Li has been called ‘Mr Stock Market Li’ 厉股份, a nickname that first appeared in English in a New York Times article in 1989: One of his best known concepts is the idea of selling shares in Chinese state-owned enterprises on stock markets which he first proposed in the early 1980s. At that time, China’s policies of Reform and Opening Up had just begun. State-owned and collectively-owned enterprises were extremely inefficient: there were a myriad of problems brought about by unclear property rights and the lack of specialised skills, not to mention the challenges resulting from the devastation that the Cultural Revolution had unleashed on China’s manufacturing sector. With large numbers of sent-down youth returning to cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were also great imbalances in labor supply and demand.

In an Employment Forum organised by the Research Department of the CPC Central Committee Secretariat and the State Labor Bureau in April 1980, Li first proposed a share-holding system for state-owned enterprises: ‘Call on everyone to raise funds, set up a number of enterprises, and allow companies to solve unemployment problems by issuing stocks and expanding their business’ (“可以号召大家集资，兴办一些企业，企业也可以通过发行股票扩大经营解决就业问题”). Three months later, at the National Conference on Employment in the summer of 1980, Li again raised his share-holding proposal.

In the early 1980s, adopting the share-holding system was discussed mainly as a tool to fight unemployment but in 1986, Li began to discuss his share-holding idea as a major direction of economic reform. In September 1986, he wrote an article titled ‘A Proposal for China’s Ownership Reform’ 我国所有制改革的设想 which was published in the People’s Daily. The piece raised economic as well as political concerns and included a pre-emptive defense of his proposal against the criticism that share-holding was tantamount to privatisation. The orthodox party-state view of the time held privatisation to be unacceptable. Li argued:

The share-holding system itself has no social nature, its nature depends on the nature of the investors. The relationship between these two are like the relationship between form and content. The share-holding system is a form of business organisation in accordance with the development of a commodity economy and not peculiar to the capitalist system. A socialist society adopting a share-holding system does not imply a change in public ownership, but replaces the old type of public ownership instead with a new type of public ownership.
股份制本身没有什么社会性质，其性质取决于投资者的性质，二者的关系如同形式与内容的关系一样。股份制是一种符合商品经济发展的企业组织形式，并不是资本主义制度所特有的,社会主义实行股份制并不意味着改变企业的公有制的性质，而是以新型的公有制代替传统的公有制。

Though the share-holding system was first adopted experimentally in 1980, it was not officially acknowledged until the 15th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1997.

Li is also known for his macro-economic analysis of China’s development, especially the idea of the ‘unbalanced Chinese economy’ 非均衡的中国经济, which Li himself says is his most representative economic idea. In Socialist Political Economics 社会主义政治经济学, a book published in 1986, Li argued that demand being greater than supply is helpful in stimulating economic growth. In the late 1980s, Li began to talk about another type of imbalance in the economy, namely that micro-economic participants and companies did not have full investment and operational rights, and were therefore unable to take proper responsibility for investment and operational risks. Li proposed a variety of enterprise reforms and a greater role for the market alongside the state.

In recent years, Li has remained an active commentator on such economic and social issues as skyrocketing housing prices and employment problems. In 2002, he proposed a controversial way to calculate the Gini coefficient (the universal measure of income disparity) which he argued was more suitable for China’s uniquely Chinese conditions. In Li’s approach, the Gini coefficient of urban and rural areas had to be calculated separately first before being combined, using differently weighted proportions, to derive the final overall figure. Thus, while many economists have calculated China Gini’s coefficient to be above 0.4, indicating a significant degree of income inequality, in 2007 Li famously came up with a figure of 0.2, projecting a far brighter and much less unequal state of affairs (thereby putting China on a similar footing to countries such as Germany, Norway and Sweden).

In November 2013, Li published a book titled Chinese Economy in Dual Transition (sic) 中国经济双重转型之路. The book’s release coincided with the holding of  the Chinese Communist Party’s Third Plenum in Beijing. Chinese media reports indicate that Li’s book, in particular those sections concerning his ideas on reforming property rights and rural land rights, had an influence on official discussions at the Third Plenum.

Additional References

Li Yining’s columns in the People’s Daily: 厉以宁专栏
2010 Netease Interview 厉以宁：非均衡的中国经济
2013 Interview: 厉以宁：我与股份制
New York Times: ‘MR. STOCK MARKET’: Li Yining; Selling China on a ‘Public’ Privatization
Beijing Review: What’s the Real Income Gap

The post Li Yining 厉以宁 appeared first on The China Story.

