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Newt Gingrich talks to ‘Political Connections’; Sharon McBreen visits ‘Central Florida Spotlight’

Coming this weekend in public-affairs programming:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, talks to “Political Connections.” The program airs at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday on Central Florida News 13. Gingrich discusses revitalizing the space program. The recent Republican presidential debate in Orlando will be reviewed by Democratic strategist John Morgan and Republican strategist Frank Kruppenbacher. The program also accesses recent statements by Gov. Rick Scott about stem-cell research and work requirements for welfare.

WFTV-Channel 9’s “Central Florida Spotlight” will explore whether fishing bans are working. The guest is Sharon McBreen of the Pew Environment Group and a former editor at the Orlando Sentinel. The program airs at 12:30 p.m. Saturday on WFTV and repeats at 4 p.m. Sunday on WRDQ-Channel 27.

WKMG-Channel 6’s “Flashpoint” looks an effort in Seminole County by the public schools, the sheriff’s office and the behavioral health center to fight cyber-bullying. Moderator Lauren Rowe previews the Holocaust Center’s UpStander Day, which she will host from 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday at Lake Eola.

Maternal Migration in China

By Lua Wilkinson

“I had to leave our son back in the village when he was two months old,” the 20-something sitting across from me explained on the hard-seat train heading from Shanghai to Xi’an. “I had to get back to work. This will be the first time I’ve seen him in five months”.

The young woman had met her husband when working at a restaurant in Shanghai in her late teens and decided to get married soon thereafter. Their marriage has been problematic; both live more or less equal distances from their hometowns, one to the north, one to the south. Because of their low-paying jobs and status, taking care of a child in the city where both of them live and work was out of the question.

Encountering women who have moved from the village to the city without their children is an everyday occurrence in China. During my last year here, I have interviewed dozens of women about their migration experiences. A registered dietitian and medical anthropologist, I came to Shanghai on a US Fulbright fellowship, where I planned to study infant feeding practices among China’s internal migrants. I have always been intrigued by the cultural contexts of health and nutrition, but realized migrants’ experiences extend far beyond “cultural contexts”.

Due to policies promoting urbanization, internal migration has skyrocketed in the last thirty years in China. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, there were 131 million rural to urban migrants at the end of 2008, representing just over ten percent of China’s total population. Of course, as anyone living in China knows, this number is incredibly fluid and difficult to actually assess, but it is estimated that women of childbearing years represent more than one-third of these workers. Because of China’s household registration system and healthcare policies, a pregnant migrant woman often must return to her natal township to deliver her child, but may need to return to work in the city immediately post-partum. Children are often left behind in their natal villages with grandparents as caregivers when the mother migrates.

Estimates put the number of these children, known as liu shou er tong, or “left behind children”, at 23 million. Working to understand the causes and implications of this startling trend has caused nothing short of headache in Beijing. China has experienced some of the fastest economic and social changes since the history of capitalism, and this new mass migration – and what to do about it – provides one of the most evocative case studies in China today.

Labor migration is a worldwide phenomenon and often a sexy subject for grad students coming to China. When I started thinking about this project, I had some exotic far-away idea of what a “migrant” exactly was in China. I dare admit to everyone that in my media-filled American mind, a “migrant” worker in China was a farmer-moved-to-city, working hard in a sweat-filled factory, peddling goods on street corners, doing whatever he or she could to scrape by in the big bad city. I had this romantic notion of them struggling through hardships on waves of dreams, always looking for a better life at the other end of the factory, the urban street corner, or the massage parlor.

In actuality, “migrant” is difficult to define. I have met numerous “migrant” Chinese women who have college educations, have lived abroad, and send their kids to private schools in Canada, all while their household registrations are still considered “rural”. Because of this lack of definition, blanket policies are difficult to implement. I quickly realized that my own romanticized idea of sweatshop migrant, while a reality in many areas, did not represent the only group of people moving around China looking for work at any given time.

“My children are the same ages as the ones I take care of here,” explained the nanny of a well-to-do foreign family living in Shanghai. “There’s nothing really for me to do back in the village though. I’d love to be home raising my kids, instead of someone else’s, but what choice do I have? I never went to college. But I have to make money so they can have opportunity. Thinking about my kids though makes my heart sting.”

Women are often forgotten in the shaping of migration policies, and therefore many of the services necessary for women or families are not included in policy guidelines or program assistance. Policies and laws that protect migrants, for example, rarely mention women outside the context of sexual trafficking. While trafficking of women is a global crisis that deserves special attention, not all women who migrate are trafficked. Most migrant women in China move to find educational opportunities, jobs, and access to resources that aren’t available to them in rural areas. But there is little to facilitate their specific needs of childcare, infant feeding support, educational training or healthcare.

