 Thank you. My name is Nirmala Rao and I'm Pro Director for Learning and Teaching here at SOAS and I would like to welcome you all on behalf of the director and the school, particularly those who've traveled a long way to be here at this very important occasion. I'm particularly delighted to see Julia's family and friends. It's great to see them. I'm sure they'll enjoy seeing her in this special work setting. We have many guests here from a wide variety of organizations and we really appreciate you taking the trouble to be here. It all adds to the occasion that SOAS, that is a SOAS inaugural, a celebration, a ceremony and an enjoyable intellectual event for the speaker and for the whole SOAS community. So thank you all. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture, which is the first of a set of nine fascinating inaugural lectures this year, which will take place throughout this term and the following term. As I said, I'm really looking forward to it, not least because it'll give me the opportunity to appreciate Julia as an academic and to find out more about her research. Julia joined the Politics and International Studies Department here at SOAS in 1994 and for nearly 10 years, she served as the editor of the prestigious China Quarterly. Her own research interests span both sides of the Taiwan Straits, focusing on state and institution building and more recently on China's going out policy towards the developing world, particularly with respect to Africa and Latin America. Throughout her time here, Professor Strauss has looked to Professor Steven Chan as a mentor and to Professor Steven Smith as a comrade-in-arms, she tells me, slogging through the back quarters of archives in search of the history of the early People's Republic of China. We are privileged to have Professor Smith and Professor Chan here with us tonight. Professor Strauss will be introduced by Professor Steven Chan, who is very well known to all of us here at SOAS. He holds the chair in world politics at this institution and before entering academic life late in his career, he was a peacekeeping diplomat in the wars of Africa and helped pioneer modern electoral observation at the birth of Zimbabwe. He was involved in both the first and the last of a series of negotiations that led from 1984 to 1989 to the release of Nelson Mandela in the subsequent year in 1990. Steven remains involved in several diplomatic assignments and initiatives and one of the most compelling was as a member of the trilateral dialogue on Africa, China and the United States, convened in the first decade of the current millennium. Steven was an advisory member of the African delegation as talks proceeded in all three continents and this experience is reflected in his latest book, The Morality of China in Africa. Steven has published widely 30 academic books, five volumes of poetry and two novels and has been deemed four times at three universities all in Britain, including twice here at SOAS. In 2010 he was honored by the International Studies Association with the title Eminence Scholar in Global Development and in the same year was awarded the OBE for services to Africa and higher education. At the end of Professor Julius Trance's lecture, the vote of thanks will be given by Professor Steven Smith. Professor Smith is a senior research fellow at Old Souls College, Oxford and a professor of history at the university. He's also a fellow of the British Academy and editor of the journal Past and Present. He's a historian of modern Russia and China and has published on the comparative history of revolution and people of Russia and China. His other works include Nationalism and Labour in Shanghai and Communism in Shanghai between 1920 and 1927. He's currently working on a book that compares the efforts of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China to eliminate religion and superstition from daily life in areas such as popular religion, life cycle rituals, agriculture and folk medicine. We are indeed truly grateful to both of them for being part of today's events and to introduce Professor Strauss. I'll now pass over to Professor Steven Chan. Thank you, Pro Director and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, it's my very great pleasure and privilege to welcome all of you here this evening to this inaugural lecture. I wonder whether I could just say something about the tradition of these inaugural lectures in the first instance. Not so much here at SOAS but in the history of universities. This is a medieval tradition which many hundreds of years after the first foundation of European universities and the 1200s continues today. It's known as the taking of a person's chair, the professorial chair and that particular speech comes from the fact that in those old medieval days you would all be sitting on benches and only the new professor was entitled to sit on a chair while she addressed you. It was a chair that was like a throne very, very much in those days as now because the professor was meant to speak truth to power, speak truth from her chair to those seated on thrones in power as an equal truth to the rulership over others and to intervene on behalf of others. The idea of universities as having a special role in society continues to this day so that when you become a professor, when you attain a chair, becomes not only a great academic occasion, it's an auspicious