Populism and Authoritarianism: The Attack on LGBTQ+ Rights in China and United States
Beijing LGBT center. Photo by Mitch Altman.
When Chinese author and internet personality Mo Xiang Tong Xiu disappeared from online communities in late 2019, fans feared the worst. Two years prior, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had sentenced an author pennamed Tianyi to ten years in prison for “writing and distributing” novels featuring homosexual relationships, and due to Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s works meeting recent acclaim amongst LGBTQ+ circles for their representations of queer romance and genderfluid characters, many netizens presumed she had met a similar fate. Rumors of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s arrest still remain unconfirmed: the author returned to online circles in late 2021 and has neglected to comment on the circumstances surrounding her sudden loss of contact. But it remains that fears regarding her disappearance surfaced at the height of a half-decade long campaign of sweeping legislation to censor and marginalize queer communities in mainland China.
Meanwhile, in the United States, LGBTQ+ communities are facing an unprecedented wave of prohibitive legislation, with state legislatures passing over seventy bills this year alone banning gender-affirming care, allowing misgendering in educational institutions, restricting drag performances, bolstering discrimination on religious grounds, and censoring queerness from school curriculums.
How is it that two countries with vastly different cultures and political systems are simultaneously rolling back the legal rights of LGBTQ+ citizens? Despite public attitudes in the United States and China ranging from uninformed tolerance to wholehearted support of issues regarding queerness, factors inherent to both governing institutions have allowed for an unprecedented surge in unpopular and extreme regulations targeting LGBTQ+ communities. In China, an authoritarian government presence allows government institutions to act independently of public sentiment on issues involving LGBTQ+ rights, and most forms of resulting dissent or pro-LGBTQ+ activism are disproportionately suppressed. Conversely, while Chinese activists struggle to operate around an abundance of centralized power, the United States suffers from a dearth of it: a lack of federal legislation cementing the legal protection of LGBTQ+ citizens allows for fringe groups to overturn inclusive laws and to institute harsh restrictions on the state level.
Conditions and Social Context of LGBTQ+ Issues in China
According to a national survey conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), public attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people in China are largely ambivalent: while seventy percent of respondents claimed to “not follow'' certain stigmas surrounding homosexuality—including the gender binary, associations of homosexuality with mental illness, and HIV-related stigmatization—a substantial demographic also reported feelings of disinclination towards forming relationships with LGBTQ+ people or allowing them to raise families. The former can generally be attributed to China’s lack of any predominant religious dogma against homosexuality: the Council of Foreign Relations estimates that the largest religious demographic in China is agnostic, with traditional and cultural religions being the second most common. Instead, many LGBTQ+ people report that their largest stressor is pressure by relatives to conform to heterosexual norms. Social status allotted to the parents of married couples, as well as the cultural importance of raising grandchildren both provide a strong social incentive for parents to pressure their children into getting married and having kids; cultural norms of filial piety also heavily encourage LGBTQ+ youth to sacrifice their identities for the sake of satisfying their parents. This has only been exacerbated in the wake of China’s one-child policy. Sole grandchildren are now burdened with single-handedly providing for themselves, their parents, and their grandparents—an issue given weight by the CCP’s recent cuts to federal eldercare, which outline that “...children who have come of age have the duty to support and assist their parents.” As a result, there are also increasing financial pressures for LGBTQ+ youth to conform to heterosexual marriages, only deepened by the CCP’s recent introduction of economic childbirth incentives to combat a projected long-term population decline.
Despite China’s overall public sentiment of general ambivalence toward LGBTQ+ lifestyles, the CCP has yet to legalize same-sex marriage and allots neither guardianship nor marriage-related property rights to same-sex couples. Efforts to combat this status quo via queer media expression have been severely suppressed. From 2015 to 2019, the central government passed several regulations banning televised depictions of homosexuality and cracking down on videos promoting “non-mainstream views of marriage” on various social media platforms. In 2021, President Xi Jinping announced an ongoing campaign to promote traditional themes of masculinity in popular media, effectively banning the presence of “effeminate men” on mainstream television. Earlier this year, the CCP’s sudden forceful closure of the Beijing LGBTQ+ Center also dealt a significant blow to the Chinese LGBTQ+ community; among other things, the organization had offered low-cost mental health counseling and provided lists of LGBTQ+-friendly health practitioners to its members, and aided the UNDP in 2015 to conduct the first comprehensive survey of sexuality, gender, and the relation of both to quality of life in China. Similarly, the CCP detained the leader of LGBTQ Rights Advocacy China in 2021, ending the organization’s efforts to build a network of lawyers willing to advocate for LGBTQ+ issues.
