[Kiang Lecture Series] Notes from the Life of a Peripatetic Chinese Revolutionary: Xu Ming (1920-2014)

Kiang Lecture Series
UCI Center for Asian Studies

Notes from the Life of a Peripatetic Chinese Revolutionary: Xu Ming (1920-2014)
 

Xu Ming had many identities: coddled son of an elite family, patriotic activist, underground Communist organizer, Clark University graduate student, New York-based journalist, land reform organizer, Korean War negotiator, diplomat, politically disgraced Rightist, rural laborer, small-town junior high basketball coach, globe-trotting government economic advisor, eyewitness to the 1989 Tiananmen suppression. This lecture explores what we can learn from the life of a single individual about a canonical event of Big History—the Chinese Communist revolution.

Speaker
Gail Hershatter
UC Santa Cruz

Gail Hershatter is Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emer. of History at UCSC, and a former President of the Association for Asian Studies.  Her books include The Workers of Tianjin (1986), Personal Voices: China Women in the 1980s (1988, with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2004), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011), and Women and China’s Revolutions (2019). 

Graduate Symposium on the History of the PRC (HG 1030)
 
Panel 1: Labor
1:00-2:30 p.m.
 
Chair: Heidi Tinsman, UCI

“Harvesting Mulberry in Ice, Rearing Silkworms in Fire: An Environmental History of Sericultural Failure in China, 1949-1966”
Yixue Yang, UCSD
 
“Menstrual Cramps, Frugal Buttons: How Women Remembered the Daqing Campaign for Oil”
Zhaorui Lu, UCI
 
“Burning Coal to Conserve Copper: Locomotive Policy and Resource Constraints in Mao's China, 1949-1978”
Ben Kletzer, UCSD
 
Discussant: Alexander Day, Occidental College
 
Panel 2: Communist Ideas
2:30-4:00 p.m.
 
Chair: James Robertson, UCI
 
“The Forgotten Carnival of Ideas”
Haoran Zhang, Yale University
 
“In the Name of Love and the Party: Negotiating Emotions in Marriage During the Mao Era”
Kiki Zhao, UCSD

"'Chairman Mao's Revolutionary Diplomatic Line': the Sino-US Rapprochement below the Politburo, 1971-1978"
Ruohan Zhou, USC
 
Discussants: Dorothy Solinger, UCI and Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, San Diego State