Xiaoping Cong, University of Houston

Xiaoping Cong is a scholar of late imperial and twentieth-century China. Her previous book, Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897–1937 (2007), was awarded a prize from the Chinese Historians in the United States society (CHUS) in 2008. Professor Cong has published a number of refereed journal articles and book chapters in both English and Chinese in the United States, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia and the Netherlands. She has also received several prestigious research grants, from Fulbright (2008–09), ACLS (2008–09) and AHA (2006). She was the President of the CHUS from 2011 to 2013, and is currently the secretary-treasurer (2014–2016) of the Historical Society of Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC).

By investigating how a 1943 legal dispute over an arranged marriage in a Chinese village became a legal and political exemplar as well as a series of cultural products presented on the national stage, this book examines the social and cultural significance of Chinese revolutionary legal practice in the construction of marriage and gender relations. The book seeks a conceptual breakthrough in revisiting the Chinese revolution and its impact on women and society by presenting a Chinese experience that cannot and should not be theorized in the framework of Western discourse. The book takes a cultural historical perspective on how the Chinese revolution and its legal practices produced new discourses, neologisms and cultural symbols that contained China's experience in twentieth-century social movements. It shows how revolutionary practice was sublimated into the concept, 'zizhu' or 'self-determination', an idea that bridged local experiences of revolution and the influence of the world.