 It's a very real pleasure to welcome you all here this afternoon to this event in honour to commemorate Lisa Croll. I'm going to say a bit more at about five o'clock when we move on to have the talks, for now I'm going to only just say a couple of things. The first thing is to express my regret to all of you here that we're down in this part of the building rather than outside in the fresh air. We took a decision last week and those of you who are around in Sirius will know last week when there was hail and it was cold that actually it probably wasn't very appropriate to do the unveiling and everyone would be standing around shivering. So we thought we'd do it inside and then we'd go outside. As it happens the weather's let us down badly, it's beautiful. So what we're going to do is we'll unveil the plaque and then I suggest that everybody comes out and we go and look at the tree which is flowering and looking very beautiful. I should say there are pictures of the tree here. It's a very lovely tree. I don't actually know what sort it is, a flowering cherry of some kind. I'm sure there's someone here that will be able to tell me exactly what it is. I walk past it every day. It makes me smile. It makes me think of Lisa. I think it's a lovely thing to have. I'm going to ask Sir David Brewer to say a few words. Sir David is a member of our governing body, a long-term friend of Lisa's. He's an ex-Lord Mayor of London so he's very experienced at unveiling things. That's principally why you're here actually because we knew we could rely on you to do the unveiling. He's also Chairman of the Chinese British Business Council. So over to Sir David. Thank you very much, David. This day has rightly been called a celebration. A celebration of a scholarly life. All those of us whose paths crossed with Lisa's benefited, gained so much from the scholarly skills and experience that she brought into our lives. It added an extra dimension, a thoughtful point of view to the deliberations of any organisation with which she was involved. I think in particular of the help and advice she gave me as a member of the Executive Committee of the Great Britain China Centre when I was chairman. First of all, she brightened up our meetings in Belgrade Square. She always arrived smiling and cheerful as in this photograph. She gave the impression of being able to give us as much of her time as we needed. Notwithstanding that we knew that every day she had such a full programme and that transport and getting about in London was not easy for her. Amongst the many gifts that Lisa gave us was the gift of her time. All of us here today know that Lisa was always thinking of others and not herself, right through to the end of her life when she was so courageous. At our meeting she was the person who could draw our discussions together and produce a solution which everyone could approve. Her intellectual skill, her scholarly approach helped her to do this and we all benefited. Similarly, when we were negotiating our business plan with representatives of the Foreign Office, she was an essential part of our small team. Her wise counsel and the respect in which she was held enabled us to reach a fair conclusion. She was never confrontational and she was as good a listener as she was a speaker. When I became involved with her as a member of governing body, Lisa was the person who gave me during various conversations a tailor-made induction course. I remember one particular meeting on a Tuesday morning when we had an appointment at 9 o'clock in her office. I had the good fortune that the previous day had been a special birthday for her and there on the desk was the remains of the chocolate cake. We shared it together and it was just as good as it tasted the night before. Again at that time that induction, an incisive, constructive and sometimes critical analysis of issues, personalities and the institution itself. Through it all shone her love of SOAS, her tremendous and infectious enthusiasm for all she was doing to help its development, working with and for the students and her colleagues. I think Paul, one of the last times that I saw her was when you invited Lisa and me to join you for a lunch you gave for Lord Campbell and Moria. In a very wide-ranging conversation, for example the comparative aspects of Indian religions, I remember the extent and depth of her knowledge and understanding. This tree and the plaque that will be in front of it commemorating Lisa and her contribution to SOAS will remind everybody of her when they pass by and particularly those of us who were fortunate enough to know her. Because all of us here today, family and friends, give thanks for the time that Lisa spent with each one of us during her life. She gave us of her gifts and the resultant memories of her life we take forward in ours. Carefully we say. Good afternoon. I'm Paul Webbly. For those of you who don't know, I'm the director and principal of SOAS. I'd like to welcome you all this evening, especially those who've travelled a long way to be here, and we have a number of people who've travelled a very long way to be here, and to Elizabeth Croll's family and friends. It's a particular pleasure to welcome Lisa's children, Catherine Nicholas, Jim Croll, Lisa's brother, Johnary's wife Ruth, Lisa's nieces. Lisa's mother and sister are unfortunately not being able to be here today. They're sad about, they regret, but they've written to say that they're here in spirit. And so welcome to you all, whether you're here physically or like Lisa's mother and sister, and many friends who I know have written saying they unfortunately couldn't make it here in spirit. Now this evening, we're celebrating the life and scholarly work of Elizabeth Croll. We've got four speakers who will describe and discuss different aspects of Lisa's work and its impact. And I'm sure that from these talks we'll also get a rich picture of Lisa as a friend and a colleague and a sense of why she was so valued and why we miss her so much. But before we move on to the first speaker, I just want to abuse the privilege of being chair to say a few words myself about Lisa and SOAS, and in particular her role as vice principal. Lisa first got to know SOAS as a student. She studied first for an MA in Far Eastern Studies, then for a PhD in anthropology. And between 1977 and the early 1990s, she held a number of different research fellowships at the Contemporary China Institute, the Department of Anthropology here at SOAS, but also other places such as Queen Elizabeth House. In 1990, she was appointed to SOAS to a permanent lectureship, and then she was very rapidly promoted, a model of what one should do, Senior Lecturer 1991, Reader 1993, Professor of Chinese Anthropology in 1995. So that is something for all young academics to aspire to, I think. She was chair of the Centre of Chinese Studies, head of the Department of Development Studies, and in 2002 she was appointed vice principal with special responsibility for external affairs. Now Lisa's role as vice principal was both to represent the school at events, functions, visiting delegations, openings, ceremonies, but also to lead and manage the school's external activities, marketing, publications, consultancy and so on. She also had responsibility for the school's regional centres. Now, I joined SOAS in August 2006, so I did not know Lisa long, but you didn't need to know Lisa long to know that she was someone special. For much of that period when we worked together, she was unwell, but she was determined to carry on with both her academic work and her role as vice principal, regardless of her illness, regardless of the side effects of her treatment. I have to say that I found the way she dealt with her illness was truly inspirational. She was open and frank about her physical state, and I hope some fears. She showed great courage, but she never stopped showing immense