Short abstract:

Chinese Cyberfeminism Archive (CCA) preserves censored Chinese cyberfeminist projects from the late 1990s to today. Using a slow archiving approach, it explores an alternative historiography of Chinese cyberfeminism, advocating for resilience against censorship-induced data loss.

Long abstract:

Chinese Cyberfeminism Archive (CCA) is a semi-public digital archive dedicated to preserving censored Chinese feminist accounts, projects, and social media groups from the late 1990s till nowadays. Embracing a slow archiving approach and the cyberfeminist spirit of hacking, it envisions an alternative historiography of Chinese cyberfeminism and advocates for resilience against censorship-induced data loss.

The development of Chinese cyberfeminism has intertwined with the transformation of the Chinese Internet since the latter's introduction in the mid-1990s. The early 2010s witnessed a rapid growth of the cyberfeminist movement, with the arrest of the Feminist Five in 2015 marking a drastic shrinking of offline space. Since then, feminist actions and advocacy have increasingly migrated online while online space continues to tighten. Our archive investigates the post-censorship Chinese Internet and salvages feminist fragments.

Phase one of the project (scheduled for release in July 2024) archives approximately 30 feminist groups from douban.com, many of which already shut down. Douban, an interest-based social platform and review site for books, films, and music, once stood out for its diverse and liberal environment among its profit-driven and propaganda-obedient rivals before its forced "rectifications," which is roughly simultaneous to the forcible shutdown of around ten radical feminist groups in 2021. Using Wayback Machine as the primary repository, we, the archivists, developed a web crawler program to locate feminist groups and preserve their snapshots. We then artistically present our findings as an interactive website, drawing visual inspirations from the anti-censorship Internet language culture prevalent among Chinese netizens.