Blockchain Papers

HUYNH GIA BAO

WHAT THIS PAPER ARGUES. Every Popperian tool this corpus has built — falsifiability criteria, self-vaccination, the act-level test, the Personal System Reminder, and the four falsification conditions just added to the Entropy-Resistant Institution (ERI) index — operates inside a discursive formation without ever asking how that formation became possible to inhabit in the first place. This is not a gap Popperian rigor can close by adding a fifth falsification condition or a fifth comparator case, because the question is not whether a claim within the formation is true or false; it is what made this particular kind of claim — a weighted numerical composite, cross-culturally applied, extracted from historical institutions and repurposed as a design template for future governance — a thinkable, legitimate object of knowledge at all. This is the question Michel Foucault's archaeological method exists to ask. This paper argues the corpus needs it, using the just-revised ERI paper as evidence rather than illustration. Four archaeological blind spots are documented directly in ERI's own text. First, its newly added Jiangnan-regeneration section treats "Jiankang, 220–589" as a bounded unit that a fourth comparator case can be added alongside — the unexamined assumption that a historical institution is a natural object rather than one constituted by the apparatus built to measure it, Foucault's critique of "the unity of the book" applied for the first time to a unity of the case. Second, the six attributes assume, without argument, that "legitimacy transfer" and "resource flexibility" name the same kind of variable in a Six Dynasties Chinese, a Shinto-imperial Japanese, and a Catholic canon-law context — a commensurability claim no additional comparator case can test, because the problem is not sample size but an a priori equivalence the index requires in order to function as an index at all. Third, ERI names its own methodological ancestors — Polity5, the Fragile States Index, V-Dem — as if borrowing a value-neutral toolkit, when each is inherited along with the specific historical formation that produced it. Fourth, ERI states plainly that the exercise exists to extract portable institutional design lessons for F2-era governance actors — read here not as incidental motivation but as the archive-producing act itself, the textbook operation of what Foucault calls biopower. The paper's constructive contribution is the Archaeological Symmetry Principle, extending this corpus's existing Principle of Epistemic Symmetry into a register falsifiability cannot reach alone: a researcher who subjects a target argument to falsifiability must, symmetrically, subject their own measuring instrument to historicization. Read this way, the Longevity Asymmetry Corpus is reread as an analysis of biopolitics that has operated, until now, without the name — the Mortality Symmetry Axiom as the statistical anonymity that historically made biopower's tolerance of differential death invisible, the Biological Zero-Day Mechanism as the process that collapses that anonymity back into sovereign-style visibility. The paper closes by naming, honestly, the tension this creates with the corpus's own Popperian commitments, and states plainly what an archaeological stance does not solve.

Revista, Zen, CHEMISTRY, 10

This paper investigates the profound influence of Tang Dynasty legacies on the subsequent Song Dynasty's distinct financial-military transformation. While the Tang era was characterized by an expansive cosmopolitanism, a decentralized military, and a complex interplay of central and regional powers, its eventual decline underscored critical vulnerabilities in state governance and defense. The Song founders, keenly aware of these historical precedents, embarked on a deliberate path of institutional re-engineering. This study argues that the Tang's "cosmopolitan crucible"—its blend of cultural openness, economic dynamism, and ultimately, military decentralization—served as a crucial historical backdrop, compelling the Song to forge a highly centralized, civilian-controlled financial-military complex. We explore how Tang's sophisticated, yet often unstable, fiscal mechanisms and its frontier-focused military organization contrasting with the rise of autonomous regional commanders, directly informed Song's innovations in state monopolies, paper currency, and a robust professional army under strict imperial command. By examining both continuity and rupture, this research illuminates the adaptive strategies employed by the Song to consolidate power, ensure stability, and sustain an unprecedented level of economic and military capability, fundamentally reshaping the trajectory of imperial Chinese statecraft.

Jun Kajima

No abstract is available for this record.

