In mid-2020, despite the COVID pandemic and years of tightening space for civil society, China’s LGBTQ movement was still making strides. While most pride celebrations around the world were canceled due to the pandemic, Shanghai Pride held nine days of festivities, including a “Pride Run” and “Pride Job Fair.” News that a transgender woman had successfully sued her employer for discrimination went viral on Weibo, reaching 380 million views. And, in the lead-up to the “Two Sessions,” the annual meeting of China’s main legislative and consultative assemblies, state media sympathetically interviewed a lesbian mother who was fighting for custody of her children with the help of LGBTQ rights groups.
Regular setbacks and collisions with state censorship and repression notwithstanding, the virtuous cycle of advocacy and popular discussion—long central to many LGBTQ activists’ theory of change—appeared to have been working. A government survey in 2010 found that about 70 percent of Guangzhou youth did not accept homosexuality. By 2018, that number had dropped by almost half. Disapproval rates among the overall public remained high, perhaps as high as 75 percent, but the feeling of forward momentum was palpable. A UNDP report, penned by a Peking University professor, concluded that social attitudes toward LGBTQ people in China were “in transition” and “could achieve rapid and profound change.”
But, in 2020, events took a turn. Soon after wrapping up Pride Month festivities, Shanghai Pride announced it was ending its 12-year run. Organizers soon revealed the reason for the closure was that they no longer felt safe under intensifying harassment and threats from authorities. For many in China’s LGBTQ community, the news was gut-wrenching not only for the sheer sense of loss, but also because the takedown of the flagship celebration—which had once won plaudits from the Global Times and China Daily for promoting inclusion—portended a menacing sea change.
State pressure on LGBTQ advocates, which had been steadily increasing for years, kicked into high gear. In the following months and years, summons from security agents became more frequent and aggressive. Authorities ordered LGBTQ groups to cancel activities and ordered philanthropic foundations to cut LGBTQ projects. Media coverage of LGBTQ issues fell, and more and more LGBTQ-related accounts and content disappeared from social media. Dozens of LGBTQ organizations closed under the squeeze. In November 2021, police made the closure of LGBT Rights Advocacy China a condition for the release of its founder from detention. In May 2023, the Beijing LGBT Center announced its closure due to “force majeure”—a euphemism for state coercion.
Explanations for why authorities launched this broad and coordinated crackdown remain speculative. Maybe the LGBTQ movement’s success at mobilization—like when advocates galvanized approximately one hundred thousand people to call on lawmakers to legalize same-sex marriage—unnerved control-obsessed officials. Or perhaps, even without such high-profile campaigns, the LGBTQ movement would have been next on the authorities’ civil society chopping block anyway, right after the labor and feminist activists. In the mix also seemed to be the old official view that queerness was a kind of social contagion from the West that could be curbed through state control. Bans on “sissy men” in entertainment, “boys’ love” dramas, “non-mainstream views on marriage and love,” and rainbow-themed clothes at concerts echoed this attitude.
Amidst the crackdown over the last several years, heightened censorship and suppression have stifled the LGBTQ movement’s capacity for collective action. One activist told me, “Now, when a homophobic incident happens, it does not give rise to a wave of advocacy like before.” He referred to how this past February another psychology textbook that labeled homosexuality as a mental illness was exposed online. In the past, similar incidents have trended on social media and led to lobbying the publisher, filing complaints, and even lawsuits. But now, he said, people are “too atomized” and “too scared” to respond.
The drop in media coverage has been stark. In 2020, when state media interviewed the lesbian mother whose same-sex partner absconded with their children, the news’ Weibo hashtag received 390 million views. But this summer when the case finally settled after years of court delay and unwillingness to proceed to trial—with the plaintiff mother obtaining visitation rights to only one of the children—media outlets in mainland China did not report the result. Analysis by the China Rainbow Media Awards shows that between 2015 and 2023, media coverage of LGBTQ-related issues fell by 72 percent to only 240 news pieces, with the large majority being about HIV/AIDS.