As an undergraduate, Li Yinhe studied history at Shanxi University from 1974 to 1977. After a brief stint as an editor at Guangming Daily, she was assigned to a research position in the newly-founded Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), where she pursued research on marriage and the family. It was during this time that she began to learn about sociology, which was excluded from Chinese universities in 1953 and was not restored as an academic discipline until the late 1970s. From 1982 to 1988, Li lived in the US where she studied at the University of Pittsburgh. Her husband Wang Xiaobo 王小波 (later a noted writer in his own right), whom she married in 1980, joined her in 1984 on a scholarship in East Asian Studies. When she returned to China, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow under the acclaimed sociologist Fei Xiaotong 费孝通.

Li and Wang co-authored Their World: a Study of Homosexuality in China 他们的世界——中国男同性恋群落透视 (Hong Kong: Cosmos Press 1992 and Shanxi People’s Publishing House 1993). The book was widely praised as a ground-breaking study of a marginalized subculture in China. During the 1990s, Li continued her research into Chinese sexuality in the context of family and institutional norms. Her two best known publications of this period are Love and Sex for Chinese Women 中国女性的感情与性 and The Sub-Culture of Homosexuality 同性恋亚文化, both of which were published in 1998 by China Today Press 今日中国出版社 in Beijing. Li has expressed frustration over the difficulty of pursuing her research. In the preface to her 1997 book, The Subculture of Sadomasochism 虐恋亚文化, a survey of Western scholarship on sadomasochistic practices and their literary representation, she lamented:

Our level of understanding of sex is equivalent to that of the Western world before the 1960s… . To a majority of Chinese, Western academic discourse [on this topic] must seem completely alien, something hailing from a different planet.

Li was an avid reader of the writings of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In 2001, she published Foucault and Sex 福柯与性, a study of the institutionalisation of sex and the development of sexual politics, based largely on the first volume of Foucault’s three-volume study of the history of sexuality in the West. It brought her many new fans among graduate students in China interested in postmodern theory.

Li has also been a vocal advocate for minority sexual practices, calling for their protection under Chinese law as an integral part of citizens’ rights. The causes she has supported range from the rights of homosexuals in the 1990s to the decriminalisation of pornography and ‘group licentiousness’ 聚众淫乱 in the 2000s. She has made annual proposals to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) urging for the legalisation of gay marriage.

Her activism and commentary did not always sit well with her employer, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). In a 2007 blog post, Li wrote that the CASS leadership was:

put under pressure by ‘people who are not ordinary’ and has asked me to shut up. In fact, the bosses do not regard what I talk about as politically sensitive, and the pressure was not of a political nature… . Yet  they seem unable to withstand social disapproval for remarks I made in a setting that is not politically sensitive… . So I’ve decided for the time being (perhaps forever) that I will:

• 1. accept as few media interviews as possible; and,
• 2. publish as few sex-related articles as possible.

Three years later she broke her silence. When, in 2010, Ma Yaohai 马尧海, formerly an assistant professor at the Nanjing Institute of Technology, stood trial on charges of having engaged in ‘group licentiousness’ by hosting an online swingers group and was sentenced to three and a half years, Li publicised his plight and argued in his defense. Similarly, in 2011, when Cheng Jianjun 成建军, a government official in Kunming, was sentenced to three and a-half years for the same offense, Li was a vocal critic of the verdict, arguing in several online commentaries that the law against ‘group licentiousness’ was obsolete and unconstitutional and should be abolished. She compared it to the law against ‘hooliganism’ 流氓罪, which encompassed offences from disruption of public order to showing disrespect for women, making the definition of a criminal act highly vulnerable to interpretation. The law against hooliganism was amended in 1997.

Li has advanced a similar argument against the criminalisation of pornography. In 2006, when Chen Hui 陈辉, a webmaster for three porn websites, was convicted of ‘disseminating obscene materials’ and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment, Li criticised the court ruling and called for abolition of the crime. She argued that when compared to the law in other countries and considering the guarantees in China’s own constitution, the selective prosecution of the law in China reflected a country that ‘still has not emerged from the Middle Ages’.

In 2012, Li retired from CASS. She published her last research monograph in 2009. Titled The Women of Houcun 后村的女人们, it was a field study of gender inequality in a southern town. She maintains a visible public presence on her blog and microblog. She also devotes much of her time to educating her adopted son and describes her present lifestyle as ‘Thoreau + microblogging’ 梭罗加微博. She has recently started writing fiction about transgressive sexual practices, including a blog-published SM-themed short story, but has rejected comparisons to her late husband’s famous writings.

Additional links

• Li Yinhe’s microblog and blog

The post Li Yinhe 李银河 appeared first on The China Story.

Born into a rural Hohhot family in Inner Mongolia in 1939, at the age of nine Li Tuo went to Beijing with his family, where his mother worked as a servant for a high-ranking Communist official family. A biographical account states that the family adored the young boy, treated him well and sent him to a primary school attended exclusively by children of top officials. Li was in the same class as Zeng Qinghong, the influential Politburo member and close ally of Jiang Zemin who served as China’s Vice-President from 2003 to 2008.

