Leta Hong Fincher - Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China

Also by Leta Hong Fincher

Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China

The Feminist Awakening in China

Leta Hong Fincher

First published by Verso 2018

Leta Hong Fincher 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-364-4 (HB)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-534-6 (EXPORT)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-366-8 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-367-5 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hong Fincher, Leta, author.

Title: Betraying Big Brother : the feminist awakening in China / Leta Hong Fincher.

Description: London; New York : Verso, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018016225 (print) | LCCN 2018016960 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786633668 (United Kingdom) | ISBN 9781786633675 (United States) |

ISBN 9781786633644

Subjects: LCSH: FeminismChina. | WomenPolitical activityChina. | Social mediaPolitical aspectsChina.

Classification: LCC HQ1767 (ebook) | LCC HQ1767 .H648 2018 (print) |DDC 305.420951dc23

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2018016225

Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays

For Aidan and Liam

And for my sisters resisting around the world

Chinese women will throw off their shackles and stand up with passion; they will all become heroines. They will ascend the stage of the new world, where the heavens have mandated that they reconsolidate the nation.

Qiu Jin, Stones of the Jingwei Bird (19051907)

T he recording begins with the bell-like soprano voice of a young woman singing a cappella in Chinese. Her melody is from Les Miserables Do You Hear the People Sing? but her lyrics are about womens rights:

Are you the same as me?

We believe in a world with equality

This is a song of freedom and dignity

A song for all women!

Twenty-five-year-old feminist activist Li Maizi circulated A Song for All Women to feminist chat groups on Chinas popular messaging app, WeChat, in mid-April 2015. She had just been released from more than a month of detention, along with four other feminist activists: Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting, and Wang Man. Her songwhich has become the anthem of Chinas feminist movementannounced to the Chinese government that despite constant threats and rounds of interrogation during her incarceration, she was unbroken.

Chinese authorities had jailed the five feminist activists for planning to commemorate International Womens Day, March 8, by handing out stickers against sexual harassment on subways and buses. At the time of their arrest, the five women were almost completely unknown. Had they not been jailed, their activities likely would not have attracted much attention. In cracking down on these largely anonymous women, however, the Chinese government sparked the creation of a powerful new symbol of dissent against the patriarchal, authoritarian state: the Feminist Five.

If Chinas leaders thought they could crush a nascent feminist movement by detaining five young women in Beijing and two other cities, they were sorely mistaken. News of the arrest of the Feminist Five spread swiftly around the world through social media. Protesters marched in support of the five feminists in the United States, the UK, Hong Kong, South Korea, India, Poland and Australia. Many of the worlds mainstream news organizations reported on the womens detention.

The jailing of the five feminists coincided with preparations for Chinese president Xi Jinping to cohost a United Nations summit on womens rights in New York to mark the twentieth anniversary of Beijings World Conference on Women, sparking an international outcry from rights organizations and world leaders. Hillary Clintonthen considered the frontrunner to become the next US presidenttweeted, Xi hosting a meeting on womens rights at the UN while persecuting feminists? Shameless. The US secretary of state and government representatives from the European Union, the UK, Canada, and elsewhere called on China to release the detained feminists. US vice president Joe Bidenusing a Twitter hashtag adopted by US government officials to refer to the run-up to the UN womens summittweeted, Rights of women and girls should never be suppressed. We urge Chinese leaders to show respect for womens rights and #FreeBeijing20Five. The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, tweeted, In China speaking out against sexual harassment is creating a disturbance. Disturbance is restricting NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] fighting for universal rights. Faced with tremendous global diplomatic and social-media pressure, Chinese authorities released the women after holding them at a detention center for thirty-seven days. But today they remain criminal suspects, subject to constant surveillance by the state.

The Chinese governments detention of the Feminist Five marked an important turning point in the history of womens rights in China, showing the world that a relatively small group of young feminists was capable of posing what the Chinese Communist Party perceived to be a serious challenge to its rule. Inside China, feminist activists, university students, lawyers, workers and scholars were galvanized by anger and shock over the injustice. Even male workers who had benefited from the feminists labor rights advocacy showed their solidarity with the Feminist Five on social media. One male worker posted a photo of himself naked from the waist up on Weibothe Chinese version of Twitterwith his bare back turned to the camera, showing off large red characters written on his body: Giant Rabbit (the nickname for Zheng Churan), always proud of you! The proletariat supports you!

Ever more young womensome of them only in high schoolbegan signing up as volunteers for the fledgling but growing feminist movement. Some women who had previously avoided political discussions now decided to identify themselves publicly as feminists on social media, forcing the governments internet censors to work even more aggressively to shut down online expressions of solidarity with the Feminist Five. The term feminist (nquan zhuyi zhe) suddenly became a politically sensitive keyword, subject to waves of censorship. One of the Feminist Five activists, Wei Tingting, wrote an account called Prison Notes, which she posted on WeChat (under a pseudonym), about her joy in betraying Big Brother during her 2015 detention, and it is from her that I draw the title of this book.

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Betraying Big Brother is about the conflict between the Chinese governments unprecedented crackdown on young feminist activists and the emergence of a broader feminist awakening that is beginning to transform women in cities across China. The outcome of this conflict between the patriarchal, authoritarian state and ordinary women who are increasingly fed up with the sexism in their daily lives could have far-reaching consequences for Chinathe worlds second largest economyand the rest of the world.