A virtual gender asylum? The social media profile picture,young Chinese women’s self-empowerment,and the emergence of a Chinese digital feminism

From avatar choosing to profile picture editing

Academic discussions about the virtual self of the human user in the digital universe have mostly concentrated on the avatars of computer gamers. Scholars believe that the avatar can accurately convey the player’s preferences, feelings and personality, and reflect the ways players see themselves and what they expect of themselves (Dunn and Guadagno, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2015; Hasler and Friedman, 2012). Zhong and Yao (2013: 561) point to how the avatar interacts with the player on both the mechanical and the psychological level, and argue that:

avatar-self-identification reflects the extent to which the players regard their avatars as surrogates or idealized versions of the self, how they are attached to their digital representations, and how much they would devote cognition or emotion into the growth of the avatars.

In addition, cultural factors have also been shown to influence avatar choosing, as argued by Hasler and Friedman (2012) who maintain that Asians in virtual space often maintain a bigger distance in their interpersonal relationships than Europeans, consistent with how these two groups generally behave in real life.

As social media take on a bigger role in the imagination and construction of the self, academics have started paying attention to the act of editing the profile picture representing the user’s account. Besides general observations, some scholars have to some extent followed the path taken by avatar studies by shedding light on the self-representation and self-construction of cultural identity through visual means (Kapidzic and Martins, 2015; Rettberg, 2014). Just like the avatars in computer games, profile pictures are inextricably connected to the users’ identities and self-identification in the offline world. Miller (2011) points to the trend where the user of social media increasingly relies on the objectified image on Facebook to understand their position in society. A study by Junco (2014: 106) on young students on social media reaches the conclusion that virtual socializing makes identity construction increasingly complicated, to the point where identity in cyberspace can be seen as consisting of three layers: true identity, pseudonymity and anonymity. Research by Uimonen (2013: 122) on the performance of digitally mediated selfhood among Tanzanian Facebook users reveals that in a globalized context, ‘marginalized’ groups are keener to display their identities through their social media profile pictures, such as Photoshopping their faces onto the Tanzanian flag, to reinforce their national identity. This observation seems to validate the prophecy of Baudrillard (2012): digital visual technology in a virtual society will fundamentally subvert the ways in which humans understand the ‘self’ and even the concept of ‘facts’. Of all the strategies of editing and self-representation, the selfie has been the most popular; so much so that it was pronounced the ‘word of the year’ by the Oxford English Dictionary for the year 2013. According to Ibrahim (2015: 211), ‘[a]s a form of self-representation, the selfie reveals the complex interplay of identity politics and self-curation’. It is no wonder, then, that a number of scholars have devoted resources to examining the selfie as profile picture in relation to the user’s narcissism, thus articulating the process of self-definition by the user through self-objectification (Fox and Rooney, 2015; Murray, 2015).

A firm academic link, however, has not been established between profile picture editing on social media and gender relations and identities, except for the scholarship using content analytical and quantitative statistical tools to investigate the gender traits as demonstrated in the pictures. In a survey by Hall et al. (2012) of 24,000 female users of MySpace, about 20% of them chose to show their bodies by wearing revealing clothing in their profile pictures, whereas a similar study on young male users of social media by Siibak (2010) found only 11% using shirtless pictures. A content analysis by Emmons and Mocarski (2014) of the Facebook profile pictures of male and female athletes revealed substantial gender differences, where the women tended to adopt traditional poses and their male peers often looked away from the camera and preferred to showcase their bodies in motion. This clearly draws a direct line from the social media user’s gender identity to their online self-representation, and indicates that hegemonic gender relations still undergird the user’s digital identity construction. Editing behaviors of female users have also been the subject of academic interest. Murray (2015: 490) believes that the female impulse to use selfies as profile pictures is less a sign of narcissism than ‘a politically oppositional and aesthetic form of resistance’. A few scholars have focused on young Chinese women’s self-empowerment through consuming and interpreting film, television and other traditional cultural products (Chan and Wang, 2011; Hu, 2008), yet scant attention has been paid to the young female users of social media in the country who espouse technology to construct their gender identities and experiences. This is the issue this article sets out to address.

