Gail Hershatter Research Articles

Sexing East Asian History

Sexing East Asian History Sabine Frühstück (bio) Todd A. Henry, ed. Queer Korea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 400 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781478001928 (cl); 9781478002901 (pb). Howard Chiang. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 416 pp.; ill. ISBN 9780231185783 (cl); 9780231185790 (pb); 9780231546331 (ebook). Howard Chiang, ed. Sexuality in China: Histories of Power and Pleasure. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. 272 pp. ISBN 9780295743462 (cl); 9780295743479 (pb). Recently, the flagship Journal of Asian Studies devoted a substantial portion of its November 2020 issue to reflections on the impact of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) on the historiography of gender and sexuality in Asia over the last thirty years. Three of that historiography's leading pioneers—Gail Hershatter (China), Tamara Loos (Southeast Asia), and Geeta Patel (South Asia)—uniformly acknowledge the game-changing quality of Butler's book.1 In a parallel recent move, the historiography of gender and sexuality has been more frequently deployed regarding regional rather than either national or global frameworks, in part due to the fact that "global history" has lost its initial glamor. Conversely, it is more difficult to determine what impact the historiography of gender and sexuality out of Asia has had on Euro-American theory. Although its representative reach is minimal given both the quantity of scholarly production in the region itself and the size of its population, a range of publishing venues suggests that the history of gender and sexuality out of Asia is in the process of securing a place within the larger field. In addition to its solid footprint in this journal, it is featured in recent issues of The Journal of Homosexuality and, slightly less substantially, The Journal of the History of Sexuality. The works reviewed here make powerful contributions to the field of gender and sexuality studies at large—as well as (in part) to women's history and, of course, Asian Studies. Until recently, queer sexualities have been notoriously underacknowledged in both Korea and China—in contrast to the increasing devotion to interstitial loci and queer identities in current scholarship that recognize the troubled nature of sex and gender elsewhere. Indeed, when sexuality in Korea has been the focus of academic and public attention, it is often with regards to either the victimized (heteronormative) female former sex slaves of the Japanese empire or the globally prominent male [End Page 153] representatives of K-pop's sexualities. Queer Korea, by contrast, is a collective, multidisciplinary pursuit with two goals: to queer the field of Korean Studies, which editor Todd A. Henry, a rising star in the field, (uncontroversially) diagnoses as "nationalistically heteronormative;" and to critique the field of queer studies that has remained stubbornly Euro-America-centric (8). As Henry notes in an exemplary introduction, Christian rhetoric in part informs the frequently aggressive posturing of South Korean conservatives against sexual and gender minorities; one result of such posturing has been that individuals characterized by their non-normative sexualities and gender variances are denied full citizenship rights. Korean conservatives frame their refusal to grant those rights with respect to "past traditions, especially by highlighting the purported lack thereof" (4). It is worth noting that, even on the superficial level of conservative rhetoric, this position differs from that of the country's (largely non-Christian) neighbor and former colonial ruler Japan; Japanese conservatives evoke traditions with an added declaration, stating that traditional Japan has always been "accepting" of such individuals and practices and, thus—to the chagrin of Japanese queer rights activists—there is no need to explicitly formulate rights for non-normative genders and sexualities.2 Henry's introduction suggests that it is primarily fundamentalist Christians who enact reactionary speech and politics in South Korea. But in so doing he downplays the degree to which militarization both governs homo- and transphobia and helps to conceal the fragility of heteronormative masculinity. Few able-bodied men in Korea escape the country's mandatory military service—which is sustained in part by the continuing threat of a hostile regime in the North, and in part by the shadow of military...

Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam by Rachel Harris

Reviewed by: Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam by Rachel Harris Eric Schluesselschluessel@gwu.edu Rachel Harris. Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam. Framing the Global Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 249 pp. $85.00 (cloth), $35.00 (cloth). The field of contemporary Uyghur studies was once preoccupied with nationalism and ethnic conflict as studied through the written word and short-term "guerrilla ethnography" in secular, urban, and male-gendered milieus. Rachel Harris's pathbreaking new book marks the successful inversion of that paradigm through an intimate study of sounded practices of Islam rooted in many years of fieldwork among rural Uyghur women. "Sounded" here refers to those ephemeral and embodied ways of making and experiencing sound, including but certainly not limited to music. The book's theoretical and methodological interventions thus illuminate vital yet neglected aspects of the human experience and have broad consequences for scholarship on Uyghur life. Anyone moving through a city or village in China will notice how all kinds of noise and music seem to contest for space and attention. In Xinjiang, that awareness is heightened by the interplay of varieties of sound, rhythm, music, and speech coded as either "Chinese" or "Uyghur"—or "secular/national" or "Islamic"—and many shades in between. Harris characterizes this politics of sound as "soundscape," the ongoing renegotiation of the boundaries of community through a complex field of sounding and listening that in turn shapes the rules of interaction (20). The soundscape of Uyghur Islam is a "'discursive tradition'…through which local actors attempt to define what constitutes true Islam and a good Muslim within relationships of power" (24), but also a "palimpsest" textured by erasure and reinscription (216). This seemingly abstract concept is intimately related to acts of repetition and to the (Uyghur, female) body as a "prime locus for imposing new regimes of knowledge and being" (213, 215). Attending to "sounded expressive practices" decenters the emphasis on physical appearance and dress that is common in the highly polarized political and media discourse surrounding Xinjiang (15). One of Soundscapes' most compelling features is its historicization of sounded practices as ways of negotiating community and space in response to shifting sociopolitical relationships that are otherwise difficult to perceive. Harris begins at the most intimate level, through a thick description of women's Sufi rituals. She convincingly analyzes these rituals' production of powerful feelings of community through rhythm, movement, and voice. While Soundscapes ranges far and wide across borders, and while the book presents a gradually broader scope, rhythm and the body remain at its core. How, Harris asks, do embodied practices of negotiating community encounter new sociopolitical and textual circumstances? Harris then demonstrates the importance of transregional connections by showing how women's Sufi groups have encountered different versions of a core Sufi text, which itself has circulated between written and spoken forms. She shows how those intimate sounds changed in interaction with transnational Islamic networks, as woman Qur'an reciters adopted recitation styles that index traditions across the theological spectrum. Soundscapes reminds us not to reduce Islam to doctrine: reciters refigure and reinterpret sounds, which gain new meanings in practice. Harris then turns to the stranger paths of circulation and analyzes the affective impact of social media and of audiovisual media of unknown origin. We see how a decontextualized sign such as a recorded recitation or a shocking video travels like a rumor, shaping discourses as it is shaped by them. [End Page E-30] Soundscapes then considers the contestation between the sounded and embodied practices of Uyghur Islam and those of the Chinese Communist Party. These aspects of piety, Harris argues, are also a technology of the state, as Ban Wang has characterized them: practices of embodiment, intended to create and enforce group feeling, that possess a specific lineage in Maoism (208).1 That lineage becomes clear through oral histories from rural Uyghur women that are presented throughout the text, including in a pair of lengthier "interludes." China scholars will recognize parallels with the study conducted by Gail Hershatter and Gao Xiaoxian (高小贤) of women's lives in rural Shaanxi,2 both in the approach to fieldwork and in the book's presentation of autobiographical narratives. Indeed, Harris's...

Women and China’s Revolutions, written by Gail Hershatter

Women and China’s Revolutions, written by Gail Hershatter

Legible and Thus Legitimate? Reading and Blurring Gender in China, Today and Yesterday

In her keynote address to the conference from which this special issue of China Perspectives has emerged, Prof. Gail Hershatter spoke of gender and “blindspotting”: how practices of looking and bringing something into focus may cause other aspects to simultaneously fade out (Hershatter 2019). This idea builds on her previous work conceptualising gender as a “kind of lens that allows one to zoom in and out,” an anchoring foothold that is “multi-scalar rather than scalable” (Hershatter 2012: 88...

Mao's Lost Children: Stories of the Rusticated Youth of China's Cultural Revolution ed. by Ou Nianzhong and Liang Yongkang

