or reading and commenting on one or more chapters at very short notice: Susan Brownell, Tim Oakes, Tim Weston, Lisa Claypool, Susan Fernsebner, Lee Haiyan, Sara Friedman, Benjamin Read, and Kate Merkel-Hess (who deserves a special separate expression of thanks, since various parts of the book were shaped by work she and I did on coauthored commentaries).
Going even further beyond the call of duty (and perhaps even friendship), Vanessa xii Acknowledgments Schwartz, Rob Culp, Peter Zarrow, and Kate Edgerton-Tarpley made time to read entire drafts of the manuscript (again at very short notice) and gave me valuable suggestions about how to improve it. I am grateful to many colleagues, first at Indiana University and now at the University of California–Irvine, for conversations that have contributed to my understanding of China and the ways that it is similar to or different from other countries.
There are too many people to list, but I’d be remiss not to mention Maria Bucur, Jeff Isaac, Jeff Gould, Nick Cullather, Mike Grossberg, John Bodnar, Sue Tuohy, Scott O’Bryan, Scott Kennedy, Jeff Veidlinger, Ben Nathans, Mark Roseman, Kumble Subbaswamy, and Michael Curtin (among those formerly or still at IU) as well as, at UCI, Ken Pomeranz, Vinayak Chaturvedi, Bob Moeller, Emily Rosenberg, Yong Chen, Guo Qitao, Dorothy Solinger, Laura Mitchell, Kavita Philip, and Jennifer Munger. I also want to thank everyone involved with the “China Beat” blog, which was launched at UCI in January 2008.
Participating in that venture has provided me with an invaluable continuing education, both about the PRC and about writing, while also offering a wonderful example of what can be accomplished by a group ready to blur or ignore completely the divides that separate, often unnecessarily, the work done by graduate students as opposed to faculty members, academics as opposed to freelance writers with a scholarly bent, and so on.