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This study explores what and how feminist discourse is constructed through Shipping, a digital culture practice of consuming and creating romance, within contemporary Chinese political, social, and cultural contexts. Chinese shipping is different from its western counterpart and closely related to fandom culture and participatory culture. Like other Chinese digital cultures, it is always considered female-centered entertainment activity but rarely a feminist practice. The study explores shipping with a feminist lens under the framework of digital feminism with Chinese characteristics. With the focus on shippers’ experience and sensibilities, ship communities, and shipping practice, the study conducts an ethnography including general participant observation, close participant observation, and in-depth interviews. 

Three feminist discourses with Chinese characteristics are distilled and discussed through analysis of the observation and interview results: female imagination and expectation, female pleasure, and female empowerment. “Shipping the romance” is not only the fulfillment of the intimacy imagination, emotional nurturance, and sexual desires but also the deconstruction of traditional gender roles and the resistance against Confucianist-supported heteropatriarchy. The thesis also indicates the tensions and contradictions during the feminist discursive construction. It is a moderate feminist practice in negotiation with authoritarian state censorship, the culture industry, and other cultural practices. Chinese shipping is a complicated and multi-faceted practice; the feminist dimension is one of them. It is a microcosm of the Chinese digital culture and needs deeper research.