On Girls' Day He Protested the Boys' Crude Love Banners — and Found the World Uglier Than the Banners

Nearly two months have passed since March 7, and Chen Yu still can't work out why one photograph set off so much that nobody could have predicted.

March 7 is Girls' Day, and on that day banners bloom across some Chinese university campuses — the boys use them to declare their love, collectively, to the women in their department, their major or their class. Think of it as a prank among the boys, one that now and then reaches for shock value.

At Shandong University's Weihai campus, the banners that day were the usual fare.

"The signal from your eyes has my heart beating at high frequency — to all the girls of Communications Class 1, Class of 2016."

"Too busy pining for beauties to study mechanics, heat, optics and electricity — the School of Physics is full of women who make fish sink and geese fall. Declared by the handsome men of Applied Class 1, Class of 2017."

"Class rules: 1. In this class the girls are always right. 2. If a girl is wrong, see rule one. — Happy Girls' Day to all the girls of Software Class 2, Class of 2016."

In front of every banner, students held up their phones to take photos and post them.

At noon that day, Chen Yu saw a photo of one banner on QQ Zone that made him uncomfortable. He asked a few classmates; they felt the same. The banner read: "Your children can have 26 or 27 godfathers — to all the girls of Communications Class 1, Class of 2017."

Around 4 p.m., Chen Yu and three friends went to stand under the banner. Three of them faced the camera making a "shush" gesture and holding up a sign that read "This is sexual harassment"; another classmate took the picture.

Chen Yu covered his own face and the faces of the two others with orange cat heads, then posted the photo to his WeChat Moments.

Trouble followed.

Chen Yu paid attention to gender and LGBT issues, and he said so wherever he happened to be: if he heard a teacher tell a class that "homosexuality is a disease," he would write the teacher a letter of protest. He also belonged to an interest group on gender, which surveyed how long the lines outside the women's toilets on campus were, asked college students what they thought of sexual minorities, and staged a script reading of The Vagina Monologues. In past activities Chen Yu had shot videos, held up placards for photos — he had tried every format.

This time was no different.

Soon after Chen Yu put the photo on Moments, Lü Pin, founding editor-in-chief of Feminist Voices, saw it circulating in other people's Moments and reposted it to her personal Weibo.

That account was not especially active and had only 57,000 followers, but the post took off: more than 4,291 comments in under 24 hours. It now has over 7,000, the most of anything she has ever posted.

"That day there were plenty of banners that treated women as entertainment, and real feminist voices were rare. Plenty of people commented on those banners online, but nobody stepped in on the spot. Tsinghua University once hung a banner that said 'tighten up in your third year and you can loosen up in your fourth' — people were angry about that too, and still nobody went there to protest. That is exactly why so many people reposted Chen Yu's photo: he turned a spoken criticism into an action, and put it where people could see it," Lü Pin said.

Lü Pin thought the photo spread — her own repost included — mainly because it held two opposing positions in one frame. Anyone who saw it was likely to judge it and, out of habit, "pick a side."

Meanwhile, Chen Yu saw a good number of classmates on campus reposting his photo on QQ Zone, and then found the picture being argued over well beyond Weibo, on comment platforms like Zhihu, Douban and Hupu.

As the protest photo became a target, Chen Yu's friends grew uneasy. Support was plentiful, but so were the attacks: that the banner had nothing to do with sexual harassment; that it was their own minds that were filthy; that they were "fishing for fame," "damaging Shandong University's reputation"... And then came the last stage of online violence: doxxing.

Before all this, Chen Yu and his friends had planned a flash mob for International Women's Day on March 8, and had rehearsed a whole week for it. But with opinion around the protest photo boiling and the threat of doxxing in front of them, they judged the risk too high and called it off.

Chen Yu stayed calm at this point, though it surprised him that the argument moved from sexual harassment to loyalty to the school. Even now he says he had no expectations about the online reaction when he took the photo. "Because I never thought this would get anyone's attention." Nothing similar he had done before ever had.

Among the many responses, Chen Yu noticed classmates on campus who wanted him to apologize in public. He thought he had done nothing wrong and owed no apology. What he wanted instead was to answer the doubts netizens had raised in a public statement, and to explain further the motives and reasons behind the action.

On March 8, International Women's Day, Chen Yu and his friends opened a Weibo account called "Shanwei Feminist Banner" and posted their only entry: "Hello everyone, I am one of the three students in the photo. Since some people have called for us to be doxxed, and to avoid unnecessary trouble, we're sorry to say we are staying anonymous. Below is our formal response to this controversy." Beneath that, apart from tagging a few accounts they thought might care about the issue, was the open letter they had written through the night.

The letter set out how the controversy began, then sorted the online comments into four questions and answered each: 1. Was that banner sexual harassment or not? 2. Was our way of exposing it in public appropriate? 3. Going further, how should college students spend Women's Day? 4. Further still, do we need feminism at all, and how should feminism be argued for?

The letter did explain clearly what the three of them were thinking and why, and it gave a good deal of space to what actually constitutes sexual harassment. "Some people say these boys meant well. I'm sorry, but whether something is sexual harassment depends on words and acts, on the result — not on intention."