“We came to the city after our son was four months old,” a woman giving me a manicure explained to me while caring for my nails. “We were thinking maybe we could bring him here after we both had jobs and some savings. But after a year, my husband left me and now I’m just scraping by.” Now six years old, her son has been living away from home as well, boarding at school during the week. “But what can I do? There’s no life for me back there. There’s no life for me here either, but at least it’s interesting.” She looked at me happily and said, “But my life is still okay, being single. I don’t have to put up with anyone I don’t want to! I miss my son so much, but how am I supposed to take care of him here? My house doesn’t even have plumbing!”

Schools came up in almost every conversation I have had with these women. Migration, family planning policies, and urbanization are putting a strain on the education system. Local schools are closing due to low attendance, and are being centralized into boarding schools. This causes more pressure on families to work to provide for school expenses.

“I have one son, who is 21,” one of the caretakers of my apartment building explained to me, mop in hand. “And a daughter who is 11. My son works in town outside of the village fixing bikes. But my daughter…well, my husband and I had to make a decision early on: do we send her to school or not? Schools cost money nowadays, we have to pay for room and board. So we decided that we had to come work in Shanghai and send her to school.”

This phenomenon has absolutely affected children. Studies show children of rural-to-urban migrants experience feelings of abandonment, anxiety and lonliness, But another perhaps less obvious problem is childhood malnutrition. In recent years, China’s Ministry of Education has implemented a rural primary school Merger Program (PDF), merging small rural schools into large centralized ones. The hope was that by concentrating resources, schools would be better fit to serve the needs of these children. Unfortunately, s tudents at boarding schools are actually more likely to have chronic signs of malnutrition, including micronutrient deficiencies. The reasons behind this are numerous (PDF), but include poor storage facilities for food brought from home, poor provisions of food by the school, and lack of nutritional knowledge of staff. Iron deficiency anemia is high as 60% in some counties, adversely affecting students’ ability to learn. Chronic malnutrition, in the form of growth-stunting rates, is much higher in rural areas and among students who board.

It is clear that when a mother moves away from her child, multiple other people must step in to make decisions for that child, all the way from infancy to adolescence. What do grandparents feed infants when the mother is unavailable to breastfeed, if they cannot afford infant formula (i.e. soymilk or rice)? What are the roles of the media, infant food companies, pediatricians and health care workers in shaping families’ perceptions and practices about what a child should be consuming? How do households make these decisions, and what is the influence of the mother as a wage earner versus the grandparents as caregivers? Among the many mothers I’ve spoken with, their answers are pretty straightforward. “I don’t have any choice in how my son is being raised. I wanted to breastfeed, I know it’s the best. Mei banfa [There’s nothing I can do], I have to work.” said the woman on the train. “I hate that my son is being raised on milk powder, full of chemicals. But I have no choice. Mei banfa.”

In Yunnan, at a women and children’s clinic, I spoke with the chief pediatrician on our walk home from clinic one day. I asked her what she thought the effects on the health of infants were of these liu shou er tong. ”Huge impact, definite influence,” she said, her slightly raspy Yunnan southern drawl rich with angst. “Right now, the main causes of infant mortality are pneumonia and diarrhea, both related to malnutrition. Sometimes the grandparents have no idea what to feed their kids, and they might not recognize something is wrong until the baby is very, very sick. They then have to come into the hospital.” I asked what the answer was, how can we start an education campaign, what kinds of things can we do?

She sighed. “It’s not education. It’s the breakdown of the family. There is no family anymore here. That is the problem.”

Lua Wilkinson recently finished her graduate degree in medical anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver and is currently in China as part of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. A registered dietitian, she has worked in clinical nutrition settings, public health and policy development, and health education projects. Her current research interests include nutrition and the role of social inequities, infant feeding among migrant women, and the worldwide impacts and causes of malnutrition.

Obama tells WESH: ‘This is a great country that had gotten a little soft’

Central Florida will see a lot of Barack Obama as the president runs for election next year, he tells WESH-Channel 2 anchor Jim Payne.

“The chances of me visiting the area are going to be very high,” Obama said. “First of all, I love coming down. I think the chances of me being down there in January or February are especially high, ’cause I’ll be looking for some sunshine at that point.”

Payne had a little more than seven minutes for the interview at the White House, WESH news director Bob Longo said. The chat, upbeat and surprisingly personal, was an exclusive for the Central Florida market.

“The president is acutely aware  that if the job situation and the economy don’t turn around soon that his administration may be doomed,” Payne said in introducing a segment. “He also is aware of his declining approval ratings. That’s why he’s pushing the American Jobs Act, his plan to put 1.9 million Americans back to work.”

