Elizabeth J. Perry

Elizabeth J. Perry, FBA (Chinese: 裴宜理; pinyin: Péi Yílǐ; born 9 September 1948) is an American scholar of Chinese politics and history at Harvard University, where she is the Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[1] a corresponding fellow of the British Academy,[2] a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship,[3] and served as Director of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research from 1999 to 2003 and as President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2007.

Life and career

Perry was born in Shanghai, shortly before the Chinese Communist Revolution, to American missionary parents who were professors at St. John's University. She grew up in Tokyo, Japan in the 1950s and participated in protests against the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty.[4]

She returned to the United States and attended William Smith College, where she earned her B.A. summa cum laude in 1969.[5] In 1978, she received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan where her disserttion advisors included Michel Oksenberg, Norma Diamond, Albert Feuerwerker, and Allen Whiting.[6] Her doctoral thesis explored the tradition of peasant rebellions of the Huaibei region of North China and the Communist Revolution.[7]

Perry took her first teaching job at the University of Arizona before becoming an assistant, then associate professor at the University of Washington (1978-1990); she the taught at the University of California, Berkeley as Robson Professor of Political Science, 1990-1997 before moving to Harvard.[8]

When China and the US resumed academic exchange in 1979, she spent a year at Nanjing University as a visiting scholar, researching Chinese secret societies under Cai Shaoqing and the Taiping Rebellion under Mao Jiaqi.[7]

Scholarship and changing views

Perry's research focuses on the history of the Chinese revolution and its implications for contemporary politics. Although she earned all her degrees in political science, much of her research focuses on history and its links to contemporary issues. She observes that contemporary China consciously sees itself as an outgrowth of its long history, and Chinese political leaders are keenly aware of history, even if they may misunderstand it. As a result, history is highly consequential in the study of contemporary politics.[4]

She had been sympathetic with the Cultural Revolution as a student, and joined the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group that opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War. After witnessing the inequality in Communist China and hearing people's personal accounts about their suffering during the period, her views on the Chinese revolution and Maoism changed fundamentally.[4]

Selected honors

Her book, Shanghai on Strike: the Politics of Chinese Labor (1993) won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association. Her article "From Mencius to Mao – and Now: Chinese Conceptions of Socioeconomic Rights" (2008) won the Heinz Eulau Prize from the American Political Science Association. Perry received honorary doctorate degrees from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The Asian Studies Library at her undergraduate alma mater has been named in her honor. She also holds honorary professorships at eight major Chinese universities.

Selected books
  • Perry, Elizabeth J. (1980), Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945, Stanford University PressCS1 maint: ref=harv (link))
  • Chinese Perspectives on the Nien Rebellion (M.E. Sharpe, 1981)
  • The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China (Harvard, 1985)
  • Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China (Westview, 1992)
  • Shanghai on Strike (Stanford, 1993)
  • Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Chinese Cities (Cambridge, 1995)
  • Putting Class in Its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia (UC Berkeley, 1996)
  • Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Westview, 1997)
  • Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (M.E. Sharpe, 1997)
  • Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and Resistance (Routledge, 2000)
  • Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge, 2001)
  • Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China (M.E. Sharpe, 2002)
  • Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Harvard, 2002)
  • Patrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship and the Chinese State (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005)
  • Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China (Harvard, 2007)
  • Mao's Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governanace in China (Harvard, 2011)
  • Anyuan: Mining China's revolutionary tradition (California, 2012)
  • Growing Pains in a Rising China (Daedalus, 2014)
  • What is the Best Kind of History? (Zhejiang, 2015) [in Chinese]
  • Beyond Regimes: China and India Compared (Harvard, 2018)
  • Similarity Amidst Difference: Christian Colleges in Republican China (Zhejiang, 2019) [in Chinese]
  • Ruling by Other Means: State-Mobilized Movements (Cambridge, forthcoming)

Selected articles
  • ——— (2002). "Moving the Masses: Emotion Work in the Chinese Revolution". Mobilization: An International Journal. 7 (2): 111–128. doi:10.17813/maiq.7.2.70rg70l202524uw6.
  • ——— (2007). "Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution?". The China Journal. 57 (57): 1–22. doi:10.1086/tcj.57.20066239.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
gollark: Newcomb's paradox is* culture.
gollark: ?
gollark: Also the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
gollark: Maybe I could put "cyber PC diagram" on!
gollark: I could put "macron FPGA" into the below the iceberg section.

References
  1. "Elizabeth J. Perry". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 21 December 2019.
  2. "Professor Elizabeth Perry FBA". British Academy. Retrieved 21 December 2019.
  3. "Elizabeth J. Perry". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 21 December 2019.
  4. Perry, Elizabeth J.; Lu, Hanchao (2015). "Narrating the Past to Interpret the Present: A Conversation with Elizabeth J. Perry". The Chinese Historical Review. 22 (2): 160–173. doi:10.1179/1547402X15Z.00000000051. ISSN 1547-402X.
  5. "HWS: Alumni/ae Publications". Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Retrieved 2020-01-29.
  6. Perry (1980), p. x.
  7. Elizabeth J. Perry (Pei Yili) (2016-10-24). "我的老师蔡少卿，一位中国顶尖的社会史学家" [My teacher Cai Shaoqing, a top Chinese scholar of social history]. The Paper. Retrieved 2020-01-29.
  8. Harvard University (2020).
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