Atomization has also hindered the ability to help people in need. Another activist shared that earlier this year a group chat alerted her to an incident in which parents sent their transgender child to an abusive boot camp for “correction,” a situation that is tragically common. “Before, an organization could show up and extend a hand,” she said. In fact, in 2016, activists rescued a gay man from a mental hospital where he was being forcibly treated for “sexual preference disorder” and later helped him win a lawsuit against the hospital. “Nowadays, I don’t think there are many activists that can intervene,” she lamented. “This means that LGBTQ individuals lack community support, especially from the institutional level.”
And while LGBTQ advocacy is in retreat, anti-LGBTQ voices, often nationalist influencers who stir up fear and anger toward perceived enemies, enjoy relative freedom and even state endorsement. This lopsidedness threatens to reverse the virtuous cycle into a vicious one. Over time, unchecked anti-LGBTQ voices and policies could erode public support and further fuel stigma.
However, many advocates think that the LGBTQ movement’s momentum—though weakened—is still too great to drive back easily. Take support among youth as an example. A recently published survey by the University of California, Los Angeles’ Williams Institute that skewed young (and, admittedly, coastal and well-educated) found that, even several years into the crackdown, only 8 percent of respondents felt that LGBTQ people should not be accepted by society. As importantly, LGBTQ individuals still have many ways to keep building visibility and support. These channels may not be as splashy as social media campaigns and court cases, but they can subtly keep social attitudes moving in the right direction.
One advocate pointed out that more people than ever in China now know they have LGBTQ family, friends, classmates, and colleagues. “These personal connections are much more powerful than forbidding rainbow-themed clothing at concerts. Such bans will set us back one step, but we will all go impact the people around us. This will bring us forward two steps,” he said.
Also, censors have been less likely to take down LGBTQ-related content that is more personal and quotidian. An advocate shared that after their organization was forced to close, “I started scrolling on my phone more, and saw how so many LGBTQ people are talking about their daily lives and their stories. It made me rethink what activism could be.” The advocate raised China’s feminist movement as an analogous example. It also went through a period of repression-induced “de-organization,” but feminist discourse has burgeoned, both online and off.
And even some LGBTQ advocacy victories are still possible, such as in August when an activist discovered a so-called “conversion therapy” clinic’s promotional articles on WeChat and rallied people to file enough complaints to get the articles taken down. The same month, a Hebei court heard a case in which a transgender woman sued a psychiatric hospital for forcibly confining her for 97 days and subjecting her to electroshock therapy. A state media outlet, The Paper, covered the story, though its visibility on social media was only a small fraction of that of previous LGBTQ rights advocacy cases.
Finally, LGBTQ advocates and communities still have some space to thrive. While more established organizations and activists that are believed to be on government blacklists can hardly move without security agents noticing, smaller informal groups have had better luck holding activities. Similarly, many LGBTQ clubs and bars are under pressure and several have closed—like Shanghai’s storied lesbian bar, Roxie, which was forced to shutter in June—but many queer spaces ranging from cafes to raves continue to serve their local communities.
LGBTQ advocates are also finding their way into various other coalitions that pursue goals that are not explicitly LGBTQ-related but still benefit the community, like promoting equal employment opportunity and the reproductive rights of unmarried women. Working on broader topics helps desensitize their work and build alliances across different groups, sectors, and institutions, and sometimes even with people who can impact policymaking. One activist believes that “some people in the system are quietly helping,” for example by removing gender-specific language in policies that would implicitly bar same-sex couples from certain rights and benefits.
It is unclear if the Party-state seeks to reach further down to cut off these surviving advocacy channels. Much will depend on whether it determines it has a problem with LGBTQ activism, LGBTQ visibility, and/or LGBTQ people. The five advocates I interviewed think that the hostility is concentrated on activism, and that the queerness-as-contagion view is fading with older generations. However, several worried that increasing geopolitical tensions and domestic securitization could inflame prejudice and suspicion toward LGBTQ people.
Rather than fatalism, though, uncertainty seems to have cultivated an attitude of trying what one can when one can. Advocates have also experienced many unexpected swings in policy before—like the vanishing of zero-COVID—and expressed an appreciation that developments can sometimes surprise on the upside too.
After all, one advocate told me, “In China, things change all the time.”