Methods

This research adopts the critical discourse analysis (CDA) as its analytical framework to look at the discursive practice of profile picture designing and editing by young female social media users in China. For this purpose, in-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted from September 2014 to March 2016 with 73 female WeChat users, ages 18–35, in three major Chinese metropolises Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

WeChat, a leading online social media service, was born in January 2011. It had leapfrogged to 697 million users by the last quarter of 2015 (Statista, 2016). The reason we chose WeChat instead of the more public Weibo is that the former, akin to Facebook, which is blocked in China, has a more clearly defined social function that fits our focus on the daily act of profile picture editing as opposed to public commentary on specific events that belongs more to the domain of Weibo and Twitter.

The locations were selected due to their status as the so-called ‘first-tier cities’ with advanced levels of economic development and cultural inclusiveness. They are also cities with enormous migrant populations, including young people from across the country flocking there for higher education and better job opportunities, meaning that our interviewees are to a great extent representative of the nation.

We found our interviewees by way of advertising on social media. We worked with two WeChat subscription accounts ¹ that focus on women issues, each with over 100,000 subscribers. The women in charge of the accounts are independent intellectuals and advocates for gender equality and provided great support by helping us disseminate and collect information, free of charge. A total of 167 women living in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou applied. Since this research is limited in scope to only ‘young women’, we ultimately whittled down the list to 73 people aged between 18 and 35 for the interviews. With no particular restrictions on cultural values, political leanings and sexual orientation in our selection of the women, it came to pass that about half of the people on our final list self-identified as feminists, and five were lesbians. They came from all walks of life, including college students and full-time homemakers. They applied for similar reasons: they were interested in or curious about the issue, believing it to be a worthy topic because social media has greatly changed how Chinese women see the world and live their lives.

The semi-structured interviews were conducted face to face, consisting of three following sets of questions: (1) What types of profile pictures would the interviewees usually use? Under what circumstances would they edit or make changes to the pictures? (2) How did their WeChat friends, especially their parents, husband or romantic partner, and friends, react to the pictures? How did the interviewees view such reactions? (3) Generally speaking, what kinds of pleasures did the act of editing profile pictures bring them? How did such pleasures then influence their ideas about what it meant to be a woman in China? Based on the answers in each case, we then decided whether to ask further questions for follow-up. Each interview lasted about 120–150 minutes, and a number of women continued conversing with us on WeChat afterwards.

We then adopted CDA as our analytical tool for the interviews. A complete model of CDA needs to involve three levels of analysis – text, discourse practice and sociocultural context – and the dynamic interplay among them. A CDA of the interviews eventually highlights three major strategies of discursive practice by the women, which are then placed within certain sociocultural conditions for contextual interpretation, namely, how the revolutionary discourse of ‘gender equality’ and the consumerist discourse of ‘freedom’ enabled by decades of economic reform have come to be articulated by the powerful resurgence of Confucianism with renewed state backing, resulting in a unique type of digital feminism with Chinese characteristics.

A comprehensive effort was first made to comb though the images the 73 interviewees usually used as their profile pictures on WeChat, and three major types were found: selfies, photos with other people, and photos with objects or with tourist attractions as background. Users often enjoy a high level of freedom when selecting, designing and editing their digital surrogates, which leads us to argue that each type indicates at least one particular state of mind or cultural demand. For their articulation, the 73 young Chinese women adopted three major strategies of discursive practice that we have drawn from their in-depth interviews.

The justification of femininity

Selfies were extremely popular among the interviewees. Almost all of them said that they used to or often use selfies as profile pictures, which gave them special pleasures. One woman named Lin told us:

One time, I posted a photo of me wearing a tank top on Moments. ² But my mom saw it, called me and gave me an earful. She said good girls should not wear revealing clothes like that. I said nothing on the phone, but when the call was over, I immediately kicked her off the list of people who could see my Moments, and chose a picture of me in a low-cut dress as my profile pic. Saying it now, I realize I was being vindictive. But what I don’t understand is my mom is also a woman. Why would she be ashamed of her own body? Women are gifted with a different body from men. And for what? So you can hide it?

