China's queer influencers thrive despite growing LGBTQ+ censorship

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Amid China’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights, queer influencers are using creative strategies, subtle hashtags and coded language to stay one step ahead of social media censors and provide much-needed support to the community.

A decade ago, LGBTQ+ communities were gaining greater visibility and acceptance in China’s traditionally conservative society. That tide has turned under President Xi Jinping, whose government is tightening controls on Pride events, restricting queer representation on TV and pressuring internet sites and platforms to scrub LGBTQ-friendly content.

In one chat group for gay kids and their parents, a distressed young man recently confided he had not heard from his mother since coming out to her a month earlier.

“Don’t worry,” replied another user on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese photo and video sharing app similar to Instagram. “Give her some time to digest. This is normal.”

The next day, the creator of the chat group interrupted with a sudden warning: Someone had reported the group for violating platform rules.

It was unclear who flagged the group and why. Xiaohongshu prohibits content that “disrupts social order,” “undermines social stability” or “violates public order and morals.”

Shi Zhujiao, the group’s host, dashed out a link to a new channel. “This chat could disappear at any time,” she wrote.

Queer influencers have become one of the remaining bastions of LGBTQ+ representation on the Chinese internet. They walk a fine line between supporting queer expression and advocating for LGBTQ+ rights. The latter could land them in the government’s crosshairs.

“Of course I worry about being banned. It hasn’t been easy, running this account for two years,” Shi, 59, said in an interview. Content creators are accustomed to such uncertainty, she added, because government directives tend to be vague and unevenly enforced. “No one knows where the line actually is.”

After her daughter Teddy came out to her in 2018, Shi started volunteering at Trueself, an LGBTQ+ nonprofit in China, answering calls from troubled queer children and their families. A few years later, she created her own social media channel, where she shares with the more than 8,500 followers her own difficult process of accepting her daughter’s sexual orientation.

“I just thought talking to people one-on-one was too slow,” she said.

Public space and support for LGBTQ+ communities are narrowing in China.

ShanghaiPRIDE, which started hosting LGBTQ+ events in 2009, canceled all future activities in 2020.

The next year, China banned “ sissy men and other abnormal aesthetics” from broadcast television.

The ubiquitous social messaging app WeChat has shut down LGBTQ+ accounts from university students and nongovernmental organizations, including the Beijing channel for Trueself, where Shi volunteers. The Shanghai channel remains active. Trueself declined to comment.

In the last several weeks, authorities banned performances by China’s most famous transgender celebrity, Jin Xing, which some suspected was due to her featuring a rainbow flag in a previous show.

As the government has cracked down on social activism, state media coverage has also declined. Articles about LGBTQ+ issues, which reached an annual peak of 867 in 2015, fell to 240 last year, according to the China Rainbow Media Awards, an advocacy group.

However, consumers and creators of queer content have found ways to thrive online through coded language or other censorship workarounds, according to Wang Shuaishuai, a lecturer at the University of Manchester who studies queer representation in Chinese media.

For example, when China banned TV shows depicting same-sex kissing or hand-holding in 2016, producers found they could use shots of eye contact between characters to communicate intimacy.

Livestreams hawking products to LGBTQ+ consumers may still present as queer, such as referring to a male host as “big sister,” or dancing with chrysanthemums in a nod to a Chinese slang term for some gay men. On Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, sexually suggestive hip thrusts may be allowed if the dancer’s pants are covered by a black box.

“Queer content creators can always find new ways of expression,” said Wang, who has interviewed Douyin content moderators in his research. “For internet and culture regulators, they don’t know how to moderate this type of content either…. Sometimes they experiment with these censorship rules themselves.”

The expansion of queer online communities has allowed Li Shuning, an estate planning lawyer based in Shenzhen, to reach more LGBTQ+ clients through social media.

In December, Li started a Xiaohongshu account marketing herself as a “Rainbow Lawyer.” Now, she estimates that about half her clients are LGBTQ+, most of them finding her via online channels. Because same-sex marriage is not legal in China, she advises couples on other ways to obtain spousal rights such as inheritance and guardianship for medical procedures.

From online comments, she gauges that society is broadly more accepting toward LGBTQ+ people than decades ago. And although organized advocacy has become rarer, there are more types of support channels online, she said, if you know where to look.

“It’s available on social media, but it takes a bit more effort. You just need to actively search for it,” Li said.

Before Wen Jianghan, a 30-year-old tech worker living in Beijing, came out to her family this year, she watched videos similar to those that Shi, Teddy’s mom, shared online. She showed them to her parents and was relieved when they accepted her relationship with her girlfriend, Zhang Shumei.

She and Zhang, a 26-year-old graduate student in nursing, now post pictures from their own lives on Xiaohongshu to about 2,500 followers, hoping to help other young queer people come out to their families. “We want to show a positive side of lesbians to people,” Zhang said.

The pair like to search other queer content for coded hashtags to use on their own account, such as “lala,” which is slang for “lesbian,” or the Chinese words for “roommates” or “besties.” Another popular hashtag they use is “address book,” a near homonym for “homosexual” in Chinese, which has also spawned the offshoot keywords “female notebook” or “male notebook.”

“We can only rely on specific tags to find the content or people we’re looking for. Beyond that, there’s no way to connect with an organization because such organizations don’t exist domestically,” Wen said.

But given the ephemeral nature of China’s censorship apparatus, those tags can quickly evolve.

In April 2019, a community hashtag for the popular gay keyword “les” disappeared from Weibo, an X-like microblogging platform. Another forum with the hashtag “le” popped up in its place, where lesbians share relationship problems and look for girlfriends. It’s grown to 180,000 followers.