As the anarchy of Mao’s cultural revolution wound down, emigration from China grew. In 1979, at the height of the flight, 36-year-old Jean Hung made her way to Hong Kong. With a young daughter to raise, the schoolteacher was looking for work when she spotted an ad in a local newspaper seeking information about Chinese society.
Hung earned $3 per hour telling the story of her life in the countryside to an American scholar with Chinese roots—Jean Oi, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, now a Stanford professor specializing in the political and economic transformation of post-Mao China.
“At that time, people wanted not just to get money, but they felt a mission to tell the world the truth about China,” says Hung, now assistant director of Hong Kong’s Universities Service Centre. “It was a peculiar historical time after the Cultural Revolution, and Jean had great sympathy for people in rural China. She treated you equally, like a friend.”
Oi spent more than 400 hours interviewing well-educated émigrés like Hung, many of whom had relatives still living in China. She guaranteed them anonymity, and they, in turn, trusted her enough to speak freely. As she listened to them—an engineer, geologist, actress, veterinarian, commune doctor, police chief, Red Guard leader and irrigation specialist, among others—she gleaned insights about the everyday workings of politics at many levels of Chinese society.
“I discovered the many strategies that peasants and officials used to get along and get ahead in what was outwardly a rigidly controlled communist system, marked by central planning, quotas, food rationing and central assignment of jobs, housing and even the right to have children,” Oi says. “I also learned how local officials colluded with peasants. Beneath all the rules was considerable leeway where human intervention determined the outcome—what is sometimes referred to as the use of guanxi, or going through the back door.”
Because data barely trickled out of China at the time, Oi also read every provincial newspaper she could find, published between 1948 and 1986. She pounced on records kept by a granary manager and sifted through accounts of communist officials who were afflicted with “red eye disease” (envy) and promulgating networks of corruption. She followed village arguments about how former collective property like tools, fishnets and tractors should be redistributed. Between 1980 and 1988, Oi made seven trips to mainland China to conduct interviews in provinces outside the capital.
“I knew about food rationing but didn’t know just how valuable a common commodity rice was—how often it was a favorite wedding present during the Mao period,” she says. “People weren’t starving, but peasants complained that they never got enough to eat. I began to appreciate the difference between a level and a heaping scoop of grain.”
Gradually, Oi began to envision the story of modern China played out against a centuries-old theme of tilling the soil. “Communist revolutions eradicate traditional power structures, but they do not alter the basic issue of peasant politics: how the harvest shall be divided.” That sentence began her first book, State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government (UC Press, 1989), which looked at how state and society interact in China. Examining the effects of the communist revolution through the lens of daily life, Oi reflected on the reasons why farmers in the Mao years often chose to hide the amount of grain they were growing, and she suggested why an entrepreneurial sofa-frame maker in the reform period would share with his neighbors the business secrets that had boosted his own income. Her conclusion? The fundamental nature of power had changed in the new half-planned, half-market China.
“What Jean did was as close to a definitive treatment as we’ll ever get of one of the major events of the 20th century,” says Jonathan Unger, head of the Contemporary China Center at the Australian National University in Canberra. “And it could never be done again, because memories have now faded.”
With a population of 1.3 billion, China is not only the most populous country in the world, but also one of the most puzzling for scholars. In a relatively brief historical window of some 50 years, the upheaval caused by Mao’s radical changes—like the Great Leap Forward, which led to the starvation deaths of millions of Chinese peasants—was replaced by the more moderate development policies of Deng Xiaoping. Farmers saw their privately owned land collectivized in communes under Mao, then decollectivized. Small-scale enterprises were banned, then encouraged. And through it all, the Chinese Communist Party held the governing reins, fearful of losing control but constantly issuing and revising state policies.
“What I focus on is the implementation of laws and regulations—when they do and don’t get implemented,” says Oi, who holds the William Haas Professorship in Chinese Politics and directs Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies. “I think a lot of politics is in the details, and that’s what makes studying China so fascinating.”
Sitting erectly, her hands folded neatly in her lap, Oi the interviewee chooses words precisely. And Oi the scholar has chosen a distinctive pathway. Where previous work on China has focused on either the central state or the peasants, she shifts the stage to the village and looks at the officials charged with carrying out the daily workings of the state’s reforms. While some China scholars have written that economic reform would rob communist officials of their power, Oi recognizes the de facto power of local officials. “Reading what Jean says about what is happening at the grass roots gives us a much better understanding of the problems that confront the leadership in Beijing every day,” says Roderick MacFarquhar, chair of the department of government at Harvard and former director of that university’s John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.