Lin’s bafflement and anger were representative. Many women revealed that they had been scolded by their parents or husbands/boyfriends for posting ‘revealing’ photos on social media, which made them indignant and defiant. One interviewee named Dongmei once even put up a topless photo of herself (with her breasts blurred) as her profile picture in the middle of the night. She took it down 30 seconds later, she told us, before explaining, ‘I just wanted to try and feel what a man feels going shirtless in public. I have to say: It’s fucking amazing!’

There are typically two kinds of selfies as profile pictures: one is about the face, and the other contains the whole upper body, each conveying different cultural and psychological needs. It can be roughly hypothesized that the face is driven by narcissistic tendencies, while the torso may embody defiance of social norms. This happens on an ad hoc basis, however, the result of complex negotiations of interpersonal constraints and traditional values. One woman named Nana was very honest about her thinking on this issue:

Girls love to look pretty! We spend so much time putting on makeup everyday not just for other people, but more importantly for ourselves!… But it’s a different story with your body. You need to be careful that your clothes and your posts do not offend people. Would they make your boss or your dad or your mom unhappy? If your breasts look huge in the photo, would that make your female friends jealous? You need to think about all these things. We aren’t men, after all. We have got to be careful in everything we do. (italics added by the authors.)

This is clearly meaningful on two levels: first, the technologically enabled liberty with selfies has greatly empowered female users of social media to express themselves in a way that transcends the passivity and objectification associated with traditional media allowing them to exercise the pure joy of self-loving; second, despite their relative freedom with the face, the women still balked at showing their bodies – not only did they worry that bodily exhibition might damage their interpersonal relationships but, more importantly, they were still under the influence of traditional gender norms, telling themselves that women enjoyed less freedom than men in showing their bodies.

This was less of a problem, however, with the lesbian interviewees. One self-identified lesbian woman named Ashu said she often used selfies of her body to be her profile pictures, such as a photo with her holding a cigarette, selfies with meaningful poses filtered in black and white or in high contrast, etc. Another lesbian named Loreen echoed similar sentiments, ‘I don’t mind at all if people see me in tights. Quite the opposite, I believe a fit body is something we should be proud of.’

Such attitudes were even palpable with the facial selfies, deemed ‘safer’ as profile pictures as mentioned above yet still pulsating with subtle distain for gender norms. Two commonly adopted tactics were ‘not smiling’ and ‘looking away from the camera’. A woman with the name Qian acknowledged the affability that might come across from a smile, but argued that it represented ‘an effort to please.… You’ll look so much cooler and more independent if you don’t smile.’ A self-identified feminist Ruchen also believed that strong empowerment came from not looking directly at the camera:

Look at those fashion magazines, album covers, movie and TV posters. Not a single woman there is not looking at you with pleading eyes … That’s pathetic! I will never do what those women do. I love taking pictures of my profile and looking into the distance. … This is because our relationships on social networks are just like pedestrians on the street walking past each other. There is no need to please, no need to suck up to anyone.

Interestingly, however, some interviewees believed in the opposite, that only by looking at the camera could they secure the pleasure of empowerment. According to one interviewee named Jieni, ‘You should look directly at the world, and let it know how determined you are, how brave you are.’

It is not difficult to see, in summary, that behind these various kinds of selfies taken by the interviewees as their online personas, there existed a common cultural and psychological motivation to consciously articulate and justify femininity. Profoundly aware of the unfair treatment women are subject to in contemporary China, the interviewees intentionally resorted to the profile picture as a virtual means to tackle oppression. It is true that not all of them possessed a visceral antipathy to conventional gender relations, as seen in a common refrain – ‘Women aren’t men, after all’ – in their conversations, but almost all were protective of the inalienable legitimacy of both the female body and femininity at the core of women’s gender identity. This is further proof of the fundamental theory of a number of Chinese feminists that the awakening feminism in contemporary China stems not from the pursuit of power dynamics based on gender equality as in the West, but in reaction to and defiance of the loss of female subjectivity caused by the Socialist discourse dictating that ‘Men and women are the same’ (Dai, 1999; X. Li, 2006).