occasion or it used to be in terms of European history and in terms of European culture. We continue that tradition here at SOAS because we mark the chair not only as an academic occasion but as rising to a certain stature which tonight we wish to honor by welcoming Professor Strauss to give this inaugural lecture. One of the things that greatly impressed me when I joined the School of Oriental African Studies and I came here as its Foundation Dean of Law and Social Sciences was the sheer quality and scale of the work of my colleagues and I was thinking in particular how impressed I was by the work of Professor Strauss when I first joined this particular institution. She has developed and sustained a theme in her work which has resonated through a very great number of volumes, books and other publications or to do with China and Taiwan or to do with the development of Chinese politics and the cultural manifestations of those politics. And one of the things that has always greatly impressed me about some of her work by herself and also in concert with other colleagues has been the investigation of the intersection between politics and the performance of politics, the performance of politics in almost a theatrical fashion. Not theatrical in the sense of being staged on a platform in a theater but theatrical in the sense that within society a certain performance of politics is required in order to convince those who are ruled that they are being ruled in a way which satisfies their demands and their aspirations. There's a certain cultural manifestation of this in different societies. What Professor Strauss has done is to investigate how this is done in China starting from the beginning of the last century coming on to the present day and this particular theme is reflected in the title of her lecture tonight, Theatres of Land Reform, Performance and State Building in Sunan and Taiwan 1950 to 1953. The idea is that you do not even in an authoritarian state simply declare that you're going to carry forward a certain policy. The trick is very, very much to persuade the citizens underneath your rule that they thought of the idea in the first place. So that the state is in a very consultative and receptive way, catering to their needs, to their wishes and to their aspirations is a certain theatrical performance of politics that renders policy acceptable to those who are ruled. And that's one of the things I think which is very, very subtle about Chinese politics which most Western observers don't often fully comprehend. One of those in the West as an academic has comprehended it, has done so in a most elegant academic fashion in a very convincing academic fashion and is for that reason in deciphering the rubrics and the mechanics of this kind of power that Professor Strauss speaks truth to us tonight. Thank you. That was a very generous introduction. So tonight, theaters of land reform, performance in state building in Sunan and Taiwan, Sunan being the region of China that is currently centered around Shanghai. But before when Shanghai was merely a tiny fishing village, this was still the wealthiest, most commercially developed area of China with tremendous extra resources, commercialization division of labor. And it is in this part of China that I focus in tonight's talk in comparison with Taiwan. So why these notions of theater? These notions of theater and performance are really a way to think about state and institution building, state building in general and its subsidiary components of institution building. And normally when we read the history of this period, well we know that China was successful in the policies that it had. And Taiwan was relatively successful in the policies that it had. And it was kind of a sort of black box, good ideas in, good policy out. And yet we know from any number of studies that concentrate on policy per se that often initiatives are contested and we know surprisingly little about key processes such as how political and bureaucratic elites decide on particular courses of action. And then we know even less about how programs, even the successful ones, are actually implemented and what this might mean and reveal about, sorry about that, about what I call the repertoire of the imaginable as well as the preferences for the doable and executable. Throughout my current book manuscript I have this notion of that how, of what is decided on and the how of actual implementation may eventually either lead to the strengthening of institutions and state institutions or indeed it may in the long run undercut other more general state building capacities in particular ways. So when I talk about performance I have three background notions. One is the notion of frame and frame theory, good grief. And I think of frame as the parameters of the imaginable for rulers and state makers. Then repertoire, the specific choice sets of particular practices for how policy once decided on should be implemented within whatever part of the frame that is deemed desirable. And then the actual performance itself is the dramatization of particular chosen actions from the repertoire and this may really vary from case to case. It may even vary depending on who the particular performers and actors are. All right, so I compare big China and small Taiwan. What's up with that? Well, there are reasons for it but this isn't done very often and it's