Travels on the Revolution's Edge: The Life and Times of Xu Ming (1920-2014)

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 cadre, Korean War negotiator, diplomat, politically disgraced Rightist, rural laborer, small-town junior high basketball coach, globe-trotting government economic advisor, and eyewitness to the 1989 Tiananmen suppression. This talk explores what we can learn from the life of a single individual about a canonical event of Big History: the Chinese Communist revolution

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About the speaker:
Gail Hershatter is a 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), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past (2011), and Women and China's Revolutions (2019). (Talk image courtesy of Carolyn Lagattuta).