Xianzi, 25, and the 91 Days Before October 25

July 26, 2018 is the day Xianzi posted on WeChat Moments accusing Zhu Jun of sexual harassment. On October 25, Zhu Jun's defamation suit went to a closed-door exchange of evidence at the Haidian District People's Court in Beijing.

Xianzi leaned back into the aisle seat in the first row of car No. 5, tired. She has big eyes and short hair. She is 1.63 meters tall and weighs under 45 kilograms, and the huge black suitcase parked in front of her made her look smaller still.

The high-speed train from Beijing to Wuhan takes about five and a half hours; it would arrive close to 11 p.m. Xianzi had brought a book of film theory but never opened it — it stayed pressed under her backpack. Most of the time she held her phone, switching between Weibo and WeChat. After boarding she posted a piece on Weibo called "How to Protect Yourself From Sexual Harassment", which passed a thousand reposts almost at once. A Reuters reporter asked her over WeChat whether the video interview could come before CNN's. When Xianzi said yes, the reporter thanked her in slightly stiff Chinese: "Awesome!"

This was October 2. Xianzi was going back to Wuhan to rest for a few days. A week earlier, on September 25, the Haidian court had called to tell her that she and Maishao (real name Xu Chao), who had reposted her account of the harassment to Weibo, were being sued by Zhu Jun. That same day she filed a countersuit at the Haidian court, arguing that Zhu Jun's sexual harassment had violated her personal rights.

She filed it that afternoon at close to 3 p.m. Then she posted a selfie to her Weibo account "Xianzi and Her Friends" — standing under a tree, smiling. The photo and its caption are still pinned to the top of the account today: "Still a bit angry. This is Xianzi. Hello everyone, time to get ready for battle." It has 14,000 reposts, more than 6,000 comments and 56,000 likes.

1. The Incident

As many reports have recounted, Xianzi's encounter with Zhu Jun took place four years ago, on June 10, during her internship on the CCTV program Art Life (《艺术人生》). She was a junior in the directing department of an arts college. Afterward, with the support of Chen Shiting, who taught her film history course, she went to the police: blood drawn, fingerprints taken, a statement recorded, witness testimony collected. Chen Shiting had made a point of bringing a lawyer along when she went with Xianzi to report it. For the media and the public who returned to the case four years later, the presence of a lawyer and the police at the time did a great deal to make the account credible.

By then Xianzi's urge to talk about what had happened was used up. What set it off again this year was a post on WeChat Moments on July 26, in which a "jiejie" — an older sister — who works in media described being sexually assaulted. "Jiejie" is what Xianzi calls the older women she trusts, though it doesn't always mean she is close to them.

It took her more than three hours to write her own account, and by the time she posted it to Moments it was 5:17 a.m. A friend she and Maishao have in common left a comment asking whether she could repost it; Xianzi wrote back "sure" and fell asleep. She had booked a carpool for 9:30 that morning, planning to go to Gubei Water Town with her boyfriend and a friend who was staying over. Staying up late made her oversleep, and what happened next is almost funny in hindsight: she cried out of regret while her boyfriend and her friend hurried to comfort her. Only after they finally got another car and set off did she find that her account was being reposted all over Weibo — and just as quickly blocked or deleted. Among those reposting it were the journalist Luo Changping and other influential accounts. Xianzi didn't know any of them; after asking around, she learned that Maishao had been the first to put it on Weibo. Then she turned off her phone and let herself enjoy the trip.

But things went further than she had imagined. Since April 2017 there had already been a string of #MeToo incidents and public arguments: the suicide of Lin Yihan, author of Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise; the Aliosha sexual assault case at the Beijing Film Academy; the accusation of sexual assault against Chen Xiaowu, a Cheung Kong Scholar at Beihang University; the suicide of Tao Chongyuan, a graduate student at Wuhan University of Technology; a high school girl in Gansu who jumped to her death after being molested by her homeroom teacher; and accusations of sexual assault against the public-interest campaigners Lei Chuang and Deng Fei.