concern for others, and she continued to out, throughout, to be engaged and took delight in discussing school matters to the end. So I would go and see her in the hospital and she would talk a bit about her and this, that and the other, and then she'd move on to school issues, and then she'd finish after she'd discussed all these school issues by saying, And how are you, Paul? And are you looking after yourself properly? And I think you ought to get more rest and you're not feeding us and all the rest of it. And I was thinking, yes, that's absolutely extraordinary. She was particularly effective at gently but firmly suggesting that I might like to reconsider a decision or reshape a proposal. And it was always done very gently, but there was a touch of steel, actually more than a touch of steel, to make sure that I actually recognised the salient to the point she was making. She was always very good at making sure I was aware of colleagues' concerns. It's one of the things I really miss. I've done it with people who say I probably may or may not realise this, but Lisa was always excellent at making sure that I was aware of what people were talking about in the corridors. Of course, whenever I went down the corridors, they all ran away, or alternatively stopped talking about it, but she always made sure that I was aware of what was going on. And above all, she helped put things in perspective. Her warmth, her insight, humanity made her a wonderful colleague, a superb vice principal. She was a passionate advocate of the regional mission of Saas, and the place of the regional centres in this. And I know all the regional chairs will be aware of this, that she was an amazingly effective spokesman for them. Whenever we considered issues that had a regional dimension, which is actually much of the time, she would always make sure it was highlighted if there was a danger of it being forgotten. She was also, as might be expected, a very strong advocate of women and women within Saas. There was one occasion when she sat down with me and she discussed every single academic female member of staff in Saas. I was astonished. She identified, and I shan't make any names, I've crossed out the names, she identified what advice Dr X ought to be given, what support Dr Y needed, how Dr Z might need a nudge in the right direction, if we said the right kind of thing, and how Professor W's research was going in a very interesting direction. What was astonishing was just the extent of her knowledge of everybody here, but also her kindness, her concern for each individual, and the acute sense of what was needed to make a difference. In a representative role, she was brilliant. She seemed to know instinctively what to say, but I think that knowing instinctively what to say reflects two things. That's apparent instinct. What it really relates to is a deep knowledge of Saas and a real sensitivity to our audiences, a real sensitivity to people she was talking to. So I always knew that if she was representing Saas events, we were in very safe hands. When we had events at Saas and we do a lot, say something like a lunch for an ambassador or a reception, she had a fine attention to detail. So she would typically come in just before the start of the lunch, and on a scrap of paper would have written down a seating plan, and then she would check a few things and make sure, kind of provide a feminine touch. I've been told it's okay to say it was a feminine touch. Just to make things just right. And then she'd give me a few words of advice on what I should, and more particularly knowing my tendency to put my foot in it, what I shouldn't say. And she was always right, and that attention to the tiny little detail, as well as the big picture, changing those tiny little details made a difference. So I hope that in today's event, we live up to the high standard that Lisa set in looking after events, and I hope that she would approve of the arrangements. I think she would. There's four other things I'd like to mention before we start with the first speaker. The first is I'd just like to draw your attention to the HIV culture and development exhibition at the Brunai Gallery. This is a collection of self-portraits of HIV positive people in India, Thailand and Kenya, and their stories in their own words. You may have noticed when you came in, the big displays on the north lawn, these are from part of the exhibition. The opening evening is on April 16th from 6-9. The exhibition and the opening evening are being dedicated to Lisa Croll and to Veena Shinoy, who was one of the painters who passed away in India several weeks ago. Second, I'd like to mention the State of the World Girls Report, which is also being dedicated to Lisa. This is a forthcoming publication by Plan UK, due to be published this year. Third, I'm very pleased and proud to announce that a new postgraduate residence being built at our Vernon Square campus will be named Elizabeth Croll Hall. You can tell my sense of timing isn't good, because I clearly should have finished with that one, because the fourth thing I want to mention is just to draw your attention. You'll have been handed out leaflets to the Elizabeth Croll Fund. We've already received a substantial number of donations already. We've got over £3,000 in the fund. We've raised very generous donations from Lisa's mother herself. I hope you'll all consider making a donation to this fund. I think it will make a difference to people and it will also commemorate Lisa. So please consider it. Okay, enough of me. The first speaker is Professor Delia Devane, who's a Meritus Professor of Chinese Studies from the University of Leeds. She was brought up, I'm told, in an expatriate New Zealand household in Oxford. We had an email from Lisa's sister who said that you have a long association with their past family with grandparents and great-grandparents at a Targo University. Is this correct? Roughly. Delia left school at 15, unusual for a professor, then completed her A-levels through evening classes before going off to teach in China at age 19. After a postgraduate study in Hong Kong Leeds in Paris, she joined the University of York in the Department of Economics. She moved to Leeds as an elector in Chinese Studies in 1988, became a professor in 1999. She's published widely written many books with a particular focus on women and gender issues in China. Among many publications in this area, Delia edited a book on China's One Child Family Policy with Lisa and Penny Cain, I think back over 20 years ago. She's known Lisa for many, many years. She's also written a biography of Mel Siddol, which I would recommend. She'll talk on pioneering the study of women in the People's Republic. I'm very impressed by your intelligence service because I didn't give all that information about myself. No, we have supplies. Of course, so us would. I'm sad but honoured to be here in Suras today to pay tribute to the achievements of Lisa, as she was known to her friends, who achieved such great distinction both as an academic and as an international consultant and policy adviser on development, on poverty alleviation and on the rights of women and children. Other speakers will focus on her later achievements, but I'm going to talk about Lisa as a pioneer in the study of women and gender in China. Lisa was born in a remote former gold mining town in the South Island of New Zealand, where her father was a Presbyterian minister. And on her mother's side, her family were academics, involved in the founding of the country's first university, University of Otago, which my parents attended, so you're quite right. She herself gained an MA in history at the University of Canterbury in 1967. In London at the beginning of the 1970s, she began to establish herself in a field that would become her life's work, undertaking an MA in Far Eastern Studies at Suras, followed by a PhD in the