Faxing feminism: The global women’s movement and the 1995 controversy over Huairou

On 31 January 2012, the Susan G Komen for the Cure Foundation, the United States’ largest breast cancer advocacy organization, took a stand against Planned Parenthood’s provision of abortions. Responding to pressure from anti-abortion advocates, the Komen Foundation announced that it would stop funding Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screenings and education. What followed was a stunning example of feminists’ abilities to harness the power of digital technology. Planned Parenthood told its supporters about the decision via email, Facebook, and Twitter, encouraging them to send donations, sign an online petition, tweet, and post a Planned Parenthood badge on their Facebook pages. In just three days, Planned Parenthood’s Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter followers increased by over 10,000. Mainstream media coverage followed, as reporters scrambled to cover a story they might have otherwise overlooked. By the time the Komen Foundation reversed its decision and apologized four days later, Planned Parenthood had raised US$3 million and acquired thousands of new supporters. ¹

Planned Parenthood’s savvy use of social media is part of a historical shift in global feminist activism towards the digital realm. A key moment in this transformation occurred in the lead-up to the Beijing Women’s Conference of 1995. This fourth international United Nations women’s conference took place on the cusp of the digital revolution, a time when communicating via fax machine and email was increasingly common among international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but political campaigns that relied on digital technology were still in their infancy (Willetts, 2011: 84–113). In the months before the conference, feminists charted new ground by coordinating one of the first and only global protests to rely primarily on the fax machine. International feminists embarked on this campaign to try to convince the Chinese government to rescind its decision to move the NGO Forum associated with the conference from Beijing to the remote location of Huairou. This move threatened to severely limit activists’ abilities to shape the policies in the conference’s Platform for Action. The leaders of the campaign encouraged women around the world to fax petitions and letters to their governments and the United Nations, attracting significant media attention and forcing the UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to broker a compromise with the Chinese government.

That one of the first international protests launched by a global social movement to rely solely on fax and email was conceived of and enacted by a geographically diverse coalition of women confounds expectations. In the 1990s, scholars and activists spoke of both a gender and regional ‘digital divide,’ in which women used new technology less frequently than men, and those living in what many activists and NGOs termed the global South (much of Africa, Central and South America, and the Asian subcontinent) had less access to such resources than those in the global North (primarily Europe, North America, Japan, and parts of Northern Asia). ² The feminists who coordinated the 1995 protest recognized and tried to address these inequities by creating an organizing structure that sought to empower women from all parts of the world to participate in and shape the campaign. They identified what contemporary scholars have described as the ‘promise and the peril’ of social movements’ adoption of digital technologies: the ways that new communication methods can facilitate extensive networking and mobilization among activists but also have the potential to exclude those who do not have access to new technologies (Gittler, 1999; Harcourt, 2000; Morahan-Martin, 2000).

At stake for many feminists in 1995 was whether they could capitalize on the potential of new technology in a way that would encourage rather than undermine the growing prominence of women from Latin America, Africa, and Asia in the international women’s movement. Making deliberate decisions about which new tools to adopt and who to include in their networks, the leaders of the Huairou campaign chose to conduct the protest primarily via fax machine instead of email because they believed it would enable them to involve the greatest number of women from different regions of the world. In the process, they created a global network of activists that helped pioneer new methods of exerting pressure on international authorities.

The Beijing conference participants’ engagement with digital technologies has shaped the process of conducting historical research on the Huairou campaign. In addition to exploring the primary sources typically produced in the lead-up to postwar international conferences, research on Beijing involves examining emails, faxes, and websites. In the mid-1990s, many activists printed their emails and faxes and filed them with their records. (Today’s social movements leave much less of a paper trail.) Several international activists and organizations – including the International Women’s Tribune Center, which spearheaded the protest – have deposited these records in archives. The collections contain not only digital communications but also letters, flyers, position papers, brochures, photos, and newsletters. A few of the websites announcing the conference have been preserved and the United Nations digitally archived one of the conference’s email listservs. ³ Media outlets from around the world covered Beijing and the conference also produced its own newspapers. Oral history offers perspectives and information not accessible through the paper and electronic trail. Together, these diverse sources shed light not only on the planning and implementation of the Huairou campaign but also on international feminists’ conceptualizations of the roles new technology would play in the global feminist movement. These analytical frameworks as well as the networks that feminists created in the lead-up to Beijing laid a foundation for some of the theories and practices of contemporary digital feminism.