Set against those, Xianzi's accusation against Zhu Jun was distinctive: she was one of the very few people who went to the police right after it happened and had a case formally opened; Zhu Jun is a public figure; and on August 15, Zhu Jun's law firm, Beijing Xingquan, sued the original Weibo posters (Maishao and Xianzi) along with users who had reposted them, at the Haidian District People's Court in Beijing — which meant that the argument over women's rights, judicial fairness and free speech would, for the first time, be conducted formally through legal procedure.

On August 16, Sina Weibo offered Xianzi a new VIP account on its own initiative and has kept renewing the membership without being asked. The account has now been running for 71 days and has 110,000 followers. One wave of media outlets reached Xianzi through the "jiejie" and Maishao, hoping she would describe in detail what had happened back then. After she sued Zhu Jun on September 25 and showed her face on Weibo, a second wave of interview requests arrived.

2. The Media

Interviews leave Xianzi exhausted, though she says again and again that they are necessary. She doesn't think of herself as a public figure, even though she chose to stand in the spotlight.

Distrusting institutions of power, she came to trust the press more. A Caixin reporter introduced her to Wang Fei, her current lawyer. Other reports laid out the sequence of events and shaped public discussion, and inevitably also became evidence in Zhu Jun's defamation suit. "I have my own purpose in giving interviews too — I want this case to get some attention. Take that child-snatching case in Fengtai District a while back: if the media hadn't paid attention, they probably wouldn't have investigated carefully and given an explanation in the end."

Maishao screens the media for Xianzi. She works at a nonprofit now, and before that spent five years as a reporter, first at Caijing and then at Caixin. Even after her careful filtering, the number and length of the interviews the two of them give is still startling.

September 28 was one of the more punishing days after Xianzi sued Zhu Jun and showed her face on Weibo. That morning she drank Heytea with a New York Times reporter at Chaoyang Joy City and talked for more than four hours. Then the two of them went to Caixin's office in Sanlitun. What happened there included a video interview of nearly three hours and more than an hour of photographs, finishing at six or seven in the evening, after which they had dinner together. "By the time I got home I was so tired I nearly cried. My brain was worn out, I just wanted to sleep, I thought I was going to collapse," she said, half joking.

Some outlets cared only about the details readers would find interesting, like "where exactly did Zhu Jun touch you." Others fixed on her dealings with the police and other state bodies. "They kept asking about being crushed by power and things like that, trying to get me to make the conflict sound extreme." Facing the same questions over and over, Xianzi at one point thought about recording her answers so she wouldn't have to put them into words again every time.

Most of the questions came from goodwill. Most interviewers were women, with the occasional man, and Xianzi noticed a small difference between them: women reporters paid more attention to how she felt, men to the facts themselves. Not long after she gave her statement at the police station on July 30, People magazine came to her home to interview and photograph her. It was the first time in four years that talking about the Zhu Jun case made her cry. "The reporter, a jiejie, cried with me. Maybe it was because it was only a few days after the statement, and I was facing a woman I could trust, and talking about why I had to keep at this — I let my guard down."

Xu Kai, Maishao's lawyer, remembers that the first time he met Xianzi the same subject made her cry: "I remember her saying, 'I just want to know whether, in this country, a man who touches a girl without her consent faces any legal consequence. If he doesn't, I want the law to tell me that too.'"

Words meant kindly sometimes left Xianzi frightened or dizzy over things that hadn't happened. On the day of the Gubei Water Town trip, an older schoolmate called to say she shouldn't go out alone — gangsters might beat her up. Media contacts kept telling her, "You need to be clear about your goal in doing this." Friends told her to watch out for Maishao, the one who had leaked the story. A university classmate suggested she turn down foreign outlets, "to avoid being used by hostile foreign forces." To check, she asked a friend to consult Feng Yuan, a board member of the China Women's Research Society, and only relaxed a little on hearing that "interviews with credible foreign outlets are fine." Another friend who deals with reporters often told her: "You have to be careful. Sometimes when you tell them you don't want to answer a question, they write it as 'she fell silent when asked this,' and make it sound melodramatic."

