「中英」清华彩虹旗事件与中国不断缩小的LGBTQ空间

卡罗琳·李和克莉丝汀·黄在北京。这两名清华大学学生正在与中国教育当局就她们在校园内展示彩虹旗的权利进行斗争。 Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
Karolyn Li still remembers reading the brochure from China’s prestigious Tsinghua University when she was in high school preparing to apply to college. It highlighted a graduate who had co-founded an L.G.B.T.Q. rights group, a suggestion of inclusivity on campus that surprised Ms. Li, who identifies as queer.
卡罗琳·李还记得，她在高中准备申大学时看过中国顶尖学府清华大学的宣传册。里面提到了一位参与创立了某LGBTQ权利团体的毕业生，这种校园包容性的暗示让自我认同为酷儿的李女士感到惊讶。
Ms. Li ended up enrolling at Tsinghua. Now a 21-year-old junior, Ms. Li sees the brochure as cruelly ironic. She and her friend, Christine Huang, a 23-year-old senior, have spent the past year locked in a losing battle against the university and the country’s education authorities over gay and transgender expression.
李女士最终进入了清华大学。现在已经是21岁的大三学生的李女士认为，这本小册子极具讽刺意味。过去一年里，她和她的朋友、23岁的大四学生克莉丝汀·黄一直在与校方和国家教育部门就同性恋和跨性别表达问题进行一场毫无胜算的斗争。
When the two women distributed rainbow flags on campus last year, and resisted school administrators who confronted them, the university issued a punishment that would stay on their permanent records. When they tried in March to place flowers outside the dorm of a transgender classmate who died by suicide, they were surrounded by security. When they posed with rainbow flags in a photo in May, a university employee ran over and said they were not allowed to post the images online.
去年，因在校园内分发彩虹旗，并反抗与她们对峙的学校管理人员，校方对两人做出了将被永久记录在案的处分。今年3月，她们试图在一名自杀身亡的跨性别同学的宿舍外留下鲜花，被保安包围。今年5月，她们与彩虹旗合影，一名大学工作人员跑过来说不允许将照片发布到网上。
“All these things add up to make me wonder: How did things get so bad?” said Ms. Huang, who identifies as a lesbian.
“这些事情加起来都让我觉得，事情怎么能变得那么糟啊？”自我认同为同性恋的黄女士说。
In late May, they were told by a court in Beijing, where Tsinghua is, that it would not accept a lawsuit they had filed against the country’s education ministry to overturn the university’s punishment over the flag incident.
5月下旬，清华所在城市北京的一家法院告知她们，法院不会受理她们对国家教育部提起的诉讼，她们在诉讼中要求大学取消对彩虹旗事件的处分。
Ms. Huang and Ms. Li’s experiences point to the shrinking space for even subtle gay and transgender expression in China. As the ruling Communist Party has tightened controls on ideology and civil society, nationalist commentators on social media have sought to depict Chinese L.G.B.T.Q. activist groups in particular as a tool of hostile foreign forces.
黄女士和李女士的经历表明，在中国，即使是隐晦的同性恋和跨性别表达，空间也在缩小。随着执政的共产党加强对意识形态和公民社会的控制，社交媒体上的民族主义评论员试图将中国的LGBTQ活动组织描绘成外国敌对势力的工具。2019年北京的一家同性恋夜店。自习近平2012年成为中国领导人以来，政府加大了对LGBTQ表达和活动主义的打压。 Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Among the top accusations made against such groups is that they are “causing conflict within society with the goal of destabilizing society,” said Darius Longarino, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.
耶鲁大学法学院蔡中曾中国中心高级研究员龙大瑞(Darius Longarino)说，针对这些团体的最主要指控是它们“在社会内部引发冲突，目的是破坏社会稳定”。
In May, the police in the eastern city of Hangzhou detained six gay men for 13 days for participating in what the report referred to as “lewd activities,” publicizing their names. That same month, Beijing LGBT Center, a well-known advocacy group, shut down after 15 years in operation, citing forces beyond its control.
5月，东部城市杭州警方将六名男同性恋者拘留了13天，通报称他们参与了“淫乱聚会”，公开了他们的姓名。同月，著名维权组织“北京同志中心”在运营15年后表示由于不可抗力终止运营。
The disbanding of the Beijing group crushed Ms. Huang, who had been a monthly donor to it. She said the center made people feel safe, citing a friend who had gone there for low-cost counseling.
北同中心的解散让每月给该组织捐款的黄女士受到打击。她说，这个中心让人们感到安全，并提到她的一位朋友在那里接受低费心理咨询。
Civic groups in China have long navigated ill-defined and constantly shifting margins of official tolerance, with activists often facing the threat of arrest. Ms. Huang and Ms. Li were born in the early 2000s, a period when the authorities slightly loosened social controls. Homosexuality was removed from China’s list of mental illnesses. Organizations like Shanghai Pride were able to host large public celebrations. Dozens of queer advocacy groups formed.
