betraying big brother the feminist awakening in china

And that itself has sparked a lot of new activism. This year, there has been quite a bit of discussion, even though there’s all this censorship of discussion of feminist topics on Weibo and Weixin, but there’s still a lot of discussion of this Xiǎo Huāméi 小花梅, who is known as the “ chained woman” in Xuzhou. And of course, a few years ago, the most influential feminist platform on Weibo and Weixin was shut down,Feminist Voices (女权之声), on International Women’s Day, basically. There was a mass deletion of feminist accounts on social media a few months ago.

Feminist activists continue to be persecuted. various women’s rights centers have been shut down. That really marked a turning point in women’s rights activism in China and kind of marked the birth of this new feminist movement that has had remarkable momentum in the years since, in spite of a really brutal crackdown from Beijing. With regard to just how International Women’s Day this year differs? I would say, of course, seven years ago on the eve of International Women’s Day, the Chinese government for the first time jailed five women’s rights activists who were planning to celebrate International Women’s Day by handing out stickers on sexual harassment. But the fact is, with intimate partner violence, we’re never going to know the exact numbers. Of course, the difference is that China has a zero-COVID policy, so the lockdowns in China have been extraordinarily severe. I don’t think that’s really unique to China.

And there was also quite a bit of feminist activism surrounding the issue of rising domestic violence in various Chinese cities.

I think this was actually true around the world, not just in China: COVID certainly was tied to a rise in reported incidents of domestic violence. With two decades of experience, first as a journalist, and then as a research scholar, closely following women’s issues and gender inequality in China, how does International Women’s Day 2022 look to you? What’s changed in the last two years? How did COVID affect Chinese women? This is an edited and abridged transcript of part of our conversation. We talked about the state of Chinese feminism today, tennis star Péng Shuài 彭帅 (who is now more famous for her #MeToo allegations), the vigorous activism around the chained woman of Xuzhou, the birth of grassroots feminist spaces, and Beijing’s designs for Han Chinese women to bear more children. Leta is the author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (2018), and, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2016).

Betraying big brother the feminist awakening in china