Xianzi doesn't like being on guard against people, and she hates the feeling of letting down other people's good intentions. She insists she is easygoing, too lazy to overthink, and rarely suspicious. The voices around her pushed her to learn how to handle the fallout of the case, and they also wore her down.

One sharper conflict came on September 27, in her exchange with a Reuters reporter. She turned down the reporter's request to photograph her, and later found that the reporter had reposted one of her Weibo posts from August 18 to Moments, with the comment: "Once you've come forward, you should have the courage to face the storm."

Xianzi treats this kind of coercive interview request as emotional blackmail. "If you deal with the media often, you have to learn how to say no. Protecting your own feelings is hard, but it's something you have to do — you have to say you're unhappy, and make her see that she can't call someone insufficiently brave every time an interview subject doesn't cooperate."

She doesn't mind arguing with reporters face to face about the case itself. In one interview she and a male reporter spent more than an hour on whether "it was because your voice is too cutesy that men felt desire."

On the eve of the National Day holiday she went from the East Fourth Ring Road to Haidian District for an interview with one outlet. Over four hours, the main interviewer kept asking questions from Zhu Jun's point of view. He couldn't work out why Zhu Jun would do such a thing; he had worked in similar places himself, where there was little private space and mostly public areas; he wondered whether Zhu Jun might not have realized at the time that he was harassing her.

As long as a question starts from goodwill, Xianzi says, she is willing to respect each outlet's own position. "Zhu Jun can't dissect himself, so there's real value in us dissecting him." The two of them ended at a shared conclusion: this was a man spoiled by power.

"Most men who do this — Zhang Wen and Deng Fei included — don't think of it as harm. It probably comes from confidence in their own charm and in the terms they can offer. They're also sure they won't be punished. It's like pouring boiling water on ants or stepping on bugs when we were kids."

This interviewer also raised another possibility: that Zhu Jun may believe that within China's social structure, trading favors is normal, sex included. Xianzi thought that even if so, it would still be wrong.

"Men get this power and these resources faster than women do. They already have the advantage of gender, plus the biases society and the workplace take for granted. If on top of that you take away a woman's body, that's unfair to women and unfair to everyone else. A person's body shouldn't be given a price."

3. Cries for Help on Weibo

Over the National Day holiday, Xianzi took her parents to Tangcheng, the Tang dynasty film set built for Chen Kaige's Legend of the Demon Cat. Whether she got any real quiet is hard to say. On October 7 we met at the Wangjiawan Mall. Our three-hour conversation was broken up several times, sometimes by people involved in other sexual harassment cases asking her opinion, sometimes by interview requests.

Since she opened "Xianzi and Her Friends" on August 16, Xianzi has received more than 30 messages a day about sexual harassment. More than 1,000 private messages are still waiting for a reply. Some are from people who want to talk and unburden themselves; others curse her for no reason — she's chasing fame, she's ugly. One university student wanted her to pay off the 50,000 yuan he owed for luxury goods.

"I've replied to everyone who cursed at me, and there's still a pile of encouraging messages I haven't gotten to," Xianzi said, sticking out her tongue. She learned to type fast from the friends she used to fangirl with, and now that speed has found an unexpected use.

Some people label her a feminist. Xianzi doesn't reject the label, but she doesn't think it's necessary to "split everyone into separate social groups and scatter it all." "You can't say women's rights are protected when there's no free speech, or talk about judicial fairness when women's rights aren't protected, or talk about free speech when the courts aren't fair. To me they're fundamentally the same thing: civil rights, freedom. You can't separate them all and say, 'I'll just do my own bit.' Every part of this society affects every other part, and the meaning of each part is larger than any one group."

When she opened the account, Xianzi's main idea for it was to keep a record. She had expected people would come to unburden themselves, but how common harassment turned out to be still went beyond what she'd expected — and most of it was done by people the victims knew: teachers, doctors, cousins, neighbors. The accounts were full of terrible detail, and some of the people telling them spoke in an agitated, disordered way.

Luo Si, involved in the sexual assault case at the Taihu Midi Music Festival, and Linglinghu'er (below, "Huer"), involved in the sexual assault case against Guangming Daily reporter Zhou Hongshuang, were the two people Xianzi eventually decided, after a lot of back-and-forth on Weibo, to add on WeChat and help where she could.

