She became a trending topic on Sina Weibo, with one story clicked on more than 9.2 million times, calling her a demon and a race traitor. Xu said a report she produced with colleagues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which implicated more than 80 international brands in forced labor, prompted the Chinese government to “go on the offensive.” “I was lynched in the Chinese media, along with a lot of my peers who study Xinjiang.” Chinese-Australian researcher Vicky Xu (許秀中) told Australian TV’s Q&A program last month. The attacks have come from regular citizens online, as well as government officials and state media. Some women who have put themselves in the public eye to draw attention to human rights issues such as the abuses in Xinjiang have been targeted with faked nude photographs, threats, accusations of being traitors, separatists and paid actors, and harassment of family members. Much of the abuse has been driven by a growing nationalistic fervor, with people criticizing or drawing attention to China’s human rights issues becoming targets of major online pile-ons, or worse. “We wanted to make the trolling words into something that could be seen, touched, to materialize the trolling comments and to amplify the abuse of what happens to people online.”
“When the Xiao Meili incident happened, a lot of feminists were being trolled, including myself,” said one of the artists, Yaqing, who did not want to use her real name.
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