Portraits of Li Tingting (top L), Wei Tingting (top R), (bottom, L-R) Wang Man, Wu Rongrong and Zheng Churan are pictured during a protest calling for their release in Hong Kong April 11, 2015.
In the Chinese village where Wu Rongrong grew up, girls were regarded as worthless. Promising young girls were pressured into giving up their studies so they could earn money to help pay for their brothers' education. Well-meaning people tried to dissuade Wu from continuing her education. But she didn't listen.
Wu, now 30, enrolled in a university, studied social work and went on to become a prominent women's rights activist. She was one of five activists arrested in March and held in detention for more than a month. The "Feminist Five," as they came to be known, attracted international attention. Even after their release from jail, though, the women remain under pressure by Chinese authorities.
Last week, Wu was detained again and subjected to long hours of harsh interrogations. "[M]y spirit is on the verge of collapse," she posted on the popular Chinese social networking site, WeChat, after the ordeal. Wu's husband told the New York Times that she was "emotionally broken."
But Wu is not keeping quiet.
"Fate and chance made me a social worker and a feminist: Gentle and timid in appearance, but a staunch defender of women’s rights," Wu wrote in a post published this week where she describes the personal path that led her to become an activist who still faces possible re-arrest and detention.
"I’m not some mastermind conspirator working behind the scenes to disturb the social order; I just want to call attention to the plight of women facing sexual harassment, and call for more public measures to punish and deter perpetrators," Wu writes.
The arrest of Wu and the four other women's rights activists effectively put Chinese feminists on notice. "You have to understand these five are not just five, they represent a whole cohort of young feminist activists," Professor Wang Zheng, a historian of Chinese feminism at the University of Michigan, told the BBC. "So when the five were detained all the others went underground."
But it didn't quash the discussion on Chinese social media. In fact, Wang says it might be doing just the opposite.
"The detention enhanced public awareness," she said.
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