Performing Artivism: Feminists, Lawyers, and Online Legal Mobilization in China, Di Wang and Sida Liu

Compared to the more cautious and restrained acts of pragmatic resistance, Wang and Liu demonstrate that legal mobilization can be confrontational and performative in the face of severe threats of repression.

Performing Feminist Artivism: From Silent Performers to Disruptive Audiences In the most widely shared “Bloody Bride” image, there were three young feminist activists wearing blood-spattered wedding dresses, holding signs with anti-domestic violence slogans, and looking determinedly into the distance. In the grey and red-themed background was Qianmen Street, a busy commercial street and popular tourist site in downtown Beijing, less than a mile from Tiananmen Square. This “Bloody Bride” image not only showed that violence could happen in any intimate partnership but also that young Chinese women were “marching” to combat it.

While the streets were their primary battlegrounds, feminist activists also extended artivism to the courthouse. One high-profile legal case that they supported was the Li Yan case, in which the defendant Li Yan was initially sentenced to death for killing her husband after suffering years of his violence and abuse. In 2013, when the Supreme People's Court reviewed and approved Li Yan's death penalty, Chinese feminist activists and lawyers peti­tioned the courts and hosted online discussions to draw national and international attention to the case and demand for the suspension of Li's death penalty. On February 3, 2013, echoing these demands, feminist activists wrapped themselves with white cloth and laid down in front of courthouses across China, with a sign “I don't want to become the next Li Yan”. These images highlighted both the imminence of Li's execution and the possibility that, under the current legal system, every woman could end up in her situation.

These feminist activist actions visualized the argument that Li Yan's case was a consequence of a flawed legal system that first failed to intervene in domestic violence cases and then punished women for fighting back against their abusers. According to the ADVN, from 2009 to 2012, the media had reported forty-eight cases similar to Li Yan's situation, and only twenty-eight of them were reported with details on their sentences, and 64 percent of these defendants were sentenced severely, ranging from ten years of imprisonment to the death penalty.

Although feminist activists have no access to the judicial decision-making process on the backstage (compare with activist lawyers, discussed in the next section), their artivism spotlighted the life-threatening consequences of the lack of legal protection for domestic violence survivors in China. By laying outside courthouses and symbolizing the imminent death of Li Yan with cloth-wrapped bodies, feminists disrupted the state's frontstage performance by unveiling the social reality outside of many people's evidential boundary - that is, domestic violence survivors are systematically constrained by law and social norms in China. The visual contrast between the majesty of the courthouse and the precarious condition of Li Yan questions whether the Chinese legal system can deliver justice when handling domestic violence cases. As a participant of the feminist action in Guangzhou told a reporter, “in a society where a victim cannot receive effective assistance, Li Yan is worthy of [our] sympathy. Li Yan's death sentence is not only a tragedy for all domestic violence victims, but also a tragedy for this society due to its absence of relevant law.” [...]

Performing Lawyer Artivism: From Courtroom Warriors to Online Activists

[...] In both the Li Zhuang case [high-profile trial of a lawyer for criminal perjury] and a few subsequent cases in 2011-12, the courtroom was the main site of lawyers' artivism. Li Zhuang's first trial in 2009-10 was highly dramatic because Li was not only defiant in his self-defense throughout the case but also used a “hidden poem” (cang tou shi), a literary legacy of Imperial China, in one of his final statements in court to send out the message that the Chongqing authorities had forced him to confess.

Soon after the trial of Li Zhuang was concluded in 2011, some activist lawyers began to use Weibo to organize “lawyer groups” (lushi tuan) to collectively and vigorously defend lawyer colleagues and other criminal defendants - they labeled themselves “die-hard lawyers” (sike lushi) because of their stubbornness over legal procedure and courage to challenge the state authorities. In the Xiaohe case in 2012, for instance, four die-hard lawyers had heated arguments with judges and were expelled from the courtroom. One of them, Chi Susheng, had diabetes, and she fainted on the way out. Thanks to Chi's status as a representative of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the dramatization of her fainting by her lawyer colleagues on Weibo, the incident generated an online uproar and led to a five-month-long trial suspen­sion. In both of these examples, courtroom drama was only effective when it was combined with the surrounding gaze on social media. Indeed, the formation of die-hard lawyer groups was made possible through Weibo. In the Beihai case in June 2011, in which four lawyers were detained by the local police, the activist lawyer Yang Jinzhu posted the case materials on Weibo and called for the formation of a lawyer group to go to Beihai, a remote city in southwest China.

The primary site of artivism for die-hard lawyers soon shifted from inside the courthouse to the outside. While lawyers must follow legal procedures and professional etiquette in the courtroom, their code of conduct on the streets becomes similar to that of feminist activists. [...]

One of the most creative performances by die-hard lawyers was made by Yang Jinzhu and Li Jinxing, the lawyer who was taken to the hospital during the Beihai case. In January 2013, Yang and Li were retained by the family members of a criminal defendant who had been detained for twelve years without a judicial sentence and asked to represent him in his second trial at Fujian Provincial People's High Court. However, the court did not permit the defendant to change his legal counsel and refused to accept Yang's and Li's letters of attorney. In response, Yang and Li bought some sweet potatoes from a grocery store, put on their lawyers' gowns, and began to march around the courthouse carrying the sweet potatoes. The idea originated from an old Chinese saying: “If an official did not deliver justice for the people, he'd better go home to sell sweet potatoes” (Dangguan buwei min zuozhu, buru huijia mai hongshu). A few hours after photos of their march were posted on Weibo, the court invited them in and approved their representation of the defendant. The conspicuous spectacle of lawyers marching in gowns carrying sweet potatoes, as well as the strategic combination of street and web theaters, worked brilliantly in this case as a means to expose the illegality of backstage judicial behavior.

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