not done very often for very good reason, for reasons of Cold War politics and the aftermath of Cold War politics, for reasons of the rhetoric internal to each, neither one of the regimes in question, namely the ROC and Taiwan or the People's Republic of China in Beijing and elsewhere in the territory of the People's Republic of China, had any interest whatsoever in playing up the similarities between it and the opposite number on the other side of the Taiwan Straits that was its mortal enemy. We also have, of course, Taiwan's quite separate existence, political existence, as a direct colony of Japan in the 50 or in the 45 years between roughly 1900 and 1945 and then, of course, there's the problem of scale crudely. China's awfully big, Taiwan is unusually small as state territories go. Despite these differences and they are real and certainly I'm not suggesting that any old comparison of China and Taiwan is doable, workable, or even desirable. For the particular question that I'm interested in, namely questions of regime consolidation, the establishment of state institutions and then how this is all practiced as implementation, as a process of convincing the population about what is necessary as well as desirable. Both the People's Republic of China in Sunan and the Republic of China on Taiwan in about 1950 found themselves in very similar circumstances. First, both felt themselves to be deeply insecure. Second, both came in as in effect alien regimes of occupation with very shallow roots in local society. Third, both needed to rapidly impose order, communicate a vision of what it was about and communicate norms to a population that was in effect a subject population. Next, both absolutely insisted on land reform is a key signature program as a foundational part of the legitimacy of the new regime. And finally, both were astonishingly, stonkingly successful in pushing through versions, their own particular versions of land reform as well as any number of other policy initiatives wrapped up with early regime consolidation. Now, what did these two regimes have in common even though they didn't like to talk about things as such? First, both shared a notion of a strong, monocratic party state, Yi Dang Zhiguo, a party that runs the state. Secondly, both were heavily committed to heavy degrees of militarization and severe downplaying of the importance of the individual. Thirdly, both subscribed to notions of scientific development as well presumed the natural goodness and sociability of the vast majority of people. So as long as you educated people into the right norms, the vast majority of them were going to come over to what you deemed preferred. Both had deep and ongoing suspicion of any kind of associational activity that it did not directly control or at the very, very least oversee. And finally, both of these regimes carried deep normative commitments to the state's role in ensuring subsistence of modicum of social justice and the presumption of the desirability of the relative equality of small freeholders in agriculture. However, in other key respects, these regimes were quite different. And in fact, they mirrored each other. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party held to a deep belief in the cleansing power of class struggle and bloodshed, even when, in truth, the subjects of class struggle did not consider themselves to be part of this, that or the other class and didn't really want to know about class struggle. Versus the Guomindang were the nationalists on Taiwan, whose entire regime was predicated on notions of inclusion and integration, even in a situation in which the majority of the population felt itself to be quite separate from the rulers, even speaking a different language. And these differences led ultimately to quite different choices in very important house of implementation, even when the core idea of a necessary land reform to equalize holdings in the agricultural population and ensure a modicum of subsistence and social justice was, in fact, identical. The way in which both regimes implemented land reform was through their own version of a campaign, or the Chinese term yun dong. Now, yun dong, translated into English, is really very ambiguous because it translates as both movement and campaign. And it is in exactly this period in the early 1950s that in the People's Republic of China in particular, that the term yun dong shifts from meaning a mass associational movement like a student movement or a labor movement, something that's out there in society, to yun dong being something that is launched and directed and implemented by the state with mass participation. There is, as well, a continuum of campaigns. I define campaigns perhaps a little differently than some. I define a campaign to be the intensification of extraordinary concentration on a particular set of policy goals, leading to an extraordinary mobilization of personnel and other resources aimed at the rapid achievement of that goal. And so the big mass campaigns, land reform, the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries, thought reform, the anti-rightist campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and so forth, are but one end of a continuum of a much wider set of different kinds of campaigns that all start every single one with mobilizing and concentrating the minds of the bureaucracy, but then each campaign