After graduating from the prestigious 101 Middle School next to the ruins of the Garden of Perfect Brightness in 1958, Li went to work at a heavy machinery factory where he spent the next two decades. During this time, he wrote stories and hoped to pursue a literary career. His first work was published in 1975. In 1979, he was admitted to the Chinese Writers’ Association, thereby becoming an officially recognized writer. The same year, he co-authored with the film director and his then wife, Zhang Nuanxin (张暖忻, 1940-1995) a widely-discussed article, ‘On Modernizing the Language of Film’  谈电影语言的现代化. By the early 1980s, Li had established his reputation as a literary critic and prize-winning fiction writer. At this time, he gave up writing fiction and turned to literary criticism. He became a prominent and outspoken figure in the literary world that was growing alongside and in competition with the Party-state cultural apparatus.

His admirers speak of Li Tuo’s charismatic personality and his dedication to mentoring the work of emerging writers. This image of the generous maestro is a familiar archetype in Chinese intellectual culture, inspired by prominent thinkers and writers of the May Fourth era  (roughly 1917-1927), most notably Lu Xun. In the 1980s, Li’s home was a regular gathering place for literary aspirants, several of whom later achieved fame as writers, including Yu Hua 余华 and Su Tong 苏童. During his tenure as Deputy Chief Editor of the influential journal Beijing Literature (1986-1989), he published innovative writing, for which the journal enjoyed an avant-garde reputation in the 1980s. He also edited a number of anthologies to showcase leading literary currents of this post-Mao period: ‘root-seeking’ literature (中国寻根小说选), experimental literature (中国实验小说选), and the new realism (中国新写实小说选).

His demeanour and style were not, however, always appreciated. More unruly members of the rambunctious literary sphere of the 1980s lambasted Li for his obsession with discovering and claiming a unique appreciation of new talents; some mockingly called him ‘Grand Master Tuo’ 陀爷. The literary firebrand and later dissident Liu Xiaobo pilloried imperious new cultural authorities in the following terms:

The famous in China are much taken with acting as benefactors of others who caress and suckle the unknown. They use a type of tenderness which is almost feminine to possess, co-opt, and finally asphyxiate you. This is one of the peculiarities of Chinese culture… . Some people have the talent to excel, but shying from the dangers of going it alone, they instead seek out a discoverer (Bo Le 伯乐). They look for support, for security, so they can sleep easy; lunging into the bosom of some grand authority or other, and doze off in their warm embrace.

During the tumultuous year of 1989 Li was among the intellectual shock-troops in favour of radical change; he did not stay around to face the consequences of the feverish agitation that so many intellectuals had encouraged. Following his discrete departure for the US, Hao Ran (1932-2008), the Party writer who enjoyed unrivaled fame during the latter years of the Cultural Revolution, was appointed Chief Editor of Beijing Literature. The journal’s subscriptions fell sharply.

Li lived in the US for the next five years. During this time, he produced numerous essays, expressing his increasing ambivalence about the country, its culture, its values, democracy and ‘the West’ in general. He professed admiration for the American way of life but was at pains to point out that the prosperity required to sustain it came through exploiting Third World countries and environmental degradation. In one article, for instance, he wrote that his love of well-trimmed American lawns turned to disillusion when he learned about the quantities of pesticide required to maintain them (not to mention the labour of non-legal immigrants to keep them manicured; see 现代文明背后的野蛮, 天涯, 2007).

For his limited understanding of North America, Li is recognised by many as an astute observer of Chinese intellectual life. He made his first trip back to China in 1994, and has divided his time between China and the US thereafter, being one of many intellectual zealots who critique the West while enjoying the privileges bestowed by a Green Card.

As a critic, he is best known for his essays on Maospeak, Mao wenti 毛文体, a term he coined in 1989 (the term ‘Maospeak’ or Maoyu 毛语, was previously used by Geremie Barmé in a series of conversations with Chinese intellectuals in 1987). He attracted controversy when he examined the influence of Maospeak on the ideas and language of eminent Chinese writers. (On the limitations of ‘Maospeak’ as a concept, see Geremie R. Barmé, ‘New China Newspeak‘ in the China Story Lexicon on this site). Li’s 1993 article, ‘Ding Ling is Not So Easy: the complex role of intellectuals and their discursive behaviour under Maoism’ 丁玲不简单——毛体制下知识分子在话语生成中的复杂角色 (今天, 1993.3) generated considerable debate. Of Ding Ling (1904-1986), one of China’s best known woman writers and an intellectual luminary who suffered twenty-five years of harsh treatment under Mao, Li wrote that she had so thoroughly absorbed Maospeak that it infected the way she thought and spoke.