These regulations are disproportionate to public sentiment regarding homosexuality—a notion corroborated by Chinese netizens’ overwhelmingly supportive response to news of Taiwan’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019. While there does exist some social pressure to conform to heterosexual norms, this underlies an overarching atmosphere of general tolerance that has not been reflected in government policy. The authoritarian nature of China’s governing body results in a lack of accountability and reduces incentive to mirror public opinion, especially with regards to issues that are private and often difficult to discuss like gender and sexuality. Rather, the general lack of consensus and information regarding LGBTQ+ rights invites a sense of apathy amongst citizens, allowing for waves of intrusive policy and harsh suppression of minority activist groups.
Conditions and Social Context of LGBTQ+ Issues in the United States
In the United States, public attitudes regarding homosexuality are heavily influenced by political polarization. According to a study by the Pew Research Center in 2022, while sixty-one percent of Americans reported positive views towards the legalization of same-sex marriage, this number becomes distorted within partisan groups: only fourty-five percent of conservatives expressed support for same-sex marriage, compared to an overwhelming eighty percent of self-identified Democrats. As reported by the Public Religion Research Institute, there exists a “strong intersection between views on LGBTQ+ rights and other types of social hierarchy like structural racism, Christian nationalism, and gender roles”—issues all highly contested between partisan lines. Despite this, public support of non-discrimination policies in the employment, public service, and housing sectors remains consistently high.
Notably, America’s relationship with its LGBTQ+ communities is increasingly characterized by the politicization of transgender rights. Widespread stigma and a lack of accurate information regarding transgender issues spearheaded by conservative political candidates has led to growing sentiments invalidating the existence of transgender individuals—most notably the notion that gender is determined by one’s sex assigned at birth, a view which sixty percent of Americans held in 2022, compared to fifty-four percent in 2014. The influence of partisanship is palpable: Democratically-aligned respondents were four times as likely to disagree with the statement that gender is determined by one’s sex assigned at birth than their Republican counterparts, and six times as likely to agree that society has “not gone far enough” in accepting transgender communities. This is the result of increasing populist rhetoric by right-wing politicians, who employ scapegoating tactics targeting transgender people to rile up their voter bases and drive them to the polls.
As a result, despite overall support for the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals in America, specific issues including that of transgender rights are more ambiguous. This, paired with an overall lack of federal non-discrimination laws in health, education, employment, and housing, as well as no centralized recognition of individual rights to gender-affirming care and privacy regarding one’s gender and sexual identities, has allowed for a shocking increase in policies targeting LGBTQ+ and transgender people that are unpopular on both local and national scales. Gerrymandering and voter suppression allow for lobbyists and extremists in conservative-leaning states to gain power and influence, resulting in the success of concentrated and well-funded campaigns targeting the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. Resulting legislation supersedes a more moderate public stance even in “red” states—one notable example of this being Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay'' bill, which prohibits discussion of LGBTQ+ identities in grades K-5. According to a University of Florida poll, forty-nine percent of voters strongly disagreed with the bill, while just over forty percent of Floridian parents surveyed by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Williams Institute cited it as their primary motivation for hoping to move out of the state.
The government’s refusal to firmly protect queer rights is also reflected by the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case to invalidate non-discrimination laws for businesses selling “expressive goods” earlier this year, which allows private businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ clients on terms of religious freedom.
In short, the lack of centralized protections for LGBTQ+ people in America allows for not only a surge in radical, oppressive policies, but also for legalized discrimination on an interpersonal scale.