The redefinition of social relations

Social relations constitute an important part of a person’s life in society and directly determine the ways in which he/she perceives, understands and acts. Naturally, gender is a crucial link in this, yet the social relations regarding female gender identities go far beyond the interplay between the genders. Besides the men (fathers, husbands or boyfriends in particular) with whom they had to deal in life, the interviewees in their feedback pointed to a wide range of social relationships that they believed shaped or even stifled their gender identification. Indeed, family bonds, workplace politics and contact with former classmates contributed as much to the female anxiety in contemporary China as the traditional female–male entanglement. This helps explain a major strategy adopted by the women of choosing photos taken with other people as profile pictures in an effort to alleviate their anxiety through an imagined independence.

Liping, 33, was the mother of a 4-year-old girl. She revealed that her WeChat profile pictures had been a nonstop stream of mother–daughter photos ever since the baby was born. Her reasons were:

The only time I’m not stressed is when I’m with my daughter.… Of course, she’s my responsibility, but this is happy responsibility, not depressing responsibility. It’s me who tells her how to live her life, not the other way around…. I want to tell other people that I feel like a real woman only when I’m with my daughter. (italics added by the authors)

Through designing her profile pictures, this woman redefined the totality of her social relations. She exalted her relationship with her daughter above everything else, to the highest plane where she wielded complete freedom to imagine and mold her female identity. Her stories were very common among interviewees who had children. One woman named Rui joked that she had succeeded in annoying everyone on her Moments with all the pictures of her child, before adding, ‘I don’t really care, though. My kid is my creation. I’m only truly carefree when I’m with him.’

Another common category of pictures featured the women’s close female friends, or, in their own words, guimi. ³ This kind of friendship, where nobody was taken advantage of and no one competed with each other was seen by many interviewees as an ideal relationship that allowed them to be their true selves as much as they could. Shiyu, 32, a woman who married into a rich family that pressured her into giving birth to three children so as to continue the family line, needed to get this off her chest:

I never post pictures of my husband or my kids on social media. My entire schedule is all about them. I have to take care of them every single day from six in the morning when I wake up all the way till eleven p.m. when they go to bed. Only then do I have some time of my own.… Of course, I’m not complaining. I love them. I’m willing to sacrifice for them. But I often feel I can’t breathe.… I can only truly relax when I hang out with my guimi every Saturday. We talk about our husbands, we gossip, we take pictures of ourselves and we post them on WeChat.

Some interviewees, however, admitted that their preferences for photos with friends as profile pictures were motivated by a desire to show off or compare themselves with other people. Someone named Shiqi was quite candid in admitting that she loved to show pictures of herself with friends less pretty than she was and that she almost always steered clear of photographs with those who were better-looking, ‘I know it’s mean.… Maybe it’s because people are vain. Women more so.’

Interestingly, photos with the husband/boyfriend appeared much less often. Few interviewees would ever consider choosing such pictures. Pressed for an explanation, the women were almost unanimous that it would be ‘embarrassing’ and that they did not wish to leave the impression that they were flaunting the fact that they were romantically involved. Underneath this attitude lay a seeming paradox: on the one hand, most people maintained that it was better to ‘have a husband or a boyfriend’ and that single women were more or less ‘sad’; on the other hand, many seemed to believe that their marital or romantic relationships had not made them happier than the single folks. Indeed, some even went out of their way to hide their marital status on social media. This conflict-ridden psychology was captured by a woman named Mingming:

In any case, women need to get married. Nobody wants to be a shengnü ⁴ – that would be too sad. But marriage lives within an enclosed wall. People outside want to break in, but only those inside it know what it’s like to be married. Once you become someone’s wife, you will cease to be you. People will only see you as a missus, but only as a missus can you be truly respected by society.

