Article is 2 years old, but it’s a happy article and I wanted to post it anyways.
EDIT: For anyone curious, here’s a link to her Douyin page: https://www.douyin.com/user/MS4wLjABAAAAC-deOgCmNN2bIugq3od6LBI-Ws7Pn8EuLwWBjZg-ghg It says she has 11.151 million followers and 170 million likes, which is awesome.
Dug into it, and there wasn’t any reasons given, however some people that used to go there speculated the following:
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The US Consulate was invited to speak at the center a couple of times… which seems uh… like an extremely bad decision. I’ve talked to people in China involved in centers and that is a HUGE no-no.
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There were conflicts with neighboring buildings that led to them being kicked out of their building.
Unfortunately, a co-founder of the Beijing LGBT Center, Wan Yanhai, had ties to the NED, which the government has been cracking down on more recently. Yanhai had a fellowship with them. He was also one of the signatories of the Charter 08 manifesto, which called for the end of CCP rule and privatization of all state-owned enterprises. Also doesn’t really help that there are still some out of touch socially conservative boomers in the government, who believe LGBT activism to be a western plot. China is still overall making progress in LGBT rights, especially with younger Chinese being generally very supportive, but there are still occasional setbacks along the way like this.
Yeah there are plenty of groups that still operate in Beijing, obviously, at least 10 major ones from what I can tell. So while it does suck, its overblown that people think this is the end of LGBT activities in Beijing in western media.