unfolds in a different way and involves different degrees of popular participation. All right. I suggest that in China and Taiwan in the early 1950s, there was a substantial overlap in shared repertoires for the implementation of land reform campaigns. First, both mobilized the bureaucracy and vastly expanded the size of the bureaucracy in order to implement land reform. In both cases, you have extraordinary, extraordinary mobilization and training sessions of hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of typically young people, often university students, sometimes even high school students, to go out and engage in particular kinds of policy implementation as part of land reform. Both regimes were equally committed to penetrating the countryside and remaking the countryside in a manner to its liking and getting rid of all real and imagined competitors in the countryside and in so doing. In so doing, as part of this mobilization of the state bureaucracy, training of agents and penetration of the countryside, both engaged in startlingly similar propaganda with very similar techniques, posters, plays, songs, puppet shows, newsreels, and so forth. And sometimes even the slogans were the same. However, there were some real divergences within the repertoires of the signature campaigns of land reform. There was, because these regimes were mortal enemies and hated each other and needed to deny the legitimacy of the other, there was a strong necessity to be publicly seen to be different even when there was substantial overlap. This actually extended into digging around in archives where in Taiwan, I managed to find one of those enormous pieces of paper that you roll out and roll out and roll out to the extent that the bureaucrats who were talking about what we were gonna do here in Taiwan in terms of the implementation of land reform, they had on one side of this very long sheet of paper, well, those awful Chinese bandits over there did class struggle and class division. They were rapid, they ran roughshod over everyone's sensibilities, they were completely out of control, and then they listed about 10 different things. And then on the right side of the paper, the Guomindang listed three or four options for each point of what the communists had done in opposition. Well, if the communists did this, then these are our options, one, two, three, four. If the communists did that, we definitely can't be seen to be doing that. We have one, two, three, four. And so we have in the Chinese Communist Party land reform campaigns being predicated on class struggle, even when none existed, sharp divisions in society, even when none existed, rapid transformation, even when no one knew what was going on, and manufactured drama and moments of high drama. In the case of the Guomindang in Taiwan, land reform had to be seen as slow, gradual, inclusive, predicated on the notion that all Chinese, or pretty much all Chinese, that we preside over are ultimately unified in a larger state-building project, even those landlords who are being expropriated because we're gonna compensate them in various kinds of ways and make sure that they then get stakes in state industry. Okay, so when we come, however, to the actual critical moment of performing the campaign, I would argue that the leaders of the People's Republic of China as filtered down in the region of Sunan, and the leaders of the nationalists in implementing their version of land reform with the help of a Sino-American organization called the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, they both were equally committed to very public kinds of theater, but the particular forms of the theater were not only different from each other, but signaled to a broader population what was necessary and desirable in terms of a new set of regime norms. So in Sunan, the signature moment of land reform were in highly dramatic and also heavily staged, managed public accusation sessions out in open space where there would be pre-coached activists who had little dress rehearsals and quiet rooms in the weeks before the accused would be paraded out. The entire, as much of the local population as possible would be gathered outside in a highly public place, often a village schoolhouse or something like that, but a place that was public. There would literally be a stage that the accused and the accusers would be on. And the public accusation session would involve an already designated victim. The victims were always, without fail, sympathetic. They were the young, the very young, the very old women, usually older women, and the disabled. You would simply never or hardly ever see an able-bodied young man engaging in this kind of public theater. They were, these were groups in society that were held to be and physically looked much more vulnerable than the norm. And the accusations were chosen, the accusers and the specific accusations were chosen for their emotional impact. And the purpose of this was to lead to what was called a gao chaol, or a high tide of emotion in which case ultimately, first the pre-coached victim would mount the stage and had to engage in what was called mien dui mien, or face-to-face accusation, preferably with the accused publicly confessing and recognizing his, almost always, his guilt. And the ultimate goal of all this was to create a merging of the collective public with the state and with