Differentiating 'women's liberation' and 'feminism' provides a significant perspective to construe the women's movement in China. By employing discourse analysis of 1628 articles in People's Daily from 1949 to 2014, this paper presents that through certain discursive strategies Socialist Feminism is transformed into the hegemonic discourse of 'women's liberation' in China: 'women's liberation' is a socialist movement fighting against feudalism, capitalism, and imperialism under the leadership of the communist party; within the movement, gender equality is constructed mainly as obligation equality, and women have to work in the public sphere to gain their equal rights. Furthermore, women's liberation is not a stagnant discourse and has different focuses in different stages. Since the 1980s, the reappearance of 'feminism' discourse in China provides a new reference object to understand 'women's liberation'.