Xianzi is careful with the word "help": "It's actually very hard to solve their problems in practice. The most I can do is be there for them, or introduce them to my lawyer. The reason I connected with Luo Si and Huer is that they held onto their pain stubbornly. A lot of girls, when this happens to them, want to talk about it once and then let it go. I suggest they use the law to protect themselves, but I won't push them into it, because I can't stay with them to the end. I'll tell them, 'This world will get better,' just to comfort them."

On October 7, less than 20 minutes into the interview, Xianzi looked down at her phone and said: "Someone wants to talk to me for a minute."

Zhou Yi is a deputy general manager of the Midi Music Festival and the leader of the volunteer group Luo Si belonged to. This assault case spread the way Xianzi's had: Luo Si posted her account to WeChat Moments, and a user called "Wo Shi Luosheng" reposted it to Weibo. Unlike Maishao, when "Wo Shi Luosheng" received a lawyer's letter alleging "suspected criminal defamation," this leaker quickly deleted the Weibo posts supporting Luo Si and apologized to Zhou Yi.

People assume the person at the center of a case and the person who leaked it are in the same camp, that the trust between them is tough and the tie close. In fact the relationship has its subtleties. Over the past 91 days, Xianzi and Maishao have met only a few times, mostly because the media asked to interview them together. In their own words, rather than friends they are "comrades fighting side by side, who agree about the same matter and hold similar values."

Luo Si later developed depression. Maishao fell out publicly with "Wo Shi Luosheng" on Weibo, and Xianzi and her boyfriend went with Luo Si — who had rushed from Hangzhou to Beijing to report the assault — on her trips to the police station. September 22 to 24 was the Mid-Autumn Festival, and Luo Si stayed at their home.

Xianzi calls the experience "surreal." The Jiuxianqiao police station the three of them went to sits right next to Taihua Binghe Yuan, the compound where she used to rent — once one of her favorite places in Beijing: close to the 798 Art Zone, two kindergartens, children running around, full of life. But the night they went to the criminal police unit, the officer on duty was hostile, shouting at Luo Si through the glass as though she were simply making trouble. Going back to Jiuxianqiao has felt subtly different since.

Helping other people sometimes became a weight. During the three days Luo Si stayed in her study, Xianzi found she couldn't work at all. Luo Si stayed inside the emotion of the assault the whole time; even when Xianzi tried talking about the idols she likes, Luo Si would pull the subject back to herself — "inside that emotion 24 hours a day."

She wants to help where she can, but Xianzi has found she can't help with everything. She explains the thinking behind her refusals this way: "You have to be clear about this. I'm not helping just one person — a lot of people come to me on Weibo. I'm really afraid that because of one person I end up ignoring everyone else. You have to protect the state you're in, or you might give this up very quickly. I always say you have to protect your own heart, and this is part of that. Don't do the things that will kill your motivation."

4. The Police Station

Unlike the women reporters she deals with constantly, on the state's side of things most of the people Xianzi meets are men. "What's hurt me most now, I think, is the police station, not Zhu Jun. You find out they can't solve most things."

Any small piece of social injustice affects her mood. The past two years have left her feeling that "the stability of your life isn't built on someone protecting you — it's built on the luck of nothing happening to you. Sometimes I think this is just how this society runs: if this matter doesn't get resolved, other people's probably won't either."

When she read Lin Yihan's Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise last year, the Zhu Jun case wasn't the first thing she thought of. After Tao Chongyuan killed himself at Wuhan University of Technology in March, she kept linking the two of them together. "With boys who've been sexually assaulted, people always think that as long as they don't die, they'll grow up and put it behind them. But once someone is dead, you no longer have the right to say things will get better."

Two years ago, Xianzi went to the police to try to catch a seller of pedophilic videos who had briefly drawn media attention. Reporting to the internet police seemed useless to her: report the accounts selling the videos and they can register new ones and carry on. She added a seller on QQ, pretending she wanted to buy, then took the QQ number and the videos she'd bought as evidence to the Chaoyang District police station near her home. The officers were polite, but opened no case and gave her no receipt.

