Chinese women find solidarity in South Korea’s feminists as declining birth rates provoke backlash

As it does for many people, Echo Yi’s obsession with South Korea started with K-pop. From her home in Beijing, she got sucked into the vortex of music, TV shows, books and movies that have made South Korea a soft-power juggernaut in recent years.

“Among the countries I like travelling to, South Korea doesn’t even rank that high, but in the past six months, I’ve flown there more than 10 times,” Ms. Yi said as she prepared for another trip to Seoul this month.

In this, Ms. Yi is by no means alone; millions of Chinese tourists travel to South Korea every year. But she is relatively rare in that what keeps her coming back isn’t K-pop or Korean barbecue, but feminism.

“As I travelled to Seoul more frequently, and deepened my understanding of Korean culture, I became increasingly interested in the ‘K-girl’ lifestyle,” Ms. Yi said. “I was shocked to discover a group of women who are also shaped by East Asian culture, but possess qualities I had never imagined.”

Ms. Yi described “K-girls” as being fiercely independent, with a focus on gender equality and breaking free from traditional heterosexual family norms. It’s a description that would be familiar to many in South Korea, but not necessarily in a positive sense: After a number of key victories for the country’s #MeToo movement, there has been a concerted backlash against feminism in recent years, to the extent that many women avoid publicly identifying as such for fear of harassment or abuse.

Some of this has been driven by growing concern over the country’s demographic crisis – South Korea’s birth rate is expected to drop to 0.64 children per woman this year, the lowest in the world – and anger among young men that women are exempt from conscription. Conservative politicians, including current president Yoon Suk Yeol, have capitalized on both of these grievances.

“Anything related to women, such as ending violence against women or efforts to promote gender equality, has largely disappeared at the official level,” said Hawon Jung, a journalist and author of Flowers of Fire, a book about the South Korean feminist movement.

“Women’s issues have become anathema to a lot of politicians,” she said. “The movement is really not in a good place right now.”

Despite this, many feminists in China still look to their neighbours for inspiration, a testament to the resilience of South Korea’s movement, in which women are uniting around ideas such as “bihon,” or the rejection of marriage, in favour of building alternative communities. The attraction for Chinese women also has to do with the increasingly dire state of gender equality in China, where activists have faced a similar backlash in response to that country’s own birth-rate decline.

“The lifestyle of Korean women is, in fact, a kind of silent rebellion,” Ms. Yi said of those who defy societal norms or even adopt alternative forms of living. “In an environment where women are generally more accomplished than men yet still face gender discrimination, it’s inevitable that women will opt not to marry or have children.”

China’s population fell for a second consecutive year in 2023, with the birth rate approaching a record low of around 1.0, far below the 2.1 level necessary to maintain population size. While researchers, and even some Chinese lawmakers, have pointed to a lack of gender equality as contributing to this trend – women fear losing their independence and earning power should they have children – the government response has been largely reactionary. This has prompted fears that gains made on issues such as abortion and divorce could be rolled back.

Unlike South Korea, however, women in China are strictly limited in how far they can go with their activism. Protests are suppressed and online organizing is tightly censored.

Moon Wang, a Chinese interior designer who said she has also found feminist inspiration in South Korea, described this as the “essential difference” between the two countries.

“The reason Korean women are radical, or dare to take things to the extreme, is because they know that their rebellion, if the numbers are large enough, will be taken seriously,” she said.

Even publicly discussing Korean feminism can be controversial in China. On social media, posts about “bihon” or the wider 6B4T movement – which advocates for women to boycott childbirth and relationships with men, among other things – have been censored, with one website, Douban, banning discussion of 6B as an “extreme” and “radical” ideology.

But the relative independence of South Korean women is still much discussed online among their Chinese counterparts, within the bounds of China’s censorship.

The limits on feminist speech in China are particularly evident when it comes to street protests, a favoured tactic of South Korean feminist groups – whose recent protests spurred the government to legislate against deepfake and non-consensual pornography – but something that is dangerous even to suggest in China.

Ms. Jung said it made sense that women in China would look to South Korea, given the shared “historical and cultural similarities in how women are treated at home or discriminated against in public spheres.”

Beyond direct political organizing, both she and Ms. Yi pointed to the success of South Korean feminist literature, including Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, a story about rejecting oppressive societal norms, and Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, about everyday sexism. Both books are popular across the region in translation, and Ms. Han was this month awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Anyone who is a woman and has read her words can understand that pain,” Ms. Yi said.

With reports from Alexandra Li in Beijing