长期以来，中国的公民团体一直在官方容忍的范围内前行，而这个范围模糊不清且不断变化，活动人士经常面临被捕的威胁。黄女士和李女士出生于2000年代初期，那个时候当局略微放松了社会控制。同性恋被从中国的精神疾病名单中删除。上海骄傲节(ShanghaiPride)等组织能够举办大型公共庆祝活动，出现了数十个酷儿倡导团体。
But under Xi Jinping, the top leader since 2012, the authorities have intensified a crackdown on human rights lawyers, feminist groups and other activists. Though Mr. Xi has not explicitly spoken about gay rights, he has emphasized Confucian values of order and obedience, in which citizens conform to traditional gender roles.
但在2012年以来担任最高领导人的习近平的领导下，当局加强了对人权律师、女权主义团体和其他活动人士的打压。尽管没有明确谈到同性恋权利，习近平强调了儒家关于秩序和服从的价值观，即公民要遵守传统的性别角色。
In 2016, China banned television shows and films from showing gay characters. In 2020, Shanghai Pride announced an indefinite hiatus, alluding to safety concerns.
2016年，中国禁止电视节目和电影出现同性恋角色。2020年，上海骄傲节宣布无限期停办，并间接提到是出于安全担忧。北京，清华大学校门。 Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times
In 2021, in what activists have described as a turning point, WeChat, the most popular app in China, suddenly deleted at least a dozen accounts of college-run L.G.B.T.Q. organizations.
2021年被活动人士称为一个转折点，中国最热门的应用程序微信突然删除了至少十几个大学运营的LGBTQ组织的账户。
One of the accounts was run by Purple, a club of more than 300 members at Tsinghua that Ms. Huang and Ms. Li belonged to. All the articles its members had written — about sex education, coming out to family, mental health — vanished overnight.
其中一个账户由Purple运营，这是一个黄女士和李女士所在的社团，有300多名清华成员。它的成员写的所有文章——关于性教育、向家人出柜、心理健康——一夜之间都消失了。
Ms. Huang tried to rally her brokenhearted friends. “Although many things make people feel hopeless, we all have to keep living, and we have to be brave after this night,” she texted them.
黄女士努力给伤心的朋友们鼓劲。“尽管很多事情让人感到没有希望，但是我们每个人都要活下去，这一夜后我们要勇敢起来，”她给大家发信息说。
Ms. Huang and Ms. Li became friends after arriving at college from distant worlds. Ms. Li attended foreign-language schools in Wuhan in central China. She explored her gender identity in an environment where her classmates felt comfortable standing up and accusing a politics teacher of discrimination when he said homosexuality was an illness.
黄女士和李女士来自截然不同的世界，因为在同一所大学就读而成为朋友。李在中国中部的武汉市念外国语学校。她的同学敢于在政治课上站出来，指责声称同性恋是疾病的老师是在歧视，她就是在这样的环境里探索自己的性别身份的。
Ms. Huang had a less privileged upbringing, raised largely by her grandmother in a small city in northeast China’s Jilin Province. She realized she was a lesbian when she had a crush on a female TV character, but she was terrified to reveal this to most of her classmates.
黄的家境没有那么优越，她来自中国东北部吉林省一座小城市，童年大多数时间由祖母抚养。在发现自己迷上了电视上的一个女性角色时，她意识到自己是一个同性恋者，但是她不敢向绝大多数同学提及这件事。参加2020年上海骄傲节期间的骄傲跑。不久之后，上海骄傲节宣布无限期停办，并间接提及是出于安全担忧。 Aly Song/Reuters
With their parents, Ms. Huang and Ms. Li almost always played the part of model daughters, obeying them and getting good grades. But in high school, they also had heated fights with their parents over whether they were gay, and have since avoided the coming-out conversation with them.
在父母面前，黄李二人基本上都保持着乖乖女的形象，听他们的话，学习成绩优秀。但是到了高中，她们和父母就她们是不是同性恋暴发激烈争吵，此后一直避免跟他们谈及出柜的话题。
Both women came to Tsinghua wanting to be free. Purple became their core social circle, a gateway to a world of new ideas. The club hosted screenings of European films about gay labor activism and organized book clubs that discussed queer theory.
