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Leta Hong Fincher

Goodreads Author

Born

Hong Kong

Website

http://www.letahongfincher.com/

Twitter

letahong

Genre

Nonfiction, Politics, Feminism

Member Since

March 2014

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Praise for Leftover Women, 10th anniversary edition:

Named one of the best China books of 2023 by China Books Review.

“Leta Hong Fincher's book was not only an instant classic, it was downright clairvoyant: Seeing what others miss, she foresaw a seismic shift in the public mood, which has intensified in the past decade. The revised edition is urgent reading; it holds essential insights into China's economic and political future.”
―Evan Osnos, winner of the National Book Award, author of Age of Ambition

“An eye-opening, groundbreaking book that cast light on critical yet overlooked changes in China - and which seems more timely than ever ten years on.”
―Tania Branigan, author of Red Memory

“The past decade has time and again underlined the presc Praise for Leftover Women, 10th anniversary edition:

Named one of the best China books of 2023 by China Books Review.

“Leta Hong Fincher's book was not only an instant classic, it was downright clairvoyant: Seeing what others miss, she foresaw a seismic shift in the public mood, which has intensified in the past decade. The revised edition is urgent reading; it holds essential insights into China's economic and political future.”
―Evan Osnos, winner of the National Book Award, author of Age of Ambition

“An eye-opening, groundbreaking book that cast light on critical yet overlooked changes in China - and which seems more timely than ever ten years on.”
―Tania Branigan, author of Red Memory

“The past decade has time and again underlined the prescience of Leta Hong Fincher's Leftover Women. This groundbreaking book made a powerful case for how state propaganda and cultural norms combined to exclude Chinese women from the wealth creation springing from the country's rapid economic development. In this new version, Hong Fincher illustrates how women are beginning to fight back, and the obstacles lined up against them. This book is more relevant than ever to anyone who wants to understand China - read it and rage.”
―Louisa Lim, Author of Indelible City and The People's Republic of Amnesia

Leta Hong Fincher has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and others. As a long-time TV and radio journalist based in China, she won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Cowan Award for Humanitarian Reporting and other journalism honors for her reporting.

Leta’s previous book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, was named Best Book of the year by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Foreign Policy Interrupted, Bitch Media and Autostraddle; it was also a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” pick. The New York Public Library named Betraying Big Brother one of its “essential reads on feminism” in 2020.

Leta's first book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2014), was named one of the top 5 China books of the year by the Asia Society’s ChinaFile and one of the best Asian books of the year by Asia House. It was on the New York Times list of recommended books on China in 2018 and on Book Riot’s list of 21 recommended Chinese history books in 2021. ...more

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Leta Hong Fincher's Blog

China Books Review names LEFTOVER WOMEN, 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION a best book of 2023

Thrilled that China Books Review named LEFTOVER WOMEN, 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION on its list of best books of 2023, along with great books by Tania Branigan, Ha Jin and more: https://chinabooksreview.com/2023/12/...

In all candor, I worked really hard to thoroughly update this book from ten years ago and I wasn't sure if it was worth it to revise an old book rather than put out something completely Read more of this blog post »

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Published on December 14, 2023 11:38 • Tags: china-feminism-women-lgbtq

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Leta Hong Fincher’s books

Average rating: 4.1 · 1,914 ratings · 284 reviews · 2 distinct works • Similar authors

	Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China 4.17 avg rating — 1,275 ratings — published 2018 — 15 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China 3.97 avg rating — 639 ratings — published 2014 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

Quotes by Leta Hong Fincher (?)

“Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls."

- Xinhua News Agency, 2011. Reposted on All-China Women's Federation website days after International Women's Day.”
― Leta Hong Fincher

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“Li Fang is relieved that she found a husband just in the nick of time. The parents of the university graduate and former human resources manager in Beijing feared that their only daughter was getting old and might never be able to marry. Li worried that she would pass the 'best child-bearing age' and might no longer be able to give birth. She is 26."

-Leta Hong Fincher, "Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China”
― Leta Hong Fincher, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China

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“Among the majority Han Chinese population, the growing numbers of Chinese women resisting marriage and childbearing pose a challenge to one of the key means of the Party's security apparatus to bring trouble making citizens into line - by threatening the troublemakers own spouses, parents and children, and making them responsible for monitoring their relatives.

For example, one believes that state security subjected Wu Rongrong to more sever abuse than the other members of the Feminist Five because she had a husband and child. It was very easy for the government to use her family members to threaten her.

The others were not married and did not have children so it was much harder for security agents to find something with which to threaten them.”
― Leta Hong Fincher, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China

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Leta’s Quotes

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

tags: escape, life, therapy, writing

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