Four years after the #MeToo movement rocked global halls of power, one of its most politically consequential cases to date is unfolding in the unlikeliest of places: China. And unsurprisingly, the government there is trying to silence the dissent.

在令全球权势人物陷入不安的“#我也是”运动开始四年后，迄今为止政治意义最为重大的一案出现在了最意想不到的地方：中国。而不意外的是，该国政府试图堵住异议者的嘴。

Yet the Chinese Communist Party’s choreographed response to a tennis star’s sexual assault allegations has backfired spectacularly. Instead of squashing a scandal, it is fueling China’s feminist movement — it could ultimately pose a challenge to the party itself.

On Nov. 2, Peng Shuai, a former Wimbledon doubles champion, accused China’s former vice premier, Zhang Gaoli, of sexual assault. “Like an egg hitting a rock, or a moth to the flame, courting self-destruction, I’ll tell the truth about you,” she wrote in a lengthy post on Weibo, China’s popular social media platform. Then she disappeared.

State censors quickly restricted searches for Ms. Peng’s name on the Chinese internet and deleted the post, but not before it was shared around 1,000 times. In the following hours, netizens logged nearly seven million searches for the post.

Journalists started asking about Ms. Peng’s whereabouts at Chinese Foreign Ministry briefings. #WhereIsPengShuai trended on Twitter. Beijing dodged for days. But then state-controlled media released a series of bizarre images and videos purporting to show Ms. Peng safe and sound: at a restaurant; cuddling a cat; signing children’s tennis balls at a teenagers’ tournament.

If Beijing thought those measures would settle matters, it was sorely mistaken. So far Ms. Peng has not made any public comment. Steve Simon, the chief executive of the Women’s Tennis Association, said on Wednesday the women’s professional tennis tour would suspend all tournaments in China, including Hong Kong, in response to Ms. Peng’s disappearance, citing “serious doubts” that she was free and safe.

Ms. Peng’s celebrity certainly has driven interest in her case. But her allegations also are groundbreaking: They are the first to implicate such a high-ranking Chinese official, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s highest ruling body.

The upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party have been largely impenetrable to scandal and enjoyed relative respect from much of the population. But Ms. Peng’s allegations raise the specter that not all is well within the elite ranks and that maybe she’s not alone: More women could speak up. The floodgates could open. And the party can’t have that.

That might help explain the heavy-handed reaction to Ms. Peng’s allegations: They were a clear attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to protect itself and its legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

这也许就是为什么彭帅的指控引起了如此严厉的回应：这些行动显然是中国共产党在试图保护自己，以及自己在百姓心中的正当性。

Such moves from the authoritarian playbook tend to succeed in silencing dissent. But what the party apparently failed to take into consideration is the current women’s-rights climate in China. Its actions hit an already aching, raw nerve. And so a domestic #MeToo scandal exploded into an international cause célèbre.

这样的专制主义手法通常是能够压制异议的。然而中共显然没有考虑到当前中国女权运动的局面。它的行动触及了一根已经在隐隐作痛的敏感神经。于是一桩国内的“#我也是”丑闻爆发成为举世轰动的大事件。

While the patriarchal nature of Chinese society is well known, Ms. Peng’s case is the rare, revelatory moment that exposes how much China’s all-male rulers depend on the subjugation of women to ensure the Communist Party’s longevity.

尽管中国社会重男轻女的本性众所周知，但彭帅事件是一个罕见的、具有启发性的时刻，揭示了中国清一色的男性统治者是如何依靠压制女性来确保共产党的长久统治。

Things have only worsened under President Xi Jinping, architect of a state-run masculinity campaign.

在策动了全国性的阳刚之气运动的习近平领导下，情况变得更糟了。

Women are severely underrepresented in national politics: There is one woman on the 25-member Politburo. Female representation on the 204-member Central Committee, the largest of the party’s political bodies, has declined over the past decade, to 10 currently from 13 in 2012.

女性在中国政治中的代表性严重不足：25名政治局委员中只有一名女性。该党最大的政治机构——拥有204名成员的中央委员会中，女性代表人数在过去10年中从2012年的13人下降到目前的10人。

Broader gender inequality also has worsened. Women’s labor-force participation has fallen to 60.5 percent in 2019 from 73 percent in 1990, according to the World Bank. China is in the bottom third of all countries evaluated for their gender disparities, according to the World Economic Forum.

The grim prospects for Chinese women are particularly jarring given the prominent role of feminism in China’s revolutionary history. Women’s emancipation was a central goal not just for activists in the May Fourth movement of 1919 but throughout the Communist revolution, culminating in the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

中国女性的前景堪虞，考虑到女权主义在中国革命史上的突出作用，这一点就显得更加惊人了。妇女解放不仅是1919年五四运动中活动人士的核心目标，也是整个共产主义革命的核心目标，直至1949年中华人民共和国成立。

China’s ruler Mao Zedong famously proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky.” Propaganda images in the 1950s and ’60s showed smiling, muscular female welders and factory workers laboring to boost industrial production.

