Jun 5th, 2014 - Joseph Esherick, “Family and State in Modern China” (Si-mian Lectures on Humanities No. 209)

Title: Family and State in Modern China

Lecturer: Joseph Esherick (Professor of Modern Chinese History at University of California, San Diego)

Chairperson: ZHANG Jishun (Fellow, Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, East China Normal University)

Date: 3 pm, June 5th, 2014 (Thursday)

Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU

Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU

Abstract of the Lecture:

Ancestral Leaves tells the story of one family through a tumultuous period of Chinese history. Through the lives of the Ye family members, we see the human dimensions of the grand narrative of modern China: the vast and destructive rebellions of the nineteenth century, the economic growth and social change of the republican era, the Japanese invasion in World War II, and the Cultural Revolution under the Chinese Communists. This is a story of social and political change told through family history. The family endures but is transformed from a multi-generation extended family to a linked group of nuclear families. Gender roles change as women are educated for careers of their own. In the twentieth century, young people are influenced by new radical ideas from friends and school, and the brothers coming of age in the 1930s each charts a separate course during the War of Resistance to Japan: some becoming Communists, some working with the Nationalist Chinese regime, some joining the Liberal Democratic League, and one studying in the U.S. The choices they make during the war will fix their status under the new Communist regime, and when they are targeted during the Communist regime, and when they are targeted during the Cultural Revolution, their families suffer with them.

Brief Introduction of the Lecturer：

Joseph Esherick is Professor of modern Chinese history at University of California, San Diego. He is the holder of the Hwei-chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies. Esherick is a graduate of Harvard college (1964, summa cum laude). He received his PH.D from University of California, Berkeley (1971), under the supervision of Joseph R. Levenson and Frederic Wakeman.

His publications including:

Lost Chance in China: The World War II Despatches of John S. Service (Random House, 1974; Vintage paperback, 1975)

Reform and Revolution in China: the 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (University of California Press, 1976)

The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press, 1987: Chinese translation: Jiangsu People’s Press, 1994). Winner of 1987 John K. Fairbank Prize from American Historical Association; 1989 Joseph R. Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies; and the 1989 Berkeley Prize from the University of California Press.