The letter also shows that the anger online had unsettled Chen Yu and the two others. At the start they made a point of saying, "I love Shanwei, but I love the truth more," and later added: "Some netizens have aimed their criticism at the school, which is not what we wanted to see. What we hope outsiders see is that our school has an atmosphere of open debate and the ability to correct its mistakes — those are things that can set an example for everyone, rather than overreacting to criticism and trying only to cancel it out."

The statement drew attention fast once it went up, gathering 17,000 reposts and 7.43 million views — and none of that reduced the anger. Some netizens left threats under the Weibo post: "If you dare stir up trouble again, are you sure you'll live to see next Friday? You think we don't know who you are? Which class, which person, what name — it's all been reported. If the school doesn't protect you, you won't be far from suicide."

Still, Chen Yu said plainly that posting the response left him much easier in his mind. Part of the reason was that the argument had until then been penned inside QQ Zone on campus; once it moved to a public platform he did start to see more discussion of the issue itself, some of it constructive — a closer look at the definition of sexual harassment, for instance. Some people also began saying in the comments that even if they disagreed with what Chen Yu and the others were protesting, they could state their views and still show respect.

Reading the replies under her own Weibo post, Lü Pin judged the split between supporters and opponents to be roughly even, which was not a particularly bad outcome. "At least on my Weibo, the people opposing him didn't get the upper hand."

Lü Pin also noticed a great many alumni flooding in, and they kept attacking under every one of her posts other than that one. "They even barge into unrelated posts — that is harassment."

From start to finish, Chen Yu never imagined the photo would bring charges of defaming the school. His friends, reading one comment after another that threatened their safety, grew frightened, and stopped going out in the clothes they wore in the photo.

It was not over. At 2 p.m. on March 9, the day after the open letter went up, a message came from Chen Yu's counselor, inviting him to a talk about the banner photo and the statement. Chen Yu was asleep in his dorm at the time; around 4 p.m. the counselor came to the dorm to ask about it.

The talks about the incident ran three days in all, from March 9 to March 11, each one longer than three hours, and two of them over the weekend.

The counselor explained why he had come: he had already seen negative comments online about the school and about Chen Yu, and he hoped Chen Yu would not post anything new, so that opinion would not spin out of control later. He suggested deleting the statement. That day Chen Yu agreed only to stop posting further statements for the time being; as for deleting the public statement, he saw no need.

Over the next two days of talks, Chen Yu was told that the gender-related activities and interest groups he had taken part in broke school rules, and that the statement had reached "level-two public opinion incident" status, so the school had to deal with it — and that if the Weibo post stayed up, the police might get involved.

On the third day the counselor called Chen Yu's parents, who were more anxious still; they wanted him to take the school's advice and delete the post at once.

After the three sides had gone back and forth many times, Chen Yu asked the school to give him until 9 p.m. that night to think. Before then, he and his friends talked over whether the statement should come down. Weighing everything, they decided to delete it.

Counting from March 7, when the photo first appeared, this was day five.

Beyond Chen Yu and the others in the photo, the whole affair also caught Zhou Han's attention.

At first Zhou Han thought it a small matter, but the classmates around him reacted fiercely, saying flatly in group chats that Chen Yu and the others were smearing the school, and planning to dox them.

That made Zhou Han curious about where the thing was going. He quickly got in touch with Chen Yu for an interview, and on March 12 published a report titled The Young People Beneath the Girls' Day Banner: Grandstanding or Speaking Out Bravely?

Zhou Han said he believed Chen Yu and the others had a real target, and also that when people meet an opinion they don't share, they may question motives, but should argue it out rationally.

While reporting, Zhou Han tried several times to reach students from the class that had hung the banner. They told him their class monitor and Youth League branch secretary had already held a meeting and told everyone not to mention the matter again; one of the students even suggested Zhou Han stay out of it too.

On the morning of March 13, a counselor called Zhou Han in for a talk as well, pointed out where his article was not rigorous enough, and asked him to delete it.

He deleted it that same day. He thought the piece, written in a hurry, did have problems — and although he didn't think deleting it was strictly necessary, he considered the trouble it might cause if it spread widely, and took it down.

According to Zhou Han, after his talk the class monitor and Youth League branch secretary of his own class were called in too, and told that a sensitive article like this should have been reported in advance.

Zhou Han had in fact realized his article might be misread, so after publishing the report he put out a clarifying statement — which was later deleted along with the rest.

With so many of the statements gone and nothing further happening, it all looked finished. But the talk online did not stop: on Zhihu, Douban, Hupu and QQ Zone, discussion of the incident kept piling up. Chen Yu thought discussion itself was fine; the many comments attacking people personally left him baffled.

From March 7 on, Chen Yu could not sleep for a long stretch, because the whole banner affair had turned into something nobody could predict. Through it he kept trying to work out why a simple protest against a banner would set off a storm like this, and where the knot at the center of it lay.

Even so, Chen Yu has never once regretted raising this protest, or writing the statement about how he sees sexual harassment.

While he was talking with the school, Chen Yu suggested it use the moment to teach students about sexual harassment and to say publicly that it opposes it. In the end, keeping opinion from running away mattered more than the thing he considered most important.

Now, nearly two months after the Girls' Day banner incident, most of the students caught up in it have gone quiet. Even the other two people in the photo say they never want to bring it up again.

(At the request of the interviewees, Chen Yu and Zhou Han are both pseudonyms.)

Cover image courtesy of Chen Yu