Elizabeth J Perry
Biographic Data
| ID | 272179 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth J Perry |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth J |
| FAMILY NAME | Perry |
| SIGNATURE | PERRY E J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7943-2097 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 74 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 407 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 11 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
China’s Governance in the “New Era” of Xi Jinping
The dramatic shifts in policies and practices of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the course of its tumultuous 75-year history underscore the decisive importance of political leadership. Institutionally, China closely resembles other former and surviving Communist regimes. Operationally, however, its dynamic patterns of governance reflect the shifting concerns of a succession of visionary Communist Party leaders
Public Health, National Strength, and Regime Legitimacy: China’s Patriotic Health Campaign
Modern public health initiatives are usually assessed according to their contribution to preventing or controlling the spread of disease. But there is also a crucial political dimension to such assessments. As the COVID-19 pandemic indicated, no country is more sensitive to the connection between public health and regime legitimacy than China. This article discusses the important role of public health efforts in the legitimation of Chinese Commun…
Blurring the Boundaries of Governance: China’s Work Teams in Comparative Perspective
A notable feature of Chinese Communist rule, from revolutionary days on, has been the blurred boundaries of its governance mechanisms. The lines separating formal from informal, legal from illegal, and state from societal have – at least until quite recently – proven exceptionally permeable. This paper focuses on an especially fluid and flexible means of Chinese Communist governance: the deployment of mobile task forces, or “work teams,” for both…
The 1960s: Wang Guangmei and Peach Garden Experience
Chapter 5 focuses on the 1967 Cultural Revolution campaign against Wang Guangmei, wife of the disgraced former PRC president Liu Shaoqi. A detailed firsthand account of Wang's emblematic and theatrical mass struggle session at Tsinghua University introduces the story, followed by background to provide context for her poor treatment, and the larger political developments which led to Wang and Liu's ultimate downfall. These include Wang's early eli…
Missionaries of the Party: Work-team Participation and Intellectual Incorporation
Among the most distinctive features of Chinese Communist Party governance is the frequent deployment of work teams to conduct campaigns, implement policies and troubleshoot crises. An underappreciated aspect of work-team operations from Land Reform to the present has been the active participation of educated intellectuals as key intermediaries between central leaders and grassroots society. Serving in effect as “missionaries” of the Party, intell…
Debating Maoism in Contemporary China: Reflections on Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao
Xi Jinping's frequent references to Mao Zedong, along with Xi's own claims to ideological originality, have fueled debate over the significance of Maoism in the PRC today. The discussion recalls an earlier debate, at the height of the Cold War, over the meaning of Maoism itself. This paper revisits that earlier controversy, reflected in arguments between Benjamin Schwartz and Karl Wittfogel, with an eye toward their contemporary relevance
Ruling by Other Means: State-Mobilized Movements
What do states gain by sending citizens into the streets? Ruling by Other Means investigates this question through the lens of State-Mobilized Movements (SMMs), an umbrella concept that includes a range of (often covertly organized) collective actions intended to advance state interests. The SMMs research agenda departs significantly from that of classic social movement and contentious politics theory, focused on threats to the state from seeming…
Educated acquiescence: How academia sustains authoritarianism in China
Making Communism Work: Sinicizing a Soviet Governance Practice
Among various grassroots governance practices adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), few have proven more adaptive and effective than the deployment of work teams-ad hoc units appointed and directed by higher-level Party and government organs and dispatched for a limited time to carry out a specific mission by means of mass mobilization. Yet, perhaps because work teams straddle the boundary between formal and informal institutions, they ha…
Beyond Regimes: China and India Compared
The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power
Introduction: Chinese Political Culture Revisited
Since its inception following World War II, the field of contemporary Chinese studies has been confronted by a series of extraordinary events. The first generation of specialists, schooled in a classical sinological tradition that stressed China's unique cultural continuity, was immediately challenged by what seemed—at least on the face of it—a major rupture with the past: the Communist Revolution of 1949. The Cultural Revolution constituted a cr…
Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Second Edition
Chinese Perspectives on the Nien Rebellion
Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China
Narrating the Past to Interpret the Present: A Conversation with Elizabeth J. Perry
