BOOK REVIEW Weibo Feminism: Expression, Activism, and Social Media in China Aviva Wei Xue and Kate Rose. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 213 pp. £19.79 (pbk). ISBN 9781350231481 Jinyan Zeng Lund University, Lund, Sweden Email: jinyan.zeng@ace.lu.se Weibo Feminism examines the rise of radical feminism on China’s most popular and heavily cen- sored microblog platform, Weibo. The spectrum of radical feminism encompasses various aspects, from prioritizing female interests and rights to creating women’s words and expressions, distancing oneself from proposals of reforming within the current system to improve gender equality, protest- ing the male-dominated LGBTQ+ movement paradigm and neoliberalism, and rejecting nation-state-family institutions. The grassroots feminism approach captured in the book critiques elitist feminism, even though many Weibo feminists are highly educated (e.g. PhD students with transnational experiences). The book describes how the emergence of radical feminism in China incorporates distinct Chinese characteristics, while echoing feminist movements in present-day South Korea and showing parallels with global radical feminism in the 1970s. Weibo Feminism covers a broad range of issues, including the subjugation in representing women in history and in contemporary China, reproductive questions such as single women’s pref- erence for having offspring and the problem of surrogacy, women’s property rights, the naming pol- itics of children, the anti-marriage movement, the betrayal by male counterparts who sacrifice feminist agendas for other activist goals, women’s desires and imaginaries, and new feminist strat- egies of online contestation. The book is organized with five main chapters on themes and/or the- oretical threads: digital feminism responding to the COVID-19 and its control; feminists contesting online discourses on women; reproductive rights contestations; feminist contestations on the con- cept of intersectionality; and feminist contestations on the use of Chinese language. Weibo Feminism provides rich data and insights into grassroots feminist contestations within China’s lim- ited public sphere, focusing on the Xi era. This review situates Weibo Feminism’s discussion of new grassroots feminists in the conceptual question of “who are Chinese intellectuals” in the Xi era. Public intellectuals, citizen intellectuals (as discussed by William A. Callahan and Timothy Cheek), citizen intelligentsia (as researched by this reviewer) and minjian grassroots intellectuals (as researched by Sebastian Veg) are iconic figures having life-long social influence through print, digital and other new types of media such as inde- pendent documentary films. Unlike them, the mass Weibo feminists are ordinary Chinese who have become activists and online influencers. Weibo feminists emerge through direct engagement and contestation with the public and the state. They are new grassroots activists and intellectuals in China’s tightened public sphere, democratizing the paradigm of studying the public sphere, both intellectual and activist, by addressing feminist agendas with women as the main leaders and par- ticipants in public life. The anarchist feminist approach of radical feminism can be dated back to the theories of He Yinzhen, the birth mother of Chinese feminism, as discussed by Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl and Dorothy Ko in The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia University Press, 2013). © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of SOAS University of London The China Quarterly (2024), 1–2 doi:10.1017/S0305741024000456    "  !" 