China’s tech companies back marriage equality

Tmall – Alibaba’s premium shopping outlet – showing support for marriage equality

Tech in Asia staff member Valeri Inting posed the insightful question: “why are Asian tech companies so silent on [the issue of marriage equality] when we’ve always spoken out and reacted to other important news about the West? Are LGBT rights just not as pertinent a conversation in Asia?”

Initially I thought this was a no-brainer as I was pretty convinced that Chinese tech companies would largely be operating in a hostile environment and would more than likely be ready for self-censorship. What I discovered was actually quite surprising.

What has been the Chinese tech community’s response to the United States Supreme court ruling?

Just as many technological, social and cutural trends from the United states gain traction in China and see their local counterparts in the form of Google Glass clones, Tinder clones, and the emergence of China-US co-productions, the issue of marriage equality has not gone unnoticed by the big technology companies of China. In the aftermath of the US Supreme court ruling on June 26, Chinese social media has seen an outpouring of mostly-positive sentiment towards the issue coming from technology companies. Tech in Asia user Balkan: provided a list of prominent Chinese technology firms having provided public support for the movement on a mixture of platforms, from Sina Weibo – China’s Twitter-like service, to their homepages and even in-app. Tech in Asia independently verified the following postings  from Alibaba and Xiaomi – two out of four of the most intriguing Chinese technology firms in existence – and a bizarre advertisement from smartphone vendor Meizu.

Alibaba’s Weibo post. The Chinese characters read ‘It begins with love.’

Xiaomi’s post from Twitter.

A private text message from Meizu entreating me to ‘make love not war’ and buy their new smartphone on Jun 30th.

Is there weight behind this sentiment? Or is this just bandwagoning?

A revealing look at some recent news items suggests that both the Chinese legal system and Chinese corporations are increasingly behaving in more liberal ways towards China’s homosexual citizens.

Just this month, Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba and Chinese same-sex dating app Blued held a competition on China’s biggest ecommerce platform Taobao. The initiative, called “We Do”, sent seven same-sex couples on an all-expenses paid trip to Hollywood, California to get married. Though same-sex marriage is illegal in China, this event attracted significant media attention both within China and in the international press. This is not the first time an event like this has been conducted by a technology company in China, however: Groupon-style daily deals site Meituan held a similar contest back in 2013.