BEIJING - The scene came seven minutes into a new Chinese-government-sponsored television drama, so short that it would have been easy to miss: The head of a bus company in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus outbreak began, asks his drivers if they are willing to make emergency runs during the city's lockdown. A line of volunteers forms. None are women.
The uproar reflects lingering tensions even as China emerges from an outbreak that sickened many, cratered its economy and upended the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people. "In previous television dramas, women would frequently be smeared. But I thought that something would change this year, after the experience of the epidemic, because so many women participated in the fight," Zoe Shen, a feminist activist and blogger in Beijing, said in an interview."I didn't think there would be such a plotline now."
"In real life, they pushed women out" onto the front lines, said one commenter about the show on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform."In propaganda, they buried the women." The comment was liked more than 30,000 times.