Anthropology of China. I think with so much world interest in China now, so much movement between China and the West, and such comparatively free access to China, it's perhaps not easy to appreciate what an act of courage and imagination it was for Lisa to involve herself in Chinese studies, and how difficult it was for her and other scholars to gain the materials and access they needed. Very little was written on Chinese women in English prior to the 1970s. In her first book, Lisa listed three titles on women that had preceded her book, none of them academic studies and a few more that were in preparation at the same time. In Chinese, although there was documentary material available, it was an era when no academic studies of this thought were being undertaken for obvious reasons. China and the West were still comparatively isolated from each other. The UK didn't recognise China at an ambassadorial level until March 72, the year that followed the Nixon visit in China's recovery of its seat in the UN. Recognition from New Zealand, Lisa's home country, and mine too, came even later in late December 1972, and its timing actually was determined by rivalry with New Zealand. It would have come a few months later, but the New Zealand Government heard that Canberra was about to go, so Wellington joined in too, and they eventually recognised it on the same day. The more general diplomatic recognition of China was followed only slowly by improvements in academic exchange and access between the West and China. Lisa, like others of her generation, felt they'd missed out on the chance to study in China, which first became possible for Westerners in the mid 1970s, when her student days were already over. She was able to make brief trips to China in 1973, 1977 and 1980, and of course many, many times in later years. However, she rather regretted that as longer field trips to China began to become possible, she was not able to commit herself to one, as she was unwilling to leave her young children for protracted periods. I say that from the heart because my children believe I did leave them for protracted periods, whereas to me it was very short periods, and I imagine Lisa's children may feel also that she was always away, but really she did care and she did try very hard to limit those trips. These problems of access never held these aback, however, in what was to be a long and successful writing career. Her first book, Feminism and Socialism in China, which appeared in 1978, was a pioneering study of the Chinese women's movement from its emergence in the late ninth century. Lisa's was the first account to track the uneasy but important relationships between Chinese feminism, nationalism and Marxism, showing that Chinese feminism had emerged with not modern nationalism, that it predated Marxism in China, and that though intertwined with the nationalist and communist revolutions in China, it has a history of its own which is important to our understanding of China's 20th century social revolutions. This study also rescued from obscurity the Chinese women's suffrage movement which began its distinguished career in the second decade of the 20th century and shed light on feminism in the May 4th movement, the ambivalence of the Kuomintang towards women and on important female historical characters such as Cho Jin and Xiang Jing Yu. It focused on fundamental issues with which Lisa was to be concerned for the rest of her academic and indeed personal life, the relationship between women's roles in the family and their work, reproductive and productive labour, women's access to and control of economic and political resources, the role of female solidarity groups, very important to Lisa personally at this stage, and the possibilities of changing the status and roles of women. Lisa's second major book, Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China in 1981 was based on the research she carried out for her PhD. It brought anthropological approaches to the study of political reform, showing that the cultural specifics of marriage in China were correlated with the structure and function of households. Marriage involved bringing a new member into the husband's family and creating new connections and perhaps alliances between the families involved. This was too important a matter to be left simply to the young couple and she showed that a range of parental involvement in the marriages of their children provided the communist government's attempts to base marriage on free choice and sexual equality. Arranged marriage lived on, at least in the rural areas of the People's Republic where parents still often initiated a match and in the urban areas parents may have given up absolute control but still retained the power of veto over their children's choices. Lisa argued that the economic policies in the rural areas by making the peasant household the basic economic unit of society actually encouraged the persistence of the old marriage customs and worked against the new ideology of marriage. Marriage reform she insisted were hard to implement and would produce conflict between older people and the state. Now over a quarter of a century later when so much of the Maoist collectivist order has been swept away and the young people of whom Lisa wrote and now themselves parents probably trying to influence the marriage choices of their children Lisa's insight into the resilience of traditional social structures of rural China can be truly appreciated. Lisa was quick to see that the post-Mao economic reforms would inevitably have important impacts for women. Her domestic rice bowl food and domestic economy in China published in 83 reflected her interest in women's roles within the rural household and in the same year she produced another book Chinese Women Since Mao a popular overview of the impact of reforms on both rural and urban women. This offered one of the first detailed considerations of the implications of the new household responsibility system in agriculture for women in which Lisa correctly foresaw that de-collectivisation would reveal a rural labour surplus and that where non-agricultural work was available rural men would be likely to take it up leaving less remunerative agricultural work to women. The one-child family policy coincided with this policy of de-collectivisation because the reform leadership in China blamed China's disappointing progress in per capita grain production on the lack of incentive in collective agriculture but also on the rapid growth of populations since 1949. It therefore introduced the one-child family policy to slow population growth. This unprecedented attempt by the state to intervene in one of the most private areas of life made ironically at a time when the reform leadership was reducing state control in so many areas of China. Lisa immediately understood the importance of the new policy and saw that it would conflict with the new economic system in the countryside which had given such importance to households. Households would naturally wish to maximise their future labour force through reproduction. The prevalence of Patrick local marriage would certainly mean that couples whose first child was female would try by every means to have a son. Otherwise, when their daughter married out they would have no younger generation to offer them economic support and care or to carry on the family line. Thus began Lisa's concern with sex ratios at birth and with the problem of missing girls in Asian populations which she would carry forward into future work. Lisa's good relations with the All China Women's Federation enabled her to make a research trip to China at this time to study the implementation of the new policy. She came back with bundles of posters showing radiant young couples with their only daughter in their arms proclaiming that girls were just as good as boys. If only said Lisa. She was very much aware