Betraying Big Brother

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global <i>cause célèbre</i>, 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 China’s urban, educated women. In <i>Betraying Big Brother</i>, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest threat to China’s authoritarian regime today.<br><br>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, <i>Betraying Big Brother</i> is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.