This is the story of how the women's movement in China took advantage of the government's official efforts to position women in the rural economic reforms of the 1980s to achieve a significant and ever-increasing role in China's developing turn toward a market economy, which was not the state's intent.

The book repositions He-Yin Zhen as central to the development of feminism in China, juxtaposing her writing with fresh translations of works by two of her better-known male interlocutors. The editors begin with a detailed portrait of He-Yin Zhen's life and an analysis of her thought in comparative terms. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1873-1947) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), to which He-Yin's work responds and with which it engages. Jin Tianhe, a poet and educator, and Liang Qichao, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that "enlightened" male intellectuals like themselves should defend. Zhen counters with an alternative conception of feminism that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends in thought.

This is the first exploration of women's campaigns to gain equal rights to political participation in China. The dynamic and successful struggle for suffrage rights waged by Chinese women activists through the first half of the twentieth century challenged fundamental and centuries-old principles of political power. By demanding a public political voice for women, the activists promoted new conceptions of democratic representation for the entire political structure, not simply for women. Their movement created the space in which gendered codes of virtue would be radically transformed for both men and women.

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.

First published in 1978, Feminism and Socialism in China explores the inter-relationship of feminism and socialism and the contribution of each towards the redefinition of the role and status of women in China. In her history of the women’s movement in China from the late nineteenth century onwards, Professor Croll provides an opportunity to study its construction, its ideological and structural development over a number of decades, and its often ambiguous relationship with a parallel movement to establish socialism. Based on a variety of material including eye witness accounts, the author examines a wide range of fundamental issues, including women’s class and oppression, the relation of women’s solidarity groups to class organisations, reproduction and the accommodation of domestic labour, women in the labour process, and the relationship between women’s participation in social production and their access to and control of political and economic resources. The book includes excerpts from studies of village and communal life, documents of the women’s movement and interviews with members of the movement.

‘Scattered with inspiring life-stories of courageous women.’ The Guardian In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China’s post-socialist era. Contrary to the image presented by China’s media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China’s economy, politics, and development.

The year 1995, when the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, marks a historical milestone in the development of the Chinese feminist movement. In the decades that followed, three distinct trends emerged: first, there was a rise in feminist NGOs in mainland China and a surfacing of LGBTQ movements; second, social and economic developments nurtured new female agency, creating a vibrant, women-oriented cultural milieu in China; third, in response to ethnocentric Western feminism, some Chinese feminist scholars and activists recuperated the legacies of socialist China’s state feminism and gender policies in a new millennium. These trends have brought Chinese women unprecedented choices, resources, opportunities, pitfalls, challenges, and even crises. In this timely volume, Zhu and Xiao offer an examination of the ways in which Chinese feminist ideas have developed since the mid-1990s. By juxtaposing the plural "feminisms" with "Chinese characteristics," they both underline the importance of integrating Chinese culture, history, and tradition in the discussions of Chinese feminisms, and, stress the difference between the plethora of contemporary Chinese feminisms and the singular state feminism. The twelve chapters in this interdisciplinary collection address the theme of feminisms with Chinese characteristics from different perspectives rendered from lived experiences, historical reflections, theoretical ruminations, and cultural and sociopolitical critiques, painting a panoramic picture of Chinese feminisms in the age of globalization.