Bargaining with the State: The Empowerment of Chinese Sexual Minorities/LGBT in the Social Media Era

This article investigates the interaction between the empowerment of Chinese sexual minorities through social media and its impact on the bargaining capacity of society with the State in terms of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-gender (LGBT) (Since ‘sexual minority’ and ‘LGBT’ are neutral terms used in news reports, social media posts and academic articles and have been translated into ‘xing shao shu’ in most cases in Chinese discourse, this article will use these two terms interchangeably for research and quotation purposes.) movements in China. Although censorship in China silences collective expression, social media empower Chinese sexual minorities to promote information publicity and increase public visibility. Moreover, by looking at the case of Qiu Bai, a lesbian college student who sued the Ministry of Education for its maladministration on homophobic textbooks in a social media environment, it indicates how LGBT activists use social media to enlighten the public during the process of fighting for their equal rights within the legal framework and more broadly, how the Internet influences the state-society relations in a traditionally sensitive issue area.