In 2022, a 36-year old woman went viral on China’s Weibo after rejecting marriage and declaring that “women are no longer living in the age of depending on men in marriage.” The post, resonating with thousands of Chinese women, did not just echo the “4B Movement” that began in South Korea. It marked its evolution, localization, and defiance in an authoritarian context.
In China, the 4B movement has been assimilated as a fringe element into the present Chinese feminist lexicon, especially at a time of ongoing crackdowns and institutional setbacks against gender activism. In such a climate of constant surveillance, the 4B Movement offers Chinese feminists a radical yet quiet strategy to subvert state-prescribed notions of womanhood. This prompts the question: how has the 4B Movement been reinterpreted by Chinese feminists navigating an authoritarian state, and what does its adaptation reveal about the shifting landscape of gender politics in China?
The Origins and Evolution of the 4B Movement
The 4B Movement (where “B” stands for the Korean word 비 or bi, meaning “no”) is a fringe radical feminist movement that emerged in South Korea around 2018, gaining traction on platforms like Twitter. It drew inspiration from earlier feminist movements such as #MeToo and Escape the Corset, and arose in response to the country’s pro-natalist policies, rising gender-based violence, and deep-rooted misogyny in both digital and offline spheres. As a radical rejection of patriarchy, the 4B principles include rejecting dating, heterosexual sex, marriage, and childbirth.
Gradually, the 4B movement evolved into its current state of 6B4T. The additional two Bs stand for not buying sexist products and supporting other single women practicing the movement. The 4T (“T” for 탈 or ta, meaning “to discard”) refers to the rejection of: rigid beauty norms, otaku culture and its fetishization of women, organized religion, and idol culture.
Although still marginal in mainstream discourse, 6B4T has resonated with urban, educated women globally, especially those who refuse to trade financial independence for the traditional expectations of marriage, motherhood, and femininity.
Feminism in China: Challenges and State Pushback
Chinese feminism, though broad and multifaceted, has always existed in negotiation with the Chinese Communist Party’s official stance on gender equality. Although rooted in revolutionary history, contemporary Chinese feminism must be contextualized in light of women’s current social standing. Despite the government’s position of “equality between the sexes” and the economic advancement of women, they remain disadvantaged in society due to institutional, patriarchal, and cultural norms.
With the Chinese state’s increased censorship of values that it considers Western and anti-establishment, as well as its decision to stop international funding for NGOs, Chinese feminism has been dealt a massive blow. Even during the peak of the fledgling Chinese #MeToo movement, Xiaoxi’s (Zhou Xiaoxuan) landmark court case against Zhu Jun was dismissed and she ended up silenced by the Chinese government, despite a three-year legal battle. Although this impeded the movement’s progress, Chinese feminists have devised unique subversive tactics to champion the feminist cause.
State-led “family values,” Chinese President Xi Jinping’s call to women to be “good daughters,” the demographic pressure of an aging society, coupled with the contemporary phenomenon of “laying flat” within China’s youth provide a perfect setup for the 4B movement’s anti-marriage, anti-natalist agenda to appeal to disillusioned Chinese women. The 6B4T movement’s export to China is especially precarious, however, due to political and cultural sensitivities.
The movement, which quietly began on the fringes of Chinese feminism, unintentionally garnered the attention of Chinese censors. In 2021, Douban, a popular social media platform in China, targeted and removed the keyword “6b4t” and closed down over 10 feminist groups on the platform, which it deemed “extremist and radical ideology.” This decision resulted in public criticism over Douban’s actions; even women who did not subscribe to the 6B4T principles argued that women’s voices should not be suppressed.
The backlash to 6B4T on platforms like Douban shows that even digital feminist expressions are not safe. Such censorship reveals the state’s anxieties, while the persistence of the movement shows the depth of dissatisfaction among Chinese women as well as the dissonance between state feminism and subversive feminism in China.
Adoption, Adaptation, and Divergence
The CCP’s co-optation of gender equality rhetoric compels Chinese feminists to frame resistance not as activism, but as disengagement. In this regard, despite repression, Chinese women have engaged in digital feminism by strategically bypassing keyword censorship, engaging in Weibo and Douyin subcultures, and hosting their own underground feminist dialogues.
Thus the 6B4T ideology has not been transplanted as a whole but adapted as a coded resistance in China, with certain 6B4T commitments themselves being lost in translation. While digital platforms have enabled limited circulation of 6B4T principles in China, these ideas are often refracted through local logics, leading to meaningful divergences from the original South Korean framing. In this regard, the resonance of this movement does not entail the wholesale replication of it in the Chinese context; instead Chinese feminists’ strategic reinterpretation is reflected through its adaptation.
The way 6B4T principles are translated and interpreted differs across contexts. Xiaoyi Chen argued that translation choices signify the ideological agendas of individual feminists, suggesting that localization is not merely linguistic but political. Despite the shared throughline of the 6B4T ideological base, the movement has evolved differently in China and South Korea, shaped by distinct objectives, approaches, and meanings. The political setup produces contrasting imagery between the two movements: of activism vs withdrawal, of visibility vs invisibility and of the varying degrees of risk involved.
Firstly, due to the differing backdrops of South Korea’s democratic but patriarchal environment and China’s equally patriarchal authoritarianism, 6B4T plays out differently. South Korean 6B4T feminists actively withdraw from patriarchal institutions, while Chinese feminists, given the risks involved with feminist activism, subtly repurpose the same logic as covert protest. Where South Korean women refuse dating as a lifestyle choice, Chinese women adopt the same refusal as political camouflage – an apolitical stance with political implications.
Second, due to differences in freedom of association, South Korean feminists are able to garner more visibility and use both digital and offline means to gain mainstream attention. Unlike their South Korean counterparts, Chinese feminists have to be far more strategic about their activism. They must bypass several state restrictions and regulations so as to avoid being shadow-banned, censored, or worse, disappeared. The 6B4T online forums, for example, only received mainstream attention due to being flagged as a potential risk and politically sensitive.
Third, the feminist priorities are vastly different, caused by the differences in the forms of backlash faced by the women of each country. While Korean women are ostracized within a patriarchal and sexist societal structure, Chinese women have to opt for piecemeal feminist progress so that their demands do not clash with “national security interests.” The emergence of ultranationalist women on social media, such as the “Little Pink” phenomenon, showcases that women must be perceived to be as patriotic as men, and perform loyalty as the “good daughters of the party.”
Conclusion
Ultimately, the divergence between South Korea’s 4B/6B4T movement and its Chinese iteration reveals the intricate ways feminist ideologies are filtered through national contexts, state structures, and cultural differences. Despite variations in its expression and the party-state’s concerns, the Chinese 6B4T movement can be understood as a direct challenge to the CCP’s gender project. At a time of declining birth rates, women’s refusal to marry or bear children is perceived as a threat to the nation’s future and a blow to Xi’s vision of actualizing the Chinese Dream.
Though quieter and less confrontational, Chinese feminist resistance proves to be no less subversive. The question is not whether transnational feminist sisterhoods can survive, but how they must transform to endure across landscapes shaped by censorship, surveillance, and systemic erasure, whether through whispers or through screams of protest.