that as long as Patrick local marriage persisted a girl could not be as good as a boy for the Chinese peasant family. She raised funding for a conference on the new policy which was held at Queen Elizabeth House in Oxford and attended by demographers, sociologists and family planning experts. Out of the conference came another new book, China's One Child Family Policy, which has already been mentioned. Although ultimately Lisa can achieve the success she deserved she herself felt that as a woman and as an outsider she had to struggle for recognition in the early days of her career. Incredibly, despite a distinguished record of successful research grant applications and of disciplinary and interdisciplinary publications Lisa was not offered a tenured position until 1990 when she finally obtained a lectureship at Seras. Thereafter of course her progress was meteoric and she came to love an institution of which she had sometimes in the past, it has to be said, been rightly critical. Other people will speak of her work in later years and of her growing recognition from the UN and from international bodies as she made an academic career into a much larger world one. Lisa will be remembered for her books and her countless papers and articles which reflect her strong focus on women, children and the domestic economy but also for the variety of her interests, her quick appreciation of the importance of developments in China in the 1980s and 90s, her readiness to extend her gaze to Asia as a whole and her refusal to be hidebound by narrow disciplinary constraints. She was remarkable for her intellectual energy and for her extraordinary productivity. It is significant that in an overview of writing in English on Chinese women in the last 50 years, published in the last 50 years which has just come out, Gail's hair-shutters women in China's long 20th century, Lisa's publications and in particular her first two books receive many, many mentions. Despite the passage of time and the publication in some cases of more detailed studies for which Lisa's writing had set the agenda, Lisa's books are still recognised as path-breaking and some remain standard texts for courses on Chinese society. Lisa's high standards extended to the domestic sphere. Collaboration with her allowed me to glimpse her impressive stamina. She worked late and rose early but one was always sustained by her excellent coffee, her home baking and her interest in and her humorous comments on the doings of friends and family, colleagues and enemies. Thank you. You can tell me more afterwards about all the criticisms of Sirius. Before your time. I'm sure there's still plenty now that we need to deal with. That was excellent. Thank you very much indeed. Our next speaker is Professor Harriet Evans from the University of Westminster. Professor Evans is Sirius alumna. He was also educated at the University of British Columbia, Beijing Languages Institute and Beijing University. She taught modern Chinese history in Mexico between 1979 and 1984 and having been head of the Chinese section at the University of Westminster, she's now coordinator of the Asian Studies Research at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. Among other books she's published Women and Sexuality in China, Gender, Daughters and Mothers in Urban China. Harriet chaired Lisa's inaugural lecture, I understand as well. So I think it's very appropriate that she should be talking about new directions in the study of women in China and Asia. So, over to you Harriet. Thank you. I have to just mention that on this particular occasion Sirius failed in its intelligence meetings because I think that I was Lisa's first PhD student and it's in part in that capacity that they did have a specific question I asked. I shall get them all. No criticism intended. Long before I met Lisa for the first time in 1986 her name had a particular resonance for me. It was a name that was at once inspirational and daunting, even intimidating. Inspirational because Lisa was one of that small pioneering group of women scholars that included Delia who introduced women into the studies of the People's Republic of China at a time when few considered women's lives a legitimate theme for scholarly inquiry. And daunting because as a pioneer in her field her name seemed to put her in a category of scholars to which few could ever hope to aspire. As I got to know Lisa first as her PhD student then as a friend and colleague the qualities I associated with her name expanded. That she could write new books apparently every year while holding down a job, acting as consultant for major international agencies and travelling extensively all alongside her domestic and family responsibilities seemed to me to indicate an almost alarming organisational efficiency as well as sheer hard work. The advice she gave me as a PhD student her consummate skills as a public commentator on social change in China her confidence in chairing debates and committees and even the speech she gave at a party with her girlfriends as she called us to celebrate her 60th birthday all demonstrated a superb ability to be able to organise her ideas in lucid and accessible ways. At the end of her life Lisa had published 35 books as the recent count done by Ruby and Woody Watson revealed. She began and this not many people I myself in fact didn't even know this as Ruby and Woody have informed me with a little known report on student accommodation in the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London 1969 which is now held in Harvard's Widner Library. She soon moved on to bigger topics however from the historical study of women in 20th century China to the themes that lay at the heart of women's gendered experiences reproduction family and food and to the experiences of discrimination and development that linked women across Asia. These texts were based on analysis of wide-ranging materials from newspaper reports to village surveys many written by her and were written for general as well as specialised readers. Other scholars as Delia has hinted subsequently gave more detailed treatment to some of the themes that Lisa's work opened up and could benefit from methodological opportunities to which Lisa did not have access yet Lisa will be remembered for the innovative quality of her work as an academic and as a policy consultant. So here I want to celebrate her life and work for the inspirational insight she brought to her field through the new directions she explored. I think of these new directions under four groups and I think Lisa would like that approach. Her early work linking feminist and scholarly concerns key concepts and arguments she developed as she moved from history through anthropology to development studies her broadening regional focus from China to Asia through her consultancy work for major international agencies and her commitment to engaging with Chinese officials in heightening awareness about gender discrimination particularly in China. Lisa began her work as an anthropologist of China long before it was possible to conduct ethnographic field work there. Indeed her first visit to China in 1973 as a member of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding was the only way that scholars from the UK could gain entry into what was then a distant and closed world. In retrospect therefore, the interviews, the field work based interviews she conducted for the politics of marriage were remarkable for the data they provided. Through the 1980s repeated short term visits to rural field work sites often undertaken for consultancy work gave her a breadth of knowledge about diverse rural settings and their peoples that few western anthropologists or sociologists of China at the time possessed. Lisa's early work was inspired by a dual interest in feminist and socialist ideas emanating from the women's movement in the west and the experience of