Beverley Hooper

Biographic Data

ID283478
NAMEBeverley Hooper
GIVEN NAMESBeverley
FAMILY NAMEHooper
SIGNATUREHOOPER B
AFFILIATIONSMurdoch University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS50
TOTAL CITATIONS41
AUTHOR COUNT50
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1975
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2016
H-INDEX3

  • Helping China?

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    As a community, the foreign experts fitted somewhere between the diplomatic/correspondent communities and the long-term residents. Like Western diplomats and correspondents, they usually spent around two years in China. But they were a much more disparate group, going to the PRC through individual arrangements with the Chinese authorities, not as representatives of Western governments or media organizations—or even on official exchanges like most…

  • Identities and roles

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    As representatives of the West in China, to use Isabel Crook’s words, the long-term residents were active participants in the PRC’s ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ (or ‘friendship diplomacy’) which, like its Soviet counterpart, was directed towards influencing foreign public opinion, especially in the West. In her book A History of China’s Foreign Propaganda 1949–1966, PRC journalist and author Xi Shaoying saw the long-term residents, along with sho…

  • Into Mao’s China

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    Who were these people, living in Mao’s China and prepared to ally themselves with it politically in an era of Cold War hostility? Blanket generalizations do not adequately explain their motivations. Some, as communist internationalists, saw the PRC as a bright new hope for socialism and were keen to participate in building a revolutionary society. Others described their underlying motivation as ‘humanitarianism’: China had turned them to communis…

  • ‘The world within’

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    To many other Western residents, the lives of embassy staff and their families seemed a world away from their own. Outside was Maoist Peking, its blue and grey cotton clothed inhabitants battling to get on crowded buses or cycling past the city’s low grey buildings and billboards urging them to ‘build socialism faster, better and more economically’. The world within was light and bright, a reproduction of a modern Western apartment with all its t…

  • Breaking down the barriers?

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    ‘Isolation and integration’ reflected the marginalization of students from Chinese society and their ongoing efforts to break down the barriers, not just for personal or political reasons but because of their raison d’être for being in the PRC. Underpinning the students’ marginalization was the preferential treatment, albeit in diluted form, that was officially prescribed for all foreigners—even when they tried to reject it.

  • Interactions

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    To outsiders, the long-term residents seemed tightly knit, conscious of their group identity and wary of Westerners who did not share the mantle of ‘foreign comrade’ or ‘international friend’. But the small community also had its internal dynamics, reflecting the length of time that people had spent in China as well as their nationality, personality and political attitudes—even within the socialist range. The turbulent politics of the era, includ…

  • Personal and political dynamics

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    Although personal relationships could be intense in China, even in cases where both parties were foreigners, politics was a more pervasive factor in many people’s everyday lives. The broad recruitment of Western teachers and polishers created a politically diverse community in which conversations invariably turned to present-day China and people’s attitudes towards it. For those with a scholarly interest in China, the foreign expert sojourn was o…

  • The web of relationships

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    Mao’s China was a striking example of Ulf Hannerz’s research finding that foreign correspondents were likely to stick together more closely ‘in cities where there were few of them’. This was particularly the case when ‘they were living under tough conditions and perhaps in an adversarial or at least closely guarded relationship with the host society and especially its government’. With a paucity of information at their disposal, Peking’s correspo…

  • Licensed contacts and beyond

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    Despite the restrictions, there was a small amount of ongoing personal contact, at least before the Cultural Revolution. Almost without exception, these friendships were with people who, as diplomats expressed it, were ‘licensed for contact’ with foreigners. Usually from the academic or cultural world, they often had long-standing Western connections which were virtually impossible to maintain in the new political environment. In the political en…

  • ‘Dateline—Peking’

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    The correspondents’ reports reflected not just the restrictions imposed on their access to information but official efforts to control what they wrote. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union until 1961, this was not done through formal censorship but through admonitions, warnings, and the non-renewal of residence permits. Expulsion was the last resort. Without formal censorship, the onus was on individual correspondents to decide for themselves…

