Gifts, Favors, and Banquets

Mayfair Yang is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China.

I heartily recommend this book. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the meaning of social relationships in Chinese society.- Gary G. Hamilton (American Journal of Sociology) To what extent did traditional customs and practices persist under the surface during the decades of Mao's rule, or are present forms a genuine revival? To what extent do these revivals testify to the enduring strength of the Chinese cultural tradition or are they to be explained much more as reflections of popular experiences during the socialist and reform eras' Mayfair Yang's book represents one of the most ambitious and systematic attempts to deal with a whole range of such questions.- Martin King Whyte (The Journal of Asian Studies)