Reviewed by: Mao's Lost Children: Stories of the Rusticated Youth of China's Cultural Revolution ed. by Ou Nianzhong and Liang Yongkang Matt Wills (bio) Ou Nianzhong and Liang Yongkang, editors. Mao's Lost Children: Stories of the Rusticated Youth of China's Cultural Revolution. Translated by Laura Maynard. Portland: MerwinAsia, 2015. xvii, 398 pp. Hardcover $65.00, isbn 978-19-37-38568-2. Paperback $28.00, isbn 978-1-937385-67-5. Beginning in mid-1968, the Chinese government organized the systematic and widespread relocation of millions of urban teenagers and young adults. This "rusticated youth program" (上山下乡运动) sent participants, both willing and unwilling, out of the cities to live in rural regions alongside locals. There, they were expected to contribute to production tasks, continue their ideological education, and work for the benefit of the revolution. The majority only managed to return home years later after a change in government policy, making rustication a formative experience for almost an entire generation of urban youth. With the passage of time, the history of the rusticated youth program has become a topic with a healthy literature. Recent notable publications include Collected Research Essays on China's Rusticated Youth edited by Jin Dalu (金大陆) and Jin Guangyao (金光耀), and Michel Bonnin's The Lost Generation: The Rustification of China's Educated Youth (1968-1980).1 Running side-by-side with this research, former rusticated youths and scholars are collecting, preserving, and publishing the testimonies of those who were sent down. Mao's Lost Children: Stories of the Rusticated Youth of China's Cultural Revolution belongs to this latter category of work. As an anthology, it brings together a remarkable range of reminiscences by individuals from Guangdong Province who spent their years of rustication on Hainan island (lying off [End Page 88] China's south coast). The fifty-six participants in the volume were sent to Hainan between 1968 and 1971, only managing to permanently return home from the mid to late 1970s onward. Two of their number, the editors Ou Nianzhong and Liang Yongkang, synthesize the recollections of their peers into thematic sections as varied as "Becoming Iron Girls," "Living with the Li," "Bringers of Arts and Knowledge," and "Escapes, Scrapes, and Tight Spots." In doing so, the editors produce a volume that provokes reflection on the nature of the rusticated youth program and suggests new ways scholars can approach studying it. In the remainder of this review, I will share a few of my reflections. Rustication was a personal, variable, and most importantly local experience for each individual, and Mao's Lost Children captures this kaleidoscope in detail. With this in mind, the title of the volume, although engaging, is somewhat deceptive in its focus on Mao. As we read memories of eating scarce fresh fruit, toiling on rubber plantations, or performing propaganda songs, national politics and Mao Zedong often fade from view. While contributors refer to unnamed campaigns, policy changes, and Mao's cult and ideology, these are less prominent than commonplace occurrences closer to home. Moments of good fortune, actions by local bureaucrats, and the pushes and pulls of the tropical farming calendar shape the narrative of recollections more than anything happening in Beijing. Moreover, the accounts move forward chronologically at a haphazard pace, skipping easily across such recognized dividing lines as the death of Mao in 1976 or the 1978 Third Plenum. The book thus supports Gail Hershatter's methodological finding that individuals do not always structure the past according to the events most familiar to historians of modern China.2 The experiences of those sent to Hainan provide a very different set of signposts to frame the 1970s. In addition, the anthology reveals a side to the Hainan rustication program that requires significant scholarly attention: its environmental impact. As highlighted in the editors' short introduction, Hainan's geographical position and tropical climate prompted the government to use the island for cultivating a range of crops and plants. In particular, many former rusticated youth tell of "opening up" (i.e., clearing) land and jungle for rubber plantations, as well as toiling for hours at a time harvesting precious rubber to be sent elsewhere. Others worked in a "rubber propagation experimental...

Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform, and Resistance in Rural Wartime China., by Isabel Brown Crook and Christina Kelley Gilmartin with, Yu Xiji, compiled and edited by, Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. xxiv + 301 pp. US$85.00/£51.95 (hardcover), US$84.99/£51.95 (eBook).

<i>Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform, and Resistance in Rural Wartime China</i>., by Isabel Brown Crook and Christina Kelley Gilmartin with, Yu Xiji, compiled and edited by, Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig. Lanham: Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2013. xxiv + 301 pp. US$85.00/£51.95 (hardcover), US$84.99/£51.95 (eBook).

