Betraying Big Brother
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.
Thwarted at Home, Can China’s Feminists Rebuild a Movement Abroad?
A small number of China’s feminist movement’s influential thinkers and organizers have relocated overseas, in search of an environment more hospitable to their activism. Today, though their numbers are relatively small, they have succeeded in...
‘It’s Hopeless But You Persist’: An Interview with Jiang Xue
from New York Review of BooksThe forty-five-year-old investigative journalist Jiang Xue is one of the most influential members of a group of journalists who came of age in the early 2000s, taking advantage of new—if temporary—freedoms created by the Internet to investigate...
China Professor Accused in #MeToo Campaign Is Sacked
A Chinese university has fired a professor accused of sexual misconduct, after a former student named him in a #MeToo campaign.
China’s Women Break Silence on Harassment as #MeToo Becomes #WoYeShi
Beijing’s strict social control mean few have risked speaking out about misogyny but campaigners are beginning to make their voices heard.
Finding Women in the State
Finding Women in the State is a provocative hidden history of socialist state feminists maneuvering behind the scenes at the core of the Chinese Communist Party. These women worked to advance gender and class equality in the early People’s Republic and fought to transform sexist norms and practices, all while facing fierce opposition from a male-dominated Chinese Communist Party leadership, from the local level to the central level. Wang Zheng extends this investigation to the cultural realm, showing how feminists within China’s film industry were working to actively create new cinematic heroines, and how they continued a New Culture anti-patriarchy heritage in socialist film production. This book illuminates not only the different visions of revolutionary transformation but also the dense entanglements among those in the top echelon of the Party. Wang discusses the causes for failure of China’s socialist revolution and raises fundamental questions about male dominance in social movements that aim to pursue social justice and equality. This is the first book engendering the People’s Republic of China high politics and has important theoretical and methodological implications for scholars and students working in gender studies as well as China studies.
China Lifts Travel Ban on Feminist Activist
A Chinese feminist activist who was banned from leaving mainland China for a decade has been given back her travel documents and allowed to travel. Wu Rongrong will fly to Hong Kong on Sunday, where she will begin a post-graduate degree in law....
China 'Feminist Five' Activist Handed 10-Year Travel Ban
One of China’s “Feminist Five” group of women who were arrested for campaigning against sexual harassment has been barred from leaving the country for a decade, in the latest example of Beijing’s ever-tightening grip on civil society.
Joan Kaufman on Foreign Nonprofits and Academia in China
from Sinica PodcastJoan Kaufman is a fascinating figure: Her long and storied career in China started in the early 1980s, when she was what she calls a “cappuccino-and-croissant socialist from Berkeley.” Today, she is the director for academics at...
China and the Legend of Ivanka
That such a vexed figure may serve as the role model for Chinese women who are just beginning to grapple with their identity in a society that has historically been hostile to their empowerment seems like a regression.
I Went to Jail for Handing out Feminist Stickers in China
The backlash is painful, but it coexists with progress as women activists manage—slowly—to bring about a change in attitudes
Trump’s Feminist Critics Gagged by Chinese Internet Giant Weibo
Chinese feminists have hit out at their country’s answer to Twitter after it gagged one of their movement’s most visible social media accounts in an apparent bid to stifle criticism of U.S. president Donald Trump.
Fighting on Behalf of China’s Women—From the United States
Among hundreds of thousands of women who took to the streets for the Women’s March on Washington were Lu Pin and more than 20 other Chinese feminists who live in the United States and belong to the Chinese Feminism Collective
There Are Echoes of China in Today’s America
We are troubled by how often lately we experience a strange sort of China-related déjà vu when following events in the U.S.
For Chinese Women, a Surname is Her Name
Keeping a surname is not an expression of marital equality, but of powerful patriarchal values. A married woman continued to be identified by her father’s lineage.
Feminism With Chinese Characteristics
China is making progress on women’s issues, but anyone trying to publicize remaining issues faces a serious backlash.
Xi Turns Back the Clock on Women’s Rights in China
Although it is unthinkable today, two decades ago 30,000 women from around the world converged outside Beijing to promote a host of social and political causes.
Chinese Feminist Wants to be the Country’s First Openly Lesbian Lawyer
Li Tingting is determined that police harrassment will not stop her.
A Bittersweet Reprieve for Chinese Woman Who Killed Abusive Husband
The verdict left lawyers and activists doubtful of the Chinese legal system’s ability to protect women.
China Releases 5 Women’s Rights Activists Detained for Weeks
Police released five female activists detained after campaigning against sexual harassment on public transport.
Dark Days for Women in China?
With China’s recent criminal detention of five feminist activists, gender inequality in China is back in the spotlight. What does a crackdown on Chinese women fighting for equal representation say about the current state of the nation’s political...
China’s Feminists Stand up Against ‘Misogynistic’ TV Gala
The most widely watched television show on earth was peppered with jokes at the expense of women.
Sporting Gender
When China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics—and amazed international observers with both its pageantry and gold-medal count—it made a very public statement about the country’s surge to global power. Yet, China has a much longer history of using sport to communicate a political message.
The Birth of Chinese Feminism
He-Yin Zhen (ca. 1884-ca.1920) was a theorist who figured centrally in the birth of Chinese feminism. Unlike her contemporaries, she was concerned less with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationship among patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global historical problems. This volume, the first translation and study of He-Yin’s work in English, critically reconstructs early twentieth-century Chinese feminist thought in a transnational context by juxtaposing He-Yin Zhen’s writing against works by two better-known male interlocutors of her time.
For China, a New Kind of Feminism
Sheryl Sandberg’s brand of self-strengthening feminism has made its way to China, receiving mixed, but generally positive, reactions among various audiences.
Women in China Leadership Fewer Than Under Mao
The chart of the day shows the falling percentage of women in the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee, a group of about 200 members that includes all seven men on the nation’s...
Wrapped Up: An Interview with Lin Tianmiao
Lin Tianmiao was born in Taiyuan, Shanxi in 1961 to an artistic family. Her father was a traditional painter and her mother a dancer. In the 1980s, she married video artist Wang Gongxin, moved to New York, and became a textile designer. It wasn’t...
The Bottom of the Well
from New York Review of BooksDo Chinese women, as the Communist Party has held for decades, “hold up half the sky?” Or, like the frog at the bottom of a well in a famous Daoist legend, do they see only a little blue patch? Why is it that tens of millions of them are said to...