3.2 Why I chose Weibo

literature. The agenda of the interviews was based on the outline but mainly following

the direction of the participants for exploring their discourse in depth.

The participants were asked to complete a demographic questionnaire including age,

gender, occupation, education, and location prior to the interview. Interview data were

used to present the practices of individual feminists, and the common obstacles,

individualized strategies, in their online participation with particular context.

As the popular international social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have

been blocked in China, Weibo is one of the most important social media absolutely,

having a huge number of audiences with over 500 million daily active users. The public

express their opinion on Weibo and requirements on the government to solve some

issues. Weibo can be seen as a "counter-hegemonic practice in everyday life ”(Yang,

2013).

Weibo is also widely used by feminists as a tool of communication. The design of

Weibo is based on the possibility to form a community around each hashtag, and users

can post in the community after following the hashtag they are interested in. As of today,

there are more than 15,000 followers and 4,115 posts in the virtual community formed by the hashtag: #feminism (#女权主义 ). Most of the domestic feminist hashtag

movements are all conducted on Weibo, like #MeToo#. In particular, Weibo, the social