The police she met in the Zhu Jun case left her with a sense of a split, and made her think of her own parents, who work in government departments. On the day she gave her statement, an officer at the Yangfangdian police station in Haidian District told her teacher, Chen Shiting: "Don't assume none of us police do our jobs. You should keep pushing this." After taking the report, the station didn't notify CCTV's leadership first; it sent three or four patrol cars to follow Xianzi straight to CCTV's security office to pull the surveillance footage.

By the next day, everyone handling the case had been replaced, and Xianzi, her teacher and her lawyer heard nothing further.

On July 30 this year, Xianzi and her lawyer went back to the Yangfangdian station, hoping to get the statement, the items collected and the surveillance video from four years earlier. She ran into the same officer from back then. She quotes him: "You look so different now — it's been four years, you've grown into a young woman." He said he would be in touch the next day. There has been no reply since.

"I think individual officers are willing to act, but they're all afraid of taking responsibility. They're inside a rigid, mechanical way of running power, inside a social structure with no feeling for people."

5. An Ordinary 25-Year-Old Girl

Under "Xianzi and Her Friends" there is a line of small type describing the user. Xianzi didn't write "party to the Zhu Jun sexual harassment case." She wrote her job: "screenwriter."

"I have a lot to do, actually, a lot of material to read. Writing a historical drama means reading the history; adapting a novel means reading the novel. My brain is pretty tired after interviews too — I have to go home and scroll Douban's Goose Group (note: originally the "Gossip Is Here" group, later renamed) to unwind."

While preparing for the suit she was writing a historical drama. At 25, Xianzi's screenwriting career has only just started. After graduating she spent a while as a development planner at a film and TV company, then joined her current company as a screenwriter, a year and a half ago. Not one of the scripts she has worked on has aired: many are killed by the censors. "We wrote one about Consort De, one of Kangxi's consorts. We'd already written a lot of episodes when word suddenly went around that people up top didn't like palace-intrigue dramas, and every company shut theirs down. But now Story of Yanxi Palace is out, and a lot of companies seem to want to make them again. You never know what those companies are thinking; projects fall apart easily."

People often forget she's a screenwriter. When she posted her account on July 26, she deliberately blocked some of the screenwriters she works with from seeing it. "We all work under senior screenwriters, and I didn't want them to pity me because of this, give me special treatment, forgive my professional shortcomings. If I wrote a script badly, I wouldn't want them saying, 'Xianzi's been dealing with a lawsuit lately, that's why the script isn't good,'" she explained afterward.

As the case went on, the screenwriters she works with learned about her other identity too, but they don't ask much about it. This is what draws Xianzi to Beijing: most people know where the line between one person and another is. She does also have to block visitors who don't. Some middle school classmates got in touch to talk about the case, out of encouragement or curiosity. "Someone sent me 80 messages in one day asking if we could talk. I said no, I don't want to talk about this."

She thinks she has learned to pull out quickly from the feelings the case and the lawsuit bring on. Opening the Goose Group and scrolling for a while is enough to forget it. But at night, what she has pulled away from comes back in dreams. On the two nights before the October 7 interview, she dreamed first that Huer had killed herself, then that she was in the middle of the lawsuit.

At one point Xianzi thought about shutting the "Xianzi and Her Friends" account down. "Because the victim label is stamped on it too plainly. People online do support me, but the account really has become a victim's confession. You can't let being a victim become your whole identity. Nobody wants to live as a victim." She has found that whenever she posts something unrelated to the case, she loses followers. On October 6 she reposted, with a comment, a Beijing News report headlined "Beijing Police Report on the 'Fengtai Child-Snatching' Incident: Elderly Woman and Friend Grabbed the Wrong Person, Mistaking Her for a Daughter-in-Law," and lost 100 followers.

People easily flatten Xianzi into a "fighter" and forget the everyday side of her. When a user asked what shade of lipstick she wore in the photo where she showed her face, she answered eagerly — YSL lip gloss No. 12 over Tom Ford's black-tube No. 16 — and screenshotted it to Moments as one funny thing among all the trouble. The day she filed her countersuit at the court, Xianzi wasn't wearing makeup; when Baidu asked whether it could come and film video, she didn't refuse, but she asked the young man editing it to cut out all the unflattering shots.

