Modern China

This article examines the career backgrounds of municipal Chinese Communist Party secretaries between 1990 and 2011. Based on an analysis of 898 cadre biographies and 32 interviews with local government officials during 2011 and 2013, this article shows that the majority of municipal party secretaries had spent their careers working at the provincial and municipal levels, while only few advanced up from the county. Our analysis finds that obstacles hindering leading county cadres from rising to the upper ranks of the municipal apparatus include age and education restrictions; limited positions at the municipal level; the lack of networks linking to provincial leaders; and provincial leaders’ appointment preferences. Limited career advancement opportunities for county cadres have important implications for understanding the incentive foundations of China’s bureaucracy. With only slim prospects for leading county cadres to rise to top municipal positions, the political incentives outlined in the cadre evaluation system might not be as effective in steering cadre behavior as currently claimed in the literature.

This article examines women’s role as the guardian of family health during the Qing period to uncover a neglected aspect of their transformation into the New Woman of the early twentieth century. Although medicine as a form of specialized knowledge has seldom been related to the tradition of women’s learning, my case studies suggest that gentry women during the Qing period routinely resorted to medical texts to regulate family health. This aspect of women’s learning readily lent itself to the project of national strengthening under new exigencies: as China’s encounter with imperialism during the late Qing period came to include a discourse of hygiene, gentry wives could take a step further to reform the national body and claim their centrality to China’s transformation into a modern nation.

This article examines instances in which Mao Zedong used food as a symbol or administrative contrivance for mass mobilization and political maneuvering during the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath. This type of “food politics” was based on some seemingly trivial matters, such as Mao’s personal preferences for certain foods, a steamed bun brought to his attention by his bodyguard, his diet during the famine, and so on. On one hand, in a political environment dominated by Mao’s personality cult and in a culture that placed great importance on culinary matters, the “triviality” of Mao’s food preferences or comments nevertheless had a cascade effect that endlessly multiplied and extended into much broader statecraft. On the other hand, in a subtle and savvy way, grassroots society circumvented the established political legitimacy with the very same comments, effectively using Mao’s own words against the policies that Mao himself advocated and enforced.