15 Mar 2019

Betraying Big Brother: A new book looks at feminism's challenge to China's Communist Party

10:03 am on 23 February 2023

In 2015 five young feminists staged protests on International Women’s Day across China against harassment on public transport, handing out stickers and posters to passengers. They had chosen the issue for good reason. Women had been harassed, assaulted and felt unsafe. But they had carefully chosen the topic for another reason; it was not directly political. It fell into that space, they believed, where Chinese are free to protest without confronting the Party and bringing down its wrath.  

Clockwise from top left: Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting, Wang Man

Clockwise from top left: Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting, Wang Man Photo: Amnesty International / EyePress

Sadly, they were wrong. Over the next few days, Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting, Wang Man and Li Maizi were rounded up by security forces, interrogated, intimidated and imprisoned. Their families were urged to persuade them to be “good daughters”, certainly compliant or even just quiet, or disown them.

The story of China’s Feminist Five is the subject of Leta Hong Fincher’s new book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China. The title comes from the thoughts of one of the women in prison as she realises they must be threatening to a male Big Brother.

Fincher’s story goes beyond the imprisonment and eventual release of the Five to look at why this particular action should have sparked such a crackdown. She sees the incident not so much as China’s #MeToo moment but as a moment when feminism’s challenge to the Party state was revealed and the determination of the Chinese Communist state to stamp it out was laid bare.

She sees “the conflict between the Chinese government’s unprecedent crackdown on young feminist activists and the emergence of a broader feminist awakening that is beginning to transform women in cities across China. The outcome of this conflict between the patriarchal, authoritarian state and ordinary women who are increasingly fed up with the sexism in their lives could have far-reaching consequences for China - the world’s second largest economy - and the rest of the world.”

Betraying Big Brother by Leta Hong Fincher

Photo: Verso 2018

Fincher has been here before detailing what has led many women to feel fed up. In China, laws against domestic violence have only recently been enacted. Rape in marriage is still not illegal. (Another of the actions of the Feminist Five was to wear bloodied wedding dresses in public as a protest.) In her 2014 book, The Leftover Women, Fincher argued women had missed out on one of the biggest accumulations of wealth in history, in China’s multi-trillion-dollar real estate boom of the last two decades because in conservative China it is the husband’s name only which goes on the title. So, while the latest Marriage Act, setting out divorce procedures, is gender-neutral, its effect is to neutralise women’s economic position. 

Here and elsewhere, Fincher uses official statistics to show that Chinese women have gone backwards in the pay gap. In 1990 the average salary of an urban woman was 77.5 percent of a man; by 2010 it was 67 percent. In rural areas a woman earns just 56 percent that of a man.

And, of course, China is still in the midst of history’s largest population project. The One Child Policy saw controls placed on women to have just one child. Now that the population has levelled off - and possibly is even falling according to some demographers - women are being urged, pressured even, to have more children, especially women considered the “right kind” - the educated, wealthier, urban and successful. But these women, like many in the West, are preferring to delay getting married or having children, to make their own choices. Yet these are the women labelled “leftover women” if they are not married by 27.

So, Fincher sees a potent brew of unrest developing. And that unrest can be shared through social media, even one as controlled as China’s censored internet.

In contrast Fincher sees the Party as increasingly male. The number of women on the Party’s Central Committee of more than 200 senior politicians stands at just 4.9 percent - down from seven percent ten years ago. Dismal, says Fincher, rightly. For six decades, there had never been a woman on the highest body of the State, the Politburo. There are now just two women on the party’s expanded 25-member Politburo. None of China’s 31 provincial governors are women.

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Photo: Nora J Tejada

So, what happened to the Party of Mao, who once famous proclaimed that women “hold up half the sky”? One of Mao’s first acts after taking power in 1949 was to implement a new Marriage Act to help women, ordaining that both parties had to consent to a marriage, raising the marriage age to 18 for women and setting out paths for divorce including domestic violence. It was unpopular in parts of rural China (the slogan was: “men and women are equal; each is worth his (or her) salt”) but a given among the former student radicals who led the Party that women had to be given a hand up.

Fincher does a very good job of explaining how early Communist thinkers supported women’s rights. Emerging from a student milieu in the 1910s and 1920s, there were feminist publications and feminists among the Party leaders (though Fincher points out that they were never allowed to soar too high). The issue, she points out, is that these early communists saw women’s rights not as an issue of equality but as a way to modernise China. They were nationalists first.

Under Mao, women rose to be leaders in local cadres (even if, as now, few entered the top leadership in the Party). But, argues Fincher, this strand of feminism in the Party has first withered and then be actively uprooted. 
Women’s economic position has deteriorated under the economic reforms of started by Deng Xiaoping. But just as crucially, argues Fincher, China’s government has become more masculine, more testosterone-based, more conservative. Xi Jinping is portrayed as Dada Xi, father of the nation; his family the paragon of a family with a father at the head.

Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2017

Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2017 Photo: TYRONE SIU / POOL / AFP

The Communist Party, which under Mao had wanted to uproot the old China weighing on the present, is now resurrecting the Confucian ideals of the past which expected wives to be obedient. The Confucian family is meant to be the foundation of the stable state with a woman loyal to her husband and looking after the welfare of children.
Thus feminism, once an ally - maybe even a part of Communism at one point - has become a challenge, she says.
She argues that the Chinese government wants women ‘to be reproductive tools of the state, obedient wives and mothers in the home, to help maintain political stability, have babies and rear the workforce of the future.” 

A wedding in Shanghai

A wedding in Shanghai Photo: Supplied/ Jeremy Rees

This is a very fine, short read and adds to a growing body of books on the place of women in China, like Gail Hershatter’s very good Women and China’s Revolutions, Fincher’s earlier book and even Ma Jian’s Dark Road, a disturbing novel from 2013 about a couple on the run from the enforcers of the One Child Policy. Fincher’s strength is in taking a seemingly small incident and widening the focus to show what she sees as a growing disconnect and discontent between some women and the State. Her reportage of the specifics of the Five is strong. Her analysis of the problems women face in modern China is even better.

Fincher ends up concerned whether a nascent feminist movement can survive crackdowns like that on the Feminist Five. She concludes that crackdowns may only intensify. Only in the long run, she argues, may women in China achieve a more open society.

And the Feminist Five? They were released about a month after the crackdown, partly due to protests in China, overseas and on social media. Feminist Voices, an online publication which covered their actions, was banned on social media Weibo in 2017, reinstated and then banned again last year. The women have mostly stayed in China.

Their protests continue.

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