Hosung Shim

Transforming Inner Mongolia, by Yi Wang, examines the long-term process of Chinese expansion into Inner Mongolia during the Qing period, which Wang describes as internal colonialization or, in Owen Lattimore's words, secondary imperialism (209, 249). Wang successfully contextualizes the Chinese colonization of Inner Mongolia on local, regional, national, and global levels by utilizing a wide range of Chinese and European sources. The book begins with a summary of the geography, environment, and history of the Mongolian steppe and then discusses various changes that the Qing's territorial expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries introduced or reinforced in the steppe region. Although the Qing officially prohibited the Chinese from entering the Mongolian steppe, its need to maintain various imperial apparatuses, as well as increasing population pressure and ecological crises in North China, drove Chinese farmers to travel outside the Great Wall. The growing presence of Chinese on the steppe—especially in today's Inner Mongolia—compelled the Qing to expand the Chinese-style administrative system north of the Great Wall, giving rise to what Wang calls “dual administrative system” (41–46). As a result, Inner Mongolia witnessed the coexistence of, as well as conflict between, the decentralized Mongol aristocracy and the centralized Chinese bureaucracy.In the second chapter, Wang examines the penetration and expansion of Chinese commerce into the Mongolian steppe. The Qing not only gave Chinese merchants direct access to Mongolia, but it also established a series of politico-military mechanisms—the postal relay system, frontier guard post system, and the institution of annual rotation of Mongol princes and high lamas—to sustain imperial control over the region. Given the cash-poor Mongolian economy, however, it was unviable for the Mongols to meet these official obligations. In this situation, Chinese merchants—most prominently those from Shanxi Province—drew partnership contracts with local Mongol authorities and took on the role of financial intermediary to facilitate the fulfillment of these duties. These developments made the Mongols economically dependent on Chinese merchants while increasingly incorporating Mongolia into the silver-based market system of China proper.The third chapter discusses the processes and ramifications of Chinese migration, settlement, and cultivation in Inner Mongolia. Chinese cultivation would have devastating impacts on the fragile environment of the steppe, causing land degradation and desertification. The ever-expanding Chinese presence also threatened the livelihood of ordinary herders and challenged the authority of local Mongol rulers, eventually leading to ethnic conflicts between Mongols and Chinese. The surge in the Chinese population also necessitated the transplantation of Chinese-style centralized administrative units to the steppe to oversee fiscal and judicial affairs related to Chinese migrants, which in turn encroached upon the autonomy of Mongol banners. Last, Chinese agricultural expansion shifted practical land ownership from Mongols to Chinese migrants, thereby fostering the commodification and privatization of Mongol lands.Chapter 4 explores the rise of a highly commercialized, capital-intensive, and market-oriented rural economy, which resembled agrarian capitalism, in the Hetao region on the northern bend of the Yellow River. From the early 1800s, a group of Chinese entrepreneurs known as “land merchants” (dishang) advanced into Hetao, where they acquired lands from the Mongols, developed elaborate irrigation systems, and established large-scale managerial farms using wage labor. In doing so, the land merchants mobilized large amounts of capital, technical expertise, land, and labor through a sophisticated shareholding system. They also participated in long-distance trade and handicraft industries. These activities increasingly integrated Hetao into the larger regional and global economic system. Wang points out that the existence of such domestically financed and organized developments—however short-lived—counters the conventional view that China, incapable of initiating transformative changes on its own, kept repeating the long-term pattern of smallholder farming and “involutionary” growth.The fifth chapter investigates the expansion of the Catholic Church in Inner Mongolia by focusing on the proselytizing activities of missionaries from the Belgian Catholic order named the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Since the 1860s, a series of rebellions, natural disasters, and famines in North China offered the missionaries favorable conditions to penetrate Inner Mongolia. To attract new converts, most of whom were land-poor and famine-stricken Chinese farmers, the missionaries adopted an evangelical strategy of acquiring Mongol pasturelands and converting them into farmland. The missionaries were also often entangled in land disputes with Mongols, Manchu and Chinese local officials, and Chinese land merchants. During the Boxer Rebellion, these disputes often erupted into violence, for which Mongols came to owe tremendous indemnities. To pay off the huge reparations, many Mongol banners had to resort to land cession, which enabled an unprecedented expansion of the church in Inner Mongolia and stimulated the increasingly Sinicized and centralizing Qing state to penetrate the steppe region.The sixth chapter examines the land reclamation campaign conducted in Inner Mongolia by the centralizing and modernizing late Qing state. From the 1860s, two major challenges brought on by foreign imperialism—the worsening financial crisis and imminent security predicament in Mongolia—gave rise to a significant cognitive shift among high Qing officials concerning the Mongolian steppe, which was now conceptualized as an untapped source of revenue and a locus of strategic defense. In the wake of the launch of the New Policies reforms, the Qing court appointed Yigu, a high-ranking Manchu official, as imperial commissioner to oversee land reclamation in Inner Mongolia, which was considered a way to finance the reform programs and to counter foreign influences on the northern frontiers. By imposing a standardized procedure of land survey, registration, and taxation, Yigu also aimed to retrieve Mongol lands for official taxation, abrogate the Mongols’ hereditary land rights, and transfer the ownership of Mongol lands to the Qing state. As a result, Chinese-style centralized bureaucratic units proliferated in Inner Mongolia. After the fall of the Qing, these developments would facilitate Inner Mongolia's integration into the centralized administrative system of the homogenizing Chinese nation-state.In the end, Wang argues that the historical process of Chinese migration and colonization in Inner Mongolia played a critical role in China's modern transition from a multiethnic empire to a centralizing and homogenizing nation-state. The author also eloquently proves that the development of Chinese colonization on the steppe originated from a set of endogenous socioeconomic transformations well before the impacts from the West forced the Qing to pursue modernization and national integration. Nonetheless, several misconceptions about the history of the steppe are intermittently spotted. For example, the author writes as if the Mongols had not been organized into territorial units before the Qing conquest (27, 37). Recent scholarship, however, points out that territoriality has been ever-present on the steppe.1 Wang also continues to use the term “tribe” to describe traditional Mongol society (26–27, 30–31, 63). Yet a group of scholars has recently challenged the terminology and concept of “tribe,” at least in the context of Mongol history.2 Moreover, the transcription system used for Mongolian words is sometimes inconsistent. Last, this research would have been more nuanced if the author had refrained from characterizing Han Chinese as the “core” and various non-Han peoples as the “periphery.” From the perspective of Qing imperial history, at least during the first half of the empire, the Mongols were not peripheral people. These minor issues, however, do not reduce the overall value of this excellent research. Given that “the PRC government has continued the policy of large-scale Chinese migration and state-sponsored development schemes in Inner Mongolia since the late Qing period and carried these initiatives forward with a forcefulness and efficiency as never seen before” (263), particularly in this time of China's hard-line state policies toward its Inner Asian minorities, Wang's book deserves to be read widely.

