Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

Beginning in late 2023 the notion of “nine purple li fire trend (jiuzi lihuo yun 九紫离火运)” started to emerge on various Chinese media platforms. The trend (yun 运) is a temporal unit of twenty years from 2024 to 2043 during which the Chinese world enters the final stage in the cosmic cycle of “Three Phases and Nine Trends (sanyuan jiuyun 三元九运)”. The popular articulation of “nine purple li fire” is closely tied to the predicted rising (jueqi 崛起), or awakening (juexing 觉醒), of middle women (zhongnü 中女) during these twenty years. According to the Book of Changes (Yijing 易经), the eight trigrams can be mapped onto a traditional household in which the li trigram is the “second daughter” (zhongnü, same characters as “middle women” in Chinese). The category of zhongnü, however, has been widely interpreted as middle-aged women (zhongnian nüxing 中年女性) in their thirties, who became increasingly visible in mediascape to advocate both spiritual and social empowerment. This proposed study engages in postcolonial feminist discussion by examining the social construct of “middle women” both on social media platforms and in offline spiritual/religious spaces. “Empowerment” in this case is not framed as a socio-political activism for gender equality but concrete ways in which female subjects make sense of their everyday experiences and life projects anchoring a cosmic pattern of rising femininity envisioned by the “nine purple li fire trend”.