In this sparkling and candid conversation, Elizabeth Perry reminisces about her early years in Japan, her first trip back to China in the late 1970s, her reconsideration of the Chinese revolution, and interdisciplinary studies and her career as both a political scientist and historian. Perry shares her insights into the cultural resources of the Chinese Communist Party, the resilience of the Chinese regime, comparisons of the Chinese and Russian …
The Populist Dream of Chinese Democracy
Mainstream Chinese discussions of "democracy" have long betrayed a decidedly populist understanding of the concept. Xi Jinping draws freely on this tradition in formulating his China Dream. Xi's efforts are part of the Chinese Communist Party's "re-Orientation" of official propaganda to showcase the glories of the ancient civilization that it claims to represent and rejuvenate. The idea of "democracy" (minzhu民主)-understood in populist rather than…
Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China
Social science theories of contentious politics have been based almost exclusively on evidence drawn from the European and American experience, and classic texts in the field make no mention of either the Chinese Communist revolution or the Cultural Revolution -- surely two of the most momentous social movements of the twentieth century. Moreover, China's record of popular upheaval stretches back well beyond this century, indeed all the way back …
Citizen Contention and Campus Calm: The Paradox of Chinese Civil Society
Contrary to conventional predictions, the growth of protest and civil society in contemporary China seems more conducive to the resilience of authoritarianism than to imminent democratization
Growing Pains: Challenges for a Rising China
ELIZABETH J. PERRY, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2002, is the Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Her many books in clude Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (1993), Patrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship, and the Modern Chinese State (2005), and Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition (2012). The accumulative achievements of C…
Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition
How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists' creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful "cultural positioning" and "cultural patronage," on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, h…
Mao's Invisible Hand
Mao's Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China
"Rejoinder to Rebecca E. Karl's "The Flight to Rights: 1990S China and Beyond
The Summer 2010 issue of Telos contained an article by Rebecca E. Karl in which she alleged that, as President of the Association for Asian Studies, I argued in an “inaugural AAS speech’” that “the current appeal to a Confucian-inspired harmonious society (hexie shehui) provides evidence for the fact that the old Confucian lack of rights-thinking is the cultural basis for the CCP's lack of rights thinking.”1 No citation or footnote was offered fo…
Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance
"Chinese Conceptions of "Rights: From Mencius to Mao-and Now
The recent explosion of popular protest in China, often framed as a demand for the fulfillment of "rights," has captured widespread attention. Some observers interpret the protests as signs of a "moral vacuum." Others see the unrest as signaling a powerful new "rights consciousness." In either case, the protests are often regarded as a major challenge to the stability of the political system. In this article, an examination of Chinese conceptions…
Moving The Masses: Emotion Work In The Chinese Revolution
Previous explanations of the Chinese Communist revolution have highlighted (variously) the role of ideology, organization, and/or social structure. While acknowledging the importance of all these factors, this article draws attention to a largely neglected feature of the revolutionary process: the mass mobilization of emotions. Building upon pre-existing traditions of popular protest and political culture, the Communists systematized "emotion wor…
Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution
China Since Tiananmen: A New Rights Consciousness
Despite the suppression of the Tiananmen Uprising of 1989, popular protest in China has by all accounts escalated steadily over the ensuing two decades. These protests have spread to virtually every sector of Chinese society, prompting more than a few observers to proclaim the emergence of a "rising rights consciousness" that poses a protodemocratic challenge to the authority and durability of the Communist state. This essay proposes instead that…
Educated acquiescence: How academia sustains authoritarianism in China
State and Society in Contemporary China
Recent works on contemporary China stress the importance of the nonmarket economy in shaping a pattern of state-society relations quite unlike those found in capitalist economies. Nevertheless, these studies present strikingly different pictures of the Chinese case: a new, party-dominated, divided, yet compliant network society on the one hand; and an enduring, localistic, solidary, and resistant cellular society on the other. The author suggests…
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
Peasant rebellions are uncommon. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance explores peasants' foot dragging, feigned ingorance, false compliance, manipulation, flight, slander, theft, arson, sabotage, and similar prosaic forms of struggle. These kinds of resistance stop well short of collective defiance, a strategy usually suicidal for the subordinate. The central argument about peasant resistance is presented in the opening chapter by James Scott in …
