This year on International Women's Day (8 March) the Chinese government struck a big blow to the country's feminist movement when Sina Weibo – the Chinese equivalent of Twitter – shut down the popular Feminist Voices Facebook page. Describing Chinas feminist activists in relation to their political and historical circumstances, the. "Even though there are tight constraints on social media there's still room to get your message across." Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China. It's constantly a cat-and-mouse game with internet censors. "If one person's social media account is shut down… they find another person to post something. When the #MeToo movement swept the world at the end of 2017, Hong didn't think China's feminist activists would be about to seize on it, but #MeToo became a convenient hashtag.Ĭhina's feminist activists are innovative and continually coming up with different strategies to get around China's heavy and sophisticated internet censorship.īefore the censors caught on, women were using the emojis for rice and bunny – which when spoken aloud are pronounced “mi tu” – to tag content relating to sexual harassment or assault. Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the challenges they face and their "joy of betraying Big Brother." Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness through online campaigns resembling #MeToo, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.Clockwise from top left: Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting, Wang Man Photo: Amnesty International / EyePress
In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest threat to China's authoritarian regime today. But the Feminist Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists and online warriors that is prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's urban, educated women. The Feminist Five became a global cause c l bre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf, and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days.
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