Given the anti China stance of the western news media, does anyone have conext on this story?
Their Weibo post about closing just says sources outside their control.
Wikipedia mentions that they've had trouble finding buildings to operate out of due to unfriendly landlords in the past.Looks like the page is gone, can you share the text if you still have it open?
I don’t know about this, but I do know that in my town the african American advocacy group’s recreation building was just closed because their neighborhood is getting gentrified and rents are going up. I haven’t seen any articles about it in AP news.
On the one hand, the CPC does have its share of socially conservative boomers. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past the NED types to try to wedge their way into Chinese Civil society via LGBT issues.
Personally I'm baseline suspicious when there are so few details provided from either side, also when anonymous sources provide stories of stuff like these euphemistic "tea times" which just sound structured like very easily repeatable propaganda snippets.
Remember that the "lgbt conversion schools" thing got retracted not too long ago due to complaints regarding manipulating citations and quotes.
Even if it is true (and if it is it's cringe and bad and I'm embracing Little Deng thought even more than previously), is this the local/provincial governments or the National level government? Just because some policemen harass an LGBT org doesn't mean it's national policy.
Remember that the “lgbt conversion schools” thing got retracted not too long ago due to complaints regarding manipulating citations and quotes.
Could you elaborate? How did they manipulate quotes and who complained?
Thats basically what the paper that published it said, the story was roughly about supposedly state sponsored conversion therapy schools, then after a short while the paper said they got complaints from cited academics/sources claiming they were not asked before being cited, and/or that their quotes and research had been manipulated to suggest a conclusion they didnt support.
Idk if this is real or anything, but If it is, idk why China doesn't just take a page from the GDR and Cuba book and just go full force with education and support for LGBT rights and education. Literally the solution to LGBT rights being a wedge to be used by the west to propagandize about China can be easily stopped by just supporting LGBT rights. Honestly the GDR's method was simple and brilliant
eh idk if it were Russia or something it would've been more believable.
If it's true it won't be the first LGBT center closed down in the past few years (hence why I don't see many reasons suspecting this to be fake).
I've thought a lot about why China can't simply just abandon their current "no support, no encouragement, no opposition" policy toward LGBT and instead just openly support LGBT rights, etc — especially since, in my own experience of growing up their, it was kind of shocking how little homophobia I experienced and how much support (albeit at times a bit condescending) I received from friends, families, teachers, etc., despite its society being highly binary-gendered and heteronormative (or maybe we should say reproduction-normative? -- I do think the pressure and homophobia start mounting immensely when one enters the typical child-raising age, but by that time I already bounced). I don't think I have a good answer as for the CPC's stance on this, but there're a few things I've thought about ...
I would suspect part of it may have to do with the fact that, from the CPC's point of view, their base has historically and I'd say continues to be rural China. And especially since the 1980s reforms, rural China's social structure thanks to the household responsibility system (as opposed to the earlier collective farming) has been defined by peasant households. This probably means that, for the lack of a better word, "feudal family values" returned in full force, insofar as it can supposedly safeguard these households that are now again functioning as units of production as well as life.
Another layer I've thought about is that, following the 1980s reforms which practically dismantled a good part of the social safety net (healthcare in particular, but also guaranteed employment and housing), families and extended families have stepped in to be a new, de facto, makeshift social safety net, a change that I suspect was particularly palpable in cities. Which again probably created space for the return of "feudal family values."
All this is to say that, from the viewpoint of the CPC, they probably think that, the moment they start to formalize the disintegration of "traditional family structures," they expect there to be chaos and decay in society — which, yes, is partly attributable to their conservatism and boomer brain, but also attributable to the socio-economic reality of Dengist China.
(Sidenote: there's actually not a lot of reason to suspect that the CPC/Chinese officials of various levels are in anyway ideologically opposed to LGBT. For example, when the civil code was adopted a few years earlier, some same-sex couples started using its provisions of guardianship as a way to formalize their union, and some local governments openly acknowledged this practice and even mentioned it in their training of public notaries.)
Yeah this looks like BS to me, especially considering it's coming from AP
As far as I can tell, the only evidence presented that the government did this is one anonymous individual's insinuations, so I don't find it terribly compelling considering the history of stories where, for example, a private company closes a handful of advocacy accounts and western sources immediately blame the government.
Mind you, it totally could be true, the article just doesn't provide good reason to think so.
