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versity of Michigan who researches
feminism in China.
“Around five minutes after we pub-
lished the notice, we received a phone
call from the office asking us to delete
it,” Cai says. “The reason given was
that Professor Wang was not in a good
relationship with the university,” he
adds.
According to Cai, the Committee
Office at Fudan University was not
involved in the society’s WeChat ac-
count suspension on July 6, indicat-
ing the decision was not made by the
school, but by WeChat instead.
“They (the office) had no idea
about the incident when we first ap-
proached them to ask what had hap-
WeChat posts of Zhihe Society pened after being suspended,” Cai
says.
message saying that our account ‘has But their move was under the of- After two months of “disappear-
violated rules of the Administration of fice’s close control. “They (the office) ance”, Zhihe Society resumed opera-
Internet News Information Services’,” will try hard not to approve any of our tion on WeChat in September 2021,
Cai recalls. offline events. Prevention of COV- using a back-up account created in
Cai says the team of core members ID-19 outbreak was always cited as 2017. In a post on September 10, the
decided not to make an appeal. “We the reason or should we say their ex- association introduced what they
thought that was no use,” he adds. cuse,” Cai says. have done in the past two months and
Established in 2005, Zhihe Society The society’s main social media ac- called for students to join them at the
has been officially registered as a for- count on WeChat was also under sur- beginning of the school year.
mal student association under Fudan veillance. The public account shared a
University’s Youth League Committee notice in January 2021 about an up- Voice or Noise
Office. “We are one of the first LGBT- coming sharing session on feminism Guo Lifu, a PhD student at the
related student associations recog- at Fudan University featuring Wang University of Tokyo, who has been
nized by the university,” Cai says. Zheng, associate professor at the Uni- researching LGBT+ movement and

“

Feminism and LGBT+ thoughts are indeed imported to

China from western societies. These are not included in

the system of the China Communist Party, symbolizing

democratization that they fear.

”