A group of Chinese activists planned to hand out stickers for a protest in March against sexual harassment on public transportation. One of the stickers reads: “Catch the sexual harassers. Get them, cops!”

After 37 days in detention, Wu Rongrong was released on probation and sent home on a flight from Beijing to Hangzhou. The feminist activist said she had been prevented from taking medicine for her hepatitis B while in prison and was provided no bed for the first few days.

Now she was on her way home, accompanied by four police officers. The first thing she wanted to do was spend time with her 4-year-old son, who had celebrated his 4th birthday while she was in jail charged with creating a disturbance.

Wu is one of five women who were arrested for planning to hand out stickers on International Women’s Day on March 8 to speak out against sexual harassment on public transportation. One of the stickers read, “Catch the sexual harassers. Get them, cops!” But Wu and her colleagues never got to hand out the stickers — they were arrested the night before.



“[The police] told me it’s not about our work on feminism,” Wu said in an interview over Skype. “They said they support women’s rights.”

The detention of the five women spurred protests outside mainland China, with #FreeTheFive trending in many languages. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted about the five, calling their arrest “inexcusable.”



In recent years, demonstrations led by civil rights groups to bring attention to issues of gender equality and domestic violence have grown in China. But the arrest of the five women in March was one of the most provocative for a civil rights group in recent years, and it has stoked fears that China is launching a new crackdown on activism, which many activists and scholars until now thought was only targeting political dissidents.



Wu’s activism started in college, when she often volunteered in social work, helping migrant workers by taking care of their children and raising awareness about HIV/AIDS. She later started working for Yirenping, a leading civil rights group in China, and other rights organizations, during which time her work was focused mainly on discrimination against women. In 2008, she led a national campaign on behalf of children who were rejected by kindergartens for carrying hepatitis B, which is not uncommon in China, where more than 120 million people carry the disease. Two years later, a new regulation prohibited testing incoming students for hepatitis B. Last August, Wu started a women’s center, Weizhiming, in Hangzhou.

After the women intending to distribute the stickers were arrested, in a late-night raid in March, both Weizhiming and Yirenping's offices were locked by the police and have had to halt their operations. People who spoke up for the five feminists or worked at the center were barred from leaving the country. At customs, they were informed that they are criminal suspects under an ongoing investigation. One of those barred from leaving was Li Fangping, a lawyer who worked with Yirenping, who was stopped when he tried to leave Shenzhen for Hong Kong in April.

“They are released but not free,” said Wang Zheng, an associate professor of women’s studies at the University of Michigan. “They are still regarded as criminal suspects.”

The government's actions against the women are a serious blow to the country's nascent women's movement. Since 1995, there have been 15 institutes for women's studies founded in China, and more than 40 national organizations devoted to women's issues ranging from workplace equality to domestic violence, according to research by Columbia Global Centers in Beijing. While these numbers may seem small for a country with a huge population like China, they represent a dramatic shift considering the severe controls the Chinese state places on civil society and activism.

The feminist movement first broke through to the wider society in 2012 with the performance art piece “Occupying Men’s Room,” a campaign to get more toilets for women in public restrooms. The performance was put together by a group of women, one of whom was Li Tingting, a feminist college student who was unhappy about the one-to-one ratio of public restroom facilities for males and females. The symbolic event led many municipal governments to build more toilets in women’s rooms.