China: LGBTQI community struggling to exercise internet freedom
Dec 01, 2021
Beijing [China], December 2 : Amid China's crackdown on LGBTQI groups, the community has been struggling to exercise its freedom of using the internet in the country.
Across China, queer college societies, which had been rare spaces to safely push boundaries, were being swiftly erased from the Chinese internet, the Rest of the World news organisation informed.
For a long time, the queer Chinese people have struggled for first, to connect under the safety of anonymity, and later to organize.
As informed by the Rest of the World news organisation, the community has been struggling for their rights under a central government that seems to neither support nor actively oppose LGBTQI people.
Back on July 14, the largest and most prominent accounts associated with the community were banned by the Chinese authorities, cutting connections between thousands of members scattered across China.
The community feels like they are slowly being 'sanded down' in the country said a member from the community who has been running an online community associated with the LGBTQI for the last six years.
Besides, the local governments in China have also been refusing to register organizations.
Fabien Baussart, writing in The Times of Israel said that China's communist government is coming down heavily on the LGBTQ community, initiating measures to keep them under constant surveillance in a university and instructing broadcasters to stop using "effeminate men" in television programmes in order to promote "revolutionary culture".
In a country where there is no legal recognition of same-sex relationships or marriage, the attempt of the Chinese Communist Party to gain control over the country's education, culture and entertainment is ending up interfering in people's private lives.
In a recent crackdown on entertainment programmes on television, the Chinese television regulator is heard saying, "resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics". The insulting slang used for "effeminate men" is "niang pao", literally, "girlie guns," wrote Baussart.
It was only in 2001 that China removed homosexuality -- decriminalized in 1997 -- from its official list of mental disorders.
