A rare window for the English speaking world to learn how scholars in China understand and interpret central issues pertaining to women and family from the founding of the People’s Republic to the reform era.

In Education in China, ca. 1840–present the authors offer a description of the Chinese education system. In doing so, they touch upon various debates such as on educational modernization and the role of female education. Relevant statistical data is provided as well.

In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

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.

The history of East Asia can be most productively studied through a transnational, translingual, and transcultural approach to the region. In The Sinosphere and Beyond, twenty-six leading and emerging scholars use such approaches in rich clusters of essays on Historiography, Sino-Japanese Encounters, Law and Justice, Politics, Art, Literature, and Translation. Each essay builds on the legacy of Joshua Fogel, whose scholarship defined the contours of the Sinosphere in the Western world and beyond. The collection will be of interest to scholars and students with specific research concerns within these broader rubrics: from the towering progenitors of Japanese Sinology to gendered, diplomatic, and cultural dimensions of Sino-Japanese encounters; from Sinitic poetry to legal culture and revolutionary life; from art commerce and levels of literary expression to the quandaries of translation. In addition to offering a broad range of case studies, the volume is testimony to the methodological importance of a dynamic intra- and transregional approach for an understanding of the layered history of East Asia.

Agnes Smedley worked in and wrote about China from 1928 until 1941. Her journalism and fiction capture the massacre of short-haired feminists in the Canton commune, the lives of silk workers of Canton charged with being lesbians, and the story of Mother Tsai, a peasant who leads village women in smashing an opium den. The Village Voice praised the volume for having "captured brilliantly... the forces of the old and new China struggling in each person she describes."

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.