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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.

We began our archive with six prominent feminist and queer websites from our initial research. Following a snowball approach across the sites’ hyperlink networks, we collected over 100 additional sites. These sites cover a wide range of topics, corresponding to feminist discourse in post-socialist China and its rapidly changing socio-political context. Using the Wayback Machine as the primary repository, we then developed a web crawler program to preserve snapshots and media files of the archived sites. We artistically present our collected data as a public web archive and a distributable semi-public database. The first version of the web archive (released in July 2024) presents 38 cyberfeminist and queer sites (est. 1996~2013), many of which are no longer accessible as of today.