In the interview, Payne talked about his two sons, ages 19 and 23. The WESH anchor revealed that his older son recently moved home, and Payne said he is worried his children won’t have the same opportunities he enjoyed as a young man.

President Obama said he shared that concern. “This is the worst financial crisis and recession that has existed in our lifetimes,” Obama said. “So it’s challenging for young people who are coming up in the midst of those kind of circumstances.”

But Obama stressed that country needs to revamp its education system, improve its infrastructure and invest in science and technology.

“This is a great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades,” Obama told Payne. “We need to get back on track, but I still wouldn’t trade our position with any countries on Earth. We still have the best universities, best scientists and best workers in the world. We still have the most dynamic economic system in the world. So we just need to bring those things together.”

Obama added that young people — “like your sons” — give him confidence “that they’re going to help figure this out and make sure that we maintain our No. 1 status.”

In more of the interview that aired at 6, Obama said it was a mistake for Florida Gov. Rick Scott to say no to federal money to high-speed rail from Orlando to Tampa. Obama said the project had support from the business community and Republican legislators.

“Florida stood to make big gains and to create a lot of jobs,” Obama said. “It was a mistake to turn that money down because there were a lot of other states that were anxious to pick it up.”

Payne asked about job losses in the space program and what’s ahead. Obama said the space program is in transition.

“I am absolutely committed to manned space flight,” Obama said. “What we’re trying to do is figure out is how we can move as many of the folks — the engineers, the scientists, the technicians who have expertise — into these new projects to develop that next stage of human space flight.”

Gail Hershatter Discusses Her New Book, The Gender of Memory

By Nicole Elizabeth Barnes

Gail Hershatter’s new book, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, is the outcome of a decade spent conducting oral history interviews of 72 women—and a few surviving men—in rural Shaanxi province. The interviews focus on farming women’s experiences of political campaigns in the 1950s, ranging from land reform to the 1950 Marriage Law to agricultural collectives. The book adds individual women’s voices—often quoted at length—to the narrative of 1950s rural reform, illustrating the taffy pull between empowerment and continued discrimination that women experienced throughout the decade. The Gender of Memory is incredibly thorough, emotionally powerful, beautifully written, theoretically innovative, and personally searching; it will have an earth-shattering effect on the study of Chinese history, calling scholars to new fields of inquiry for decades to come. In order to find out more about the making of this landmark book, I talked with Gail Hershatter and conducted the following interview:

NEB: This book is the product of collaborative research conducted with Gao Xiaoxian, Shaanxi native, research office director of the Shaanxi Provincial Women’s Federation, and secretary-general of the Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family. Can you tell us more about how you first met Gao and how the two of you decided to collaborate?

GH: Gao Xiaoxian was invited to an early conference on “Engendering China” that I helped to organize in 1992, but because of a blip in U.S.-China tensions, she and others who were then working for the Women’s Federation were not able to attend, although she sent a paper about rural women in the first decade of post-Mao reform. I met her later that year at a conference in Beijing. We quickly discovered a common interest in the years of early socialism in rural China. For me, as I say in the book, this interest was partly a response to the lack of good teaching materials about the collective era. In between Fanshen’s mesmerizing account of land reform and the reportage of the 1980s, surely many complex things had happened in the countryside, but it was difficult to get beyond policy pronouncements and cheerful posters to a more complex picture. (In the past 20 years, the scholarly picture has improved somewhat with respect to rural China.) Women far from centers of power were even less well represented in the historical record than rural men. For Gao Xiaoxian, who was deeply involved in trying to assess and improve the status of women under the reforms, it was important to understand how three decades of collective arrangements had changed people’s aspirations and capacities. While almost everyone else I met in China was talking about rupture between the Mao era and the reforms, she was curious about continuities as well. We couldn’t stop talking, and we hatched a project to go interview rural women in Gao’s native Shaanxi. Once we got started, it was difficult to stop. We were both reluctant to bring our interviewing trips to an end.

NEB: You describe Gao’s usefulness as a partner in the section “Listener” in Chapter 1, which details the importance of having local contacts, the ability to speak the Shaanxi dialect, and a local identity to get access to villages and introductions to the women interviewees. What skills did you bring to the table for this partnership?

GH: Often, believe me, I asked myself what I was contributing to this project beyond a lot of complications for Gao Xiaoxian. It was easy for her to move around the countryside alone; with a foreigner in tow, permissions and logistics got much more complicated. Once we were installed, however, no one monitored or interfered with our interviewing. Gao Xiaoxian generously says that she always learned something from how I interpreted the stories women told us. Perhaps I brought some experience with oral history interviewing and analysis. Mainly, however, I think I brought the curiosity and omnivorous interest of an outsider. If something in an interview or a village situation confused me, I usually attributed it to my ignorance. If something confused both of us, however, there were usually interesting conversations to be had about it.

