Emeriti Faculty Lecture

Notes from the Life of a Peripatetic Revolutionary with Gail Hershatter

Xu Ming had many identities: coddled son of an elite family, patriotic activist, underground Communist organizer, Clark University graduate student, New York-based journalist, land reform organizer, Korean War negotiator, diplomat, politically disgraced Rightist, rural laborer, small-town junior high basketball coach, globe-trotting government economic advisor, eyewitness to the 1989 Tiananmen suppression. This lecture explores what we can learn from the life of a single individual about a canonical event of Big History—the Chinese Communist revolution.

Gail Hershatter is Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emer. of History at UC Santa Cruz, and a former President of the Association for Asian Studies. Her books include The Workers of Tianjin (1986), Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980's (1988, with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2004), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011), and Women and China’s Revolutions (2019).