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 célèbre 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 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.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.