The 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference was the largest international gathering of women in world history. Over 17,000 people from 189 countries and territories gathered at the official conference in Beijing, which produced a Platform for Action that was the most far-reaching international policy statement of women’s aspirations ever produced. At the accompanying NGO Forum, over 30,000 activists participated in plenaries and panels covering topics ranging from poverty, militarization, violence, development, and reproduction to political representation, labor, racism, environmental justice, and sexuality.

This broad vision of global feminism represented a culmination of decades of activism that played out in a series of international women’s conferences held between 1975 and 1995. At the First UN Women’s Conference in Mexico City in 1975, several white European and US women’s groups had attempted to dictate a narrow agenda for global feminism focused on gender oppression. These efforts drew criticism from many women from other countries, who sought to fully integrate issues of race, class, nationality, and religion into feminist politics. Similar divisions persisted at the Second International Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in 1980. At the Third World Conference in Nairobi in 1985, however, the rise of neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism around the world, coupled with the large numbers of African women in attendance, helped to create a very different environment. In Nairobi, those who insisted that poverty, militarization, global inequality, and the harmful effects of Northern-imposed structural adjustment policies were core feminist concerns exerted considerable influence, in part because these global political trends had begun to negatively affect many women in all parts of the world. At the same time, feminists from the United States and Europe began to forge coalitions with activists from Africa, Latin America, and Asia surrounding domestic violence and women’s legal rights (Desai, 2002; Moghadam, 2005: 6–8; 2013: Locations 2861, 2903). By the early 1990s, while tensions still existed, women’s organizations from different parts of the world had developed many partnerships, often aimed at foregrounding the perspectives of women from the global South. Many veteran international activists had high hopes that the Beijing conference would mark the culmination of this 20-year transition towards Southern women’s prominence within the global movement and would feature a ‘new level of solidarity’ (Snyder, 2006) among women from different backgrounds (Tripp, 2006).

In tandem with the push towards a far-reaching feminist agenda came an increased emphasis on involving activists who identified themselves as representing the ‘grassroots.’ Throughout the 1980s, the main global feminist players tended to be relatively established and well-known activists who could secure funding to travel internationally, such as Peggy Antrobus from Barbados, Gita Sen from India, and Mildred Persinger from the United States. Community-based groups representing low-income women in many different parts of the world criticized their lack of representation on the international stage. ⁴ The organizers of the Beijing conference sought to make the NGO Forum more representative of this kind of feminist organizing happening on the ground. Preparatory meetings for Beijing took place in every world region. In some places, local meetings involving community-based women fed into regional and then national meetings, creating a ‘spider-web’ structure intended to ensure that those who could not attend the conference still had an opportunity to offer their input on the drafting of the Platform for Action. ⁵ Activists who identified themselves as representing the grassroots also organized independently for Beijing, holding meetings in Jamaica, India, Costa Rica, Ghana, the Ukraine, and the United States in preparation for the conference. They successfully lobbied for a ‘grassroots tent’ at the NGO Forum, where they could network and strategize about how to influence global social policy. ⁶

Some critics charged that these moves to enhance the leadership of women from Africa, Latin America, and Asia and to involve more community-based activists in global feminist politics did not go far enough. Indeed, many grassroots anti-poverty and anti-racist groups charged that they were still largely shut out of preparations for the conference and deplored the fact that established NGOs exerted far more influence at international meetings than local groups, most of which had no access to the official negotiations. ⁷ Others observed the persistence of mistrust between women from different regions of the world. Some of these tensions began to flare after the United Nations chose China to host the 1995 conference. When people spoke out against the choice on the grounds that China was not a democracy and had a terrible human rights record, some activists interpreted such criticism as an example of women from the global North trying to dictate where the conference would be held and looking down on countries in the global South. They emphasized that women were unequal in all countries of the world, not just in China, and that the United States was hardly a model for promoting women’s rights. Indeed, they pointed out, the US had failed to ratify the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). ⁸