This rather fatalistic statement of capitulation threw into sharp relief the psychological millstone tied to Chinese women by the power dynamics of gender discourse in contemporary Chinese society. This dictates that marriage, with its deep politico-economic roots, is the prime measure of a woman’s social status and personal dignity. This cultural and mental imposition, however, appeared ‘normal’ to most of our interviewees, who believed in its necessity in building a healthy society. ‘Only when the family is stable can society be stable,’ claimed a woman named Xueqiao.

It can be seen, therefore, that the self-curated profile pictures empowered the interviewees to subvert and then virtually reconstruct their social relationships in the real world. While in the offline world marriage governed the boundaries of their femininity, the women in cyberspace made a priority of their relationships with young children and close female friends. It needs to be stressed here that this self-empowerment mechanism did not aim at rebellion against or negotiation with marriage itself, but rather the dominant power discourse that firmly placed marriage at the core of female identity.

The creation of the ‘middle-class women’

Photographs of items, luxury goods in particular, and of tourist attractions as background are usually a poor choice, frowned upon by Chinese social media users. Those who flout the norm are often called ‘wealth flaunters’ and seen as being in defiance of Chinese traditions that stress frugality and modesty. Yet, based on the interviews, we can sketch out a phenomenon where many female WeChat users have normalized such behavior. They revealed that whenever they travelled abroad, they would most definitely select photos taken on the trip to be their profile pictures.

These most often feature the woman and such luxury goods as expensive cars, handbags, purses and jewelry. Generally speaking, the items are foregrounded in the frame with a special focus on the brand, whereas the individual, often blurred, is relegated to the margins. This may seem like an ostentatious display of materialistic fetishism, but we argue that it reflects the intention of young Chinese women to demonstrate their uniqueness and even independence by self-identifying as a consumer who can and will consume. Take, for example, the words of an interviewee named Yuanyuan:

I must admit, when I uploaded a picture of me with a Ferrari to WeChat, vanity got the better of me. That car might not have been mine. It might have belonged to a friend. Still, I would like to think the fact that I had such a friend was something to brag about. But more importantly, unless a woman has money, unless she’s successful, she can only rely on men for support. That’s why women need money and luxury. It’s sad, but that’s what it is.

Yuanyuan and a few other interviewees laid bare the fact that the identification of women in today’s Chinese society could only be positioned at the intersection of gender and class, that a ‘pure’ female identity transcending socioeconomic conditions did not exist. Many interviewees frankly conceded that wrapped in all the ‘flaunting’ with the attention and pleasure it brought them was a harsh reality that they were forced to accommodate. As Jiajia said, ‘Apart from the rings, the bags, and the designer outfits you buy at out-of-season discounts, nothing in this world truly belongs to you.’ This corroborates the findings of a number of studies that find it impossible to untangle contemporary Chinese feminism from Western-style consumerism, and that even though women are still objectified by the consumerist discourse, they are empowered to wrestle from it a certain degree of autonomy by smashing the blunt egalitarian discourse – ‘Men and women are the same’ – deeply ingrained in Chinese Communist traditions (Gill, 2007; Li, 2015; Thornham and Feng, 2010).

This palpable yearning among the interviewees for a secure economic status was spurred on by their unmistakable pursuit of a new identity as middle-class women. Not everyone uttered the words ‘middle-class women’, but almost all of them were aching to improve their economic conditions. Rather than challenging male socioeconomic hegemony, the interviewees were seeking a kind of emotional security made possible by the middle-class lifestyle. Indeed, a number of women chose travel photos as their profile pictures. They were mostly married or romantically revolved, leading self-described happy lives, and the photographs were taken on overseas trips they made with their husbands or boyfriends. Unlike the Ferrari and Tiffany ladies, the flaunters of the Eiffel Tower and Tahiti exhibited a more classic middle-class identity (or imagination). Instead of raging against the real gender equality in economic status, they were determined to settle for a sense of security in a stable middle-class family where a steady flow of decent income would generate more mutual respect between the couple, thus empowering the woman. One interviewee named Juan who had been married for four years put it this way:

My husband and I vacation abroad once a year. He has his own company and I work for a government agency. We went to France last year. This year we plan to go to Australia. Every time before we leave, my friends always ask me to post a lot of beautiful pictures of the trip on WeChat. I know they won’t be jealous, because we’ve got similar lives. We are all happily middle class. We are happy for our friends. If someone thinks you are a show-off, maybe that’s because they can’t afford such a lifestyle. (italics added by the authors.)