She also "ships" celebrity couples and idols: Leehom Wang and Li Yundi once, then Yang Yang, and now Zhu Zhengting from Idol Producer. This used to be a hobby; now it is also an important way of getting out from under the case's emotions — do what needs doing, fangirl when it's time to fangirl. In her fan groups on WeChat, Xianzi gets a free, cheerful sense of belonging: everyone there knows she's the party to the Zhu Jun case, and it doesn't matter much. What matters is shipping couples and trashing rival idols, viciously and gleefully. Sometimes they complain about their jobs and their bosses on the side.

Zhu Zhengting's soft, gentle image makes Xianzi feel safe. Her taste in men, she realizes, has changed. As a child it was Hugh Jackman in Wolverine who first made her aware of the pull of male hormones. Now she has no requirement for masculinity and prefers men with no aggression in them. "I'm put off by the men on Hupu. I don't think swearing, being loud and careless, and picking fights with people in public is attractive. I'd rather go clothes shopping with a man than argue with one. They haven't realized that some masculine traits are the problem; they only think feminine traits are."

On October 9, Xianzi left home in Wuhan early to meet her lawyer and prepare materials for the October 25 exchange of evidence. While she was dealing with that, she ran into what many young renters in Beijing face: her landlord wanted to raise the rent in the middle of the lease. Rents nearby had climbed to 6,800 yuan, and the landlord thought 6,000 was now far too low — he would rather pay the penalty for breaking the lease than keep renting at that price. Facing the trouble of handling the lawsuit, work and finding a new place to move to all at once, Xianzi and her boyfriend gave in.

Preparation for the evidence exchange did not go smoothly. On October 12 a new topic went up on Weibo: "Xianzi and Maishao's Court Diary." But just two days before that, a friend who had gone with her to report the case back then and now lives in the United States said she would refuse to appear in court and refuse to talk to the court by video. This friend also revealed something she had kept hidden for four years: she too had given a statement to the police at the time, and had mentioned a detail that could leave Xianzi "facing groundless humiliation in court." Meanwhile, some of the coverage was being partly blocked — the Financial Times' interview with Xianzi and Maishao, headlined "The Power He Had Was Only the Shadow of Power," for one. iQiyi wrongly reported the "evidence exchange day" as the "court date."

At 2 p.m. on October 25, the Zhu Jun defamation case went to a closed-door exchange of evidence in Room 2236, the foreign affairs courtroom on the second floor of the Haidian District People's Court in Beijing; the whole thing ran more than two hours. Xianzi and Maishao were both there. Zhu Jun was not. Xianzi's side submitted supplementary evidence; Zhu Jun's side resubmitted its evidence and the index to it. The court will decide, on the evidence, whether to require Zhu Jun to attend. A trial date is still to be set, and there may be a pretrial conference as well.

More media came than the two of them expected, and a fair number of Weibo users had traveled from other cities. After the exchange, Xianzi and Maishao gave interviews outside the courthouse to Sina Entertainment, iQiyi, Youku, ifeng.com, Beijing Youth Daily and other outlets. Apart from questions about that day's proceedings, the questions hadn't changed much: Are you confident? What outcome do you want? How do you balance this with your life and work? Why bring up something from four years ago now?

"It's not that I didn't want to settle this four years ago. I went to the Yangfangdian police station and got no response at all. I don't know what people count as giving up by choice and giving up because you have no choice. I think back then I gave up because I had no choice."

All of this is the new ordinary Xianzi has to learn to live with and manage. When she needs to calm down, she takes out the Song dynasty paintings she likes and looks at them. Her favorite one shows four people passing a tree, one of them dropping behind and turning back to admire it.

She thinks that figure is a little different from the rest: "That one is me — the one who spent 30 yuan on a scan of the Complete Song Paintings, Liaoning Museum Volume."

Cover image from the Complete Song Paintings, Liaoning Museum Volume.