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Lee Jinglei, the ex-wife of Wang Leehom, a Mandarin pop superstar for the last two decades and an immaculate top idol in the Chinese-speaking world, has emerged in their recent public divorce row as a darling among the netizens on the Chinese social media platform Weibo and Instagram. In a series of lengthy online posts, she told her side of the story: the abuse and humiliation she suffered from her philandering ex-husband and his family as a stay-at-home mom raising three children alone and the unequal terms of their divorce. She invited the public to think about the cost of raising children for single women and questioned gender inequality and celebrity culture. Her words, nicknamed the “hammer of the thunder goddess” (her name “Lei” is pronounced the same as “thunder” in Mandarin), have been praised as pointed, thoughtful, and provocative, liked by tens of millions of men and women. People thanked Lee for “defending the dignity of women and mothers.”
A question Lee asked of her ex-husband—“Is it true that you have been treating me as a birth-giving machine?”—resonated not only with those concerned about women's rights. It also touched the official nerve at a time when China is trying hard to make women bear more children in the shadow of population decline, which, ironically, speaks of the efficacy of the government's one-child policy (1980–2015). To address a prospective existential crisis of radical decrease of birth rate, the government has been aggressively promoting “family values” and “social ethics.” In this context, the government sees the celebrity culture of money worship, hedonism, and extreme individualism as a dangerously decadent Western import that must be tackled in order to build a birthing-friendly environment. Party leadership criticized Wang indirectly, and Chinese state-run media called for his permanent ban. Businesses quickly cut ties with him. Wang issued public apologies, vowing that he will take a break from performing to focus on bec