Dr. Dorothy J. Solinger is Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Dr. Solinger is also Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. She is the author of over 60 articles and five books, and the editor or co-editor of three volumes prior to the current one. Dr. Solinger’s most recent publications are Contesting Citizenship in Urban China (winner of the Joseph R. Levenson prize of the Association of Asian Studies for the best book published in 1999 on twentieth-century China) and States and Sovereignty in the Global Market (co-editor).
2006 0-7734-5929-4 This book is a collection of stories telling how seven Chinese individuals navigated their personal transitions during the Chinese state’s shift from a state-managed and state-owned, planned socialist economy to one primarily driven by market forces. Each author has selected a person s/he met in the course of fieldwork for larger projects. Each subject is a vibrant individual, whose choices and actions exhibit the energy, initiative, grit and nerve called for in confronting what was, for that person, the initially unfamiliar forces of the market and/or the changing face of the state in the wake of the market’s rebirth in China. These are people whose strivings have been both licit and illicit, as they reached out for recognition, riches, or just simple sustenance. There is a mixture of genders, locales, ethnicities, and occupations. No other book available illustrates China’s market transition through a focus on specific, real individuals as this one does. The target audience is students, scholars, and the general public.