Author Leta Hong Fincher (@LetaHong) joins Here & Now's Lisa Mullins to discuss her new book, "Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China," and why Chinese feminists are being detained, surveilled and censored for actions like putting up stickers in subways against sexual harassment. "There's this huge confrontation now between the agenda of the government, which is pushing a very traditional gender norm,” says Fincher. "But then you have this enormous upswelling of particularly educated young women who are pushing back in every way.” Interview Highlights On the history of the ‘Feminist Five,’ the focus of her book “These five women became known as the ‘Feminist Five’ after they were jailed in 2015 for planning to celebrate International Women's Day, and it wasn't just those five women. There were a lot of women in different cities across China who were planning to hand out stickers about sexual harassment on subways and buses, but before they even carried out their plan, the police in all of these Chinese cities just carried out a sweeping round of arrests and focused on the five women — the Feminist Five — brought them to Beijing and detained them for 37 days, before there was a huge global outcry that resulted in their release.

"The reason why the arrest and jailing of these women just galvanized so many in the feminist community inside China, and globally, is ... because all they wanted to do was to hand out stickers." Leta Hong Fincher

“The authorities were kind of feeling around for something to charge them with, and in the end, it was something akin to ‘disturbing the social order.’ But the reason why the arrest and jailing of these women just galvanized so many in the feminist community inside China, and globally, is ... because all they wanted to do was to hand out stickers, raising awareness about sexual harassment.” On the motivation for the Feminist Five, as well as other Chinese women’s rights activists, for speaking out “Among the Feminist Five, quite a few of them had suffered abuse in their personal lives while growing up. For example, Li Maizi herself spoke about quite severe physical violence at the hands of her father from a very early age, and her uncle. Some of the other activists had also encountered sexual abuse. “And it wasn't just these five women. A lot of the women who … have been involved in the Women's Rights Movement have personally been victims of sexual assault or very severe domestic violence, and that has given these women an intense sense of personal commitment to fight back.”

"The rhetoric at the time was very much that women can do whatever men can do. And so, even today, you see the legacy of that early communist era." Leta Hong Fincher

On Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party’s previously-stated goal of gender equality “In the early communist era, there were a lot of changes brought about for women. “Even though women still had to assume the double burden of working in the workforce and then taking care of children and cooking in the home, the fact is that the Communist Party mobilized women and said that they assigned them jobs, either in the cities or … in the fields, and so that brought women out of the confinements of the household, and so female labor force participation was really the highest in the world in the early communist era. “The rhetoric at the time was very much that women can do whatever men can do. And so, even today, you see the legacy of that early communist era, because China's female labor force participation is still relatively high compared to a lot of other countries. Although, it's really falling dramatically with the onset of market reforms. But now, in the last couple of decades, you've seen a huge resurgence of gender inequality. “With the dismantling of the planned economies, so many women have been laid off relative to men, and the gender gap is rising exponentially in so many ways, and that's a big part of why this feminist movement has grown, is because of that dissatisfaction with this huge gender gap, that women have to put themselves behind men. And so, many young women today feel that that's really profoundly unfair.”

"Sexism and misogyny and the subjugation of women -- pushing women to return to these traditional roles of dutiful wife and mother -- all of that is at the core of what I call China's patriarchal authoritarianism." Leta Hong Fincher