Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China

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On the eve of International Womens Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause clbre, 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 Chinas 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 Chinas 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." 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.

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Author Bio

Leta Hong Fincheris a journalist who has written for theNew York Times,Guardian,Ms. Magazine, the BBC and CNN and is the author ofLeftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China.