Oi returns to the homeland of her great-grandparents every chance she gets—on quarterly breaks or when she can slip in a week following a conference in Asia. She couldn’t travel to China last academic year because of the SARS outbreak, but in summer ’02, Oi took 15 students to Beijing for the first Stanford Overseas Studies seminar in that capital. She also shepherded them into the countryside, traveling by plane and train to Heilongjiang province on the Russian border, where they spent 10 days observing elections in two small villages. The students were up at 6 a.m., and their days often ended with late-night banquets. In between, they tried to keep up with the ever-energetic Oi.
Students “would be [saying], ‘Are you sure we have to go through the fields?’ while Professor Oi was way ahead of us,” recalls Kay Shimizu, a doctoral student in political science who was a teaching assistant for the seminar. “She’d already be in the farmer’s house, talking about crops, and we’d be, like, ‘Where the hell did she go?’ ”
Oi was about the same age as her students and just out of college when she went to Taiwan in 1972 to live with a family and work on her language skills. Although she had grown up speaking what she calls a “country bumpkin dialect” at home in Indiana, it wasn’t until she enrolled at Indiana University that she began to study Mandarin Chinese. “At first they weren’t going to let me take any [Mandarin] courses, because they saw my face and said, ‘Well, you must be a native speaker,’” she says. “I had to assure them I could not speak a word.”
Her graduate studies in the late 1970s coincided with the start of Deng’s reform period and his Open Door Policy, and in 1980, Oi made her first trip to China. By the mid-’80s, she could travel out of Beijing to interview farmers and learn firsthand about such phenomena as the doubling of the annual household income of rural families between 1980 and 1985. As China’s rural industrialization boomed, Oi also began to interview entrepreneurial village bureaucrats and managers of the small textile, furniture, steel tubing, cornstarch and beer factories that were sprouting up in rural areas. Between 1986 and 1996, she logged more than 1,000 hours of interviews in China while teaching at Lehigh University and Harvard. In 1997, Oi and her husband, sociologist Andrew Walder, were recruited to Stanford; two years later, she published her take on the success of China’s state-led development in Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (UC Press, 1999).
In the book she’s currently researching, Oi examines how China’s central government is privatizing some state-owned factories, making workers partial shareholders. Farther down the road—“when I’m too old to go out and do fieldwork”—she envisions a study that will compare governance and state-society relations in the Qing (1644-1911), Republican (1912-1949) and People’s Republic of China (1949-present) periods.
“Jean has gone from [studying] governance in the rural areas to corporate governance, but her analytic tools are pretty much the same and she’s applying them to a new, very important set of questions today,” says Susan Shirk, a professor in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC-San Diego and former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration.
Oi has led the Center for East Asian Studies since 1998. While she was being recruited to Stanford, she says she “sort of suspected” that administrators wanted her to direct the center. “And I decided if I was going to run something, I wanted it to have a dynamic presence. So we’ve really worked hard to grow the program.”
In March 2001, the Faculty Senate renewed the center’s interdisciplinary master’s program for another five years. Later that year, Oi secured funding for Stanford’s first two postdoctoral fellowships in Chinese studies. She also played a key role in hiring three historians to teach Chinese studies and Japanese studies. And last year, she landed a huge seed grant—$2 million for undergraduate education from the Freeman Foundation—which has helped to send more than 70 Stanford students to China, Japan and Korea for internships and study. In addition to teaching and keeping up her own research and publishing, including serving on the editorial board of the China Quarterly, Oi consistently sets aside time for students, and was named outstanding faculty adviser on campus in 2000. She even hosts a weekly Chinese take-out dinner for grad students examining China-related issues.
At home, Oi keeps busy chauffeuring the 6-foot-6 center on the Palo Alto High School’s varsity basketball team—her 16-year-old son, Greg. Mom and Dad have seen a lot of small towns, from California to Tennessee, as they’ve driven him to tournaments in the past several years. “We say we’re doing what the Chinese call ‘research on society,’” Oi says.
On campus, she’s known as a comparativist who has studied Japan, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and she attracts similarly inclined students. During one session of her spring course on corporate governance in China, Korea and Japan, Oi couldn’t stop nodding her head in agreement as one of her grad students speculated about some parallel economic structures he’d spotted in Asia and Eastern Europe. “You’re asking precisely the right questions!” she exclaimed, and later she wanted a visitor to the class to know about the student’s background. “He is a Bulgarian who speaks five languages,” Oi said, visibly impressed. “He’s studying the enforcement of intellectual property rights in China, Russia and the Czech Republic, and he’s also done research in France and Taiwan. His dissertation is really comparative, and that’s what I really want.”
In her own work, Oi is trying to “get China out of the ghetto” and into the mainstream of political science research. “I don’t want China to be marginalized or seen just as area studies,” she says.“I’d rather see China studied as another case, like England or France, [because] those of us who have area expertise in China have something to contribute to the understanding of a lot of different political trends.”