In between international meetings, extensive communications networks sustained debates and coalitions among global feminists. Recognizing that they could not rely on the mainstream media to report accurately or comprehensively about women’s issues, in the decade following the 1975 Mexico City conference, activist women created media and information outlets of their own: FEMNET and TAMWA in Africa; Women’s Feature Service, ISIS International, and DEPTHNEWS in Asia; the South Pacific Commission/Pacific Women’s Resource Bureau in the Pacific; ISIS-WICCE in Europe; ISIS International and FEMPRESS in Latin America; and Women and Development Unit, Sistren Theatre Collective, and the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action in the Caribbean. An important moment in these networks’ adoption of new technology came at a 1992 workshop in Barbados put together by the feminist research and activist organization Development Alternatives with Women of the New Era (DAWN). At this event, a coalition of women’s media groups formed a network they called WOMANET to streamline the process of disseminating information and facilitate greater communication between and within different regions. The mailing lists of the groups that made up WOMANET covered every region of the world with the exception of Eastern Europe. At the meeting, the groups decided to rely on fax machines to communicate with each other, with DAWN supplying machines to organizations that did not already own them. The idea was that each member of the network would become a fax hub, redistributing information they received from WOMANET to their local, regional, and national contacts (Frankson, 1996: 106–107; Friedman, 2003: 318). ⁹

The 1995 protest marked a critical moment in which feminists preparing for the Beijing conference demonstrated how information networks such as WOMANET could serve not only as facilitators of communication but also as vehicles for political activism. The seeds of this transformation had been planted in the early 1990s. WOMANET had been part of a 1991 global campaign that helped secure the release of environmental activist Wangari Maathai, after her arrest by the Kenyan government. And some of the participants in the 1993 Global Campaign for Women’s Human Rights had made use of the fax in their effort to gather 1 million signatures on a petition presented to the UN. Building on these efforts, feminists involved with preparations for Beijing made the fax machine the prime mover of a major global protest (Friedman, 2003: 319; Gittler, 1999: 93; Walker, n.d.: 82–82; Willetts, 2011: 103).

The 1995 campaign began five months before the Fourth World Conference on Women was scheduled to begin. China announced plans to move the site of the NGO Forum from Beijing’s Workers’ Stadium, which was near the official conference, to Huairou – a semi-rural town over an hour away from the city, often used by tourists as a ‘pit stop’ on their way to the Great Wall. ¹⁰ US feminist Betty Friedan called it ‘the sticks.’ ¹¹ The plan enraged many established international women’s rights activists because they hoped to influence the deliberations at the official conference in Beijing. Indeed, at the parallel NGO meetings held at the UN international conferences on the Environment (1992), Human Rights (1993), and Population and Development (1994), feminist NGOs had closely monitored the official negotiations and lobbied delegates. At their own conference in Beijing, they had expected to play an even more important role in the negotiations, something that would be nearly impossible to do from the remote location of Huairou (Chen, 1996; Petchesky, 2003: 31–34; The Tribune, 1994).

The decision to relocate the Forum reflected the Chinese government’s growing fears that the NGO meeting would draw public attention to a host of controversial issues, not the least of which was its own human rights record, just six years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese leaders’ unease was fueled by the unprecedented number of women’s groups that had applied to attend the NGO Forum, far exceeding the 20,000 China had agreed to host. Then, in early March, while attending the UN Social Development Summit in Copenhagen, Chinese Premier Li Peng caught a glimpse of exactly what the Forum might entail when he witnessed radical NGO women holding a hunger strike and encountered NGO criticisms of the Chinese government. ‘I think it finally hit the Chinese,’ NGO director Suzanne Kindervatter observed. ¹² A Beijing-based diplomat remarked: ‘When China bid to hold the conference, all it saw was the prestige that would come with hosting such a big gathering of world leaders. It didn’t realise what it was getting itself into.’ ¹³ As the reality began to sink in, the Wall Street Journal reported that the specter of hosting ‘an army of feisty women with strong views on everything from reproductive rights and homosexuality to Taiwan’s status seems to be stirring dread among Chinese officials.’ ¹⁴ The answer, Chinese officials decided, was to banish the NGO Forum to Huairou.