NEB: I understand that Gao is also publishing a book out of this research, as a means of rewarding the effort that both of you put into the interviews. How did you and Gao agree upon a suitable division of labor in this project? Would you recommend this model for others?

GH: It’s not exactly a division of labor; it’s two overlapping projects aimed at different groups of readers. We agreed to conduct the research together but to write separately. I had a non-Chinese audience in mind (though I will be very happy if this book is translated someday). I had to provide a great deal of historical background and explanation that a Chinese audience wouldn’t need—though maybe that is less true all the time, as the knowledge of that period recedes. I was and am interested in questions of gendered memory and narrative, as well as the issue of what survives in the historical record and what is knowable about the past. Gao Xiaoxian is interested in the history of women’s labor and childbearing over the past half-century, and in making that history visible to a Chinese reading public. She has also been very active in the founding and operations of an important development NGO, the ????????????? (westwomen.org). Her scholarship is inseparable from her grassroots development work—which has also delayed her writing. We’ve talked endlessly about the interviews, the dynamics of the villages where we interviewed, and the puzzles and pathos of specific situations—and we’ve worked through our own individual approaches to issues by talking them through with each other.

NEB: This book also came out of your search, as a teacher of Chinese history for a sense of the personal, lived experiences of 1950s campaigns, something to give some individual color to political slogans and statistics. Now that you have completed your book, how would you recommend that your colleagues use it in the classroom to fill this gap in the source base?

GH: Great question. The irony is that I write the kinds of things I would like to teach, but then I can’t teach them because I wrote them, and my students are far more polite when the author is standing in front of them than is probably good for their critical skills. Still, I’ve used many of these stories over the years in lectures. I hope that people can use this book to raise questions about local variation, the reach of the state, and the meaning of revolutionary change, after it’s over, as it is held in memory and transmitted (or not) to younger generations.

NEB: You use Timothy Mitchell’s theory of the “state effect” as a means of understanding how the Communist state designated itself a primary reformer of a “society” from which it stood separate and apart, even as individuals within a community—retrained midwives, labor models, dundian cadres—embodied this state as it moved into previously untouched territory. Why did you choose Mitchells’ theory, and how would you modify it after doing this work on women’s memories of the 1950s?

GH: Mitchell is concerned, among other things, with analyzing how the categories of state and society are naturalized as separate and distinct. In the China field, we are very dependent upon these categories—many a scholarly interpretation would collapse without them. And yet “the state” in actual, messy historical time is both remote and locally embodied. I wanted to try to explore the blurry zone of social relations, discursive production, and institutional arrangements where the local instantiation of a “state” was produced, especially as women were incorporated into the process. It’s not really a question of modifying Mitchell, who is writing about a very different historical situation than the one that preoccupied me here. But his notion of the state effect is good to think with.

NEB: At the end of the Introduction, you mention that today, no one wants to hear these women’s stories; the world in which they spent their youth is long gone. In light of this, were these 72 women excited to be interviewed? Did they find it odd that you and Gao Xiaoxian took such interest in what to others is not worth mentioning?

GH: They were happy to talk—many bursting with stories to tell, others with grievances (historical and contemporary, personal and social) that they wanted to articulate. I don’t know if “excited” is the right term, though many of them were certainly very animated. What I still find astonishing is how natural it seemed to them to sit down and talk, especially given the oddity of my presence in these villages. They understand themselves and their stories as worthwhile, even when those around them don’t.

NEB: Your Introduction is remarkably personal, and feels fitting for this particular project in that it is the work of two women friends who spent years interviewing women—frequently in their own homes—about how the early Communist state intersected in their personal lives. At one point you mention your chagrin at not being able to produce foreign capital or important connections upon the requests of first village officials and later villagers themselves. This kind of research, requiring you to stay in rural villages and be known to all, seems starkly different from archival research during which one can live in a large city as a virtual stranger. Did this project feel different to you from your previous work? What advantages and disadvantages did this work have for you?

GH: There was a lot of archival work involved in this project as well, so I had plenty of chances to be lonely and buried in documents. But the time I spent interviewing in the villages was the most intellectually and emotionally intense research I had ever experienced. It was different from ethnographic fieldwork in that there was very little hanging out—I wasn’t there for months or years, but for days or weeks. The variations in accent and vocabulary from one Shaanxi village to the next were daunting. I’ve never felt so challenged or so engaged.

NEB: In Chapter 1, “Frames,” you write about the gap between archival documents and rural women’s lives, concluding that, “the historian who enters the archive with questions about rural women will be made acutely aware of how Party-state agendas differ from her own.”