How Public Opinion Shapes Differences in LGBTQ+-Related Politics
China and the United States both have public constituencies with ambiguous feelings toward queer communities, which inevitably feeds into the political encroachment of LGBTQ+ rights. While citizens of both nations are willing to acknowledge the need for the legal protection of queer communities, their support wanes when it comes to aspects that may affect them personally, such as accepting children and relatives that identify outside of the gender binary. Thus, they are more willing to cede grounds regarding these individual issues—for example, censorship laws that “protect” children from queer influences—which paves the way for harsher and more repressive anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Notably, demographics that discourage queerness in the United States are far more extreme in their opinions, primarily due to the intensified meshing of political leanings with religion and personal identity in right-wing circles. This rings especially true for pushback against transgender rights, which is much more harsh and widespread than in China. It is interesting to note that, due to the U.S.’s democratic structure, conservative politicians have an incentive to continuously stir indignation within their voter demographics, weaponizing their depictions of the LGBTQ+ community to make voters feel as if their identities and lifestyles are being put at risk. This is unnecessary for Chinese politicians, as the CCP retains relatively stable and long-term political control; even the outlier of Xi Jinping’s recent campaign against “effeminate men” is rooted less in generating fear and more in reinvigorating the outdated image of the “masculine” nationalist. The relationship between the government and pro-LGBTQ+ activists also remains a major distinction between the nations, as advocates in the United States can freely organize and publicize their stances and initiatives without fear of government reprisal.
Most notably, recent rollbacks in legal rights for LGBTQ+ individuals in China can be largely attributed to the government’s ability to act independently of public sentiment, while in the United States, they are the result of a decades-long absence of centralized protections.
Of course, one might also argue that the U.S.’s lack of a federal consensus on LGBTQ+ rights is precisely what allows massive public movements to mobilize for positive legislative change. Similarly, in China, despite the authoritarian nature of its governing body, public opinion is not entirely irrelevant to the government’s stance on LGBTQ+ rights. The CCP must also cater to international pressure, and there have been instances in which the government has moderated its stance on certain policy issues due to public outcry—one example being Beijing’s shift to target air pollution following massive public protests in 2013. However, given the current state of political polarization in America, the mobilization of a substantial majority is greatly hindered by the prominence of partisan echo chambers; though large groups may form, their messages rarely get across to increasingly isolated demographics disagreeing with them. Simultaneously, in China, the efficacy of advocacy has decreased over the years due to intensified censorship and crackdowns on activist organizations under President Xi Jinping.
Looking to the Future
Despite recent attacks on LGBTQ+ rights in China and the United States, movements for equality persist. This summer, at the behest of advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the NAACP, U.S. House Representative Mark Takano (D-CA) and Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) reintroduced the Equality Act, a bill originally proposed in the 1970s that would cement federal protections for LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in employment, housing, credit, education, public spaces and services, and jury selection. Such a bill would prove monumental in preventing the encroachment of LGBTQ+ rights by individual states and private entities. While China faces a more dire situation due to the CCP’s forceful disbanding of its most prominent LGBTQ+ activist organizations, many smaller groups are finding creative methods to continue their efforts, including but not limited to rebranding, focusing on groundwork, and operating within foreign embassies. In both nations, many activists look toward generational disparities in views on LGBTQ+ issues as a source of hope for the future: a survey conducted by Peking University in collaboration with the UNDP noted that Chinese youth are widely more accepting toward sexual diversity than their older counterparts, and UCLA’s Williams Institute reports that citizens born after the Silent Generation are not only significantly more open toward their LGBTQ+ peers, but also substantially less tolerant of homophobia and LGBTQ+ discrimination.
In Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s case, following her extended absence and rumored arrest, her novels were picked up by the Los Angeles publishing company Seven Seas Entertainment, allowing them to be enjoyed by fans internationally despite China’s restrictions—a shining example of the global LGBTQ+ community’s creative and continued persistence. I, myself, was quite happy to come across a copy of her novel Heaven Official’s Blessing while perusing the shelves at the Morningside Heights public library.
Tazia Mohammad (CC ‘27) is a staff writer at CPR majoring in economics and political science.