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Lucy Ridout, Betraying Big Brother: the feminist awakening in China, International Affairs, Volume 97, Issue 3, May 2021, Pages 916–918, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab050
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In December 2020, a crowd assembled outside the Haidian District Court in Beijing to express solidarity with Zhou Xiaoxuan (more commonly referred to as Xianzi), ahead of her sexual harassment trial against Zhu Jun, one of China's most prominent TV presenters. In a rare display of activism, the crowd held posters bearing messages of support, and the Chinese characters for ‘rice’ (mĭ) and ‘bunny’ (tù), which together create: ‘mĭ tù’—a homonym for ‘MeToo’. Xianzi's case is one of many sexual harassment cases that have emerged in China in recent years, spurred on by the country's fledgling #MeToo movement.
Leta Hong Fincher's Betraying Big Brother seeks to explain the origins of China's #MeToo movement, the political environment Chinese feminist activists operate within and the challenges they face. Deftly interweaving historical context with first-hand accounts from leading feminist activists, lawyers and workers, Betraying Big Brother raises troubling questions about the threat that a large-scale feminist movement might pose to a government that, according to Hong Fincher, ‘view[s] women primarily as reproductive tools to realize the nation's development goals’ (p. 13).
