My research goal is to begin the writing of post 1949 Chinese social and cultural history, by joining the insights of social science with an historian's appreciation for context and narrative. Methodologically, I am archive-based but also informed by the possibilities of memoirs and oral sources. In broad terms, I am interested in the social dimensions of political change, an inexaustible seam in China's recent past.

In addition to my dissertation, I am pursuing this agenda through three projects, the first two of which are article-length byproducts of my doctoral work. As an invited participant to the Cornell conference on the Chinese businessman and the 1949 revolution, I will present a paper on an early and unrealized attempt to capitalize on Shanghai's unique economic advantages to build a distinct and locally-centered kind of socialism. I also plan to write a second article about economic crime in the 1950s. By culling material from the restricted circular Internal Reference, available only to ranking officials, I will show the persistence and pervasiveness of small-scale capitalism and the Party's awareness of and ambivalence even during the politically sensitive times of the late 1950s.

My third project turns to local history, though the setting, Sichuan province, is as large and populous as many countries. The little known but dramatic "Xiao-Li-Liao" case offers a window into the interplay of local interests and personal networks with national politics and official position. In the aftermath of the disastrous Great Leap famine (1958-60), urban officials in Chongqing discovered evidence of even more extensive devastation in rural counties than had been admitted, and blamed leading provincial officials headquartered in Chengdu. The clash that followed illuminates the surprising, complicated, and contradictory ways that Party conflict is managed. The difference over policy became not only personal, but had a price in lives, and this sharpness of consequence brought out more clearly tensions between Chongqing and Chengdu, generations of cadres, arms of Party and government, and different mechanisms for pressing Sichuanese interests in Beijing. Spanning the late 1950s through the 1980s, the story takes place against a national background that touches all of contemporary China's turning points but retains a particularly Sichuan flavor. With a combination of internal documents, official pronouncements, memoirs, and oral informants, I aspire to not just analyze the local, informal, and social dimensions of conflict, but also to bring this inside view of PRC life to a wider reading public.