the state's chosen directives, namely to do away with these awful landlords. Public theater in land reform campaigns played out very differently in Taiwan. It was still theater, but it was a very different show. In the Guangming Dang in Taiwan, we had a series of elections to what were, they had various names, but they were called various particular names for farm tenancy committees. Proceeded by relatively decorous campaigning within rules and procedures laid down by the ruling party, leading to ultimately depersonalized procedures and public elections and public input, but channeled in an explicitly procedural way. So everyone wants the good visuals, so let's get to the good visuals. Here, on the left, in the sort of yellowish frame, this is very, very emblematic of what the public accusation session was supposed to be. It's outside, it's dramatic, there's hundreds of people that you can sort of see vaguely in the background. And the this, that's a direct mian dui mian or face-to-face accusation. You can even see that the flag is fluttering in the wind, so this is all about movement and the masses. If we look to the second picture on your right, which is more black and whitish, this is a reproduction or a copy of a photograph of the election to one of these farm tenancy committees. And you can see the differences right away. First of all, everyone is sitting there looking and seemingly because they have to. No one looks particularly happy. People look kind of bored and kind of compelled to be there. People are holding things up like this. It's inside, not outside. There's not a lot of movement. It's clearly contained, spatially, emotionally, and procedurally. When we look at land reform campaigns as processes, as opposed to simply their culminating dramatic moments, we see differences again. The photograph on your left is a representation of the final act, if you will, of land reform, of public land reform in the People's Republic of China with the burning, the public burning of the old land deeds. What we have on the right is a flow chart, a very Chinese flow chart, but a flow chart nonetheless made up by the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction in Chinese to indicate exactly, let's see if I can get this, the process of land reform from the beginning of propaganda to speeches to going out into the countryside and educating people and so on down to the ultimate end, which is farmers back out in the field. Very, very different kind of representation, a dramatic ending versus a procedural slow winding process. I'm not sure that the poster maker for the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction realized this, but this composition almost perfectly replicates traditional Shanshui Chinese landscape painting with the sinuous S, very, very classic type of visual representation in imperial Chinese art. So why the insistence on these different theaters? Well, everyone claimed that we need to have land reform. We need it for economic efficiency. We need it as a platform for further growth. We need it for social justice. In fact, if you look very carefully, many of these claims are suspect if not completely false. However, as part of regime consolidation, land reform absolutely had to be done and it had to be performed publicly in quite different ways. Why? Because ultimately land reform was about regime consolidation and penetrating the countryside and while these regimes were at it, educating the population, while laying down the foundation of their own claims to regime legitimacy. What we have in the case of the historical afterlives of land reform in both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan are regimes that, even if they weren't aware of so doing, were establishing basic templates for action for later regime consolidation and later governance. In the case of the People's Republic of China, very, very clearly what happens with land reform is that the leaders of the People's Republic of China take a set of repertoires and techniques about land reform, about public accusation, about a class division and class struggle that's channeled in particular ways. They take a set of repertoires that was developed over many years, certainly the previous 10 years, mostly in relatively impoverished areas of North Northeast and Northwest China and they are imposing these repertoires in these ways of doing things on the rest of the country. And in truth, these repertoires didn't resonate in nearly the same way in Sunan as they had in North China. Local circumstances were different, local society was very different. Nobody really cared that much about landlords because everyone in their brother was a petty rentier in buying and selling and trading land. Landlords weren't particularly hated. Anybody who was that prosperous had long since upsticks and moved to the city. But the Chinese Communist Party insisted on not just that land reform be implemented but that it be implemented in this very particular way. Why? Because this was a replication of success and what success that was understood to be successful from the period prior to 1949. And there was a very, very deep attachment on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to these kinds of repertoires. Unfortunately, after regime consolidation and after the establishment of the core institutions of socialism continued attachment to these particular