The Populist Dream of Chinese Democracy
Mainstream Chinese discussions of "democracy" have long betrayed a decidedly populist understanding of the concept. Xi Jinping draws freely on this tradition in formulating his China Dream. Xi's efforts are part of the Chinese Communist Party's "re-Orientation" of official propaganda to showcase the glories of the ancient civilization that it claims to represent and rejuvenate. The idea of "democracy" (minzhu民主)-understood in populist rather than…
Syncretic Sects in Chinese Society: An Introduction
Social Banditry Revisited: The Case of Bai Lang, a Chinese Brigand
Growing Pains: Challenges for a Rising China
ELIZABETH J. PERRY, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2002, is the Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Her many books in clude Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (1993), Patrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship, and the Modern Chinese State (2005), and Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition (2012). The accumulative achievements of C…
Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China
Worshipers and Warriors: White Lotus Influence on the Nian Rebellion
Peer Reviewed
Public Health, National Strength, and Regime Legitimacy: China’s Patriotic Health Campaign
Modern public health initiatives are usually assessed according to their contribution to preventing or controlling the spread of disease. But there is also a crucial political dimension to such assessments. As the COVID-19 pandemic indicated, no country is more sensitive to the connection between public health and regime legitimacy than China. This article discusses the important role of public health efforts in the legitimation of Chinese Commun…
Blurring the Boundaries of Governance: China’s Work Teams in Comparative Perspective
A notable feature of Chinese Communist rule, from revolutionary days on, has been the blurred boundaries of its governance mechanisms. The lines separating formal from informal, legal from illegal, and state from societal have – at least until quite recently – proven exceptionally permeable. This paper focuses on an especially fluid and flexible means of Chinese Communist governance: the deployment of mobile task forces, or “work teams,” for both…
Reclaiming the Chinese Revolution
Focusing on the Chinese Communists' mobilizational efforts at the Anyuan coal mine in the early 1920s, the author argues for reconsidering a sometimes forgotten part of Chinese revolutionary history. At Anyuan, idealistic young Communist cadres led a highly successful nonviolent strike and launched a major educational program for workers, peasants, and their families. The result was a remarkable outpouring of popular support for the Communist rev…
Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics
When Peasants Speak: Sources for the Study of Chinese Rebellions
Making Communism Work: Sinicizing a Soviet Governance Practice
Among various grassroots governance practices adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), few have proven more adaptive and effective than the deployment of work teams-ad hoc units appointed and directed by higher-level Party and government organs and dispatched for a limited time to carry out a specific mission by means of mass mobilization. Yet, perhaps because work teams straddle the boundary between formal and informal institutions, they ha…
Labor's Love Lost: Worker Militancy in Communist China
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The Political Consequences of China's Reforms
Ten years have now passed since the calamitous year of 1976, when Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Mao Zedong all died, Deng Xiaoping fell for the second time, and the Gang of Four went down once and for all. The of sweeping reform that followed that watershed year has been as momentous as the Cultural Revolution decade which preceded it. The question now is how profoundly this period of reform has altered Chinese politics. The books reviewed in this arti…
Research Conditions at Nanjing University
The present Nanjing University (Nanda) was established in the summer of 1952 out of the former Jinling University and the humanities division of the former Zhongyang University. Today Nanda is comprised of seven colleges: humanities, law, education, engineering, natural sciences, medicine, and agriculture. The History Department, located within tho College of Humanities, at present enrolls more than 200 undergraduates and 31 graduate students. Un…
The Mystery of Yellow Cliff: A Controversial "Rebellion" in the Late Qing
Worshipers and Warriors: White Lotus Influence on the Nian Rebellion
Peer Reviewed
The politics of China's peasant revolution
Efforts to explain the success of the Chinese Communist revolution have preoccupied more than a few American historians and political scientists in recent years. Most of these scholars, following the trail blazed by George Taylor's The Struggle for North China, have focused attention on the War of Resistance period (1937–1945) in search of the factors responsible for the phenomenal growth in Communist power. Chalmers Johnson, with his famous thes…
When Peasants Speak: Sources for the Study of Chinese Rebellions
Research Conditions at Nanjing University
