Depending on their aims, activists can be targeted and harassed in China. These men, trying to draw attention to child trafficking are painted with a slogan in China's Shanxi province in 2013. Credit:Reuters Now five of them - core members of China's new feminist movement - sit in jail, accused of provoking social instability. One of the women, Wu Rongrong, 30, an AIDS activist, is said to be ailing after the police withheld the medication she takes for hepatitis. Another, Wang Man, 33, a gender researcher, was said to have had a mild heart attack while in custody. Lawyers for the detainees, who include Zheng Churan, 25, affectionately known as Big Rabbit, say the women have been subjected to near-constant interrogation. The women were detainedearly last month on the eve of International Women's Day as they planned a public awareness campaign about sexual harassment on public transportation. Now, as security agents from Beijing fan out across the country hunting down the volunteers who took part in the women's theatrical protests, many young feminists have gone into hiding. "We're so afraid and confused", said one of them, Xiao Meili, 26, who recently completed a 1900-kilometre trek across China to draw attention to sexual violence. "We don't understand what we did wrong to warrant such a ferocious backlash".

Some protesters, though, march unmolested. These Chinese activists, egged on by Beijing authorities, express their anger about Japan's 1930s occupation of Manchuria. Credit:AP Despite government efforts to keep reporting of the crackdown out of the domestic news media, the jailing of the five women has been noticed here. Word has spread across college campuses, and more than 1,100 people took the risky step last week of adding their names to a petition demanding the women's release. Outside China, campaigners have used Facebook and Twitter to publicise the detainees' plight, and Western governments have been issuing statements to protest their incarceration. Sometimes civil action reaps dividends. A protester stands in front of a banner in 2012 to protest against plans to expand a petrochemical plant in Zhejiang province. The expansion was suspended. Credit:Reuters "If China is committed to advancing the rights of women, then it should be working to address the issues raised by these women's rights activists - not silencing them", said Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations.

From Morocco to India to New York, supporters have been posting images of themselves wearing masks that bear the photos of the jailed women. Because two of the detainees are lesbian and another is bisexual, overseas gay rights organisations like All Out have jumped into the fray, collecting more than 85,000 signatures and popularising the hashtag #freethefive on Twitter. As international attention to the women's case mounts, some rights advocates see echoes of the public relations maelstrom surrounding the female Russian dissident group, Pussy Riot, whose members were arrested in 2012 for their provocative protests against President Vladimir Putin. Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said the five jailed feminists have drawn far more international attention than the scores of Chinese activists who have been detained during the previous two years of an intensified government drive against political dissent. "Many people find it mind-boggling that the government of the second-largest economy and the world's largest standing army is afraid of a group of women trying to draw attention to sexual harassment," Ms Richardson said. "The combination of power and paranoia on display is very telling". Analysts say the effort to quash China's nascent feminist movement represents a dismal milestone in the Communist Party's war on grass-roots activism, a campaign that has gained momentum since President Xi Jinping came to power in November 2012. Unlike the government critics and political reform advocates jailed in earlier sweeps, the five detained women confined their activities to matters like domestic violence and discrimination against people with HIV - issues the government claims to have also embraced.

"They have been very successful in using performance to provoke social dialogue on gender issues," said Zeng Jinyan, a blogger who studies Chinese feminist activism. "I think we can call them the first modern, independent, feminist, grass-roots actors in Chinese history". Soon after coming to power in 1949, Mao Zedong outlawed forced marriages, prostitution and foot binding, and he introduced a groundbreaking marriage law that gave women the right to file for divorce. Women were considered equal to men, but only as a collective force for economic production, Zeng said. But in recent decades, as market economics took hold in China, unapologetic male chauvinism re-emerged, and with it, traditional notions of a woman's role in the family. Women's incomes have been falling compared with those of their male counterparts in recent years; just over 2 percent of Chinese women hold managerial positions; and all but two of the 25 Politburo members are men. In the meantime, friends, relatives and fellow feminists are reeling. If the women are not released this week - more than 37 days from the date of their detention - it is likely they will be prosecuted, tried and convicted. The charge of "picking quarrels and provoking troubles" carries a maximum five-year sentence in China, although it can be extended to 10 years if a defendant is convicted of organising multiple public disturbances.

Fan, Wei's roommate, said none of the women ever imagined they could be jailed for their work. He said Wei had been doing laundry on the day she was summoned by the police and had left a load of clothing in the washing machine. "Clearly she thought she would be returning home in a few hours," he said. New York Times