kinds of repertoires, popular mobilization, public merging with state shows and targets, defined scapegoating of enemies and so forth. Once you've nationalized everything, once you've already gotten rid of the usual suspects, this can only be turned inward into you and everyone with actually quite disastrous results as we see started in particularly 1957 and after with the Great Leap Forward and then finally in its most extreme form in some ways with the 10 year campaign and campaigns and campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. Whereas in Taiwan, what we had was the establishment of a set of template, the establishment of a template for governing and governance that was predicated on avoiding failure, not on repeating success but on avoiding the failures that had been seen and were being seen in contemporary discourse in the early 1950s to be directly implicated in the Republic of China's disastrous, humiliating catastrophic loss of the mainland. So the early 1950s in nationalist policymaking circles was characterized by a complete repudiation of what this set of policy makers understood to be the compromises, the factionalization, the militarization, the co-optation that were understood to have been such a failure in China itself leading to an extraordinary concentration of political will to launch a series of highly effective campaigns in just this period. However, the more minimalist, procedurally oriented, legitimating performances that were adopted by the nationalists didn't get the press and they didn't get the drama of the time. I mean, you could see this from the pictures. People were really exercised in China and they looked pretty bored in Taiwan but in the medium to long term, these more minimal legitimating performances that were established as a core template in the early years of the 1950s in the Republic of China, Taiwan, was much more suited to development in the long run. So we have at heart a fundamental irony that in the case of the People's Republic of China, exactly what was felt and understood to have led to such incredible success in making revolution up to and in 1949 and in the early 1950s ended up being a large part of much later catastrophic failures and in fact, running off a cliff. Whereas in Taiwan, it was exactly the opposite. The leaders of the Republic of China and Taiwan learned the lesson of the past. They were absolutely convinced that they had to concentrate political will and avoid the mistakes of the past and the set of repertoires and the template that they laid down ended up ultimately leading to much greater success. So in one case, we have unbelievable success leading to catastrophic failure and in the other case, we have catastrophic failure ultimately leading to quite unanticipated success and I would leave it there. Thank you. Well, it's an enormous pleasure to be invited to give the vote of thanks for Julia's inaugural lecture. I was slightly shocked when Professor Chan said that Julia came in 1994 because I was trying to calculate how long I'd known her and I was thinking probably about 12 years but I think it's possibly longer than that and just to start on a personal note, she was the person who enthused me into thinking about moving from working on Republic and China to the People's Republic and I remember talking at length with her about the kinds of materials she was finding in the county and provincial archives in China and thinking that sounds really, really interesting and in that respect she has pointed me in what is now a very, very exciting for me, exciting phase of my own career so I thank her for that. I think you have seen in this tour de force all the intellectual qualities that Julia has. She's the kind of political scientist that historians love and I say that risking, reinforcing the impression that historians are really empiricists who don't like theory and so on and she's not at all like that but I think it's worth saying that this very elegant and very comprehensive view of two societies struggling with land reform is an elegance that's been hard won in terms of very, very detailed sometimes drudge-like work in archives both in Sunan and in Taiwan and that rootedness in the archive is obviously something historians like but they don't like it because they're archive rats, they like it, so they like to tell you because it gives people a sense of context and although I want to talk about Julia as a comparative historian in a moment and this is something I myself do and in that respect I like her work at a somewhat MISO level of analysis nevertheless what strikes one as one reads her work is that this very, very time consuming work in the archive attunes her to context, to economic and social context, to issues of agency, to issues of historical timing and significantly the land reform in Sunan is going on something like five years after it started in the old liberated areas of North China and I think too she has an eye for the telling detail which is often something that I miss in social science and yet she has all the qualities of a social scientist she's a very wide-ranging scholar not just historically though she is one of the few who works across the 1949 divide the work goes back to 1911 and right up to the present but she's also wide-ranging in a conceptual sense the conceptual sophistication I think is evident in her ability to draw on theory