A feminist movement clashing with China’s authoritarian
government. Featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
On
the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese
government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for
thirty-seven days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre,
with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists
inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are
only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights
lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors
prompting an unprecedented awakening among China’s educated, urban
women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta
Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the
greatest challenge to China’s authoritarian regime today.
Through
interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese
activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face
and their “joy of betraying Big
Brother,” as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance
she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist
consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, 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.