Many prominent feminist NGOs learned about the proposed change in site during one of the Beijing Preparatory Conferences (PrepComs) held in New York City at the end of March. ¹⁵ Upon hearing the news, the International Women’s Tribune Center (IWTC) urged women’s organizations to join together to challenge the decision. Established in 1975 by the NGO Forum Planning Committee for the First World Conference on Women, IWTC was charged with providing assistance to women’s organizations in the global South, sustaining grassroots and NGO momentum between international conferences, and facilitating networking between the UN and international women’s organizations. Although based in New York for the proximity to the United Nations, the Tribune Center saw itself as a truly international organization, led by an Australian and staffed by women from around the world. ¹⁶

In response to the announcement of the Huairou site, the Tribune Center convened an NGO strategy meeting at the PrepCom. Even before news of the site change, many of the NGO representatives attending the New York meeting had been chafing at the barriers they faced in their efforts to gain access to the official deliberations on the Platform for Action. They had also been struggling with China’s attempts to restrict NGO attendance at the conference to 20,000, when over 30,000 wanted to attend. The site change was the final straw. ‘In a conference about themselves, the world’s women were being sidelined,’ one NGO representative remarked (Frankson, 1996: 109). During their strategy meeting, the assembled NGO representatives decided to challenge China’s plan to move the Forum, and the Tribune Center took the lead in organizing an international protest. Deeply involved in the planning for the conference, the Tribune Center possessed the contacts and resources needed to launch a global campaign in a short period of time. ¹⁷

The Tribune Center staff aimed to construct a protest that would involve diverse activists while foregrounding the concerns and actions of women from the global South. WOMANET, which the Tribune Center had helped to establish, seemed an ideal starting point for such an endeavor. By 1995, WOMANET consisted of 28 different information hubs, primarily in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While not ignoring the growing numbers of women’s email networks, with some devoted specifically to the Beijing conference, the Tribune Center focused its efforts on spreading the word about Huairou through WOMANET. At this point in time, email was still quite new and it was a tool mainly used in the global North. For a broad-based international campaign, the Tribune Center believed fax was by far the most inclusive way of disseminating information. ¹⁸

The protest began with the Tribune Center preparing a petition that Executive Director Anne Walker faxed out through WOMENET opposing the Huairou location. The accompanying letter asked women’s organizations to distribute the petition widely, secure signatures, and then fax the signed petitions back. Organizations were also encouraged to send signed petitions and letters directly to the UN. ¹⁹ With criticisms of China creating discomfort among some global feminists, the Tribune Center focused its communications on the decision China had made to relocate the NGO Forum, rather than a critique of China’s human rights policies. ²⁰

The faxed petition hit a nerve. Because preparatory meetings for Beijing had been held in so many places, thousands of women from different parts of the world felt invested in the conference. Some veteran activists expressed a unique commitment. Antrobus, who served as General Coordinator of DAWN, explained: ‘Those of us (from the South) who have worked over the past 20 years on issues concerning women and development … have been looking forward to participation in a conference and Forum which could capture the spirit of our struggles and success.’ ²¹

After four days, the Tribune Center had received signed petitions and petitions adapted into letters from 111 organizations in 40 countries ranging from Malaysia, Australia, Austria, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Kenya, Hong Kong and the Philippines to Puerto Rico, Tanzania, Switzerland, Trinidad, the United States and the United Kingdom. The petition was translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and local languages such as Kiswahili (spoken in East Africa). The Pacific NGO Coordinating Group in Fiji re-faxed the petition to eight local, four national, and 24 regional women’s groups. In Costa Rica, activists translated the petition into Spanish, faxed it to local women’s organizations, and sent it to human rights and women’s rights groups in other parts of Central America. The Tanzania Media Women’s Association mobilized signatures via phone and fax and the London office of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) contacted its network via fax and regular mail (Frankson, 1996: 103–104).

With faxes arriving from many women’s groups that were not part of WOMANET, the Tribune Center’s mailing list grew exponentially, illuminating how digital technology could rapidly expand activist networks. The Tribune Center staff faxed copies of the signed petitions directly to UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in New York and the China Organizing Committee in Beijing. They also copied and distributed the faxes in person, putting them into large orange binders for the government and NGO representatives attending the New York preparatory meeting for the conference. ²²

The enormous response from women’s organizations soon became too much for the Tribune Center to handle. Walker recalled: ‘I’d arrive in the morning in the office and find the floor littered with pages. The fax machine … kept running out of toner … [and] was in no way able to cope with what was going on.’ ²³ Despite the outpouring of support, China gave no indication of backing down. Many NGOs believed the only hope was for UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to exert significant pressure on the Chinese government. But Boutros-Ghali seemed to have no intention of getting involved in the controversy.