in a very, very creative kind of way I read strong institutions in weak politics an earlier book of hers with extraordinary interest because it reveals not just the complex and contradictory institutional relationships between the party, the state and the military that as it were galvanized state building in Republic and China but it draws in a very, very interesting and very innovative way both on Vaberian ideas on ideas of technocracy and also normative and heroic approaches and as Professor Chan said at the beginning one of the striking things is that although she is extraordinarily attentive to institutions, to the materiality of institutions to issues of financing, of military security and the like she is nevertheless very, very attuned to what one might call the cultural dimensions of state building to issues of language which we heard just now to issues of performativity in politics to issues of ritual I suppose one might say and this to me is very, very remarkable and very unusual and I thought today's lecture was also unusual somewhat counterintuitive I think in the sense that if we came to a lecture or comparing China and Taiwan I think we would expect a lecture that was about difference, that was about contrast between two such mutually hostile and politically distinct regimes but in fact she gives our expectations a little sort of twist because much of the analysis, not all of course is concerned with similarities between two regimes that both saw land reform as a key to legitimation both saw the peasantry and small scale agriculture as a problem both sought to overcome deep-seated social and economic inequalities in the countryside and to produce a fairer and more rational organization of the rural order ultimately to facilitate industrial development and as we saw she points to similarities of method which are really quite striking particularly the whole issue of the campaign more generally of course she sets this issue of land reform in a broader context it's a key element in a wider process of regime consolidation which entails expanding the arm of the state into the countryside for the first time entails expanding the coercive apparatus of the state inculcating new ideas and norms into the population and she shows just how different this process was in Sunan than in North China where I think paradoxically despite the fact that a majority of peasants were small holding peasants rather than tenants nevertheless the appeal of a struggle against the landlord seems to have had more traction than it did in the southern part of Jiangsu province Julia in an interesting way I think explains in a longer version of this how much reluctance there is on the part of peasants to perform their roles in the drama of the accusation meeting and of suku and speaking bitterness and I think for me what I'd like to see her do is develop this idea of theater even more I mean especially for China, mainland China this emotion work it's been called this mobilizing people not only to fan shen which is to turn over, turn their backs over but also as some called it fan xin hui the overturning of a mentality the overturning of one's mind these were absolutely vital to this process and in that sense I can see why it would lead away from the very very elegant comparison but in terms of thinking about drama in politics this is an extraordinary case study I could go on, I think I won't but again thinking about the end of the lecture it struck me that in a way we are looking at not just success to failure in the case of the People's Republic and failure to success in the case of Taiwan we're looking at the success of land reform in Taiwan whereas in China we're looking I think much much less at land reform because after all by 1953 and even in 1952 in some areas the parcelization of land among peasants was already beginning to be undone and by the mid fifties much of the land and the resources that have been given to individual households were being rapidly pooled in higher level agricultural cooperatives leading to the dismal tragedy of the Great Leap Forward in some ways then I think what one sees is much more the state building aspect of this what strikes me about land reform in a longer term perspective in mainland China is not so much the distribution of land the expropriation of landlords the killing of landlords the distribution of land among peasants it's the assignation of class labels to peasant households that is really the thing that will last this is what will determine the life chances of families long after the land they gained in 1952 has been put into first of all some kind of cooperative and then ultimately into the commune but to close the fact that this lecture stimulates one to think about some big issues to do with both Taiwan and the People's Republic does I think reflect the extraordinary intellectual range that Julia has her ability to think big about big questions but also this extraordinary ability to combine this with a command of telling detail and the fact that she has constructed this comparison and remember she said at the outset that there's very very little comparative work surprisingly on the PRC and Taiwan the fact that she did this I think reflects a very deep independence of mind a very questing intellect and also real creativity and imagination and as a historian I particularly value those things so thank you Julia