Juan’s matter-of-fact pride in her middle-class status stemmed from the sources of their income: the husband was a successful businessman who took advantage of the opportunities offered by the market economy, and the wife provided the family with a solid social safety net available to civil servants. In this sense, they were equal in this marriage.

Generally speaking, what the committed feminists denouncing gender inequality and the women content with their well-off living conditions and stable social status had in common was a strong belief that power and pleasure were unlikely to come to women without the financial wherewithal. By selecting photos of themselves with expensive things or tourist attractions, the interviewees took the intersectional identity of middle-class women that they yearned for and transformed it into immensely empowering cultural imagination. To drive the point home, a woman named Xiaohui even quoted a verse from an ancient Chinese poem that roughly means, ‘Everything goes wrong for the couple who are poor.’ Interestingly, since most of the interviewees were young, not many of them could be counted as technically middle class. Even those in stable marriages were mostly lower middle class and had to pay mortgage loans, provide financial support for the elderly and put aside funds for their children’s education. For these women, a Chanel purse or a trip to Venice was still luxury. Nevertheless, they managed to broadcast on social media that they owned such a middle-class lifestyle, and in the process validate and empower themselves through ostentatious visual symbols.

The rise of Confucianism and the formation of a Chinese digital feminism

Through textual and discursive analyses of the interviews, it can clearly be seen that underlying the WeChat profile pictures of young urban Chinese women is a moderate notion of the power dynamics of gender. The women see gender relations as part of a broader social web that encompasses both family ties and class identities, and, within the scope thus set, adopt various means of symbolic resistance in order to reinforce the uniqueness of their own experience that contributes to a gender dynamics that is more benign and harmonious. A contextualized analysis can help demonstrate the visible interference in female identity by the conflicting state ideology and market economy, but what is even more worth noting is the fact that, despite such interference, young urban Chinese women have failed to form a sharply assertive view regarding gender or power. Instead, they are increasingly subscribing to a distinctly Chinese digital feminism that places ‘harmony’ as its ultimate goal.

The Chinese state discursively intervenes in gender relations and identity to a much greater degree than the West. The revolutionary, Communist/Socialist mantras as exemplified by ‘Men and women are the same’ and ‘Women hold up half the sky’ forged in Mao’s time have survived to this day, still preserving their political and moral legitimacy even in a freewheeling market economy with unbridled consumerism (Thornham and Feng, 2010). However, whether in the fervent revolutionary years or in the ‘post-revolutionary’ era of breakneck economic growth, the idea that ‘men and women are equal’ has always remained purely theoretical precisely because it has kept out of view the fact that Chinese women have to work both in and outside the family. Nevertheless, the catchphrase ‘men and women are equal’ has continued to be stressed in the daily lives of Chinese as unassailably politically correct, because it is an important legacy of the ‘Great Chinese Revolution’ led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), which cites it as one of the key sources of legitimacy of its rule as an ‘advanced Socialist party’, disregarding the fact that ‘gender equality’ has little basis in reality. Indeed, while most of our interviewees bought into the mantra of ‘men and women are equal’ as the ultimate ideal to be continually striving for, quite a number either said explicitly or implied that since true equality was next to impossible, there was no need to obsess over whether the two sexes were really equal.

