betraying big brother the feminist awakening in china

Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their 'joy of betraying Big Brother,' as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest challenge to China's authoritarian regime today. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's educated, urban women. The Feminist Five became a global cause celebre, 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 thirty-seven days. There are a lot of commonalities and a lot of overlap between how patriarchal authoritarianism exists in China and how it exists in other countries as well.A feminist movement clashing with China's authoritarian government He’s always praising strongmen rulers around the world. Most recently Bolsonaro in Brazil, is a horrible misogynist. There isn’t a single authoritarian state that embraces feminism, and so that misogyny and subjugation of women underpins all of these strongman-like states.

Have you seen similar tendencies in other world leaders?

So when you have single women refusing to get married and have babies, insisting that they control their own bodies, wanting to make their own decisions and not follow the edicts of the Communist Party, then that’s an existential threat to these male leaders. Keeping the family with children together under a man who exerts his authority and a wife who is obedient is seen as critical to political stability. There is also the hyper-masculine personality cult of Xi Jinping, where he presents himself as a father figure and strongman ruler over these male-dominated, harmonious families. I think that’s even more important to them than sustaining economic growth. They see the subjugation of women as critical to the party’s survival. Patriarchal authoritarianism is what underpins the longevity of the Communist Party.

Betraying big brother the feminist awakening in china