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SUSAN GREENHALGH is John King and
Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of
Chinese Society at Harvard University.
XIYING WANG is a Professor in the Faculty of
Education at Beijing Normal University.
China’s Feminist
Fight
#MeToo in the Middle
Kingdom
Susan Greenhalgh and
Xiying Wang
Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist
Awakening in China
BY LETA HONG FINCHER. Verso,
2018, 240 pp.
A
s the #MeToo movement spreads
around the globe, women’s
rights advocates are looking for
cases to cheer, stories o women standing
up to sexual harassment and assault and
saying, “Enough is enough.” Chinese
women who are doing just that are the
focus o Betraying Big Brother, a deeply
aecting book by the journalist and
China specialist Leta Hong Fincher. The
main characters in her tale are a small
group o relatively well-o, college-
educated young women in China’s major
cities who connect with one another
through social media. Coming o age in
an era o economic progress and promise,
these women had high hopes for their
lives and careers. But their aspirations
were dealt a blow by widespread sexism.
Beginning in 2012, they dared to take to
the streets to engage in performance art,
including forming Áash mobs, and then
posted videos o their activities online to
promote discussion and raise awareness
about gender among the general public.
Based on interviews with these young
women, including the group that came
to be known as the Feminist Five, Hong
Fincher describes a collective awakening
in which they came to see their lives as
“worth something,” a realization that led
them to believe they had a right to ask
for more than their society seemed willing
to oer. In recent years, young Chinese
feminists have advocated a national law
on domestic violence; criticized sexual
harassment, sexual assault, and misogyny
in the media and culture; challenged
gender discrimination in college admis-
sions, job recruitment, and workplace
practices; and appealed for more public
restrooms for women. Such activism
“tapp[ed] into a groundswell o dissatis-
faction among hundreds o thousands
o educated urban women who were
just beginning to wake up to the ram-
pant sexism in Chinese society,” Hong
Fincher writes.
But the story then takes a disturbing
turn. In March 2015, one day before
International Women’s Day, the Femi-
nist Five were detained by China’s
aggressive state security apparatus and
held for 37 days, during which they were
often treated roughly. They had been
preparing to hand out stickers decrying
sexual harassment in public spaces—for
instance, the widespread phenomenon
o men groping women on public
transportation. Their ordeal created a
scandal in China, where the news spread
quickly on social media despite being
mostly ignored or trivialized by theReturn to Table of Contents