Becoming Independent: Female Autonomy and the Individualization of Empowerment on Chinese Social Media

The “independent woman” (独立女性, dúlì nǚxìng) has become a prominent ideal of womanhood in contemporary Chinese popular culture. This study asks how the figure is constructed on Xiaohongshu and what that construction suggests about the values attached to female empowerment. Using directed content analysis with descriptive frequency counts, it codes 100 publicly accessible posts, retrieved through four Chinese search terms, for 12 themes covering forms of autonomy and the location of responsibility for achieving it. Independence appears as a multidimensional ideal. Emotional autonomy and individual responsibility were the most frequent themes (each in 52% of posts), followed by self-improvement (45%); structural gender critique (27%) and female solidarity (8%) were far less common. The sampled posts widen what women are encouraged to claim, including financial security, emotional self-sufficiency, and choice in marriage and motherhood, while more often locating the means of achieving these goals in the individual woman than in social change. The study argues that the dúlì nǚxìng is best understood as a contested feminist ideal in which expanded agency coexists with individualized expectations of self-sufficiency and self-development. The findings describe visible discourse on one platform, not the views of Chinese women.