, over 80 per cent of Chinese internet-using respondents said that they thought the internet should be managed or controlled in some way. Roughly the same number thought the government was the body that should be responsible for the task. When I spoke to university students and young translators, they thought that the current level of censorship was definitely too restrictive, but believed the internet had to be censored somehow. ‘If you live in a country without any censorship at all,’ one young woman told me, ‘it would be chaos. Or just lots of porn.’ Thinking about the internet back home, the logic was difficult to refute. Censorship in China might have been a problem, they said, but what would the internet be like without it? It would be wild and chaotic, overrun with smut, perversion and subversive ideas. When you let people do whatever they wanted, what did you get? Anarchy.
So in China, the internet operated in a parallel universe. Running Google searches inside the country for China’s taboo ‘Three Ts’– Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan – yielded completely different results than would the same search outside the country. When I typed ‘Tiananmen’ into Google’s image search, it was as though those iconic images – bloodshed, protesters, tanks – didn’t exist. I just got touristy images of the square as it looked now. YouTube was blacklisted, but hey, there was no need to worry when you could watch clips on Youko. And sure, Facebook was banned, but there wasn’t any need to get upset: Chinese language social-networking site RenRen was everywhere. It didn’t matter that MSN was blocked when everyone had their personal QQ account. For every website that was cut off, there was a government-approved Chinese version that was often just as good and, in some cases, arguably better.
Recently, though, internet censorship had become especially intense. A few months before, the government had silently geared up for the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre by vacuuming up online references to it before they reached Chinese computer monitors. Resolved and ready, the network of internet censors embarked on a vast cleansing campaign, blocking access to major sites like Twitter, Flickr and Bing, and news sites like BBC, CNN and the New York Times. Facebook and Wikipedia had already been blacklisted, and now Hotmail mysteriously disappeared overnight too. Knowing all this, I signed up for a VPN – a virtual private network that allowed me access to banned sites for a fee – in a spirit of adolescent resentment: Why did the Chinese government hate the internet so much? What exactly was their problem?
Around the same time, the government’s State Council Information Office released its first ever white paper on the internet, officially outlining the nation’s attitude to online connectivity. On first read, it seemed that I (and most of the Western media) had been mistaken. The Chinese government didn’t hate the internet at all. In fact, the internet, the white paper announced, in vaguely Buddhist tones, was ‘the crystallisation of human wisdom’. The paper also assured people that the Chinese government would ‘unswervingly safeguard the freedom of speech on the Internet enjoyed by Chinese citizens’.
Reading that made me disorientated. Wasn’t this the same government that operated 24-hour surveillance systems and enforced filters to sift out activism and dissent? I was confused. It didn’t take long for the white paper to return to familiar territory, though. Soon, the paper started to focus on issues like ‘effectively protecting Internet security’, ‘protecting state security’ and how the Chinese government refused to tolerate anything that would subvert state power, jeopardise national unification, damage state honour and interests, instigate ethnic hatred or discrimination, jeopardise ethnic unity or state religious policy, propagate heretical or superstitious ideas – the list went on and on. The section explaining what was and wasn’t allowed went on for pages and pages, too. But there was nothing about gay and lesbian content. At least not explicitly.
Still, everyone was careful. Young gay men told me that every time there was a huge internet crackdown, dozens of popular gay websites would disappear without a trace. No one knew whether it was the gay stuff that made the site a target, though. Gay internet porn – like all porn – was technically banned in China, but sites still existed; they were just well hidden and required membership. You needed to know the rules, but you also needed to know what you were looking at, because these websites didn’t look like gay porn sites at all. Instead, an innocuous homepage was the first step in a long obstacle course.
If you were accepted, you had to become an active member in the discussion forum. By posting the required (and secret) number of messages in the forums, you scored points on your profile. Once you got enough points, the site unlocked, and you could suddenly gain access to the gold: videos of dudes having sex with each other. This arduous process was the price you had to pay without a VPN.
It was a complicated system, but perfect for getting around China’s censorship infrastructure. If you were a government-employed censor, you wouldn’t have time to leave messages in the forums. You definitely wouldn’t be aware of a points system. The ministry’s automated bots would never find these websites either, since there were no keywords or images to scan, filter out and destroy.
When I met Jeff – a well-groomed 29-year-old IT specialist – he had just launched Feizan, a kind of Chinese-language version of Facebook that catered exclusively to gay men. In its first half-year Feizan had already racked up an average of 1000 new members each month. Jeff and his friends looked like friendly members of a high school AV club. Allen – a 23-year-old online games designer, dressed in skatey clothes – wasn’t openly gay with his family, but regularly organised social activities through Feizan, like movie and reading groups. Suan, a bespectacled string-bean of a 27-year-old, worked full-time for an internet company and helped Jeff maintain the website. Over dinner, Jeff recalled how he had come up with the idea of Feizan during a holiday in Thailand.
‘I’d log in to some gay sites overseas and found they were very professional and commercial,’ Jeff said in Mandarin. ‘When I saw the sites in China, most of them were out of date and not professional. I wanted to make a site that was professional and represented the real life of gays. Because I have some gay friends – some couples – that have been together for a very long time. Some are musicians, lawyers, architects, and they are very “colourful”. Sex is not the entire life of gays. They want to communicate with each other too.’
Nearby, a sloppy-looking middle-aged man with a massive gut eavesdropped on the conversation, pricking up his ears when he heard the word ‘sex’ come up. Whenever I turned to him, his eyes darted to the ceiling.
When he wasn’t working full-time, Jeff spent most of his waking hours maintaining Feizan. Even at work, he’d constantly maintain the website in the background and would keep going until past midnight. This constant monitoring was one of the most important aspects of his work with Feizan. If he slipped up on any ‘rules’ – rules that weren’t exactly clear – the entire site could disappear without any warning. Everyone in China’s queer community knew that LGBT websites regularly disappeared without any explanation from
Chinese censors. Jeff hosted Feizan on foreign servers in Kuala Lumpur, a decision that had its pros and cons. On one hand, it meant Chinese censors couldn’t ever take down the site entirely and it could always be accessed from overseas. On the other, running a Chinese website without a government-issued licence risked having the government find it and block it off on the grounds that it wasn’t properly registered.
‘I actually want to register the site with the government,’ Jeff explained. ‘I want the licence. Because if you don’t have a licence, the government can easily block you by using the excuse: “You’re not registered, so you’re illegal.”’
‘Do you think the government has anything against gay websites, though?’
Jeff shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.
Technically, Jeff was right. For the Chinese Communist Party, homosexuality fell under what was termed ‘the three nos’: no support, no prohibition and no promotion. Its official stance on homosexuality was supposed to be completely neutral. Yet some webmasters argued that homosexual content existed in a grey zone of acceptability. In 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had installed filtering software on all new PCs sold on the mainland, which ended up blocking any references to homosexuality altogether, including non-pornographic sites. It might have been a bug, though. This was the same filter that infamously blocked photos of pigs from web browsers when the software mistook pig skin for naked human skin.