women in China across decades of revolutionary change. Feminism and socialism that Delia has already mentioned explored the strategies to redefine the social and political women in China throughout the different stages of the 20th century. In the process she identified many of the contradictions between China's brand of socialism and feminism that later scholars were to revisit in their studies of women, family and social change. The politics of marriage a book of extraordinary prescience in my view offered a more focused analysis of the cultural and political factors influencing marriage arrangements that impeded women's struggle for equal recognition. Looking particularly at the role of household and family as Delia has mentioned in the negotiations of marriage she argued that the official policy of free choice marriage and gender equality conflicted with the interests of both state and the older generation embedded within expectations and requirements of the patrilineal family. Other titles followed with extraordinary speed including the family rice bowl, Chinese women since Mao, China's one child policy, women and rural development in China. Through these and papers she published at the time she again developed a number of ideas that demonstrated unique insights. At a time when data about the imbalance in sex ratio as an effect of the new single child policy was only just beginning to emerge she argued for example together with Delia and Penny Cain that the restoration of the household is the basic unit of rural production, distribution and consumption clearly conflicted with the aims of the birth control policy. Then into the 1990s more works explored themes that focused not so heavily on changing policies and their effects but increasingly on the interplay between these and gendered experiences of life. Hence in From Heaven to Earth published in 1994 and changing identities of Chinese women in 1995 she called attention to the place of gendered concepts of memory, time and space at a time when even though debated within anthropological circles such ideas rarely appeared in works on related issues in China. She contrasted the continuous linearity of male experiences of time embedded in and engendered by their expectations and experiences of family, marriage and ancestry with women's experiences of separation and rupture to argue that social and political interpretations of reform and revolution are always embedded in distinctive gender realities. Lisa's work during this period began to move in another new direction towards issues of change and development in Asia. In this her remarkable and widely cited work Endangered Daughters pointed to commonalities of social, economic and cultural practice that disturbingly linked women's and girls' experiences of discrimination in different parts of Asia. One clear argument that came through this was a critical challenge to policymakers and scholars who held to the modernisation model of change in developing societies, namely that increased production and consumption, higher standards of living and education do not in themselves diminish gender discrimination. Based on analysis of demographic data and ethnographic reports this groundbreaking book demonstrated that in cultural worlds where girls could not substitute for sons despite improved economic development availability of reproductive technologies increased daughter discrimination through infanticide, abandonment and neglect. In one of her last works based on ethnographic studies of East, South East and South Asia she further argued that in contrast to the common argument that modernisation erodes collective familial interests in favour of the individuals, the family contract was being renegotiated across generations as a major source of individual well-being creating intergenerational resources that subsidised larger development strategies. Lisa's interest in comparative studies of gender and family in Asia grew significantly through the work she did for international agencies and Chinese ministries on poverty alleviation, agricultural labour supply, investment and migration. She excelled in this work and she loved doing it and much of the field work that contributed to her later writings came from her role as consultant academic and policy adviser to major UN and international agencies and the list of these is phenomenal. Amongst others feature the ILO, UNRIST, the FAO, UNDP, UNICEF and Oxfam, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation and the British Government's Department for International Development, Difford. In 1998 she was appointed to the UN council in Tokyo where she was elected vice chair and then chair in 2002 to 2004. And as Paul has already noted at a time when health impeded her movements. Recognition of her contribution to work on gender in Asia led to a hectic schedule of opening addresses and keynote speeches at international conferences on gender sex trafficking endangered girls in China and Asia. Elizabeth, I hope, will talk about acknowledgement of her work here at home. Lisa's policy and consultancy oriented achievements however never obscured her feminist commitments. She worked relentlessly to raise awareness of gender discrimination in China not only through her writings but also through her engagements not infrequently through gender training workshops set up with officials from the Women's Federation to the Ministry of Agriculture. Indeed her understanding of the socioeconomic and cultural dimensions of gender discrimination in China and Asia made her a forceful spokesperson for women. In late 2000 the Chinese edition of Women in China Women of China, the Women's Federation's Journal published a lengthy article about her work on endangered daughters that readers of this journal, the length and breadth of China could become acquainted with her work was testimony to her extraordinary status as an advocate of women's and girls' rights across China and Asia as a whole. In ending, people from China, America, Australia and Europe have written to me with apologies for their absence today. They would want me to join me in honouring Lisa for her foresight and resilience. I hope this wouldn't happen. In bringing to the agendas of scholarship and policymaking many issues and concerns, mundane and distressing that characterise the lives of women across China and Asia as a whole. I've noted but a tiny part of them here but Lisa reached out to many not only through the words she spoke and wrote but also through the pictures she got young girls to draw with themselves through the exhibitions of such work she organised. Speaking for myself, I feel privileged and honoured to be associated with her as her student and in a sense as one of those in a position to inherit her legacy through the work we do. Lisa was still absolutely full of ideas when she died. There was a lot more to come that tragically she cannot undertake so it is up to others to continue to explore the issues she raised and identified and to develop them in their own unique directions. Thank you. Thank you, Harriet. That was fascinating and moving. We now have, and I'm also sorry not to have identified you as a PhD student. As you said, the intelligence has gone wrong now. No, I'm done. We now have Professor Coo Hock Bun who's based at Hong Kong Polytechnic University who's also a science alumnus and also one of Lisa's PhD students. They published a book chapter together six years ago on social security rights and contracts in a Chinese village. Hock Bun has been involved in China's rural development for about 15 years now. He's written extensively on rural development on cultural politics, social work education and his most recent work in English is called Moral Responsibility in a South Chinese Village. Responsibility, reciprocity and resistance. His most recent book in Chinese relates, I think, to some of Lisa's interest. It's