GENDER IN HISTORY AND MEMORY: A CONVERSATION WITH GAIL HERSHATTER

Interviewer’s Note:Among Western scholars, Gail Hershatter is one of the very few who conducted extended research in China right after such fieldwork became possible when the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) ended. Dr. Hershatter spent two years at Nankai University (1979–1981), collecting sources for her dissertation on Tianjin workers of the first half of the twentieth century. Her liuxuesheng (study abroad) life left undeletable marks in her academic career. Her solid scholarship benefited from her ability to dive into archives and to interview locals; her research projects and interests reflected her acute concern for the changes in Chinese society. Dr. Hershatter also exemplifies the new generation of China scholars’ departure from traditional sinology, in their effort to incorporate theories and approaches from the social sciences.Gail Hershatter received her PhD in history from Stanford University and has taught at University of California Santa Cruz for twenty-three years, four of them as Distinguished Professor. She is the inaugural director of the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, and served many years as chair of the History Department. She was President of the Association for Asian Studies (2011–12).Dr. Hershatter’s scholarship ranges from labor, modernity, to gender and women’s life in modern China. Her monographs, Dangerous Pleasures and The Memory of Gender won American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for Women’s History in 1997 and 2012 respectively. Since my research interest also lies in women and gender in Chinese history, I came to be quite familiar with Dr. Hershatter’s work and got to know her in person. Last March (2013) Dr. Hershatter was invited by Pomona College to deliver the 2013 Ena H. Thompson Lectures. Siting among a captivated audience, I came up with the idea to interview her for The Chinese Historical Review, which was graciously accepted and supported by the journal’s editors.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past

Le livre de Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, est base sur plus d’une decennie de recherches entreprises avec Gao Xiaoxian (高小贤), nee dans la province du Shaanxi – leur terrain d'etudes – et cumulant les fonctions de directrice du Bureau d’etudes de la Federation des femmes de la province du Shaanxi et de secretaire generale de l’Association de recherche sur les femmes et la famille de la province. Quand les deux femmes se rencontrent a Pekin en 1...

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. xiv + 455 pp. US$49.95/£34.95 (hardcover), US$49.95 (eBook).

<i>The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past</i>, by Gail Hershatter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. xiv + 455 pp. US$49.95/£34.95 (hardcover), US$49.95 (eBook).

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past by Gail Hershatter

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past by Gail Hershatter

GAIL HERSHATTER. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past.

GAIL HERSHATTER. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past.

The Personal Past—Two Readings

The Personal Past—Two Readings Tobie Meyer-Fong (bio) Joseph Esherick, Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. 392 pp. $28 (paper). Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. 472 pp. $55 (cloth). What do we learn when we reconsider modern Chinese history from the vantage point of those who lived through it? Does our understanding of the grand narrative of key events change fundamentally when we think not in terms of the revolution or the state but in terms of life experience and memory? What happens when an empathic historian literally engages his or her sources in conversation? The authors of the two books under review offer radically different answers to these questions, even as they cover some of the same temporal ground. In The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, Gail Hershatter uses oral interviews with rural women to call into question the inevitability of “campaign time” as an organizing principle. In Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History, Joseph Esherick revisits the iconic events of modern Chinese history through the life experiences of several generations of elite men from his wife’s family, shedding new light on the familiar timeline while reiterating that chronology’s organizing power. Hershatter offers a breathtaking interrogation of her sources and methods, rendering elegantly transparent the thought processes [End Page 430] behind her book’s production. Esherick integrates sources and storytelling, providing a confident and seamless narrative in which politics and personal lives are inextricably intertwined. In The Gender of Memory, Gail Hershatter interrogates the timeline that structures the modern China survey. She refocuses attention on some of the least privileged people in Chinese society and questions the salience of “campaign time” (or “national history”) to their experience. Hershatter argues that in thinking about post-1949 history, we have been too wedded for too long to a litany of political events and state initiatives produced in Beijing. Our histories have been too centralized, too state-oriented, and too concerned with elite men—or they have focused on “women’s liberation” as defined by either the revolutionary state or Western feminism. Hershatter turns these perspectives inside out; she asks us to consider what the twentieth century felt like at the local level, what political events meant for women’s work, what changed for women after 1949, and, most significantly, how rural women’s accounts of their own life experiences change how historians understand fundamental categories like revolution, gender, and the nation. The book is animated by the question of whether Chinese women had a Chinese revolution. If so, when, and in what ways? (7). In pursuit of answers, Hershatter and her Chinese colleague Gao Xiaoxian interviewed seventy-two elderly women in four villages in Shaanxi Province over the ten-year period from 1996 to 2006. They also interviewed a smaller number of men and younger people. The chapters are enlivened by extensive passages in the informants’ own words; the women thus talk back, “speaking bitterness” to the historian, the reader, and those more locally who have not listened to them (34). Hershatter’s informants seem, at least in memory, remarkably disengaged from “Beijing time.” The women get the chronology “wrong” in ways that Hershatter reads as gendered; they use officially sanctioned terms like “old society,” “feudal,” and “revolution” in unconventional (or asynchronous) ways (25). They describe themselves as having been “shut away at home” prior to 1949, even when “the details of their stories suggest otherwise” (44). They deploy older notions of virtue in service to revolutionary ideals and express consternation at the present-day failure of family members and the state to reward or recognize their contributions in those terms (269). For these women, tradition, revolution, and modernity are not incompatible categories. Nor, Hershatter finds, can their lives be narrated as a straight-forward [End Page 431] progression from oppression to liberation. The past bitterness of which they speak has moral force and emotional power. It is not, however, the stuff of simple historical evidence, if such a thing can be said to exist. The informants...

