Amid corruption, economic woes, pollution, and calls for political reform, China is ripe for the Occupy movement. Beijing of course is not sympathetic to anything resembling a gathering of people, not even if it’s people waiting to buy iPhones.But when a group of woman got tired of waiting on another kind of line, it actually happened. It’s called Occupy Men’s Toilet.The movement began with a female college student in Beijing fed up with what she saw as generally an unfair ratio of male to female toilet stalls. Going by the name Li Maizi, she has said the goal of the movement wasn’t to disrupt men trying to do their business, but to bring awareness to a central gender fairness issue. Last week, Li received a formal response from Beijing: a travel ban to keep her in the capital city, limiting her ability to organize.Because women typically spend three times as long in the bathroom as men, according to studies, mandatory toilet ratios have increasingly favored women. In Hong Kong, the ratio of male to female public toilet space currently stands at 1:1.5. In the U.S., at least 21 states and municipalities in the U.S. have passed similar laws. A recent mandate in New York City calls for a ratio of 2:1 in new construction. But, as with handicapped access, such mandates don’t exist in Beijing or in most Chinese cities."It seems like women and men are equal with the same amount of public bathrooms built for them. But the physical differences make them spend a different amount of time in the toilet – so it's just not fair," Li told the blog behind the wall.Li’s first action: she and 20 women marched into a men's public toilet in the southern city of Guangzhou, then asked the men waiting on line if they could hold their bladders for a few minutes to allow women to go ahead of them. They held colorful signs that read "love women, starting with convenience" and "the more convenience, the more sexual equality. (In Chinese, “convenience” also means "to use a toilet." An occupied bathroom is described with the phrase “有人,” or literally, “contains people.”)Li has emphasized however that the group is not trying to inconvenience men. Occupy Toilet only occupies the men’s room for three minutes at a time, allowing a brief window for women every ten minutes or so. That hasn’t appeased all of the opposite sex, who, thanks in part to the one-child policy, now actually outnumber women by over 30 million. “How could you do this?,” a 70-year old man quoted by China Daily said. “Men’s toilets are built for men, not for women. What if a man wants to go to the toilet? It’s over the top.”Also un-sympathetic are the men who occupy Zhongnanhai. According to the South China Morning Post, police told Li last week not to leave Beijing for two weeks. That’s typical treatment for troublemakers during the gatherings of China’s top political representatives, the National People’s Congress, which just began in Beijing.Also included in the security response: more than 700,000 security personnel and a ban on “promotional and recreational” airplane flights within 200 kilometers of Tiananmen Square. That Li would have a travel ban imposed on her as well suggests that the local government, at least, is taking her ability to organize protests quite seriously. Forget the “dangerous” politics of an Ai Weiwei or a Chen Guangcheng: it’s her ability to gather people together, physically, that makes Li Maizi so scary. And, perhaps, her shrewd sense of toilet humor.Regulation changes and new toilet construction have been proposed, and so far the movement has had one material victory: Guangzhou has reportedly begun installing new toilets to meet a 1:1.5 men-to-women ratio. Therein lies the simple solution, one would think: rather than tracking citizens to enforce travel bans, the government could spend some money on building more toilets. And on many of the other reforms it likes to talk about. Dissenters like Li, armed with the Internet, are making it harder to flush out calls for change, and shit is only starting to hit the fan.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter.
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