Constructing Gender Antagonism: Moralised Platform Governance in China

“Gender antagonism” (xingbie duili) has emerged on Chinese social media platforms as a prevailing term, and subsequently as a governance category for regulating online disputes. Adopting a power-sensitive approach, which scrutinises the interplay between the production of meaning and the allocation of communication resources, this study examines how “gender antagonism” is dynamically constructed between users, platforms, and the state through the case of Weibo. Employing critical discourse analysis of user jury voting records, Weibo’s disclosures, and state policy documents, we argue that gender antagonism is not an objective description of gender disputes, but a discursive framework initially mobilised by some users and later institutionalised by platforms and state authorities. The pervasive moralised deployment of this term in platform governance marginalises discussions of gender equality and delegitimises critiques of mainstream gender norms amid China’s crisis of population reproduction. While this discursive construction reflects a moralised platform governance pattern and transfers into effective online visibility control, it eschews gender equality, failing to alleviate long-standing tensions in China’s social governance.