In face of these challenges, the Tribune Center came up with an innovative strategy to take the heat off its fax machine and bring the force of the global women’s movement to bear more directly on the UN. With fax distribution points now extending well beyond the initial 28 members of WOMANET, the Tribune Center renamed the new network ‘Global Faxnet’ and suggested a different mode of activism. Instead of the Tribune Center delivering signed materials to international authorities, women’s groups would lobby the UN and their governments directly. To facilitate this strategy, the Tribune Center developed a ‘Fact Sheet’ with information about the original agreement between the NGO Forum and the China Organizing Committee and details about the events surrounding the site controversy. The Tribune Center faxed this ‘Fact Sheet’ together with an ‘Urgent Appeal’ that called on women’s groups around the world to contact their governments and United Nations representatives and write letters directly to Boutros-Ghali and the China Organizing Committee. The Tribune Center included with the Urgent Appeal the fax numbers of the Secretary General and the China Organizing Committee as well as a template for a letter that groups could send. The idea was for groups to take the template, adapt it to suit their own local contexts if desired, type it on their organizations’ letterhead, and then fax it out widely. ²⁴ This method of organizing was a precursor to the online petitions and online letter-writing campaigns many people participate in today.

At the time, though, it was an original strategy that enabled marginalized women from across the world to take a public stand on the international stage. ‘I circulated your Urgent Appeal among 70 groups/individuals mostly based in Asia & Africa,’ reported one activist. ²⁵ ‘We have … started the signature campaign in Bangladesh,’ explained another. ‘So far we have circulated this urgent appeal to Women’s Groups, school/university teachers, activists, and general people.’ ²⁶ The fax machine proved to be a very useful global organizing tool at this early stage of the digital revolution because it could disseminate information immediately that could then be spread by other means. ‘The beauty of the fax alerts has been their instant accessibility,’ observed IWTC Communications Coordinator Joan Ross Frankson. The Tribune Center’s communications could be ‘shared with others very quickly – slapped straight back onto the fax machine; photocopied and mailed; read over the telephone, on the radio or TV; easily adapted into press releases and protest letters’ (Frankson, 1996: 105). ²⁷ Those who had direct access to fax machines could not only disseminate information but also collect and deliver signed letters and petitions directly to the UN and government authorities.

Soon ‘a great wave of letters’ arrived in the Secretary General’s office in New York and in the United Nations Development Program office in Beijing. ²⁸ One UN representative remarked that he would need a wheelbarrow to cart all the faxes. ²⁹ In Beijing, UNIFEM’s Special Advisor on the UN Women’s Conference, Sarah Burd-Sharps, recalled walking into the All-China Women’s Federation office, where ‘the fax machine was just going nonstop and the faxes were pouring out … all over the floor.’ ³⁰ Over the course of the campaign, an estimated 3000 signed petitions and protest letters arrived from over 100 countries from every region of the world (Frankson, 1996: 103–104). Fax machines whirred to life in diplomatic offices, an in-time evocation of the voices represented on the petitions and letters sent from women across the globe. Deeming the NGO response ‘spectacular,’ the Tribune Center congratulated itself for having developed ‘a highly effective channel for getting breaking news to women worldwide, and for stimulating collaborative actions and pressure groups.’ ³¹ One UN staff person observed, ‘the UN has never experienced anything like this.’ ³²

Neither had the media. Because many feminists had contacts with their local news outlets, word of the protest spread quickly. In Fiji, for example, women sent a news release to national media, resulting in several newspaper articles and two live radio interviews. FEMPRESS in Chile contacted over 4000 organizations, researchers, politicians, and journalists across Latin America. In Costa Rica, women broadcast the news in Spanish and English via short-wave to listeners in over 100 countries (Frankson, 1996: 103). US media outlets also reported extensively on the site change. With so many media outlets spreading the word, feminists created an international controversy, inspiring several nations – including Canada and Australia – to call on China and the UN to negotiate. ³³

