Betraying Big Brother Audiobook By Leta Hong Fincher cover art

Betraying Big Brother

The Feminist Awakening in China

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Betraying Big Brother

By: Leta Hong Fincher
Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
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A feminist movement clashing with China's authoritarian government

On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. 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. 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.

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. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, 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.

©2018 Leta Hong Fincher (P)2019 Tantor Asia Civil Rights & Liberties Freedom & Security Gender Studies History & Theory Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences World China Socialism Social justice Human Rights Law
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To my shame, before reading Leta Hong Fincher’s Betraying Big Brother (2018), I had not heard of or had forgotten the Chinese Feminist Five (Zheng Churan, Li Maizi AKA Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Wang Man, Wei Tingting), so anything about their names, personalities, lives, arrests and detentions (for planning to hand out anti-sexual harassment on public transportation stickers to honor International Woman’s Day in 2015), and so on was fascinating, harrowing, moving, and inspiring. Though the authorities didn’t actually beat or physically torture the five, they did pretty much everything short of that, including refusing them vital medication and medical treatment for conditions like Hepatitis, denying them their eye glasses, confiscating their warm boots and isolating them in cold cells, waking them up at all hours for multiple interrogations each day, intimidating them by shouts and curses and threats, pressuring them by intimidating and threatening their families, repeatedly trying to get them to confess to being tools of hostile western foreign powers, and more. Even after they were released after thirty-seven days (largely due to international attention and condemnation of their detentions), the authorities continued harassing them and their families, summoning them for repeated interrogations, getting their landlords to evict them, their bosses to fire them, their families to condemn them, and so on.

Despite all such traumatic treatment, the five women survived their PTSD and remained (as of 2018 when the book was published) undefeated and undaunted. Their endurance and perseverance and courage and humor often moved me to tears.

Hong Fincher’s compact book, then, introduces the Feminist Five; covers the relationship between social networking sites and feminism in China; relates the (appalling) details the five women’s detentions, eventual releases, and subsequent harassments; explains the need for feminist movements in countries like China where a woman’s “body is a battleground”; covers the history of feminism in China from the early twentieth century, explicates the relationships and lack of relationships between feminists, lawyers, and workers; anatomizes China’s “patriarchal authoritarianism”; and concludes with “A Song for All Women,” an assessment of where feminism in China stands as of the 2018 publication of the book and a plea to fight patriarchy, support women’s rights in China and worldwide, and stay positive.

Hong Fincher doesn’t limit herself to the Five but relates anecdotes and backgrounds and situations of a variety of other Chinese women related to them and or to their feminist endeavors. She also doesn’t limit herself to China—she doesn’t say that China is THE most anti-woman country in the world etc.—but rather places China in the context of the current trend in the world towards ever greater “crony capitalism and patriarchal authoritarianism,” as in countries like Russia and Hungary and the USA (one wonders what Hong Fincher thinks of the USA now that it’s elected Trump for the second time). Some of the most inspiring parts of the book come when Fincher quotes Chinese feminists quoting Virginia Woolf (“As a woman, my country is the whole world”) or meeting feminists who’ve experienced detention and physical/emotional harm in other countries.

But it is true, of course, that she mainly focuses on China and its patriarchal authoritarian government (and “digital dictatorship”), which began cracking down on women’s rights and feminism when its economic boom started in the late twentieth century, censoring and eliminating feminist social networking site posts and groups, exhorting single women to marry and have kids, making laws that favor husbands as property owners over wives, and so on. One of her central (and convincing) arguments is that “the longevity of China's Communist Party” is intertwined with “the patriarchal underpinnings of its authoritarianism.” Hong Fincher argues that to maintain its hold on power, the government wants to prevent university educated Chinese feminists from linking up with Chinese working class women and NGOs and human rights lawyers, all while seemingly encouraging “commercial feminism” in commercials and the entertainment industry.

One wonders how things are NOW for the Feminist Five and their Chinese sisters seven years after the initial publication of this book.

The audiobook reader Emily Woo Zeller kinda has a monotonous staccato delivery, but maybe it’s more effective to be less dramatically emotional when reading such potent material as Hong Fincher’s, and Woo Zeller does speak clearly and pronounces the Chinese names and phrases accurately (as far as my limited knowledge of Chinese enables me to tell).

I highly recommended this book to anyone interested in feminism or Chinese culture.

Fascinating, Harrowing, Moving, and Inspiring

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...tragic, yet hopeful, filled with true heroism, yet a sequence of stories that should make any objective reader's blood boil at the shameless efforts of a mammoth government and its party bosses to suppress China's feminist movement, and all for the worst imaginable reasons...lift the curtain, read and learn, parse the propaganda, surveillance, endless harassment by overweaning domestic security services intent upon enforcing a make- believe vision that the People's Republic of China is a normal state and the Communist Party of China has the interests of the Chinese people genuinely at heart.

A Brilliant Report...

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