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. 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. 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. 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. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf, and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. Academic and journalist Leta Hong-Fincher made an impressive debut some years ago with her first work, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed Books, 2014). On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. Leta Hong-Fincher, Betraying Big Brother: the Feminist Awakening in China, (Verso Books, 2018), 288pp.
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