In 2020, New York Public Library named Betraying Big Brother one of its 'essential reads on feminism'. 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. Betraying Big Brother named one of the best books of 2018 by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Foreign Policy Interrupted, Bitch Media and Autostraddle. 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. Leta Hong Fincher is author of the critically acclaimed book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, with an updated, 10th anniversary edition published by Bloomsbury this November. 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