The woman is standing in a company canteen with a megaphone.

She shouts: “An Ali supervisor rapes his employee, and nobody cares.” She hands out pieces of paper on which the alleged rapist is named.

Likewise, five presumably initiated superiors who would still have done nothing.

“I demand justice,” it says on the note.

A video of the scene was shared millions of times on the Chinese Internet over the weekend.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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The case is attracting a lot of attention in China for two reasons: first, because it is not about any company, but about the Alibaba Group, one of the country's leading technology companies.

Especially a company that is currently being targeted by the supervisory authorities.

Second, because the circumstances under which the alleged crime was committed are familiar to many working women: A young woman is forced to drink at a business lunch with a customer on a business trip until she is no longer sane.

The customer is encouraged to use her defenselessness to kiss her, to grab her breasts and between the legs.

Multiple rape charges

But this story goes beyond that. The woman accuses her supervisor of later raping her several times in her hotel room. Recordings from surveillance cameras showed that he obtained the key card and came into her room four times during the night, where she was still barely conscious, writes the woman on the Alibaba intranet. The police are investigating. However, her employer did not respond to her complaints for days until she made herself heard in the canteen.

Alibaba's CEO Daniel Zhang spoke up on Monday.

The accused had violated company rules by having "excessive intimate contact with the drunk employee".

He was released.

The police will clarify whether it is rape.

In addition, the HR manager had been warned because her department had not paid enough attention to the case.

Alibaba promised to set up a complaint channel for victims of sexual violence and to renounce the "drinking culture".

Warning to large technology companies

China's party media meanwhile used the case for another broadside against the disgraced technology industry. "The Weibo users agree that power and capital must be enclosed in a cage," wrote a subsidiary publication of the Volkszeitung. Alibaba owes the public full clarification. The author accused the company of having paid the social network Weibo for the fact that the scandal had been placed less prominently. "Weibo should not become an instrument for certain interest groups to manipulate public opinion." If someone deletes certain articles or suppresses topic trends as a PR tactic, the state will act against it, it is said in the mouthpiece of the party. In other words, the Communist Party believesthe leading tech companies have become too influential.

The supervisory authorities have been taking action against them for weeks with various reasons. This applies to Alibaba as well as to the driver service provider Didi and provider of online lessons. The party newspaper Huangiu Shibao took the case as an opportunity to warn the big technology companies to spread more “positive energy”. As if it were about the misconduct of an industry and not about the realities of a society in which sexual violence is often played down and influential perpetrators are protected from criminal consequences. It is doubtful that the rape allegations could have been discussed so intensely on the Chinese Internet if they had been directed against a manager of a state-owned company. In the wake of the MeToo debate, which peaked in China in 2018,contributions from those affected were repeatedly censored.

Nonetheless, women's rights activists rated the widespread response to the Alibaba case as a success of the MeToo movement. "She has a great influence," said Zhou Xiaoxuan, one of the movement's most famous activists, the FAZ one, denounced the need to drink at business lunches and pointed out the importance of addictive relationships, Zhou said.

The customer of the Alibaba employee, who is accused of having groped her, apparently sees it differently. He told Beijing News that they "drank normally, and of course there is touch and hugs." The man is also being investigated. Meanwhile, the employee had to hear from a supervisor that he would only hire men in the future. What happened shows him that women are not suitable for this job.

Just a few days ago, another suspected rape case had preoccupied China's online public. Prominent pop singer Kris Wu was arrested after a young woman accused him of drinking alcohol and raping her. In this case too, the Communist Party propagated its own reading. To blame are the decadence of the entertainment industry and the star cult that fans pursued around their role models.