Tensions heightened after an NGO Forum team traveled to China to inspect the Huairou site and view possible alternatives. Upon its return, the group sent a report to women’s organizations around the world through the Tribune Center’s fax network, women’s email networks, and traditional media sources. The report deemed the Huairou site unacceptable despite efforts by the Chinese government to build new hotels and conference facilities. Not only was Huairou too far from Beijing, the town lacked a contiguous area for Forum activities, accommodation for people with disabilities, adequate press and communication facilities, sufficient housing, and a suitable site for large plenary sessions with interpretation. ³⁴ As an alternative, the NGO mission suggested a site once used for the Asian Games on the north edge of Beijing. The Chinese government rejected this request, stating that the Beijing site was booked for an intra-ministerial volleyball competition. ³⁵ Unable to broker a deal, the NGO Forum Facilitating Committee gave the China Organizing Committee two weeks to come up with alternative sites and called on the UN and national governments around the world to exert pressure. ³⁶ The Tribune Center kept Global Faxnet members informed of these and other new developments by disseminating regular one-page news bulletins. One activist in Asia described the faxes as ‘vital links for those of us … who may have no other timely and authoritative source of information about the WCW [world conference on women] issues.’ ³⁷

But increasingly the Tribune Center was reporting discouraging news. Women across the world had mobilized in an unprecedented way but their efforts had not convinced the Chinese officials to budge. Nor were they having much luck persuading the UN to exert significant pressure. Irene Santiago, Executive Director of the NGO Forum, wryly noted that while Boutros-Ghali assured women’s groups that he was conducting ‘quiet diplomacy’ with the Chinese, his ‘quiet diplomacy’ was ‘so quiet that the world’s women can’t hear it.’ ³⁸

Meanwhile, the success of the protest created unanticipated problems for the Tribune Center, which had not budgeted for an expensive fax campaign. ‘The cost to IWTC has been high,’ reported the Tribune Center in May, predicting the need for US$26,000 to continue sending fax bulletins for the next six months. ³⁹ A few individuals and organizations offered assistance but Global Faxnet proved to be a hard sell to funders. ‘Women’s information and communications networks are often devalued by donors,’ noted Frankson, expressing what some activists have identified as one of feminism’s major difficulties today (Frankson, 1996: 105; Martin and Valenti, 2013).

A different set of challenges reflected the ongoing struggle to involve a diverse range of activists in the global feminist movement and retain a united front among women from different regions of the world. Although the Tribune Center’s mission was to support women’s organizations in the global South, it was a liberal feminist organization based in the United States and the Huairou protest put the New York City office at the center of the firestorm. To counter the image of a Northern-dominated protest, the Tribune Center portrayed itself as a conduit, not a leader, of the campaign, depicting the protest as ‘a consultative process [that] brought out diverse voices rather than just a linear model of action.’ Women’s groups throughout the world had made the campaign their own, the Tribune Center maintained, praising activists for sending faxes ‘across your own networks’ and rewriting letters ‘to suit your own local flavor.’ ⁴⁰ Yet while fax technology was better than email in its ability to involve women in countries that had limited access to digital communication methods, the Tribune Center served as the sole disseminator of information to Global Faxnet whereas news and opinions could more easily flow multidirectionally over email networks. And despite feminist efforts to share resources, some places and people still had more access to fax technology than others. Even within the United States, the groups that participated in the Huairou campaign tended to be established women’s organizations. Some grassroots US groups planning on attending the conference did not even hear about the campaign because they were not yet connected to fax and email networks. ⁴¹

Nor did all feminists agree with the decision to protest. Some who had felt uncomfortable with the international criticism of the choice of China as a host for the conference felt similarly uneasy about the campaign. Women from Asia were particularly invested in hosting the conference and some viewed the protest through the prism of a long history of ‘China-bashing’ by sanctimonious Northerners. Filipino indigenous women’s rights activist Victoria Tauli-Corpuz believed it was most important that ‘there was a country in Asia that was offering to host.’ She described ‘feeling that … it’s being held in Asia, this is our region, and we [should] make good use of it and not be diverted or distracted by this kind of [site change] issue.’ ⁴²

