"Much of the abuse has been driven by a growing nationalistic fervour, with people criticising or drawing attention to China’s human rights issues becoming targets of major online pile-ons, or worse.
Some women who have put themselves in the public eye to draw attention to human rights issues like the abuses in Xinjiang have been targeted with faked nude photographs, threats, accusations of being traitors, separatists, and paid actors, and harassment of family members. The attacks have come from regular citizens online as well as government officials and state media.
“I was lynched in the Chinese media,” Chinese-Australian researcher Vicky Xu told Australian TV’s Q&A program in April. “Along with a lot of my peers who study Xinjiang.”
Xu said a report she produced with colleagues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which implicated more than 80 international brands in forced labour, prompted the Chinese government to “go on the offensive”.
She became a trending topic on Weibo, with one story clicked on more than 9.2m times, calling her a demon and a race traitor. In an article headlined “Bewitched Vicky Xu who fabricates Xinjiang story stokes anti-China sentiment in Australia: observer”, state media tabloid the Global Times said Xu was endangering Chinese people in Australia.
Fake nude images of Xu have circulated online, her past relationships doxxed and dissected to slut-shame her, and her family and contacts in China harassed, detained and interrogated – an accusation echoed by most of the women the Guardian spoke to for this article."