TOC | Summary | Foreword | Introduction | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Notes | Acknowledgments | Author

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

Acknowledgments

This monograph is one stage of what is intended as a much larger project. In the beginning, when I conceived the research as a study of the problems of democratization in China, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars offered me a yearlong fellowship. Later, Mary Brown Bullock, then the director of the center’s Asia program and now president of Agnes Scott College, graciously allowed me to spend that year writing The Private Life of Chairman Mao with Li Zhisui, Mao’s personal physician. I remain deeply indebted to Mary Bullock and the Wilson Center for that exceptionally intense and stimulating year.

     The United States Institute of Peace and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation both provided me generous funding for the broader research of which this monograph is a part. Richard H. Solomon, the president of the Institute of Peace and himself a leading China specialist, was a major source of encouragement, while Joseph Klaits, director of the Institute’s Jennings Randolph fellowship program, and the Institute staff and fellows provided an ideal atmosphere for research and writing. The Peace Institute fellowship in 1993–94 allowed me, with the diligent and good-humored assistance of John Crist and Shaohua Hu, to do much of the background research for this study and to make two field trips to China. The grant from the MacArthur Foundation’s program in Peace and International Cooperation allowed me to spend several more months conducting field research in China, including visits to Bend in the River, to Fengyang and Lishu counties, and to Sichuan province. I am not only profoundly grateful to both institutions for their generous support, but painfully aware of the notebooks full of research notes and the not-yet-satisfactory manuscript that leave this project still frustratingly incomplete. I remain an author whose story has yet to take full shape.

     In China, the people who helped me are, regretfully, far too numerous to name. At the Ministry of Civil Affairs, I am especially grateful to Wang Zhenyao as well as to Bai Guangzhao and Zhan Chengfu. At the provincial level, I benefited especially from conversations with Zeng Fanxu and Fei Yuncheng in Jilin and Zhang Xiaogan in Fujian, and I would like to thank anonymously the many officials in Anhui, Fujian, Jilin, Shanxi, and Sichuan who made my visits both possible and worthwhile. I am especially grateful to Tong Yanqi for allowing me to accompany her to Shanxi, to the vice governor for overseeing the arrangements, to our hosts in Bend in the River, and above all to the villagers who so graciously shared their time, their stories, and their delicious food. I also want to thank the Carter Center, especially Robert Pastor, for including me as a member of the delegation observing village elections in Fujian in March 1997.

     For reading and commenting on drafts of the manuscript I would like to thank Amy Epstein Gadsden, Andrew J. Nathan, and Lucian W. Pye, as well as an anonymous reviewer selected by the United States Institute of Peace. Special thanks go to Institute editor Nigel Quinney, not only for his numerous readings and thoughtful comments but also for his unfailing good humor in the face of an unintentionally recalcitrant author. Whatever mistakes of understanding and interpretation that remain are, of course, my own.

     Finally, my thanks to numerous traveling companions and conversationalists, including Mary Brown Bullock, David Carroll, Phyllis Chang, Allen Choate, Jaime Florcruz, Lincoln Kaye, Ian McKinnon, Steve Mufson, Renþe Schoof, Lorraine Spiess, and Qingshan Tan.

TOC | Summary | Foreword | Introduction | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Notes | Acknowledgments | Author

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