Exacerbating such divisions among feminists, the Chinese government offered an NGO delegation representing the Third World Network an opportunity to weigh in on the controversy. The Third World Network had been previously involved in the preparations for the conference, helping the organizers ensure that perspectives from outside Europe and the North America would be fully represented. In mid-May, China invited Third World Network representatives from Malaysia, the Philippines, Ghana, and Nicaragua to tour the Huairou site. Aware that some feminists had called for a boycott, many members of this group believed it was crucial to hold the event in China as planned. Emphasizing the importance of holding the conference in an Asian country, Tauli-Corpuz explained that she and her ‘colleagues in the Third World Network’ believed that China’s decision to move the NGO Forum to Huairou was ‘not the main issue’ and that feminists needed to focus on the important proceedings that would take place during the conference. After visiting the facilities, the group deemed the site ‘adequate and suitable for the NGO Forum.’ Imploring their ‘sisters’ to focus on the ‘substantive critical issues facing women around the world’ instead of wrangling about Huairou, the Third World Network called on women’s groups to concentrate on the threats posed by conservative opponents of the women’s movement and the pressing problems NGOs and UN representatives faced drafting the Platform for Action. ⁴³

With China refusing to budge, costs spiraling, and splits among feminists becoming visible, the Tribune Center ultimately dropped the protest. However, the leaders of the campaign identified gains that pointed to the potential of digital technology to help move a policy agenda. First, while Boutros-Ghali did not act swiftly, the fax campaign did force him to take up an issue that he had wanted to ignore. The UN ultimately stepped in to broker a compromise in which the NGO Forum agreed to use the Huairou site in exchange for China pledging to erect new buildings in a contiguous area and to increase the number of NGO participants so that the nearly 36,000 people who had applied to the conference could attend without any restrictions on their obtainment of travel visas. The Chinese also agreed to provide a frequent and reliable shuttle service between Huairou and Beijing and offered sites in Beijing where both accredited and non-accredited NGOs could gather to network and track developments in the official conference. These concessions all came as a direct result of the protest. ⁴⁴

In coming to terms with the compromise, the Tribune Center emphasized the gains, noting ‘the eventual acceptance of Huariou needs to be seen in a larger political perspective as part of our long term work to become central players in global policy making.’ Through the protest, women had forced China and the UN to respond to their concerns, demonstrating that they had ‘the skills to lobby, mobilize, articulate demands, and also to negotiate at the local, national, regional, and international levels of governance.’ Further, ‘a considerable amount of global solidarity across diverse lines was demonstrated in the campaign – illustrating the ability of women to act as a global community. By negotiating to accept Huairou when we did, we averted the growing possibility of serious splits among women over this question, particularly along N-S or E-W lines.’ ⁴⁵

Not only had serious splits been avoided, the global women’s movement emerged from the campaign with a striking new strength. During the protest, Global Faxnet grew to include 500 NGO and government ‘multiplier’ groups, connecting over 3200 organizations in over 80 countries in every world region. This fax network was bolstered by burgeoning email networks such as GlobalNet, an email sister of Global Faxnet created by the Tribune Center in June. GlobalNet joined the growing number of women’s email networks that included two lists established specifically for the Beijing conference and several women’s electronic conferences. ⁴⁶ As the preparations for Beijing heated up, the GlobalNet homepage averaged 85,000 visits per week. ⁴⁷ Global feminists’ adoption of digital technology continued at the NGO Forum in Huairou, which featured an entire pavilion devoted to new technology as well as a computer center, staffed by women, where conference participants could set up email accounts and get online. After Beijing, feminist digital communication networks thrived, increasingly connecting women’s groups around the world through emails and websites instead of faxes. The growing reliance on the internet created new technological inequities as well as new opportunities for networking and activism.

As the digital revolution spread across the world, global feminists stood at the forefront of efforts to identify and help to shape its political ramifications. The Huairou campaign fostered the growth of a digitally connected transnational women’s movement that reflected feminists’ attempts to address the digital divide and create an inclusive social movement. The protest also exposed and contributed to rifts among feminists who had different priorities and access to resources. In the process, global feminists demonstrated how new technology could foster not only communication but also international political activism. They transformed the fax machine from a noisy transmitter of information into the engine of a major global protest.