called Female Voices, A Practice of Feminist Writing. Hock Bun will talk to us about Elizabeth Croll and anthropology in China and this is the point where I hope that the technology works. So I have to say as director of SERS is one of my immense anxieties about the place. Exactly the quality of the infrastructure of us. Something we will improve over the years. Over to you. Thank you for Paul's invitation. I think it is my great honour to be here to give a speech for celebration of the life and work of my most respected PhD supervisor, Professor Elizabeth Croll. I have been shocked and very saddened by the news of Lisa's death in October 2007. At the time, I was the full-time visiting scholar in the Washington University in St. Louis in the United States. I could not accept that it was the true news and tried to verify through the internet. But the truth was that these are really letters. Many scenes of my life in London came back to my mind and Lisa smiles an image rose before me again. I studied my PhD from 1994 to 1998 in the department of anthropologists and sociologists at SERS under the supervision of Lisa. Actually I have many choices to study my PhD at the time because I got full scholarship from the SERS Edward Youth Foundation in Hong Kong. But finally I decided to come to SERS because of Lisa. The world-well-known scholar on subjects such as development, poverty reduction and the rights of women and children in China. After I came to SERS, I knew I made the right decision. I have to say I enjoy my life in London very much because Lisa gave me a lot of freedom to pursue my own research and encouraged me to develop Indigenous Chinese concepts in understanding Chinese pattern resistance in the post-reform China. As I state in my book, Moral Politics in a South Chinese Village, I'm very grateful to Lisa for her warm encouragement at every stage of my research project. Lisa set a great role model for her students and young scholars that we academic should work out from the ivory tower and rethink the position and mission of social scientists and the ways of sociological and anthropological intervention. I remember one time I asked Lisa if she positioned herself as an anthropologist. She told me that she did not want to be high-bound by narrow disciplinary constraints. To her, the most important concern is the practical implication of our research. For many Chinese scholars, Lisa is unforgettable not only because of her academic achievement in advancing field studies in China, but because of her passion in participating in social change and development. Lisa went beyond the academic world and she was deeply involved in the consultancy world for UN agencies, the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, the Four Foundation, Oxford, and so on and so forth. She has many collaborative relationships in China with my Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a Ministry of Civil Affairs, where her work was admired by academics and officials. She advised the Chinese Women's Federation on gender issues and worked with government ministries on poverty reduction, agricultural labour, rural to urban migration, flowing the footprints of Lisa, most of her students in mainland China and Hong Kong also actively engage in social movement and public affairs. For example, my classmate and now my colleague Dr Pung Ngai is the founder of the Chinese Working Women Network in Shenzhen, aiming at promoting betterment for the life of Chinese migrant workers and developing feminist awareness of workers' empowerment. Her book, Making in China, Women Factory Workers in Global Workplace, was owner as the winner of the CYMU awards in 2006 in the US. She became the first Asian winner of these awards since its establishment in 1964. Here, I would also like to highlight the important of Lisa's work to Chinese academic in specific and the Chinese community in general. As you know, and for poetry or other social sciences, programmes were offered in the most university in China in the 1920s. At the time, the Upright Sociology approach was used in teaching and learning, emphasising the importance of social inquiry and field research and applying nature of knowledge. The sociology or anthropology for change and liberation is part of a long tradition of sociology and anthropology that aim at both studying and rebuilding society. However, regards as the capitalist academic discipline by the socialist government or the sociology, social work and anthropology course were eliminated from the university during the restructuring of institutions of higher education in 1952 in the newly established People's Republic of China. China adopted the Soviet model of socialism in 1978, a centralized print economy in which the government provided people with a comprehensive welfare package from cradle to grave. The social sciences including anthropology as a profession was seen as unnecessary and was eliminated from all universities. In 1979, sociology or anthropology as a discipline were restored to the university curriculum soon after the introduction of open door economic policy in the People's Republic of China. However, the problem is that after 20 years discontinuity of development, when sociology and anthropology were restored to the university curriculum, China's social sciences have had a clear break from the work of early anthropologists and have had a break from the central methodological commitment that anthropologists should understand particular phenomenon only by seeing the social world from the point of view of the actor. In China, there has been a chance in the direction of sociology or anthropology to increasingly ascending instrumental positivism and the use of scientific methodology. The idea of scientific methodology has become mostly equal to the application of statistical techniques to government census data or other survey data. Most of the Chinese social scientists still believe that the researcher can be value free and separate themselves from the method used and the object they studied. But the survey data can only provide superficial evidence on the social world. In China, the strong link between academia and community gradually weakened as academics increasingly assume a pose of scientific objectivity and are focused on the creation of new knowledge within academia that's detaching themselves from direct involvement in reform and activism. However, Lisa's work was different from mainstream sociology and anthropology in men and China. Her work hits the great transformation of Chinese society since the end of the 1970s. As Chinese students of Lisa, we are not only proud to say that Lisa is a great scientist who pioneering works on women movement and socialist revolution opens up a paradigm shift on China's studies looking into the everyday life struggle of women in Chinese villages. But we are deeply touched by her social concern for the betterment of Chinese women's life reflecting from her first book, Feminism and Socialism in China, written in 1978. Up to her last book, China's New Consumer, Social Development and Domestic Demand, published in 2006. Her lasting commitment on research into women's life in rural China over three decades had tremendous impact on Chinese academic circles. As one of Lisa's students, we are born to carry on her intellectual spirit which shed light on a community due long to care about ordinary lives. Lisa's unfailing concerns on the improvement of Chinese women's life inspire the Chinese academic community which now begins to talk about the role of public intellectual in defining and redefining the path of social development in China. Lisa's spirit is a challenge to assisting the Germany of China's development and post-earners calling for us to rethink the role of Chinese intellectual and the path of social development for China's future. Today, increasingly more Chinese social scientists