As MeToo unnerves China, a student fights to tell her story
QINGDAO, China — The sight of five burly guards blocking her way out of her dorm filled Ren Liping with rage.
It was 3 a.m. on a recent Saturday (Aug. 4) and the thin, bespectacled 26-yearold Chinese graduate student was exhausted. Her mind raced back to earlier in the day when she had tried once again to publicly protest her alleged rape. Again, the police had stopped her and held her at a station for hours. Again, she was escorted back to campus.
Now this.
She pounded on the glass door with her fist, but the men ignored her. “This is illegal!” she shouted, to no response. She felt nauseous. Her face was numb. She picked up a bicycle pump in the corner and smashed it against the glass.
The door shattered. “Whoever tries to suppress my case will end up like this door,” Ren said to the men.
More than a year after she accused an ex-boyfriend of raping her on the China University of Petroleum campus in the coastal city of Qingdao, this had become Ren’s life: a series of attempts to protest the university and authorities’ mishandling of the case.
At every turn, Ren has been stymied by the school’s guards or the police, who say there’s no evidence of a crime. She was even detained in a hotel for six days at one point.
Her efforts highlight at once the challenges of reporting sexual assault in China and the determination of a new generation of Chinese women pushing the country into its own #MeToo moment despite attempts to silence them.
The movement has gathered considerable steam in China, with dozens of men, including prominent media personalities, non-profit advocates and even a top monk, publicly accused of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in recent months.
But like any social campaign, #MeToo poses a challenge to President Xi Jinping’s administration, which has waged an unprecedented crackdown on civil society groups and activism that the ruling Communist Party deems as threats to its rule.
Ren accuses Liang Shengyu, her ex-boyfriend, of raping her on campus last summer. Liang denies the allegation. They are suing each other for defamation.
In what legal experts say is unprecedented, Ren is also suing the police — for what she’s described as a mishandling of the investigation and the use of force against her.
“She is a representative for the #MeToo movement,” said Lyu Xiaoquan, a Beijing lawyer who helped Ren prepare her initial complaints.
Ren and Liang met in 2013 when they were undergraduates at the university’s geosciences department. Liang says he was attracted to Ren’s strength and independence. They dated for two years, experiencing for the first time the freedom of a romance far from their parents’ scrutiny.
After a bitter breakup, Liang and Ren rarely spoke. But last summer they got back in touch, and on the evening of July 28, 2017, agreed to walk back to their dorms together after Liang completed an assignment in the lab.
Their accounts of the rest of the night diverge.
Ren said Liang asked her if they could get back together, but that she said no because she liked someone else. Liang then cornered her in a bicycle parking lot, she said, pinned her against a concrete wall and put his hand inside her denim shorts.
Stunned and terrified, Ren tried to choke him but wasn’t strong enough. “You’re dirty,” she told him. “You’ve been with me before,” he said, according to Ren. “You didn’t think I was dirty then,” she alleges he said.
Ren said Liang ignored her protests, pulled down her shorts and raped her. She was sobbing in pain, she said.
“Do you want to destroy me?” she cried at the time.
That’s when he stopped, picked his cap up off the ground, and walked away, Ren said.