25/07/2021
China is increasingly at loggerheads with the West and this may have resulted in a new crackdown on LGBTQ organisations in a country which has traditionally celebrated samesex relationships, but which since its bloody communist takeover in 1949, has pursued mostly homophobic policies. Neil Miller's 1994 textbook “Out of the Past” records that during the brutal cultural revolution, the Maoist regime's purges of homosexuals and other dissident groups left bodies piled up in rivers, and shocked even the Stalinist Russian regime which was also nominally communist. Since the nineties there were signs of some thaw in this attitude, but any LGBTQ organisation not under the direct control of the state was regarded as a threat. This week Al Jazeera and the BBC report that the social media channels of student LGBTQ groups across China have been shut down without official explanation. However, China analysts say that it is because any movement or group outside of state control is viewed with suspicion. They believe that it is not hosility to homosexuality per se that is behind the crackdown, but fear of the West, fear of liberal values, fear of independent thought and fear of free media that concerns Beijing. In this respect, the crackdown is part of a wider picture including the persecution of Muslims in Northern China, closedown of the independent Hong Kong media, and the replacement of television executives with party loyalists.