  • After Mao

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    Much easier access to China, travel all over the country, choosing one’s own accommodation, having Chinese friends and relationships: it was all vastly different from the Mao era. But while the closed communist society with its segregation of Westerners was largely a thing of the past, China still had an authoritarian government, was still intensely nationalistic, and continued to draw a clear line between foreigners and Chinese. Foreign correspo…

  • Choosing China

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    On 24 February 1954, twenty-one American GIs and a British marine crossed the border from North Korea into the PRC. Whatever the individual differences in the men’s explanations, there was a common theme that to some extent accorded with the emotive accusations of brainwashing. After taking over the camps from the North Korean army, the Chinese pursued their so-called leniency policy which, instead of punishing soldiers as the enemy, was directed…

  • Across divides

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    National and political identities sometimes cut across group identity, just as they divided some individual communities. This can be seen most clearly by looking at relations between the diplomatic-correspondent communities, which represented Western governments and media, and the others who were based in Chinese institutions. To diplomats and correspondents, the students, foreign experts and long-term residents were all ‘out there’ in a sombre g…

  • ‘Our life and hard times’

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    Western correspondents were in some ways even less welcome than diplomats. Embassy reports finished up in foreign office files but correspondents’ despatches were in the public arena, potentially undermining the images of new China that the government was trying so hard to project. On assuming power, the Communists had issued a series of bans on Western news organizations. Official images to the outside world were presented through the government…

  • Disenchantment

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    Overall, China had failed to live up to the former POWs’ hopes. The grand socialist narrative of international peace and equality for all seemed to have little relevance to their everyday lives. The daily grind, whether working on a farm or in a factory—or even the hard slog of learning Chinese—was not quite the adventure that some had anticipated. There was also the low standard of living and the realities of everyday life in a strictly controll…

  • Studying, Maoist style

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    During the Mao era, only a tiny proportion of Chinese language students in the West had the opportunity to study in China. Just a few Western students managed to have the real China experience. Before the 1970s, the student route to Mao’s China was largely confined to those who could demonstrate their political friendliness, either by having communist party links in their own country (at least until the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s) or through …

  • Cold War diplomacy

    Beverley HooperCHAPTERForeigners under Mao2016

    From the early 1970s, the US-China relationship was central to diplomatic reporting, with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s visit to Peking in October 1971, President Nixon’s historic visit in February 1972, and the establishment the following year of small liaison offices in Peking and Washington. Following each of Kissinger’s further visits in 1973 and 1974, senior diplomats virtually queued up at the liaison office to find out what p…

  • Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949-1976

    Beverley HooperBOOKForeigners under Mao2016

    "A pioneering study of the Western community during the turbulent Mao era. Based largely on personal interviews, memoirs, private letters, and archives, this book 'gives a voice' to the Westerners who lived under Mao. It shows that China was not as closed to Western residents as has often been portrayed."--Page [4] of cover

  • Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949–1976

    Beverley HooperBOOKForeigners under Mao2016

    Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949–1976 is a pioneering study of the Western community during the turbulent Mao era. Based largely on personal interviews, memoirs, private letters, and archives, this book ‘gives a voice’ to the Westerners who lived under Mao. It shows that China was not as closed to Western residents as has often been portrayed. The book examines the lives of six different groups of Westerners: ‘foreign comrades’ …

  • Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China . Kevin Latham , Stuart Thompson , Jakob Klein

    Beverley HooperARTICLEThe China Journal2007

  • Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond . Wen-Hsin Yeh

    Beverley HooperARTICLEThe China Journal2003

  • The Consumer Revolution in Urban China . Deborah S. Davis

    Beverley HooperARTICLEThe China Journal2002

  • Globalisation and resistance in Post‐Mao China: The case of foreign consumer products

    Beverley HooperARTICLEAsian Studies Review2000Cited by: 10References: 16

    (2000). Globalisation and resistance in Post‐Mao China: the case of foreign consumer products. Asian Studies Review: Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 439-470

  • Consumer Voices: Asserting Rights in Post-Mao China

    Open AccessBeverley HooperARTICLEChina Information2000Cited by: 7

  • A Million Truths: A Decade in China . Linda Jakobson

    Beverley HooperARTICLEThe China Journal1999