In March 2021, a 23-year-old Chinese woman tragically died while using the logistics company Huolala to move apartments at night; she fell off the moving truck, which was driven by a male driver. In the aftermath, many netizens voiced dissatisfaction with the arrest of the male driver and launched online doxxing against the female victim. They spread the false narrative that the woman worked as an online “procuress,” enticing male viewers to spend money on female live-streamers and that on that night she tried to seduce the driver and distracted him. While this baseless accusation was never corrected, its wide circulation on digital platforms has effectively directed the netizens’ attention away from her tragic death to debates about her female virtue, further stoking a wave of gendered cyberhate against the deceased woman.

The dissemination of such pieces of disinformation, that devalue and discredit women as individuals or communities online, is a prominent manifestation of misogyny in contemporary China. As a longstanding system of structural oppression, misogyny in China has its roots in the deeply-sedimented framework of patriarchal Confucianism, which underpins the conventional social norms of male supremacy and female subordination. Today, amid the rise of “platform society” (van Dijck et al., 2018) where the dual power of digital capitalism and the authoritarian state dictates the social space, misogyny has gained greater momentum, joining forces with disinformation and subjecting women to complex forms of oppression.