This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com

and by Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles, perfect for dig listeners like you.

One that you might like is Betraying Big Brother, The Feminist Awakening in China by Leda Hong Fincher.

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 cause celeb,

with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf,

and activists inundating social media with

hashtag free the five 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, journalists and scholar Leda 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 Me Too 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.

Betraying Big Brother. The Feminist Awakening in China by Leda Hong Fincher, out now from

Verso Books.

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