I have had the very same feeling in my own work. I am now in the final months of research for my dissertation on gender and public health in Chongqing during the war with Japan, and have been continually surprised by issues of striking gender inequality in public health service and employment being duly recorded as dry facts but never commented on qualitatively in the archival record. How do the oral histories in The Gender of Memory address and partially fill this gap between the aim of the gender historian and the authors of state archives?

GH: There’s lots of drama in the archives—various levels of the state apparatus were very incompletely meshed in the early years, and the local variation and profusion of problems was daunting enough that it seeps out around the dry formulaic reports people were learning to write. Neither the archives nor the memories of individuals are designed to directly address what the historian wants to know. The important thing is to concentrate on what they do want to tell you, and pay attention to cacophony, gaps, and silences. Oral history is a messy, contaminated source. So is the archive.

NEB: You discuss the differences in how women and men narrate their pasts, commenting that while women tend to mark their lives by personal and traumatic events such as marriage, childbirth, or death of a family member, men more commonly refer to “campaign time” and political events as the primary signposts. I imagine that your evening discussions with Gao Xiaoxian frequently touched upon this issue and how to interpret it. Could you tell us about what you discussed and how you ultimately chose to understand this difference in the “gender of memory”?

GH: Men and women spent their time differently, though they certainly had many shared tasks. The gendered division of labor was a constant feature of rural life, even though its content changed all the time. Men went to more meetings; women did more unpaid crucial domestic work. They remember the tasks that they performed (which differed) and the languages of political change to which they were exposed (which varied by gender, generation, location, and a host of other factors).

NEB: In Chapter 2, “No One is Home,” which covers the 1930s and 40s, you write that the women’s life stories were frequently “emotionally difficult to narrate and to hear.” Did you ever have a visible emotional response to what you heard, and if so how did the interviewee react?

GH: Both of us made it clear that we were listening hard, and that these narrations of terrible hardship and tragedy deserved a respectful hearing. We tended not to carry on much ourselves, but rather to engage with what we were being told, and to ask more questions. I can’t speak for Gao Xiaoxian, who is an astute and sensitive interviewer. But for my part, I felt that the best I could do was to listen carefully.

NEB: Perhaps because your collaborator Gao Xiaoxian was interested in women’s domestic labor in cloth (spinning yarn, weaving, making clothing), your book frequently discusses this aspect of women’s lives. Do women in your four key villages still do this work, and if so, what form does it take in the early 21st century? Do you have products of their handiwork in your own house now?

GH: In one village, handloom weaving remained common for domestic consumption and has recently made a comeback in production for the market. In another village, local embroidery of old-style wedding pillows was an important art, though it was unclear whether it was going to die out or have a resurgence as folk craft. I was given some small handkerchiefs and embroidered shoe soles, and took pictures of more elaborate embroidery.

NEB: The subject of a loved one’s corpse sometimes comes up in the stories of hardship in the 1930s and 40s: a father disappears and his body is never found; a brother dies fighting the Guomindang but his body is not recovered until 1949, etc. These comments are always inserted in passing into your narrative; did they sit apart like that in the interviewees’ original speech? Are there any clues to the corresponding feelings in the manner in which people discussed this issue?

GH: People often cried in speaking of these losses, but often these terrible events tumbled out as part of a long complex narrative. The determination to talk and to name losses, as well as accomplishments, dominated many stories.

NEB: Interviews with one of your labor models Cao Zhuxiang raised “larger questions about what we used to think was an uncomplicated source, a source we all yearned for: the face-to-face interview with a subaltern who speaks.” You break the usual historian’s pretense to objectivity and report to the reader that Cao’s flat and rather emotionless narrative of her post-49 life greatly confounded you and Gao Xiaoxian, particularly in comparison to her animated narrative of pre-49 hardships. Ultimately, you the researcher and we the readers can only speculate as to the cause of this flatness. This serves as a good cautionary tale for the researcher who yearns for a complete picture of the past. You mention at the end of Chapter 8 that both you and Gao Xiaoxian do have the desire to keep going back for further interviews in an attempt to answer those unanswerable questions. How did you ultimately cultivate satisfaction with what you term a “good-enough story”?

GH: I don’t think satisfaction is the right term. Maybe resignation. We both felt that if we knew at the beginning what we knew at the end, both about Cao Zhuxiang’s life and community and about interviewing more generally, we could have drawn her out more skillfully. But it’s not a perfectly iterative process with infinite retakes. Still, we both learned so much (in my case, sometimes in spite of clumsy questions and clueless approaches) that I can’t complain. These stories are more than good enough. They’re magnificent.