The present Nanjing University (Nanda) was established in the summer of 1952 out of the former Jinling University and the humanities division of the former Zhongyang University. Today Nanda is comprised of seven colleges: humanities, law, education, engineering, natural sciences, medicine, and agriculture. The History Department, located within tho College of Humanities, at present enrolls more than 200 undergraduates and 31 graduate students. Un…
The Mystery of Yellow Cliff: A Controversial "Rebellion" in the Late Qing
Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945
Syncretic Sects in Chinese Society: An Introduction
Social Banditry Revisited: The Case of Bai Lang, a Chinese Brigand
The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China
Tax Revolt in Late Qing China: The Small Swords of Shanghai and Liu Depei of Shandong
The Political Consequences of China's Reforms
Ten years have now passed since the calamitous year of 1976, when Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Mao Zedong all died, Deng Xiaoping fell for the second time, and the Gang of Four went down once and for all. The of sweeping reform that followed that watershed year has been as momentous as the Cultural Revolution decade which preceded it. The question now is how profoundly this period of reform has altered Chinese politics. The books reviewed in this arti…
State and Society in Contemporary China
Recent works on contemporary China stress the importance of the nonmarket economy in shaping a pattern of state-society relations quite unlike those found in capitalist economies. Nevertheless, these studies present strikingly different pictures of the Chinese case: a new, party-dominated, divided, yet compliant network society on the one hand; and an enduring, localistic, solidary, and resistant cellular society on the other. The author suggests…
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
Peasant rebellions are uncommon. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance explores peasants' foot dragging, feigned ingorance, false compliance, manipulation, flight, slander, theft, arson, sabotage, and similar prosaic forms of struggle. These kinds of resistance stop well short of collective defiance, a strategy usually suicidal for the subordinate. The central argument about peasant resistance is presented in the opening chapter by James Scott in …
Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Learning from 1989.
China in 1992: An Experiment in Neo-Authoritarianism
Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Learning from 1989
Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Learning from 1989
Labor divided: Sources of state formation in modern China
Recent generations of labor historians, disappointed by the failure of twentieth-century workers to live up to the exalted expectations of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, have focused their explanatory energies on the limitations of proletarian politics. Central to this new wave of scholarship is attention to the fragmented character of labor. Divided along lines of gender, age, ethnicity, and skill, workers are shown rarely to have acted in the …
Shanghai's Strike Wave of 1957
In the spring of 1957, a strike wave of monumental proportions rolled across the city of Shanghai. The strikes in Shanghai represented the climax of a national outpouring of labour protest that had been gaining momentum for more than a year. The magnitude of the 1957 strike wave is especially impressive when placed in historical perspective. Major labour disturbances (naoshi) erupted at 587 Shanghai enterprises in the spring of 1957, involving ne…
Trends in the Study of Chinese Politics: State-Society Relations
In his survey of the field some years ago, Harry Harding noted that the study of contemporary Chinese politics stood then on the threshold of a third generation of scholarship. While the first generation had been limited by the atmosphere of the Cold War and the second had been overly influenced by the Cultural Revolution, Harding held out hope for a third generation able to surpass its predecessors in both substance and theoretical sophisticatio…
Popular Protest And Political Culture In Modern China: Second Edition
Introduction: Chinese Political Culture Revisited Elizabeth J. Perry. General Frameworks * Imagining the Ancien Rgime in the Deng Era Ernest P. Young. * Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Class, Gender, And Identity: 1989 As A Social Movement * Casting a Chinese Democracy Movement: The Roles of Students, Workers, and Entrepreneurs E. J. Perry. * Science, Democracy, and the Politi…
Riding the Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao China. Gordon White China's Transition from Socialism: Statist Legacies and Marketing Reforms. Dorothy J. Solinger
Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor
This work is an important addition to the rather limited literature on the social history of China during the first half of the twentieth century. It draws on abundant sources and studies which have appeared in the People's Republic of China since the early 1980s and which have not been systematically used in Western historiography. China has undergone a series of fundamental political transformations: from the 1911 Revolution that toppled the im…
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Callaloo - Volume 18, Number 2, Spring 1995
Putting Class in Its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia
Political science (59 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (49 works) · Law (49 works) · China (47 works) · Politics (39 works) · Sociology (38 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (33 works) · History (28 works) · Political economy (23 works) · Law (19 works)