ConnexionSatirical “gay pandas” post lands two men in detention
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in Western China and the country’s fourth largest city, has for years been referred to as “Gaydu” by Chinese millennials wise to the cosmopolitan city’s reputation as China’s “gay capital”.
Recent detentions are evidence that the government’s tolerance for Chengdu’s notoriety as a gay hub is fraying.
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Two Chinese men who allegedly produced and shared an AI-manipulated photo of two “gay pandas” from Chengdu — known as China’s “panda capital”, as well — have been detained, the Washington Post reports.
Chinese officials call the arrests part of a crackdown on attempts to “maliciously associate” gayness with certain Chinese cities.
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The detainees, 29 and 33 years old, are accused of posting the satirical photo as a news report on social media, using an official government report as the source. It showed one male panda mounting another, with a caption that read, “Chengdu: Two male Sichuan giant pandas successfully mate for the first time without intervention.”
Local police said in a statement that the two suspects were detained and their social media accounts suspended. They accused the men of “spreading… fake news” that “triggered a flood of misinterpretations, disrupted the order of cyberspace, and caused adverse social impact.”
The arrests follow at least two other similar detentions addressing activity that allegedly tarnishes municipalities with a gay reputation.
A 25-year-old man from Sichuan was detained last week for posting multiple videos that “insinuated” men in Chengdu lack masculinity and “stigmatized the male population in Chengdu,” according to a statement from the Chengdu Public Security Bureau issued January 17.
A 23-year-old man from the Eastern province of Shandong, known on social media for his street interviews queerbaiting male pedestrians and subway passengers for clicks, was also apprehended, according to state media reports.
“Homosexuality is not universally accepted in China, but we cannot say being gay or claiming to be gay is wrong,” said Wang Xuetang, a lawyer with J. Tongue Law Office in Shenzhen, just outside Hong Kong.
China officially dropped homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 2001.
Authorities appear to be trying to erase Chengdu’s unofficial queer capital status by other means, he said.
The Chengdu cases were defined as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vaguely defined criminal offense that has often been used to control speech and deter dissent, Wang explained.
“This case has been described as a stigmatization of Chengdu, because many netizens joked that homosexuality is so widespread in the city that even pandas there turned gay.”
The real danger, he said, “is in the police drawing conclusions from online reactions — not strictly from the content of the posts — as evidence for offenses.”
China has exerted slow and steady pressure on the LGBTQ+ community in the last several years, while stopping short of the draconian measures of other authoritarian regimes, like Russia. The moves coincide with Xi Jinping’s ascension to power in 2015.
Last year, the country’s main internet regulator and censorship authority ordered Apple to remove two popular gay dating apps from its App Store in China, including Blued, with an estimated 56 million users. In September, government censors used AI to turn a gay couple straight in the Dave Franco thriller Together.
Two years ago, authorities launched a campaign aimed at erasing the popular “danmei”, or Boys’ Love, erotic fiction genre, with the detention of hundreds of writers, most of them young women. They’ve been accused of “producing and distributing obscene material” under China’s pornography law, which targets “explicit descriptions of gay sex or other sexual perversions.”
In 2023, Chinese authorities shut down one of the last, most visible signs of LGBTQ+ activism in China: the LGBT Center in Beijing.
“There used to be a vibrant gay scene in Chengdu, and LGBTQ people there were highly visible and welcomed,” said Kenneth Cheung, a Hong Kong-based activist and founder of LGBTQ+ rights group Rainbow China, which has been banned from organizing in the country.
“Now,” he said, “that culture increasingly faces challenges.”
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