This article was re-published in Yesterday’s Stories 昨天的故事 (Oxford, 2006), an anthology of writings by Li  and other writers that had first appeared in the 1990s in the highly regarded magazine Today 今天. Li was a regular contributor to the magazine’s ‘Rewriting Literary History’ column. Li also co-edited, with the poet Bei Dao, The 70s 七十年代 (Oxford 2008, Sanlian Joint Publishing, 2009), a book of interviews in which cultural figures who achieved fame and success in the 1980s, the first decade of Reform-era China, looked back on their formative influences in the 1970s. In 2000, Li co-founded Horizons 视界, a journal seen as a vehicle for ‘New Left’ ideas. Li’s own writings reflect the critical views published in the journal of a world despoiled by ‘late capitalism’. He has also continued to write on Chinese literary history and the politics of language use in China. As Geremie Barmé has remarked, ‘Like many intellectuals of the globalised New Left, Li too is adroit at navigating the authoritarian Party-state system of the mainland while achieving a measure of intellectual kudos among fellow travellers in international academia.’

Li Tuo is currently a research scholar at the East Asian Languages Cultures Department at Columbia University. His wife Lydia H. Liu is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the same university.

Additional links

• Liu Kunya 刘琨亚, Shenzhen Evening News 深圳晚报, 李陀：只做批评家, 25 November 2006.
• Beijing Youth Daily 北京青年报, 李陀：种种现实 一种目光, 29 July 2009 – In this interview Li Tuo comments on China’s media culture: the net, TV, film, and literature.
• Horizons 视界 http://www.hnzose.com/vision/

The post Li Tuo 李陀 appeared first on The China Story.

Due to his broad areas of academic interest, Lei Yi had a frequent media presence around the centenary of the Xinhai Revolution in 2011. Among other things, he argued that the resistance to substantive socio-political reform within the Qing court caused the dominant power-holders to make a series of crucial errors, or missteps, that by default empowered and emboldened radical revolutionaries. This contributed directly to the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the collapse of dynastic rule in China. Lei’s essays on the subject are collected in the volume A Delayed Modernisation 被延误的现代化 (Daxiang Publishing House, 2002).

In a recent lecture, presented on the one-hundred and first anniversary of the revolution under the aegis of the Hunan University of Technology in Zhuzhou 株洲湖南科技大学, Lei discussed the relevance of the late-Qing period to the understanding China’s post-1978 reform era.

The echoes of the late Qing 晚清 in contemporary politics is something that Lei Yi pursues as a public intellectual, although it is a popular topic with many other writers and thinkers when debating China’s faltering reforms. Lei, however, brings a particular verve and stylistic flair, not to mention deep scholarship, to the discussion. In his frequent contributions to liberal-leaning popular media, he finds historical precedents for hot-button issues concerning contemporary culture and citizenship. For example, in a Southern Metropolis Daily 南方都市报 op-ed dealing with the controversy over the incursion of English terms and other ‘letter words’ 字母词 into Chinese texts, he outlines the ultimately futile opposition by late-Qing statesmen such as Zhang Zhidong 张之洞 and Duanfang 端方 to neologisms imported into Chinese from Japanese.

Lei Yi is also a microblogger who takes an active role in online discussions of current affairs. He contributed a short video commentary on behalf of Chen Guangcheng 陈光诚 when the blind activist was under house arrest, and posted dismissive remarks on articles that appeared in state media denouncing Chen’s US-assisted escape.

A recent masterful book, Li Hongzhang and the Last Four Decades of the Qing Dynasty 李鸿章与晚清四十年, subtitled ‘an old bureaucrat and an empire’ 一个老官僚与一个帝国 (Shanxi People’s Publishing House, 2008), uses key palace memorials 奏折 and letters 信函 to examine the famous late-Qing foreign minister’s career in the arenas of domestic affairs, diplomacy and modernisation. It was chosen as one of the year’s best books by a panel made up of cross-straits academics and mainland book journalists.

Lei Yi is the Chinese translator of Danny Wynn Ye Kwok’s Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900-1950 (1965); Paul A. Cohen’s Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and reform in late Ch’ing China (1974); and, Min-chih Chou’s Hu Shih and Intellectual Choice in Modern China (1984).

Additional Links:

• Lei Yi’s blog and microblog.
• ‘Reflections of a Revolutionary’ 一位革命者的反思, on Li Xin 李新, Tencent History, 腾讯历史 30 July 2010.
• ‘The Qing Court Manufactured Revolutionaries‘ 清政府恰事革命党的制造厂, Southern Metropolitan Daily 南方都市报, 12 May 2011.
• ‘They Manufactured Revolution in the Xinhai Year’ 辛亥革命是被逼出来的, Global Times 环球时报, 11 October 2011.

The post Lei Yi 雷颐 appeared first on The China Story.