Chinese Women Protesting Domestic Violence: The Beijing Conference, International Donor Agencies, and the Making of a Chinese Women’s NGO

The “Domestic Violence in China: Research, Intervention and Prevention” Project of China Law Society, the first women’s NGO in China organized exclusively against the issue of domestic violence, was launched in Beijing in 2000. This article examines the construction of this non-profit project as an outcome of dynamic interactions among a constellation of both global and local feminist forces and agents. It shows that the formation of the project combines three interwoven processes, which include 1) the emergence of women’s NGOs and the rise of anti-domestic violence activism among the NGOs as a result of the Beijing Conference; 2) international donors’ active economic cultivation of anti-gender violence activism among local women’s NGOs; 3) participant activists’ rationalization of the project as a worthwhile cause for their political commitment with their “vocabularies of motives.” This article provides a contextualized study of the global spread of the feminist anti-violence against women cause from a local perspective, suggesting that the “global and the “local,” in the field of transnational feminism, should be treated more attentively as an interactive nexus rather than as largely independent entities.