Anger is growing on Chinese social media after news reports revealed the existence of online groups, said to involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, which shared photographs of women, including sexually explicit ones, taken without their consent.
The Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published a report last week about a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram called “MaskPark tree hole forum”. It said it had more than 100,000 members and was “comprised entirely of Chinese men”.
Men reportedly shared sexually explicit images of women either in intimate settings or with so-called “pinhole cameras” that can be hidden in everyday items such as plug sockets and shoes.
The scandal has been compared to South Korea’s “Nth Room” case, in which women were blackmailed into sharing sexually explicit photographs of themselves with members of a Telegram group.
Telegram is blocked in China but can be accessed by using a virtual private network, or VPN, which circumvents location controls.
Hashtags related to the scandal clocked up more than 11m views on the social media platform Weibo by Thursday. But there are signs the online conversation is being censored, with some relevant searches returning the result: “According to the relevant laws and regulations, this content cannot be shown.” Reuters reported earlier in the week that associated hashtags had received more than 270m views.
“A woman’s life is not a man’s erotic novel,” wrote one user on Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like platform also known as RedNote.
Another user on Xiaohongshu, an app predominantly used by women, wrote: “So scary! After seeing this, I’ve decided if the MaskPark incident isn’t properly addressed, I’ll never get married or have kids.”
In the South Korean case, the mastermind of the chat group was eventually sentenced to 40 years in prison.
In China, the penalty for taking pictures of someone without their consent is up to 10 days’ detention and a 500 yuan (£53) fine. People who disseminate pornographic material can be sentenced to up to two years in prison.
The MaskPark scandal is not the first time men have been discovered to be secretly filming women. Last year, the boss of a tech company in Beijing was found to have secretly recorded more than 10,000 videos of his female employees using the bathroom. He was detained for 10 days as a punishment. “Ten days is nothing short of encouragement,” one Weibo user wrote.
Lao Dongyan, a criminal law professor at Tsinghua University, wrote on Weibo that Chinese law punished the dissemination of secretly – filmed material as an obscenity offence rather than a violation of women’s rights.
“The women who were secretly filmed are the primary victims. Simply treating them as obscene materials is tantamount to treating them as the parties involved in pornographic works. This is absurd,” Lao wrote.
Speaking out about feminism and women’s rights has become increasingly difficult in China as the government has cracked down on civil society and activism. But some women have found ways to address misogyny in public. One method is through comedy.
On a recent episode of a popular standup comedy television show, The King of Standup Comedy, the comedian Huang Yijin joked that she wore make-up even when alone in hotel rooms: “Whenever I’m in a hotel, I just assume there are hidden cameras … There are about 2 million people in my room,” she said.