Wei Tingting, Wang Man, Li Maizi, Zheng Churan, and Wu Rongrong had worked for years on social-justice projects before they were detained. The book also looks ahead, sizing up China’s emerging #MeToo movement. Fincher bases her narrative on interviews with the Five and their allies, while supporting their stories with deep research into the roots of the government’s crackdown on feminism. “Had they not been jailed, their activities likely would not have attracted much attention,” Leta Hong Fincher writes of these women, who became known as the “Feminist Five.” Instead, their detention “sparked the creation of a powerful new symbol of dissent.” In her sprawling and detailed recent book, Betraying Big Brother, Fincher aims to tell the story of the women’s rights movement in China through their saga.
Their offense? A plan to distribute anti-sexual-harassment stickers on public transportation. The women were sent to a detention center in Beijing, where they were held for over a month on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” While in custody, the activists were isolated from friends and family, subjected to constant interrogation, and deprived of medical care. 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.On March 6, 2015, just before International Women’s Day, authorities in cities around China rounded up feminist activists to preempt a planned public demonstration. 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 célèbre, 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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