两人都希望来到清华后能得到自由。Purple成为她们的核心社交圈，一个通往许多新理念的入口。社团会放映讲同性恋劳工行动主义的欧洲电影，组织读书会讨论酷儿理论。
The club gave them a sense of purpose. When a Purple member was at risk of contracting H.I.V., Ms. Huang helped him get off-campus testing. They tiptoed into activism, like giving flowers to the school’s female employees for International Women’s Day. To express their opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, they went out to eat stewed goose — because in Chinese, the word for “goose” sounds like the word for “Russia.”
Purple让她们有了一种抱负。一位会员有感染HIV的风险，黄女士帮助他到校外做了检测。他们小心翼翼地实践行动主义，比如在妇女节那天给校内的女性员工献花。为了表达对俄罗斯侵略乌克兰的反对，他们去吃了焖鹅煲——因为在中文里，“鹅”与“俄”同音。
Then, last year on May 14, before a pride day in China, they spread 10 rainbow flags on a table inside a supermarket on campus. “Please take ~ #PRIDE,” they scribbled on an accompanying note.
后来，在去年的5月14日——中国的一个同志骄傲日前夕，她们在校内一家超市的桌上摆了10面彩虹旗，旁边配有两行小字：“请自取~#PRIDE”。
A surveillance camera caught them.
监控摄像头拍下了她们的举动。李女士和黄女士在清华校园超市内展示的彩虹旗。 Christine Huang
School officials barged into their dorms that night, the women said. The school later accused them of promoting a “harmful influence,” according to written decisions by the university explaining the punishment.
两人说，学校官员当晚闯进她们的寝室。在后来校方解释处分理由的书面文件中，她们被指造成“不良影响”。
The university asserted that the women had not sought permission to distribute the flags. It also accused Ms. Huang of using abusive and insulting language against university employees who had confronted her, and of sharing their names and job titles on WeChat. Ms. Huang acknowledged posting the names, but denied using abusive language. A representative for Tsinghua did not respond to requests for comment.
校方坚称两人分发旗帜前没有申请批准，并指责黄女士谩骂、侮辱与其对峙的校方工作人员，还在微信上分享了他们的姓名与职务。黄女士承认她公布了姓名，但否认有谩骂。清华大学的一名代表没有回应置评请求。
The punishment barred them from receiving scholarship money for six months and made it harder for them to apply to graduate school in China.
这项处分导致她们被停发六个月的奖学金，并增加了她们在中国报考研究生的难度。
Ms. Li, a history major, is now looking to build a new life abroad, hoping to apply to graduate programs overseas.
主修历史的李女士现在试图去国外开启新的人生，并希望能攻读国外大学的研究生学位。
Ms. Huang, a sociology major, recently drafted a letter to her parents revealing her sexual orientation. If the police knock on her parents’ door, she plans to send a photo of the letter to them.
主修社会学的黄女士不久前写了一封给父母的信，向他们陈明她的性取向。万一警方找到她父母那里，她打算把这封信的照片发给他们。
When Ms. Huang got into Tsinghua, it was the talk of her hometown, a dream come true for her family. Now, she is graduating next month with no job prospects. She had hoped to work at an L.G.B.T.Q. nonprofit, but knows her options are dwindling.
考上清华曾让黄女士成为家乡的话题人物，使她的家族梦想成真。如今再过一个月她就要毕业了，就业前景不妙。她希望在LGBTQ非营利组织工作，但她知道选择的余地正变得越来越小。
In February, Ms. Huang and Ms. Li sued the education ministry because the legal system seemed the safest way to protest what happened to them.
2月，黄李二人状告教育部，因为通过司法系统来抗议她们的遭遇似乎是最安全的方式。李女士和黄女士起诉中国教育部，要求校方撤销对她们展示彩虹旗的处分。她们认为用诉讼来抗议她们的遭遇是最为安全的途径。 Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
After the lawsuit hung in limbo for three months, they visited the courthouse on May 24 with their lawyer, only to hear from a judge that the case would not be accepted. According to the women, the judge said there would be no written explanation, but cited a regulation prohibiting lawsuits that endanger national security or undermine national unity.
诉讼提交后三个月没有回音，于是她们于5月24日带着律师去了法院，结果从一位法官那里得知此案不会得到受理。据两人说，法官称不会做出书面解释，但提到有相关法规禁止受理危及国家安全或国家统一的诉讼。
They plan to challenge the decision and exhaust all legal avenues to the end, even though they know the likely outcome.
她们打算对这一决定发起挑战，穷尽一切法律手段，尽管她们知道可能会是怎样的结果。
“Even if the lawsuit cannot give us justice or recognition,” Ms. Li said, “we must record in documents that we existed, worked hard and fought.”
“哪怕这个法律无法给我们公正、无法给我们承认，”李女士说，“我们就必须以这种文书的形式去记录我们曾经存在过、努力过、抗争过。”