NEB: These women have overcome struggles and privations that are heartbreaking even to imagine. Do you feel that you learned more than you had bargained for in a decade of this work? Did these women touch you personally?

GH: Yes and yes. These are everyday haunting stories. Whatever the terrible shortcomings of revolutionary change—and there are many—the kinds of catastrophe that were absolutely commonplace during these women’s younger years are no longer routine or even comprehensible to their grandchildren. That’s important.

NEB: Your book uncovers many grey areas of 1950s reforms and troubles the statist narrative of progress: although the lives of farming women improved in many significant ways in the 1950s, most of the reforms stopped far short of gender equality. Women never got as many work points as did men; collectivization completely effaced women’s domestic labor and motherhood; reforms in midwifery gave farming women more children to look after and left them exhausted. You tease your way through these layers of complexity by, for example, examining “work points as a category of gender analysis.” If the interviewees themselves often did not understand work points in this way, what advantages are there for us as researchers in applying this level of analysis?

GH: Oh, but they did. Some found it natural that women should be paid less than men, and had complicated reasons why. Others thought it was unjust, and had a lot to say about that. Some expressed their opinions in language provided by the state, though they used official terminology creatively. The term “feudalism,” for instance, was used by both men and women to describe behavior specific to women, which was not the way it had first been deployed. I didn’t import gender as a category of analysis—it’s a fundamental structuring device for rural Chinese. Everything I know about how gender worked in the rural Chinese 1950s, I learned through listening to stories that even an outsider could understand. What astonishes me is how anyone could think to give an account of the 1950s without attention to gender.

NEB: Are there any last words you would like to leave your readers with before they immediately pick up your book to read your fascinating account of China’s 1950s?

The Chinese countryside (like many other places, no doubt) is bursting with untold stories. One or two or a hundred researchers can’t begin to make a dent. If reading this book whets the curiosity of readers, and inspires some of them to go ask questions and to think hard about what they hear, the book will have served its purpose.

NEB: Well then I must ask for some more last words: what advice might you give to a scholar who wanted to undertake such a project? Is it best to partner with a local Chinese? Would ten years of interviewing time—as you and Gao had—be necessary? How does one best avoid getting into trouble with authorities?

GH: I’m in favor of all sorts of collaborations. I am very encouraged to meet more and more Chinese graduate students in the PRC whose training is beginning to include research projects in the countryside. For U.S. graduate students, who often have the flexibility to stay longer in a research site than faculty, ten years is not practical or necessary, but I’m glad I had the luxury to reflect and regroup between research trips. As for the authorities, what is sensitive and what is not changes all the time—but talking to octogenarians does not seem to be on anyone’s list of dangerous activities. Local authorities were unfailingly courteous to us, but they didn’t linger to listen.

NEB: Lastly, thank you for contributing this stupendous book to the field of Chinese history!

GH: I was lucky to have the chance to do this work. I look forward to what other researchers can tell us about the Chinese countryside, which deserves a larger place in our narratives of recent history.

Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine.

Does Tom Brady have the best NFL quarterback hair?

I love stories about hair, because I have so little of my own.

And I think I can spot a good head of hair, because I’ve taken note of so many people who misuse the lustrous locks given them.

So I was astonished to learn that Tom Brady had won an award for having the best NFL quarterback hair — and this was for his unruly look.

The honor was voted by Pert Plus’ fans on Facebook. He took the prize shortly before he unveiled a shorter style.

Brady’s shaggy style was more attractive than the haircuts of Mark Sanchez, Eli Manning, Matt Stafford and Tim Tebow, the Pert Plus fans ruled.

What do you say to that? And did Brady make the right move in going short?

‘Dancing With the Stars’: Which celebrity is out?

“Dancing With the Stars” sent its second celebrity packing tonight.

SPOILER ALERT: The show identified actor/director David Arquette, activist/author Chaz Bono and Italian TV star Elisabetta Canalis as the three celebrities in jeopardy.

Bono was the first to learn he would be back next week. Then the show revealed that Canalis, who is best known as an ex of actor George Clooney, was the second ejection this season. She described the show as “a great adventure,” and her partner, Val Chmerkovskiy, said he wished he could have done more for her. Yet the two made great strides from last week, when their dance was disastrous.

Basketball star Ron Artest, who is now known at Metta World Peace, was eliminated last week.

Demi Lovato and The Script performed tonight. The contest resumes at 8 p.m. Monday on ABC (WFTV-Channel 9 locally). 

Ten celebrities and their professional partners remain in contention. The strongest dancers so far are actress Ricki Lake, actor/Iraq War veteran J.R. Martinez and singer Chynna Phillips.