have been discontent with the gap between social practice and social research during the last few decades because the needs of the local community have not been understood by social scientists and because the knowledge generated by social researchers have not informed social policy and practice and has really been able to tackle the problem of the local communities. Hence, there is an increasing concern about exploring alternative ways of conducting social research and ways of promoting partnership between practitioners and social researchers to generate practical knowledge that is useful for social change and development. Lisa's life and work demonstrates how an academic engaged into public sphere. She advocates a broader interpretation of scholarship and advises an application of knowledge and more towards social engagement. She believes that education, institutes, faculty and students in collaboration with community should apply their knowledge to the solution of social issues and problems. I remember she told me that she didn't intend to publish her books in academic press but commercial pressures like sex and knowledge because she wanted her work to be read by more readers and hope through her book the western audience could know more about China in a non-biased way. When I asked her why she had so much energy to engage in the work of different NGOs or organisations and international agencies she clearly told me that it was the responsibility of academics. The essence of public anthropology is to bring anthropology into conversation with publics understood as people who are themselves involved in conversation. This is a process involving a double conversation engaged public beyond the academy about matters of political and moral concern. To these public anthropologists should work in close connection with a visible, thick, active, local and often counter-public and work with social movements like labour organisations, neighbourhood associations, community of faith, immigration rights groups, human rights organisations and so on. I have to say the academia community partnership model of education is not easier to achieve but if it is effectively implemented it will have positive impact on social development and our professional education. There is an old Chinese saying that a journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step. 1,000 miles begins with one step. Though the path of social development in China has not been smooth and it still has a long way to go, our older generation start by taking the first step. Today it is our responsibility to follow the footprints of our older generation and as the agents for social development. Thank you. Thank you. Final speaker to end this evening's talks is Elizabeth Wright. Elizabeth is chair of the advisory board of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham where she was previously chair and she's also a SOAS alumna having gained both a BA in Chinese and her MA in area studies from SOAS. After graduating and spending a year in Taiwan she worked first for the Foreign Office, then for the Great Britain China Centre, then for the BBC World Service where she was head of the Chinese Service and then head of the Asia and Pacific Region and from there she moved to Nottingham to the China Policy Institute. I know Elizabeth because she's a member, most importantly for me, of the SOAS Governing Body and a very good member of the SOAS Governing Body she is too. So her talk is entitled Elizabeth Crawl Public Voice Private Person over to you Elizabeth. Perhaps I should say that my qualification for doing this also is because Lisa and I did our master's degrees together longer ago than I care to remember. I was working full time at the time so I did mine part time and she was doing hers full time so that was when I first knew her. Now it's always difficult being the last person to speak as everything's generally already been said and everyone's getting rather weary and dying to get out to have a drink. At least that's what Lisa and I would generally be dying to do and she'd then give me a lift home and we'd have a good analysis of the occasion. Not always a charitable one. Others have talked eloquently and with great warmth and admiration about Lisa's work as a social anthropologist and specialist on China and the work that she did for the Ford Foundation, the ILO, etc. So I'm not going to go into any of that but it's just one piece of research I remember that she did that I was always very jealous of her access because I having worked for the Foreign Office and then for the BBC was always seen I think by the Chinese authorities as a kind of running dog of the British government and with the BBC as working for an enemy radio station so it was always much more difficult for me to get access so it was always fascinating for me when she came back from a trip and then told me what she'd seen, what she'd done and these were things that I could never do and there was one really interesting bit of research I remember that she did for the World Bank a movement of large numbers of people to make way for big civil engineering projects and of course the Three Gorges Dam was one of these and she came to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that they were generally worse off because of course they moved from fairly decent land pushed higher up hillsides and mind you one does sometimes wonder about the value of such research when the results are then largely ignored. Lisa had always been a public voice on China attending meetings at the FCO, the Treasury and the Government Departments but there's no doubt that this exposure increased enormously after she became Vice Principal of SOAS in 2002. Now Paul's talked about Lisa's role as Vice Principal of SOAS and I really want to talk about my personal observations of how she operated in that role. As others have said she was hugely sociable and she really enjoyed the dinners, receptions and conferences that went with the job and despite this chronic medical condition standing and walking really painful at times she rarely missed any social activities and networked brilliantly and whether she was hosting a reception at SOAS for a Thai princess or giving a speech at mansion house she was always perfectly prepared as Paul said she rarely if ever did speeches off the cuff she wrote very careful and well thought out notes always by hand impossible for anybody else to read if she'd keeled over. On scruffy bits of paper she was very tiny handwriting and the amount of thought in each speech was very apparent and as Paul again said I was always struck by how she managed to say something extremely appropriate and often very original on each occasion and the other thing very important she always remembered to thank everyone who'd helped to make things a success whether it was a host on the occasion or whether it was the caterers. When Lisa was invited to join the Deputy Prime Minister's China Task Force she was absolutely delighted as she felt it put her right at the centre of the UK's thinking on China and Britain's relations with that country she added a particular viewpoint and depth of knowledge that was I think it's fair to say unique around that table and I think that her loss to that particular form is really unfortunate. She was also an executive member of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs and Deputy Chair of the Great Britain China Centre as David Brewer said and I know that Katie and all her colleagues in the centre were extremely grateful for Lisa's generosity with her time, her wise advice and her commitment to the centre. She was genuinely interested in what the centre did and promoted it tirelessly and she did give an awful lot of time to it. She always thought of the good of the centre and never what might be personally advantageous to her and she loved the working lunches at the