Fighting on Behalf of China’s Women — From the United States
In September 2015, when the Chinese government and the United Nations co-organized the Global Leaders’ Meeting on Gender Equality
and Women’s Empowerment in New York and President Xi Jinping made a state visit to the United States, we held a photography exhibit called Aboveground: 40 Moments of Transformation near the U.N. headquarters, documenting the performance art and other actions of Chinese feminists.
Ms. Lu, 45, a former journalist at the state-run China Women’s News
and founder of the influential online platform Women’s Voices, had come to New York from Beijing on March 5, 2015, to attend a meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
Among them were Lu Pin and more than 20 other Chinese feminists who live in the United States and belong to the Chinese Feminism Collective, a new nongovernmental organization to "support feminist activities
that are facing sustained political pressure in China." Using a WeChat account, they sent reports from the Washington march back to China.
In an interview, Ms. Lu, who was appointed a visiting scholar at Columbia University
and is working on a master’s degree in gender studies at the State University of New York at Albany, talked about opening a new front for Chinese feminism in the United States.
In the second half of 2016, an independent feminist theater group began meeting in New York with the aim of performing "Our Vaginas, Ourselves." This was originally created
by several young feminists in Beijing who were inspired by the American work "The Vagina Monologues" to make a similar examination of Chinese sex and gender issues.
In 2015, the case of the Feminist Five attracted the support of feminists around
the world, which made me appreciate the importance of international solidarity.