Book Review: Mao’s Invisible Hand

Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. xiii, 336 pp. $24.95 (paper).

By Chen Xi

On the book cover of Mao’s Invisible Hand, edited by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, there is a photo of Mao’s colossal statue, which was seen everywhere in urban China before the reform era. Most such statues have been demolished since the 1980s. Was Mao’s style of politics swept into the historical dustbin with them? The book shows that such legacies are surprisingly resilient. Even some past practices consciously rejected by the reform-era leadership, such as mass campaigns, continue to shape policy making and implementation today.

For the Chinese who have struggled for modernization for more than a century, history was often regarded as a burden. This book, however, indicates that, for reform China at least, historical legacies are not a liability but an asset. In their introduction, Heilmann and Perry contend that without revolutionary legacies, China’s stunning economic growth and impressive political stability over the past three decades would not have been possible. The reforms have particularly benefited from so-called guerrilla-style policy making. Developed during guerrilla wars and revolutionary mobilization, this policy style features ceaseless change and ad hoc adjustment and proved especially useful for coping with uncertainties and surprises in the reforms.

Heilmann’s study of experimentation provides an illuminating example. Since the times of Communist regional bases, the CCP has developed a tactic of “proceeding from point to surface,” which gives room for local officials to develop models on their own while retaining final say for the center. This work style contributed to a variety of innovative policies in the reform era. The CCP’s adaptiveness and learning capacity are confirmed by Shaoguang Wang’s study of rural medical financing. According to Wang, the CCP learned not just from experiments, which he believes were quite limited in pre-reform eras, but also extensively from local practices.

Of course, while revolutionary legacies have contributed to the success of the reforms, they have also created problems. Joseph Fewsmith focuses on the flip side of the legacies. As he argues, the CCP inherited from the revolutionary era not just policy flexibility and adaptability but also personalized power structures, especially at the local levels, which lead to the widespread abuse of power and constitute a formidable barrier to effective governance.

While the revolutionary legacies continue to shape today’s politics, they have been substantially adapted. After all, the CCP has experienced generational changes, with revolutionary leaders replaced by technocrats. In addition, the CCP is faced with quite different tasks today from those in the revolutionary era—namely, the challenges posed by governing a market economy and maintaining political stability in a diverse and mobile society. Several studies in this volume explore how the methods and mind-sets of the revolutionary era have been adapted to a dramatically new setting. Perry’s chapter on the New Socialist Countryside campaign suggests that although the campaign tradition, which is the hallmark of Maoist politics, continues to be useful in many policy areas in the reform era, it has in fact been converted into “managed campaigns.” Unlike mass campaigns, managed campaigns combine the Leninist tradition with technocratic technique and usually target grassroots bureaucrats instead of the masses. Similarly, Nara Dillon argues that the CCP’s approaches toward the voluntary sectors (such as NGOs) maintain important aspects of Mao’s campaign tradition but also have increasingly relied on legalistic methods.

Adaptations are not limited to the campaign tradition. As Patricia Thornton argues, the CCP also changed its method of social investigation from an examination of “typical cases” to random survey methods. This change reflects a new relationship between the Party and the population: the mobilized masses as potential activists have been replaced with a depoliticized, passive audience. Similarly, Yuezhi Zhao’s study of the Party’s control of the media, while highlighting continuity with the old methods, shows how those controls have also been “selectively abandoned by the CCP and subverted by liberal ideological forces in the market-driven media system” (p. 229).

How do the Maoist ad hoc approaches reconcile with a market economy that values predictability? Despite the CCP’s efforts at adaptation, we might expect severe conflicts and profound tensions. In fact, the tensions between Maoist political style and market reform are among the most interesting issues addressed in this book. While many chapters touch upon this topic, it is most explicitly explored by Benjamin Liebman’s study of legal reforms. Since the late 1970s the Party has enthusiastically pursued modern forms of legality, but from revolutionary history it also inherited the embrace of populism by legal institutions. Consequently, the Chinese legal system is characterized by tensions between trends toward professionalism and toward populism (p. 170). He notes a worrisome tendency of the past decade: legal institutions have been more frequently instructed to yield to popular pressure from the media and the xinfang system.

Such an apparently short-term setback of legal reforms actually reflects the long-term difficulty in modernizing Chinese society. Heilmann and Perry rightly point out that, to a certain degree, Maoist policy style actually has its roots in the long line of traditional thought in China, “which stressed fluid, dialectical, and tactical approaches to managing ubiquitous tensions and contradictions” (p. 15). Other studies in this book, such as Fewsmith’s examination of personalized power structures and Jae Ho Chung’s study of central-local relations, confirm that many aspects of Maoist methods and mind-sets reach back far beyond the revolutionary era and into the imperial eras.