Age as a Category of Gender Analysis: Servant Girls, Modern Girls, and Gender in Southeast Asia

Gail Hershatter's presidential addressat the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can “sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location.” The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; “gender is everywhere in the scholarship.” But, as Hershatter observes, “it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found.” Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the “house of gender,” hard-won though it has been. “Perhaps,” she commented wryly, “we need to get out of the house.” For Chinese historians, “disquiet in the house of gender” promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.

Introduction to theJASat AAS Roundtable on “Sexuality and the State in Asia”

Attendees of the 2012 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in Toronto were treated to two extraordinary speeches at the presidential address and awards ceremony. First, Charlotte Furth's acceptance of the AAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies was a primer in the history of China-related gender studies (Furth 2012). Then, as Rachel Leow discusses in her paper in this forum, outgoing AAS President Gail Hershatter followed up with an inspirational critique (reprinted in this issue) of the current state of gender and sexuality studies in China. Taken together, these two speeches showed how far gender and sexuality studies in Asia have come in the last forty years, but also suggested that it is time for some fresh approaches. For example, Furth explained that when theCambridge History of Chinavolumes on Republican China were commissioned, she and others argued strenuously for the inclusion of a chapter on gender; but in the end, one could not be written because no one had yet done the scholarship on which such a chapter could be based. Fortunately, all of this has changed: the scholarship is there now. But Hershatter quite rightly pointed out that it is time to rethink many of the categories of analysis we have been using, because they are preventing us from asking questions we should be asking, and therefore making us miss the meanings of crucial social events and phenomena.

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past by Gail Hershatter

American EthnologistVolume 39, Issue 3 p. 645-646 Book Reviews The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past by Gail Hershatter SHANSHAN DU, SHANSHAN DU Tulane UniversitySearch for more papers by this author SHANSHAN DU, SHANSHAN DU Tulane UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 July 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01385_15.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume39, Issue3August 2012Pages 645-646 RelatedInformation

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past. By Gail Hershatter. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. xiv, 455 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past. By Gail Hershatter. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. xiv, 455 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

The gender of memory: rural women and China's collective past

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group--rural women--at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women's life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women's agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting--even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

Confusion, Elision, and Erasure: Feminism, Religion, and Chinese Confucian Traditions