Athenaeum. The consequence of this growing interest in the UK about so many changes in China meant that Lisa was increasingly asked by broadcasters such as the BBC to comment on developments in China and this is where I think the public voice title is particularly opposite and she was always ready to do these interviews they must be really stumped without her I often think whether for womans our BBC world, news night or the world tonight but it wasn't always easy for her as so often in explaining official Chinese government policy hang on, sorry my pages stuck together She was then accused of supporting these policies I'm afraid people only ever hear what they want to hear and the worst occasion and I talked about this at Lisa's funeral but I think it's worth repeating that I can remember was when Lisa was part of a panel which reviewed the Channel 4 programme The Dying Rooms about the grim conditions in which Chinese orphans, especially girls were living and dying and again I remember Lisa stayed very calm and put the Chinese government viewpoint in what was a very heated panel discussion She was then pillar it in newspapers like The Observer for having apparently supported the Chinese government position which was not the case and I remember she was very depressed and upset by that reaction and swore she'd never do another interview about China but of course she did and that was an example of her great integrity and courage she felt that someone needed to try to keep the record straight and make objective comments about Chinese policy even if she herself totally disagreed with them One truly odd thing about Lisa was that she really enjoyed committee meetings She did I remember once when I was moaning about a full day of meetings she said well I love meetings and she did she liked the opportunity to contribute to have her say and she never hesitated to take an unpopular position if she thought that was right and she brought this fierce integrity into her life Whether that was speaking up for developments in China pressing for a better deal for women in the academic world or stating her personal views about changes in British society One of her increasingly strong themes was that immigration was becoming a major problem in the UK with its unforeseen pressures on housing education and the NHS not a popular stance to take in the circles in which Lisa moved but typical of her integrity and she did have the good grace to laugh when I pointed out that she too was an immigrant but that was the public Lisa and what about the private woman Well one thing that every single person has mentioned since her death and indeed when she was alive was her amazing capacity for friendship she would always make time for her friends and was quite brilliant at talking through their problems and helping to solve them Lisa like most people I suppose was more complex than might have appeared at first sight The fact that she did not do her first degree in anthropology as others have said made a sensitive criticism of her work by narrower academics Most of us would argue that it was her very training as an historian that gave her the ability to see her research in the round and to make it very accessible to the general public and I think that so many people have read her books and have learnt so much about China from those books that these criticisms of her are really carping Her occasional treats were trips to the opera which she loved especially composers like Prachini and Berlioz visits to the cinema and meals out with friends A cup of coffee and a croissant with a friend was always a treat, never to be taken for granted especially a whole almond croissant Her rather austere family background made her desperately careful with money She bought many of her clothes in charity shops and then used her sewing skills to alter them and as we all know she used to wear these great jackets and really beautiful scarves not for her the sort of scruffiness of academia But her meanness with herself nearly drove her daughter Kath mad not to mention her closest friends Having got tenure rather late in her career she was obsessed by the need to save her retirement and there's a bitter irony in the fact that she wouldn't live to enjoy the fruits of her own carefulness All of us herself included I suspect was surprised and delighted by the huge pleasure which she gained from her grandson Rafi She loved looking after him and was a marvellous grandmother I hate to use that hackneyed pray she lived life to the full but she did She always packed in that extra as Harriet has said or several extra things that meant she was generally late for everything Having always underestimated the horrors of the London traffic She was great at working out backstreet routes zipping along with a cup of tea or coffee perched perilously somewhere on the dashboard talking at top speed She was a technophobe coming late to the delights of the internet and she never learned how to text from her mobile despite many efforts to help her with this Another thing that will always remain for me apart from all these other qualities was Lisa's great sense of humour She was really funny and managed to retain that sense of humour even through very difficult times in her life including her last months when her laughter was sometimes mixed with tears I don't want to sound like Lord Spencer when he made his infamous speech at the funeral of Princess Diana but I want to conclude by trying to encapsulate Lisa as I knew her for more than three decades She was both firm in her opinions whilst being insecure vulnerable, humble yet with a quite correct sense of her own worth and abilities which were innumerable She was very aesthetically aware She was a brilliant networker for any organisation that she worked for whilst personally actually I thought quite shy She was a really loving friend for her family and all who knew her both professionally and personally she's irreplaceable She'll be remembered with great love and a sense of loss but great gratitude for her life enhancing qualities Thank you That brings the evening to an end Can I thank on all of our behalves evening speakers who fulfilled their brief wonderfully every one of them I'm sure that Lisa would have been proud and pleased would have enjoyed what they've said and as Elizabeth said would have taken care to thank them all personally, individually She always made sure that people were thanked and felt good about what they'd done always in all the events she was involved in I'd also like to thank those who put this event together Peter Barob who conceived and coordinated the event Jane Savie, Kelly Scott managed the administration publicity and so on Richard Paulson is colleagues arranged for the tree and the plaque and I hope you all agree that's been very successful The print room, the AV technicians Gengaraclyff, conference office Mary O'Shea, Richard Wittis so us musicians will come on to them later Couching department, development office all helped in a number of ways I'm not going to mention everybody by name naturally lots of others have been involved but I want to thank everybody for making a great event and I hope you all agree that's been successful The print room, the AV technicians but I want to thank everybody for making this evening a success and with that final thanks can I invite you all now to move to the Brunais Suite where there'll be a reception but before we all rush off I was noted Elizabeth's comments about Elizabeth sitting there thinking it's about time we had a drink isn't it? I'd like to present Catherine with a book Is that alright Catherine? So there you go The book is a book about psoas it's called psoas, a celebration in many voices that a number of you will know and I think that's like the celebration we've had this evening celebration in many voices of Lisa so thank you all it's a journey to a drink no questions though