Under the shadow of such a long tradition, the Western model of modernization, which features bureaucratic and legalistic approaches, has seldom been wholeheartedly embraced in China. When today’s leaders, like Mao several decades ago, become unhappy with the constraints imposed by legal reforms and other institutional developments, they are tempted to scrap them in the name of rejecting “blind copying of the West” and, instead, pay tribute to historical tradition.

While Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century often deplored the stubbornness of Chinese tradition and the difficulty in modernizing Chinese society, the fluidity and flexibility of that tradition have served the country surprisingly well in the reform era. Mao’s Invisible Hand was produced at a time when more than three decades of prosperity and stability do not appear in danger of ending, and its overall tone is optimistic and approving about Maoist approaches, even though some authors have expressed some doubt about the long-term impact of these approaches. No matter what people, including Chinese leaders, think of the historical legacies, they will continue to shape the special path that China will take.

This is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking books published in recent years on the critical questions about China’s developmental path and the role of history. It provides few definite answers to those questions, and the contributors evidently disagree with each other in some important aspects. However, this volume, skillfully edited by Heilmann and Perry, presents lively debates in which we are all invited to join.

Chen Xi is Assistant Professor in Department of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Contentious Authoritarianism: Social Protest and the State in China.

© 2011 by Twentieth-Century China Editorial Board. All rights reserved.

‘Harry’s Law’: Karen Olivo jumps from Broadway to NBC

Winter Haven’s Karen Olivo won’t sing and dance regularly on “Harry’s Law.” But the actress gets to show off her big voice in an upcoming episode.

“It’s very tasteful and not out of the ordinary,” Olivo said. “It’s all plausible. I do sing. No dancing.”

She sang and danced her way to a Tony as Anita in the revival of “West Side Story” and dazzled Broadway in the Tony-winning musical “In the Heights.” But Olivo wanted to try television.

“I’ve been doing theater professionally since I was 18,” said Olivo, who is in her mid 30s. “I wanted to use a different muscle. I wanted to be the new kid on the block.”

She is precisely that as determined lawyer Cassie Reynolds on “Harry’s Law.” She joined the NBC drama in its second season, and the next episode airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on WESH-Channel 2. Olivo said she was lucky to become a regular on a series created by David E. Kelley and starring Oscar winner Kathy Bates.

“She sets the tone on set,” Olivo said of Bates. “It’s a classy, respectful set, and it’s all because of her. I’m learning as much as I can from her.”

Olivo praised the skill of Kelley (“Ally McBeal,” “Boston Legal”) at creating characters. “He gives you everything in the words,” Olivo said. “I had two lines in one scene. It was evident who Cassie was and her take on what’s going on in the room. He economizes.”

Executive producer Bill D’Elia said that Olivo stood out when he saw her via an Internet link, but he didn’t think her reading for Cassie was right.

“We had one conversation where I directed her over the phone,” D’Elia said. “She put herself back on tape. It was clear to me how good she was. If you can take my direction over the phone and turn it into something, it showed me some strong acting chops.”

Olivo also gets the movie-star treatment as the series photographs her beautifully. “That’s not hard to do,” D’Elia said. “She possesses strength and an inner beauty. She’s a natural.”

She laughs at the memory of someone telling her, “You’re the hot girl on a David E. Kelley show.”

“When you have talented cameramen doing this wonderful lighting, you end up looking a little bit of movie star,” Olivo said.

As Cassie, Olivo plays the most grounded character in a cast of off-the-wall types. The regular cast includes Mark Valley and Christopher McDonald. Jean Smart and Alfred Molina are guest stars in early episodes this season.

“David writes full-fledged characters with their quirks and faults on their sleeves,” Olivo said. “When we talked at the first table read about my character, he said she had to be cool under pressure and a little less quirky than everyone else. There are so many personalities bouncing around the office. She is a smart woman, a great lawyer. She does everything by the book.”

D’Elia seconds that interpretation. “We’re developing a compassionate character who doesn’t fly off the handle,” he said. “She will provide a voice of reason.”

Is TV everything she hoped it would be? “Yes. It’s so unlike theater,” Olivo said. “The pace is different, the terminology is so different.”

But doing a dramatic show doesn’t leave a lot of time for other work. ” ‘Harry’ is a full-time job,” she said. “We do an episode every week. On weekends, I grocery shop, do laundry and learn my lines. I’m booked in the best way possible.”

Olivo will finish shooting 13 episodes in December. “If ‘Harry’s Law’ goes on and on, it will be wonderful and I’ll come back to New York on holiday,” she said.

And if it ends? “Then I’ll be back in New York like all my colleagues, pounding the pavement.”