The Socialist gender discourse went dormant as the revolutionary era drew to a close. Instead, the market forces unleashed by the ‘reform and opening-up’ policies put in place since the late 1970s have greatly and irrevocably shaped China’s dominant gender ideology, where ‘state-enforced androgyny went by the wayside as Maoist policies and ideology were repudiated’ (Wallis, 2015: 226), relegating ‘men and women are equal’ to the status merely of a slogan or an unobtainable utopia. No longer subject to the abnegation of their own individuality in favor of a revolutionary masculinity, women can now enjoy relatively independent discursive space. Yet new problems have arisen, including the gross fetishization of women by the popular media and the implicit discrimination that has pervaded wide swaths of society, not least on the job market (Ding et al., 2009). As the middle class (or ‘middle-income groups’ as they are often called in China) that have benefited from the economic reforms expands, and their collective political and cultural sensibilities have taken shape (H. Li, 2006; L. Li, 2015; X. Li, 2006; Wu et al., 2016), the female members have come to develop a Western-style, ‘post-feminist’ politics. Either consciously or not, they stay silent on issues of ‘equality’, prioritizing ‘freedom of choice’ over political or economic equality between men and women, thus transforming the revolution of identity politics into a gentle, symbolic one in the spheres of media and culture. Research has shown that the personal wealth and social status that China’s middle class enjoy are to a great degree determined by the state’s uninhibited manipulation of and interference with the market economy, which helps explain the overwhelming sense of insecurity pervasive in the group (Crabb, 2010; Goodman, 2016; H. Li, 2006; Weber, 2011). As a result of this psychological vulnerability, our middle-class female interviewees on social media are often compelled to go over the top in showing off the expensive things they own and the vacations they take abroad – the clearest, most naked symbols of their (imagined) middle-class identity – in an effort to wring enough affirmation out of them, thus substantiating the intersectionality of class and gender by basing their desired female identity on their extremely fragile class status, which is nonetheless crucial for women’s self-empowerment in the Chinese context.

It logically follows that the revolutionary discourse of gender equality and the consumerist discourse of freedom of choice should be mutually exclusive. Yet, under the powerful influence of Chinese cultural traditions, Confucianism in particular, there does not seem to exist a substantial clash between the two but a relatively peaceful reconciliation. Since the late 1990s, seeing its legitimacy threatened by such problems as the widening wealth gap and appalling environmental degradation caused by a fast growing, unbridled economy, the CPC has launched a sustained campaign for a stable family and social order enshrined by a resurgent Confucianism with ‘harmony’ as its highest ideal (Duan, 2014; Gan and Zhou, 2013), a complete reversal of the vehement Maoist denunciations of Confucian values in the early decades of Communist rule. This revived state endorsement has been most obvious since Xi Jinping became the supreme leader in 2012. The Confucian appeals for domestic harmony and social order are utilized by the CPC to grant legitimacy to its motto ‘[the] harmonious society’ as a way of quelling and dispelling elements of social unrest. Naturally, this has had an impact on China’s mainstream gender ideology as well: since Confucianism has never treated equality and freedom as ends in themselves but rather as means to achieve its ultimate ideal, ‘harmony’, it is able simultaneously to articulate both the deep-seated revolutionary discourse of ‘men and women are equal’ and the individualist discourse based on ‘freedom of choice’ made possible by the market economy, thus feeding into a certain type of feminism with Chinese characteristics that is a moderate, negotiated hybrid. As Yan (1997) puts it, the Confucian renaissance may have led Chinese women ‘to view women as equal to and different from men at the same time’ (1997: 79). To Chinese women who are deeply Confucian, equality and freedom are no more than specific tools; the ‘revolution’ must set its sights on the harmony of gender relations and, building on this, the harmony of family and society at large.

