“Rat Rat” Culture and Digital Misogyny: Extreme Misogyny, Problematic Feminisms, and the Governmentality of Gender in Post-Socialist China

Abstract: This paper employs digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis to examine misogynistic communities across Chinese digital platforms, including the SunXiaoChuan Bar, misogynistic vloggers on Bilibili, and extreme QQ groups. It investigates the practices and ideologies of these communities, highlighting their intersections with Western manosphere discourses as well as problematic strands of local online feminism. The analysis traces the co-construction of popular feminism and popular misogyny, showing how platform algorithms and state censorship shape the circulation and visibility of gendered discourse. Neoliberal rationality further conducts both misogynistic ideologies and feminist expressions, reframing gender politics around individual success or antagonistic confrontation. While misogyny in China has grown increasingly radicalized, it is rarely curtailed by state censorship and is often amplified by platform algorithms. Crucially, it channels rising class discontent into hostility toward women, deflecting critique of economic inequality and state power. By contrast, digital feminisms are systematically filtered, reduced to either neoliberal success stories or radicalized attacks. This process not only fragments feminist solidarity but also reinforces dominant misogynistic ideologies within the digital public sphere.