Confusion, Elision, and ErasureFeminism, Religion, and Chinese Confucian Traditions Vivian-Lee Nyitray (bio) Chenyang Li, ed., with a foreword by Patricia Ebrey, The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 256 pp + xiii. Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 200 pp + ix. Joanne D. Birdwhistell, “Mencius” and Masculinities: Dynamics of Power, Morality, and Maternal Thinking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 158 pp. + ix. Over the past two and one-half decades, scholarship on China has amassed a wealth of data exposing the historical shifts in conditions of women’s lives and examining the gendered effects of state-sponsored Confucian patriarchy.1 Not surprisingly, fresh views of women’s victimization have been exposed, even as other studies reveal that particulars of time, class, and locale allowed surprising degrees of female agency and authority. Familiar feminist strategies of reading canonical texts against the grain and of mining local records, biographies, and diaries have fueled recovery of Chinese women’s voices and historical experiences. Studies of sexuality, labor, migration, and urbanism have increasingly employed sex and gender as principal categories of analysis. Recent scholarship is particularly rich in documenting the late imperial period (Qing dynasty, [End Page 143] 1644–1911), the Republican era (1911–49), the Maoist era (1949–78), and the present reformist era in the People’s Republic of China (since the mid-1980s). Studies of women in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and diasporic and transnational communities worldwide complicate the picture usefully. In fact, so many monographs focused on women in late imperial and modern China have been published that historian Gail Hershatter, when asked to write a “state of the field” essay, found it necessary to restrict her assessment to (a) English-language studies of (b) twentieth-century (c) majority Han Chinese women (d) on the Chinese mainland. These restrictions notwithstanding, she still amassed roughly five hundred citations.2 In sharp contrast, I realized quickly that my intended review of feminist studies of Confucian traditions, particularly if restricted to Chinese cultural contexts, might be the shortest such essay in the history of the JFSR. The fact of the matter is this: of the hundreds of works that examine the intersection of Confucianism and Chinese women’s lives, few interpret Confucian traditions in religious or spiritual terms, and even fewer adopt a feminist approach in doing so. Of course, an explicitly religious analysis is not the only way to ground a feminist study of Chinese (or other) traditions of Confucian thought or cultural practice, but the relative paucity of such studies is notable. Contributing factors are several. First, there is no agreement on the definition of “Confucianism.” The Chinese term for “Confucian,” ru, seems originally to have had multiple meanings but eventually denoted a scholar or classicist; its association with Confucius (551–479 BCE) and his followers stemmed from their derivation of an ethico-political system from ancient texts. Over the centuries, Confucianism has been vaunted as a continuous narrative of culture/civilization and vilified as a tool of the state—an “imagined world” lacking in cultural essence or continuity but promoted cynically as a means of social control. In the 1920s, both of these characterizations figured in the May Fourth/New Culture Movement’s attack on the tradition as a remnant of patriarchal “feudal ideology” that had kept the nation technologically backward and its women oppressed; patriotic duty required the expulsion of “Confucius and Sons.”3 More recently, under the guise of “Asian values,” Confucianism has been valorized as the force powering the late twentieth-century engines of economic success achieved by Japan and the Four “Mini Dragons” of Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore. As varied as these characterizations are, they are alike in understanding Confucian traditions as deeply rooted in, and expressive of, a distinctively [End Page 144] patriarchal familialism. Confucianism thus represents a system of historically patrilineal and patrilocal social structures bolstered by the demands of ancestral veneration and regulated through codes of filial behavior. Yet Confucianism is also rightly understood as a moral philosophical system. Over the past thirty years, many Western-trained philosophers have focused their attention on the earliest texts of...

Dilemmas of victory: the early years of the People's Republic of China

Acknowledgments 1. Early Years of the People's Republic of China: An Introduction Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz Part I: Urban Takeover 2. Clean-Up: Order in Shanghai Frederic Wakeman, Jr. 3. Masters of the Country? Shanghai Workers in the Early People's Republic Elizabeth Perry 4. Democracy and the Demise of Private Charity in Shanghai Nara Dillon Part II: Occupying the Periphery 5. From Resisting Communists to Resisting America: Civil War and Korean War in Southwest China, 1950-51 Jeremy Brown 6. Chinese Communist of Tibet, 1949-1951 Chen Jian 7. Big Brother is Watching: Local Sino-Soviet Relations and the Building of Dalian, 1945-1955 Christian Hess 8. Call of the Oases: Peaceful Liberation of Xinjiang, 1949-1953 James Z. Gao Part III: Culture of Accommodation 9. Crocodile Bird: Xiangsheng in the Early 1950s Perry Link 10. The Very First Lesson: Teaching about Human Evolution in Early 1950s China Sigrid Schmalzer 11. Acting Like Revolutionaries: Shi Hui, the Wenhua Studio, and Private-Sector Filmmaking, 1949-1952 Paul G. Pickowicz 12. Creating New China's First New-Style Regular University, 1949-50 Douglas A. Stiffler Part IV: Family Strategies 13. Ye Family in China Joseph W. Esherick 14. Birthing Stories: Rural Midwives in 1950s China Gail Hershatter 15. Capitalists Choosing Communist China: Liu Family of Shanghai, 1948-1956 Sherman Cochran Notes Index

The End of the Peasant? New Rural Reconstruction in China

I would like to thank Gail Hershatter, Chris Connery, Arif Dirlik, Ana Candela, Angelina Chin, Matthew Hale, Charles Hayford, Wenqing Kang, and Xiaoping Sun for their comments on drafts of this essay. Errors and infelicities are, of course, my own. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.