The reason that this research focuses on the Confucian renaissance at the core of its contextual interpretation lies in the fact that all of our interviewees, despite their various ways of ‘resisting’ gender norms, eventually fell back on their desire to create a more harmonious social reality for themselves where they could handle their life and the world with more ease. This quest, conscious or not, for ‘harmony’ attests to the profound influence of Confucianism on the way in which contemporary Chinese women view the power dynamics of gender, thus decidedly diverging from their Western counterparts in female identity, gender relations and feminism as a whole. The Confucian priorities of ‘harmony’ and the utopian world of ‘Great Unity’ have sculpted a society built on an intricate, supposedly benevolent hierarchy of interpersonal relationship progressing steadily along an orderly path, which denies Chinese women seeking self-empowerment the possibility of wielding radically discursive weapons of destruction or deconstruction. Our interviewees would rather look to technology and to traditional and foreign cultural resources for the validation of their belief in the uniqueness of the female experience, hoping that with more and more women forging ‘correct’ identities, mainstream values will eventually catch on and, little by little, reject the myriad forms of discrimination against women. Female–male relations are far from confrontational, but are, in the words of ancient Chinese philosophy, a perpetual cycle of mutual creation and destruction.

The revival of Confucianism since the turn of the century serves both as a great force for conservatism that any type of female identity politics cannot but confront and as the most important source of discursive power to play midwife to a new type of ‘digital feminism with Chinese characteristics’. It is precisely within the crucible of Confucianism that the revolutionary discourse of equality is finally reconciled with the depoliticized discourse of freedom to create a female identity politics that is distinctly Chinese by highlighting women’s technology-and-culture-mediated experiences. It is not that equality and freedom are not important to young urban Chinese women, but that they are treated not as ends but as means. This happens against the backdrop of highly hybridized gender relations as a result of China’s political, economic and cultural traditions. Validating the statement by Moreiras (1999: 395) that ‘[h]ybrid reterritorialization and hybrid deterritorialization are two different sides of the same coin’, these women have taken the singular gender identities sanctioned by Communist ideology and consumerism respectively, and fashioned out of them a moderate, pragmatic strategy that allows a certain degree of flexibility in articulating the two discourses in different contexts to suit practical political needs: it Is a strategy that has given them empowerment at the cultural level by legitimizing their own experiences. Underneath it all is the Confucian ‘harmony’ of symbiosis between the two sexes that lies at the core of Chinese ideals.

Conclusion

China’s political, economic and cultural contexts, with the contemporary renaissance of Confucianism in particular, have enabled Chinese women to fashion uniquely Chinese gender identities by adopting particular strategies of self-empowerment through a variety of distinctly Chinese discursive practices that are highly negotiable, constructive and non-confrontational. This is further reinforced, both technologically and culturally, by the growing might of social media that allows young women to realize self-empowerment and self-identification by choosing and editing their profile pictures. They aim not at the stark Western-style sloganeering of ‘burning down the patriarchy’ or ‘woman power’, but at adopting a gentle, rational yet resolute stance that finds its rightful place in the ‘harmonious society’ enshrined in Chinese ideals. Unfortunately, Confucianism’s traditional contempt for binary systems, and its capacity to hold wildly different or even conflicting discourses within its ideological universe, are often overlooked by researchers with the habit of examining Chinese social phenomena under a state/market dichotomous framework.

Ultimately, however, it needs to be repeated that in a country such as China, where the omnipotent state takes every aspect of life under its direct control, no ideology, be it gender, racial or market, can ever enjoy truly independent discursive space. This is why contextual analysis is not only important but indispensable for discussing gender issues in contemporary Chinese society. The fact that this study is focused on the roles new technology plays in the formation of ‘female identity with Chinese characteristics’ should in no way indicate that technology is of utmost importance; its role is at most an auxiliary one in the face of overwhelming state discourse. An interviewee named Yuexiu was piercing in her observation: ‘The internet is not an asylum for women.’ Indeed, a clear line between individual empowerment and the omnipresent state discourse in China does not exist. The fact that the internet and social media have played a large role in facilitating social change and the evolution of mainstream values in China can be attributed to the Chinese belief in the totality of the world. In this particular sociocultural context, it is both unrealistic and wrong to completely separate personal experience from the profound influence the state exerts on the individual. On the contrary, we are witnessing the shoots of a new type of digital feminism deeply rooted in the distinctly Chinese experience of 73 young, highly educated women leading cosmopolitan lives in international metropolises. The future of this uniquely Chinese phenomenon demands continued scholarly attention.