Buon lunedì, prodi seguaci!👓

Se la triste vicenda di Peng Shuai vi ha fatto venire voglia di saperne di più sulla condizione delle donne e di come il movimento Me Too è stato recepito in Cina, vi consiglio caldamente la lettura di Betraying Big Brother di Leta Hong Fisher.

For an inconoclast who often makes fun of the Chinese tradition of filial piety, Li is remarkably forgiving of her father. While she crusaded against domestic violence and sexual harassment in her public life, in her private life Li believed that her father genuinely loved her. He was violent toward her and her mother because he was raised as a male chauvinist, she reasoned. At times she felt that his violent combattiveness had helped prepare her for her own battles with state security agents during her detention.

She had encountered an even greater threat than her own father – the political violence of the patriarcal, authoritarian state – and felt that this was the more dangerous enemy she needed to fight. Given Li’s unique history of persecution on multiple fronts, I could understand her deeply contradictory emotions about someone who had once come close to actually killing her. “Many people ask me why I became a feminist activist, but for me, I’ve always been resisting. Resistance is my daily life,” says Lu. “If I don’t resist, then who am I?”

How the Feminist Five and the rise of China’s feminist movement threatens 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 Feminist Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists and online warriors that is prompting an unprecedented awakening among China’s urban, educated women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest threat to China’s authoritarian regime today.
Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the challenges they face and their “joy of betraying Big Brother,” as Wei Tingting—one of the Feminist Five—wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness through online campaigns resembling #MeToo, 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.