{"id":86718,"date":"2018-11-26T08:04:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T08:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=86718 "},"modified":"2018-11-26T08:04:00","modified_gmt":"2018-11-26T08:04:00","slug":"86718-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=86718","title":{"rendered":"BETRAYING BIG BROTHER The Feminist Awakening in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Keith B. Richburg, a professor and director of the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong, is a former China correspondent for The Washington Post.<\/em><\/p><\/div>

Almost a decade ago, in a hardscrabble mountain town in the remote Chinese province of Hubei, a 21-year-old woman named Deng Yujiao became an early, unwilling symbol of pervasive sexual violence against women by powerful men. Deng, a high school dropout, had a job giving pedicures at the seedy Dream Fantasy City karaoke and bathhouse in May 2009, when a local Communist Party bigwig came in with his cronies and demanded “special services,” a euphemism for sex. When she refused, the official slapped Deng’s face with a wad of money, pushed her onto a couch and climbed on top of her. Deng reached for the only weapon she had, a three-inch knife, and stabbed the big man in his neck, chest and stomach. She called the police as the official bled to death.<\/p>

Deng was charged with “intentional homicide” and strapped to a bed in a psychiatric hospital. She might have stayed there, or been swiftly tried and executed, had her story not found its way to the Internet, where she suddenly became a national heroine. Fearing social unrest, authorities released Deng and allowed her to relocate to another province.<\/p>

Deng came to mind recently as the #MeToo movement exploded in the United States, rippled across the globe to Asia and finally reached China — where it has run smack into a great wall of official repression and cultural obduracy. Some see this burgeoning women’s movement as a turning point that is already rattling the pillars of China’s patriarchal, authoritarian regime. Researcher Leta Hong Fincher, in her new book, “Betraying Big Brother<\/a>,” writes that for the first time since 1949, “organized feminist activists independent of the Communist Party have tapped into broad discontent among Chinese women and developed a level of influence over public opinion that is highly unusual for any social movement in China.”<\/p>

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<div><font color="#111111">More likely, I fear that this new feminist movement will be stamped out like so many promising movements before, including the early online activism that brought stories like Deng Yujiao&#8217;s to life. I learned about Deng while researching a book idea about how Internet activism had emerged as a serious threat to Communist Party rule in China &#8212; or so I thought. The Internet revolution that I believed I was witnessing was quickly crushed after Xi came to power and launched an unrelenting crackdown on the online space. That &#8220;revolution&#8221; was snuffed out, just like every other popular uprising over the past 30 years.<\/font><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div>If feminist activism is any more lasting, it will defy the odds, and history.<\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}