Delia Davin

Delia Davin
Born	(1944-06-09)9 June 1944 Oxford
Died	13 October 2016(2016-10-13) (aged 72)
Occupation	Foreign Languages Press
Nationality	Chinese
Alma mater	University of Leeds
Notable awards	President of the British Association for Chinese Studies

Delia Davin (9 June 1944 – 13 October 2016) was a writer and lecturer on Chinese society and particularly Chinese women's stories. She was one of the first foreign scholars to consider the impact of the policies of the Chinese Communist Party on women.

From 1988 until her retirement in 2004, Davin taught Chinese history at Leeds University, where she became a chaired Professor. She was also Head of the Department of East Asian Studies and Deputy Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Before coming to Leeds, she had taught in the Department of Economics and Related Studies at the University of York, where she was a founding member of York’s Centre for Women's Studies. The British Association for Chinese Studies elected her President for 1993-1994 , and the China Panel of the British Academy made her a member, as did the Executive Council of the Universities’ China Committee in London.

Early life

Davin was born in Oxford, England, to an expatriate literary family - her father Dan Davin and her mother Winnie Davin (née Gonley) were both New Zealanders and were writers and editors for Oxford University Press. She left school at the age of 15 and finished her high school studies through evening classes. In 1963, aged 19, she went to Beijing with a group of "foreign experts" and taught English at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute until 1965. She then returned to England and enrolled at the University of Leeds, where she completed a B.A. degree in 1968 and a Ph.D. degree in 1974 in the Department of Chinese. While a student, Davin visited Paris and Hong Kong on research trips.

In 1975, Davin returned to China and worked as a translator for the Foreign Languages Press, a position arranged for her by her friends Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, who were also translators.

Communist policy and women's lives

Davin was one of the first scholars to study Chinese Communist Party policies on women and the problemss of working them out in practice. Her first major work was Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (1976), which she published after returning from her second stay in Beijing. The scholar Gail Hershatter called the work "classic". She explained that the book followed policies from the 1930s until 1949, but spent the most time and detailed analysis on the 1950s. Chapters treated the Women’s Federation, marriage reform, the effects of land reform and collectivization on women, and the lives of urban women. Davin, Hershatter continued, acknowledged the great changes brought about by the new "Party-state", and described the contradictions between the reformist Marriage Law and the realities of its results; women in the countryside were also caught between economic independence and their continued fixed place in patrilocal families. The book, said Hershatter, "effectively laid out an agenda for much of the subsequent scholarship on women in the Mao years". John Gittings wrote that the book went "far beyond the stereotypes offered both by the communist regime and its critics" and that it probed the "tensions between a new 'socialist' emphasis on women’s participation in economic and political life and a relatively unchallenged structure of gender and generational relationships in the family."

During the follwing years, Davin wrote articles and chapters that analyzed marriage migration, domestic service, and welfare entitlements for Chinese women workers. Her jointly edited book China’s One Child Family Policy (1985) was one of the first studies of the early effects of that policy. The review in The China Journal called the essays, though written when the policy was relatively new, "a timely review of the policy's origins, problems, and prospets."

In 1999, after tracking the changes of the post-Mao economic reforms, Davin published a second major study, Internal Migration in Contemporary China, that used field research, interviews, and published media. She remarked that her own parents' "stories of the migration of their parents and grandparents from the west of Ireland to New Zealand gave me an interest in the forces that drive people to leave their homes and families in search of a living elsewhere, and a sympathy with the struggles and sufferings of migrants everywhere." Dorothy Solinger in China Quarterly wrote that the book was "more for the initiate than for the specialist," but "rich with observations and covers every major topic that touches on internal geographical movement in China since the late 1970s," including the demographic traits of the migrants, state policies, the reason farmers leave the countryside and to come to the city, and the images of these migrants in the media. Although Solinger found "carelessness" and a tendency to rely on "vague words" such "few" and "in general," she found that "overall this volume stands as an excellent summation ... and is filled with insightful comments, if not encased within an overarching framewwork."

Selected works

Books

• Mao: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013 ISBN: 9780199588664)
• ——— (1999), Internal migration in Contemporary China, London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's {{citation}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• ——— (1997), Mao Zedong: A Life, Sutton; Reprinted History Press 2009
• ——— (1988), Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, co-edited with William Jenner, New York: Pantheon; London: Macmillan; reprinted, Penguin (1989)
• China's One Child Family Policy, (co-editor with E. Croll and P. Kane). Macmillan, 1985.
• Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (1976).

Artikel

• 'Gendered Mao: Mao, Maoism and Women' in Timothy Cheek (ed) A Critical Introduction to Mao, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
• 'Dark Tales of Mao the Merciless' in Greg Benton and Lin Chun (eds) Was Mao Really a Monster? The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story. London: Routledge June 2009.
• 'Marriage Migration In China: The Enlargement Of Marriage Markets In The Era Of Market Reforms' in Rajni Palriwala and Patricia Uberoi (eds) Marriage Migration and Gender. New Delhi: Sage, 2008.
• 'Women and Migration in Contemporary China’, China Report 41:1 2005, New Delhi: Sage.
• 'The impact of export-oriented manufacturing on the welfare entitlements of Chinese women workers' in Shahra Razavi, Ruth Pearson and Caroline Danloy (eds), Globalisation, Export-oriented Employment and Social Policy: Gendered Connections, UNISD/London:Palgrave, 2004.
• 'Country maids in the city: Domestic Service as an Agent of Modernity in China' in Françoise Mengin and Jean-Louis Rocca (eds), Politics in China: Moving Frontiers, London: Palgrave 2002.
• 'Chinese Women: Media Concerns and Politics of Reform' in Afshar.H. (ed) Women and Politics in the Third World. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Davin, Delia (1992). "British Women Missionaries in Nineteenth‐Century China". Women's History Review. 1 (2): 257–271. doi:10.1080/0961202920010204. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• 'Population Policy and Reform: the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China' in Shirin Rai et al (eds). Women in the Face of Change: the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. London: Routledge, 1992.

Personal life

Davin was married twice - first to Bill Jenner, a fellow scholar of China, and then in 1996 to Owen Wells. She had three children and three step-children.