But today’s Communist Party appears to want women to be obedient wives and mothers. In his International Women’s Day address this year, Mr. Xi barely mentioned working women’s contributions to economic development.

Therein lies the tinder that has fueled the current feminist fire around Ms. Peng’s case. It also should have informed the government’s response, since those same conditions and authoritarian overreach landed the Communist Party in a similar mess in 2015. That’s when Chinese authorities jailed five female activists for planning to commemorate International Women’s Day by handing out stickers against sexual harassment on public transportation.

这就是目前围绕彭帅案燃起的女权主义之火的导火索。这应该也影响了政府此次的应对决策，因为在2015年，同样的情况和同样的威权专横使共产党陷入了相似的混乱。当时中国当局逮捕了五名女性活动人士，她们当时计划分发反对公共交通性骚扰的贴纸，以此来纪念国际妇女节。

At the time, the five were almost completely unknown. But other feminists created the term “Feminist Five” to shine a media spotlight on the jailed women.

当时，这五人几乎完全不为人知。但其他女权主义者创造了“女权五姐妹”一词，以让媒体关注这些被监禁的女性。

Inside China, the injustice invigorated activists, marking the beginning of a significant feminist movement. As internet censors worked to shut down expressions of solidarity with the five, the term “feminist” (“nüquan zhuyi zhe”) itself became a sensitive keyword.

Since then, organized feminist activists have tapped into the broad discontent felt by Chinese women and developed a level of influence that is highly unusual for any social movement in China.

The government has responded by shuttering women’s-rights and L.G.B.T.Q.-rights centers, deactivating feminist social media accounts and tightening control over gender-studies courses. The government crackdown on feminist organizing intensified earlier this year. One #MeToo activist, Sophia Huang Xueqin, was reportedly arrested under the charge of “inciting subversion of state power.”

政府的回应是关闭女权和LGBTQ权利中心，关停女权主义者的社交媒体帐户，并加强对性别研究课程的控制。今年早些时候，政府加大了对女权组织的打击力度。据报道，“#我也是”活动人士黄雪琴因“煽动颠覆国家政权罪”被捕。

It’s telling, though, that neither her case nor the few other #MeToo cases that broke through state media censorship — like the rape allegation against an executive at the tech giant Alibaba — have had the explosive impact of Ms. Peng’s.

不过，很明显，无论是她的案件还是其他少数突破官方媒体审查的“#我也是”案件——例如针对科技巨头阿里巴巴高管的强奸指控——都没有产生像彭帅事件那样的爆炸性影响。

That’s because none hold such potentially enormous implications for the Chinese Communist Party’s future. The party derives its legitimacy in part from its ability to control and finesse (all) narratives, through censorship and other authoritarian means. But with Ms. Peng, it has lost that control. If more women are inspired and able to speak out, the party might not be able to get it back.

这是因为它们都不会对中共的未来有如此巨大的潜在影响。党合法性部分来自通过审查和其他专制手段控制和修饰（所有）叙事的能力。但对于彭帅，它已经失去了这种控制。如果更多女性受到启发并能够发声，中共可能无法挽回局面。

Sports celebrities such as Naomi Osaka, Serena Williams and Martina Navratilova have tweeted support for Ms. Peng. The Biden administration called on Beijing to offer “verifiable proof” Ms. Peng is safe.

大坂直美、塞雷娜·威廉姆斯和玛蒂娜·纳芙拉蒂洛娃等体育名人都在Twitter上支持彭帅。拜登政府呼吁北京就彭帅的处境提供“可核实的证据”。

To be sure, there’s always a chance the government could take even harsher action to crush the #MeToo movement.

可以肯定的是，政府总是有可能采取更严厉的行动来镇压“#我也是”运动。

The party leadership is certainly spooked. Acknowledging Ms. Peng’s allegations of assault might delegitimize their hold on power. Staying the course could infuriate more people, driving them to activism.

此事无疑惊动了中共领导层。承认彭帅的性侵指控可能会使他们的权力失去合法性。而坚持到底可能会激怒更多的人，促使这些人变成活动人士。

Chinese feminists have been tweeting out pictures of Ms. Peng projected onto walls, with slogans like “Chinese Women Breaking the Silence” and “The Voiceless Rise Up!”

Their words echo those of the feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin in the early 20th century: “Arise, arise, Chinese women arise! … Chinese women will throw off their shackles and stand up with passion,” she wrote. “They will ascend the stage of the new world, where the heavens have mandated that they reconsolidate the nation.”

她们的话呼应了20世纪初女权主义革命者秋瑾的话：“速振！速振！女界其速振！……脱范围，奋然自拔，”她写道。“飞上舞台新世界，天教红粉定神京。”

Just a few years later, Chinese women and men fighting for greater freedoms helped bring down the last imperial dynasty.

仅仅几年后，为争取更大自由而奋斗的中国女性和男性推翻了最后一个帝国王朝。