About the book: Leta Hong Fincher’s landmark book Leftover Women shone a light on the resurgence of gender inequality in 21st-century China. Ten years on, women in China continue to experience a dramatic rolling back of rights and gains in the increasingly patriarchal political climate of the Xi Jinping era.

Leftover Women explores the structural discrimination against women and the broader problems with China’s economy, politics, and development that lie behind them. This updated edition includes a new preface exploring developments in China in the 10 years since the book’s original publication, including the new “three child policy”, the growth in online feminist and LGBTQ activism and the state’s increasingly repressive moves against dissent.

About the author: Leta has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine, BBC, CNN and others. She won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for her China reporting. Fluent in Mandarin, Leta is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology in Beijing and is currently a Research Associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. She has a master’s degree from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree with high honors from Harvard University.

About the panelist: Churan Zheng is a Chinese feminist activist and organizer and is one of the China Feminist Five. Since 2012, she has been organizing young Chinese women to engage in policy advocacy and public education and has also worked on advocating for female workers’ rights. She is one of Ms. Magazine’s 10 of the Most Inspiring Feminists of 2015 and one of the BBC’s 100 Women in 2016.

About the moderator: Indira Lakshmanan, an award-winning journalist who has reported from more than 80 countries, is global enterprise editor at The Associated Press. Indira has reported from six continents and Washington for newspapers, a wire service, magazines, radio, television and podcasts. For The Boston Globe and Bloomberg News, she interviewed and profiled newsmakers from Fidel Castro and Benazir Bhutto to Hillary Clinton. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Indira graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in history of art and architecture, did graduate work in Latin America studies at Oxford University as a Rotary Scholar and was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard.