China’s highest-profile sexual harassment case ended in another defeat this week, but its plaintiff and supporters are not giving up
“On June 9, 2014, I was a 21-year-old student in university…when I was sexually harassed by Zhu Jun in the dressing room, I wasn’t able to call for help immediately because of the shame I felt over sex,” Zhou Xiaoxuan told around 30 supporters several blocks away from the First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing on Wednesday night, reading from a printed statement hours after one of China’s most high-profile sexual harassment cases ended in what might be its final defeat.
The court upheld last September’s decision by the Haidian People’s Court to dismiss Zhou’s lawsuit against Zhu Jun, formerly a presenter on state broadcaster CCTV, for sexual harassment, citing a lack of evidence. Zhou, better known by the Chinese public as Xianzi, appealed the decision, and had been granted a second hearing on Wednesday, August 10. In 2018, Zhou accused Zhu of groping and forcibly kissing her in the dressing room during the filming of the show Art Life while she was an intern, and later sued him after he attempted to sue her for reputation damage.
The involvement of a well-known television host immediately caught the public’s attention, and the case has been at the center of the Chinese #MeToo movement, finally going to court three years later in December 2020. As the years continued to tick by, with news and discussions of gender-based violence more and more prominent in Chinese media, the case itself felt more hopeless than ever to Zhou as well as her supporters—yet its importance had only intensified.
Anita is a researcher at The World of Chinese. She is interested in stories that involve gender inequality, social issues, as well as current affairs. She is also passionate about the development of subcultures in Chinese society.
