BEIJING — Though in western Beijing, the five young women’s rights activists who have won broad international support, including from Hillary Rodham Clinton and other political leaders, remain criminal suspects in the eyes of the police and the Chinese judicial system.
For at least one year, the women cannot travel without informing the police, their lawyers said. They could be detained again at any time or called into a police station for interrogation.
Any further activist campaigns or work with nongovernmental organizations could mean more jail time for them. On Tuesday, the husband of Wu Rongrong, one of the women, said in a telephone interview that he was not sure what Ms. Wu planned to do with the advocacy group she had founded in the eastern city of Hangzhou.
The women have been released on bail because prosecutors have not yet brought charges against them, as the police had wanted. But the continuing pressure and scrutiny on their activities means the security forces under , ’s president and head of the Communist Party, have again tightened the vise around civic discourse and action, even over issues that do not overtly threaten the party.
More than any other case since Mr. Xi rose to power in late 2012, the ordeal of the so-called Feminist Five gives a clear look at the dyspeptic and hostile view that Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders have of civil society. It also reveals the lengths those officials will go to constrict grass-roots activism, even at the expense of international good will.
Public condemnations by American leaders and other prominent figures over the women’s detentions might have contributed to a high-level decision to release them on bail. But the Beijing police’s relentless push for criminal charges and the fact that the women were held for five weeks despite the international uproar show that the party was willing to tolerate China taking a hit to its global image in order to send a chilling message to Chinese activists, scholars and human rights advocates said.
“Since their actions were so successful in drawing public attention and in influencing public policy, the ‘sensitive’ label that will now be put on this type of campaign will likely set back China’s women’s rights movement, at least for some time,” said Maya Wang, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Sadly the five’s release does not indicate a change of view by the government towards civil society activists: It still treats them as criminals, rather than as partners in solving pressing social problems.”
The women — Li Tingting, 25; Zheng Churan, 25; Wei Tingting, 26; Wang Man, 33; and Ms. Wu, 30 — are pushing for gender equality, an area in which China by significant measures. The question now is whether these women, their feminist compatriots and advocates involved in other causes will curb their activities out of fear. The five women in particular would run a high risk of being prosecuted.
“In keeping with the Xi Jinping government’s extreme hostility towards independent civil society, a formal prosecution will serve the dual purposes of discouraging activism — no matter how legal, no matter how mild, no matter whether the issue has been discussed in the state press — and of leaving people wondering about where the red lines are really drawn in challenging the government,” said Sophie Richardson, China director of Human Rights Watch.
Anxiety among activists has been building for months. Chinese officials are moving to pass a draft law proposed by the Ministry of Public Security that would impose much stricter regulations on foreign nongovernmental organizations and their Chinese partners. Officials suspect those types of groups of propagating the kinds of ideas they believe led to the so-called color revolutions in former Soviet nations and to the recent Arab rebellions.
Police officers have raided the offices of some grass-roots groups, including Yirenping, a nationwide organization that advocates equal rights for people with H.I.V., hepatitis and physical disabilities. Several of the detained women have close ties to the group, which had been tolerated by officials for several years, albeit with occasional harassment by the authorities. On Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said at a news conference that Yirenping “will be punished because it is suspected of violating the law.” Files, laptops and desktop computers were seized when in late March.
“The raid of Yirenping’s office surprised me,” said Lu Jun, a founder of the Beijing center. “It’s obvious that recently there has been a significant shift in the authorities’ policies.”
Mr. Lu said it was notable that the women jailed for five weeks were all members of nongovernmental organizations, while other women detained starting March 6 over their planned campaign against sexual harassment who were not members of such groups were quickly released.
He added that the arrests of the five women were not “isolated, incidental events” but were on a continuum of clampdowns on nongovernmental organizations that intensified about a year ago.
Ms. Wang, the human rights researcher, compared the crackdown on the women to that on the , a grass-roots campaign inspired by a prominent rights lawyer, Xu Zhiyong, that had advocated transparency in government before being crushed by the Xi administration. Mr. Xu was sentenced in January 2014 to four years in prison for “organizing a crowd to disturb public order” — the against the five women.
Ms. Wang, based in Hong Kong, said that the cases showed that even when activists are pushing for policy changes consistent with those publicly supported by senior Chinese officials, the officials want to ensure they are the only ones defining the agenda.
“The leadership does not want any civic initiatives that it cannot control,” she said. “The authorities want to be the one at the driver’s seat when it comes to reforms. In other words, top-down reforms are the only reforms acceptable, whether they are legal reforms, economic reforms, anticorruption campaigns and so on; but bottom-up initiatives are treated with utmost suspicion, more so than it has ever been.”
Officials have also grown more wary of grass-roots activists because of their ability to use social networking tools and mobile phone apps to organize crowds quickly and in unpredictable ways. The Feminist Five, for example, had since 2011 directed theatrical street actions ranging from occupying men’s public restrooms as a way of pushing for more toilets for women, to wearing wedding dresses with fake blood to draw attention to domestic abuse. They had been using WeChat, a popular messaging app, to organize the anti-sexual-harassment campaign to be carried out nationwide around March 8, International Women’s Day.
Wang Zheng, a professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said she first saw word of the campaign on WeChat, which feminists have used to form many groups and could be used to mobilize people.
Ms. Wang is among those who see some hopeful signs in how the case of the five women unfolded. She said Tuesday in a series of email exchanges that the fact that they were released rather than charged with crimes “shows clearly that there were officials in the system who pushed very hard towards a positive solution.” She added that “a core group of young activists who have the leadership capacity and deep commitment to social justice is emerging in this historical event.”
“That said, I am fully aware of the grave challenges that confront Chinese feminists,” she said. “As long as nongovernmental organizations’ activism for advocating and implementing laws relating to gender equality or any other issue is defined as criminal, there will be no safe zone for feminists as well as activists working in other realms for social justice.”