Rebecca E. Karl

The Flight to Rights: 1990s China and Beyond

A recent spate of exposés about Mao Zedongs China, in English and Chinese, announces a finality to the tendency toward the temporal-spatial conflation of twentieth-century Chinese and global history. This sense was confirmed when the New York Times reported in late January 2006 that George W. Bushs recent bedtime reading had been Jung Chang and Jon Hallidays Mao: The Unknown Story,1 or when, later in 2006, according to a column in the British paper The Guardian, “the Council of Europes parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the ‘crimes of totalitarian communist regimes’, linking them with Nazism.”2 The temporal-spatial conflation hence is,…

Qian, Nanxiu Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press 376 pp.,

Lippman began his long tenure as a columnist with the New York Daily World, and he maintained a prodigious correspondence with a wide range of individuals in academia (especially the Harvard Economics Department), government, and business. Lippmann spent the first half of the 1930s excoriating Hoover and Roosevelt and the second half of the decade popularizing Keynes and opposing American isolationism while rejecting unthinking exceptionalism. The Lippmann that emerges in these pages is remarkably prescient. He immediately saw the foolishness of the 1930 Smoot–Hawley Tariff and understood that the New Deal unwisely stunted production, artificially sustained prices, and re-created monopoly in the name of recovery, all while discouraging the private investment without which redistribution would produce little growth. Lippmann called for the end of the gold standard, promoted reductions of international trade barriers, and promoted Keynesian policies well before his friend published his seminal General Theory in 1936—and, thus, according to Goodwin, deserves more credit for bringing Keynes to America than historians generally give him. Lippmann wisely called for genuine reflation and “became annoyed that so many critics of deficit finance kept shouting ‘inflation’ when there was clearly no danger” (140). Lippmann even detected some of the flaws in Keynesianism well ahead of his time: its assumption that taxes should be raised during booms makes sense on paper but is politically dubious, and it places too much faith in the benevolence and ability of policymakers, minimizing the corrupting influence of myopic special interests. Instead, Lippman called for a “regenerated liberalism,” which demanded “a new form of social control: one that is neither laissez-faire nor collectivism, is neither rugged individualism nor a planned or directed economy but is a method which calls for the use of power of the government to preserve private enterprise by regulating its abuses and balancing its deficiencies” (226). As the Depression persisted, Lippmann became increasingly shrill and pessimistic. The publication of The Good Society in 1937 seemed to announce a new, distinctly conservative Keynesianism. His disdain for state-dependent special interests made him oppose benefits even for farmers and veterans, and he echoed Joseph Schumpeter’s concerns that, because of capitalism’s short-term destructiveness, the populace might not be up to the task of sustaining free enterprise. The rising generation of market-celebrants on the right tried to claim Lippmann and invited him to join their new Mont Pelerin Society, but he declined. As Goodwin effectively shows, Lippmann sought liberalism focused on the macro, rather than retreating into conservatism. Insisting that mild redistribution, such as through public education, sustains aggregate demand, free enterprise, and even patriotism (251), Lippmann argued in Jeffersonian terms “that the preservation of freedom in America . . . depends upon maintaining and restoring for the great majority of individuals the economic means to remain independent individuals” (250). Lippmann called for surprisingly comprehensive federal economic planning during World War II, but in the postwar era he joined the widespread consensus favoring a mixed and compensated American capitalism undergirded by Keynesian demand management. After the success of the Kennedy–Johnson tax cut in 1964, Lippmann hoped for a new burst of progressive reforms, but he saw early on that the Vietnam War would crush these dreams, politically as well as fiscally. Despite his exhaustive and superbly researched treatment, Goodwin occasionally misses chances to point out where Lippmann’s biases got the better of him. For example, during the Great Depression, Lippmann retained too much of the early-century progressive’s belief that monopoly was at the root of the nation’s economic problems, and his dislike of Roosevelt seems to have made him miss the administration’s embrace of Keynesian deficit spending during the recession of 1937–38. This reader also wanted to learn more about Lippmann’s postwar views on the New Deal: did he come to accept that, for all of its flaws, it created several new institutions that acted as Keynesian automatic stabilizers for American capitalism, such as unemployment insurance and Social Security? These quibbles aside, Walter Lippman: Public Economist provides a sturdy guide to twentieth-century American political economy that convincingly demonstrates Lippmann’s real influence in—ironically—shaping a public opinion he feared could not grasp complex political issues. Today, when columnists and cable networks largely preach to their own side, American society sorely misses Lippmann’s nonpartisan and temperate calls for reason.

65.00, ISBN 978-0-8047-9240-0 Publication Date: May 2015

This essay discusses the significances and meanings of the emergence of feminism as a mode of social analysis in the early twentieth century in China. It focuses on a critical examination of some of the more dominant discourses of the time, and seeks to contextualize these in a global perspective. By concentrating in the last part of the essay on He-Yin Zhen (He Zhen), the anarchist–feminist editor of the Tokyo-based journal Natural Justice (Tianyi bao), and in particular on her exposition on female labor, the essay introduces one of the most radical critiques of Chinese and global gender issues written at the time. In so doing, it demonstrates He-Yin Zhens prescience and the ways in which her analyses can continue to inform feminisms for our day.

Feminism in modern China

I have apologized privately to Prof. Perry—and do so again publicly—for my incorrect notation about her speech and my lack of precise citation. I was unaware of the published article, but had heard the speech at a regional AAS conference. I made assumptions about its nature (not its content) that I should not have done. I do not wish to elaborate here on our different ways of framing historical arguments and questions. Over many years, I have been an admiring reader of Prof. Perrys impressive corpus of work, even as I have disagreed with elements of it (as is normal…

Response to Elizabeth J. Perry

542 provide numerous examples of massive redevelopment, from Beijing’s SOHO to Shanghai’s Xintiandi, and explore the massive problems associated with residential resettlement. Chapter nine looks at urban sprawl, suburbia, and migrant enclaves as new forms of urban space in Chinese cities. The book concludes by pondering the social, spatial, economic, and political impacts of establishing market institutions in China. The transformation was difficult and certainly cannot be characterized as a “retreat of the state.” As Wu, Xu, and Yeh brilliantly illustrate, the state played an active role in the transformation. Although not flawless—the process is still less than transparent, rent seeking continues, and the rights of the less powerful are overlooked, China’s urban land market transformation has generated remarkable results, widespread urban modernization, improved housing quality, and urban service provision. DAVID E. DOWALL, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Book Review: Margherita ZANASI, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xi + 336 pp. ISBN: 0-226-97873-7 (hc). Price: US

This essay takes the first Beijing Opera of Chinas early twentieth‐century reformist opera movement as an exemplary text and performative context through which to analyze the production of a new historical consciousness in late‐Qing China (1895–1911). Performed in Shanghai in 1904, the opera is centrally concerned with the modern partition of Poland. The essay argues that the operas interpretation of history is a deliberate intervention into Chinas turbulent socio‐political atmosphere and helps mark an attempt to popularize through performance a new synchronic global consciousness that links Chinas contemporary history to the non‐Western world of global transformation at the turn of the twentieth century.