Chinese-Saudi relations are closer now than ever before. In the past few years, strategic, economic, and technological interests forged a partnership strengthening ties between the two states. However, the growing closeness also sheds some light on similar structural features and sociopolitical trends that have emerged in both countries.

Scholars such as Madawi al-Rasheed and Leta Hong Fincher have discussed the masculine or patriarchal impulses that underpin Saudi and Chinese state approaches toward women and the centrality of gender to questions of regime legitimacy and national narratives of revival. In both countries, state interventions have substantively changed in recent years with respect to the situation of women, with the government granting them more access in the public sphere or weakening long established natal policies (for certain categories of women). While such policy adjustments are indicative of a relaxation in state control over women, they have been largely informed by economic or demographic national interests that point to the continued relevance of gender to political authority. Over the past decade, the convergence of these structural features and policy adjustments, hand in hand with the broader changes affecting Saudi and Chinese societies, have fueled the rise of parallel feminist mobilizations in both countries.

During 2011-15, signs of sporadic feminist activism began to appear in both Saudi Arabia and China. Initially, demands were framed in nonconfrontational terms (with respect to the state) and focused on important social and professional questions. Saudi feminists channeled their energy toward lifting the ban on driving but subsequently increased their demands by targeting the guardianship system, which they argue restricts their freedom of choice and entry into the public sphere. Chinese feminists by contrast focused on contesting persistent gender discrimination and sexual harassment within society. During this period, social media became a primary platform for feminist advocacy and mobilization, with Saudi women turning to WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter and their Chinese counterparts utilizing WeChat and Weibo in a relatively similar manner. Performative activism also became a definitive hallmark of feminist mobilization. Saudi women’s rights activist Manal al-Sharif, now in self-imposed exile, initiated a “Women2Drive” campaign in 2011. Beyond the confines of social media, Chinese feminists like Li Tingting sought to shed light on domestic violence in China by wearing bloodstained wedding gowns on Valentine’s Day in 2012.

A major turning point for the trajectory of these feminist mobilizations occurred from 2015-16 as diverse domestic and geopolitical tensions exercised a debilitating effect on their continued development. In China, feminist public outreach in 2015 during International Women’s Day, social media campaigning beginning in 2018 as part of the #MeToo movement, and participation in labor protests in Shenzhen in 2018 all took place against the backdrop of continued state political and ideological tightening of space in various public spheres. Similarly, the feminist movement in Saudi Arabia began gaining momentum after Human Rights Watch published “Boxed In,” a report detailing the constraints imposed on women by the guardianship system. As a result, the “I am My Own Guardian” campaign, which began in 2016 and continued into 2018, gained widespread popularity and started a mobilization that attracted Saudi women from different generations. However, regional tensions in the Gulf, which escalated in 2017, tinted the campaign and were used as an explanation for clamping down on women’s rights activists in 2018.

In both countries, the momentum of feminist mobilization was concerning to the state. Even though such movements are incapable of confronting state authority, nevertheless, they represent a challenge demonstrated in their ability to demand other civil rights that could potentially become difficult to maintain. These mobilizations also complicated government policy adjustments. In China, the state is seeking to address serious demographic problems by promoting family-oriented traditional values, which feminist mobilizations directly threaten. Likewise, in Saudi Arabia, state success in minimizing the influence of religious scholars is challenged by feminist mobilizations that continue to demand further diminution of male dominance in the private sphere. Moreover, the growing trend of women fleeing the kingdom, which received international attention after the case of Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun early this year, continues to undermine the state’s image abroad.

Reaction to the feminist mobilizations in both countries has been quite similar. In Saudi Arabia, feminists were compared with radical networks, such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. For decades, the religious discourse considered feminists a mere tool used by foreign agendas to Westernize Saudi society. Now, however, radicalism has become a common association usually linked to activism, including women’s rights campaigners, who are seen as adopting foreign ideologies that can break the family unit. In China, party-state framing linked these mobilizations with hostile Western forces that seek to Westernize and divide the country. Feminists are presented as being influenced by radical Western conceptions of feminism that are not congruent with China’s traditions and social norms. Beyond these discursive framings, both states have also detained many feminists as well as limited the scope of their digital activity.

In recent years, feminist mobilizations in both the Saudi and Chinese contexts have faced considerable difficulty arising from sustained state and public opposition. Beyond outright state crackdowns and censorship, online nationalist discussions increasingly cast feminists as being infiltrated by foreign elements (or problematic minorities) and as representing values (notably, those of the “white left”) antithetical to those held by much of society. In all, the broader state and public climate in Saudi Arabia and China, emerging in parallel with one another, appears to have paralyzed the capacity and continued growth of these feminist mobilizations in the public sphere, at least for the coming period.