Well, first of all, can I say that it's my privilege
to be here, thank you so much for
inviting me. And I'm really happy to take
this opportunity to say a bit about this
forthcoming book. It's called Beijing
from below, and it is based on research
I've been doing since 2007. So, over a
long period of time.
Research that started as what I thought then was an
oral history about everyday life
 in one of Beijing's most disadvantaged
remaining old neighborhoods, in the center
 of the capital. Just literally the
southwestern corner of Tian'anmen Square.
And over the years, I got to know a
number of
local families there who were born and brought up in the neighborhood
or who married into the neighborhood.
The oldest person I knew was an
elderly woman who died in 2011,
aged 87, who I call old Mrs. Gao, who
moved into the neighborhood in 1937,
when she married into the neighborhood, and never
left. She'd never been on a train, she was
completely illiterate and lived a life
of incredible
hardship and uncertainty, and precarity,
in very, very congested and
unsanitary, I would have said unsanitary
conditions, and by that I mean
no sanitation, no hot water, no showers, to
this very day.
And, so, the book, the large part
of the book is chapters that are based on
individual family stories, that are
the result of
my compilations of recordings I've made, of notes I've taken,
just sitting with these people
hanging out and chatting over the years.
None of it is a conventional oral history, because none of it
is based on formal
interviews, with mics at all.
And when I started the project, together with a
local photographer, called Zhao Tielin,
who died, also prematurely, of cancer
in 2010, if I remember correctly. I may have gotten the date a bit wrong.
But, when I started the project,
it seemed to have nothing to do with gender, so, I
sort of thought of it
as something that was quite different from my previous
projects.
I won't now go into why, I started it, that's another
history, but let's just for the sake of argument say that
gender insisted on finding me through the project. And because everyday life in the neighborhood
turned out to be extremely segregated in all sorts of ways
along pretty conventional - traditional quote unquote lines, and
expectations of children and children's
filial support of their parents
had profoundly gendered dimensions, which I hadn't anticipated when I started the project.
So, at the end of the project, it turns out to be almost as much about gender as about anything else.
If there's a single main argument about the book,
it really is that history cannot be
told through a single narrative,
that history is necessarily multiple, and that if you want a story of the transformation of
China's capital since the early 1950s
through the experiences and memories of some of its most impoverished people,
then this is it. And what you get is a story that is not there
in the history textbooks. It reveals a kind of narrative of
China's transformation
over the 20th century that is radically different,
because it's told through the
voices of these very, very disadvantaged people.
Well, that's correct, I completely agree with the way that you put it it. It doesn't equate to
westernization.
I mean, to call what is happening in China now
in the women's movement, and with feminist activism
the effect of westernization, I think, is to
profoundly kind of misconstrue
the sort of multiple, multi-layered circulation of ideas between China, Japan, and that part of the world,
and Europe, and America, that has been going on, really, since the early part of the 20th century.
And, I mean just to go over some of the points that I made yesterday, the
book The Birth of Chinese Feminism
which is about He Yinzhen, the most
extraordinary anarcho feminist,
who, together with her partner in 1907, in Tokyo,
published a journal called Natural Justice in English.
This journal, this is in 1907, before there were any kind of telecommunications,
before it was easy to gain access to information about what was
happening beyond the boundaries of Japan and China, for that matter, but,
the book is a collection of translations, annotated translations and analyses of
the texts that she and her partner, and
some others, at the turn of the century, effectively published.
Which demonstrates an understanding of what we call gender equality.
She had another term for it, but the political economy, if you like, of gender
subordination and the needs of human emancipation
that were, I mean, drew on ideas that referred to the parliamentary system in Finland,
and also that made, I mean, the ideas that are articulated in her texts
are truly original, they are imaginative, they cannot be located either in the West
or simply in China, because they draw on so many different currents, and I should say
into the bargain that Natural Justice and He Yinzhen and her partner
were responsible for the first translation of Marx's Communist Manifesto into Chinese.
This is in an anarchic feminist journal, Which, you know, many people might be quite surprised.
I think for many, many reasons. I mean, just to set the record straight
most of my, I mean, gender has always been, and gender equality has always been at the heart of my
intellectual concerns, my political concerns,
and indeed my social concerns, and my concerns as a parent, as a mother of daughters,
and so it's always been there at the heart of my concerns.
Nevertheless, it's only relatively recently that I begun to
hook up with or link up with young feminist activists, like Li Miazi.
I guess, I mean, to be more generous to my own record.
Since the late 1980s, I've had quite close links
with an earlier generation of
feminists who then worked with the Women's
Federation, and who were
very central in  setting up the Women's Studies courses
and so on and so forth in China.
I think that the links between, I mean, I think
that activism and research at their best
can really sort of nurture each other
so that activism can feed off the kinds of
theorized, and, you know, clearly
theoretically articulated concerns that good
research can come up with, by no
means all research, we know very well there's a lot of
rather bad research out there,
and in return researchers like myself, I mean, can learn a huge amount
from activists to our own benefit. So, I think,
you know, I would say that there's a,
you know, that ideally there's a, researchers, academic researchers, and activists
are not the same, and I think it's important that activists
are serious and true to themselves as activists,
and researchers a serious and true to their
calling, if you want to call it as researchers.
But, ideally the links between them, the intersections
between them really feed and benefit each other
in ways that, I think, you know, that this conference that you have organized has shown can be wonderfully exciting.