Sofia Cossar, Tara Merk, Jamilya Kamalova, Primavera De Filippi

In 2021, the Proof of Humanity (PoH) project debuted as the first Sybil-resistant registry of“unique and singular” individuals on the Ethereum network. The project offers an economic incentivethrough collaboration with the Universal Basic Income (UBI) smart contract, which distributes $UBIcryptocurrency tokens to registered humans. The PoH registry, equipped with measures to combatfraudulent registrations or bot impersonations, allows users to challenge suspicious profiles. Thesechallenges are adjudicated by Kleros' Humanity Court. Within two years, over 17,000 registrants joinedthe registry. The founding organization, Kleros Cooperative, announced the registry would be gov-erned by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The launch of the PoH DAO, the first in theEthereum ecosystem to implement a 1-person-1-vote liquid democracy system, challenged traditionaltoken-weighted voting mechanisms in DAO governance. Despite gaining recognition and endorsementfrom influential figures like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the community grappled with irrecon-cilable long-term visions, leading to the adoption of a binding proposal to "fork" by the end of 2022,highlighting underlying challenges within the PoH DAO. In 2022, our team at BlockchainGov conducteda research study to explore the governance dynamics that led to the PoH DAO’s governance crisis andsubsequent decision to “fork.”

Henrik Axelsen, Johannes Rude Jensen, Omri Ross

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have seen exponential growth and interest due to their potential to redefine organizational structure and governance. Despite this, there is a discrepancy between the ideals of autonomy and decentralization and the actual experiences of DAO stakeholders. The Information Systems (IS) literature has yet to fully explore whether DAOs are the optimal organizational choice. Addressing this gap, our research asks, "Is a DAO suitable for your organizational needs?" We derive a gated decision-making framework through a thematic review of the academic and grey literature on DAOs. Through five scenarios, the framework critically emphasizes the gaps between DAOs' theoretical capabilities and practical challenges. Our findings contribute to the IS discourse on blockchain technologies, with some ancillary contributions to the IS literature on organizational management and practitioner literature.

Wenkai He

Public infrastructural facilities such as dikes, highways, bridges, and seawalls were vital to domestic welfare. Financing their building and maintenance required extensive and sustained state–society collaboration, which was grounded in the shared public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. In fiscally decentralized Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan to 1853, self-governed communities were active in building and managing small- and medium-scale public works. But for large-scale infrastructural facilities, the royal government and shogunate had to become involved through ad hoc financing measures to cover the otherwise insupportable costs. The reverse was true in Qing China prior to 1840. The Qing state could reply upon a centrally managed fiscal system to directly fund the building and maintenance of major public works. For small-scale public works that mainly benefited local residents, it encouraged investment and involvement by local communities and gentry. It also advanced official funds to repair important local water control projects and let the benefited communities return the funds to the state over time without interest.

Michael C. M. Ng

Abstract This article examines how and why renowned Republican-era Chinese firms raised debt capital to finance their businesses by accepting savings deposits from ordinary people instead of borrowing from financial institutions. The article argues that in the absence of a powerful unitary state and centralized financial institutions, Chinese firms innovated sophisticated, decentralized financial instruments capable of amassing large quantities of capital from a broad host of depositors without the involvement of financial intermediaries. Savings deposits not only provided these firms with a cheaper and more flexible source of debt capital than that on offer from banks but also they fueled the Chinese economy by creating a sizable credit supply, a phenomenon that Chinese business and financial history scholarship focusing on the role of indigenous and modern banks has hitherto largely neglected.

Quinn DuPont

No abstract is available for this record.

Stuart R. Schram, Nancy J. Hodes

For the consideration of party branches at all levels, and of all comrades throughout the country and overseas: Ever since the time when the former Director General was still alive, we observe that revolution has had a long but unsuccessful history. When it was resolutely decided to reorganize our party, already at that time there were a band of good-for-nothing rightist party members who wanted to avoid genuine revolution, for they knew that reorganization and renovation were not advantageous for thieving idlers, monopolists, and those who seek office in order to enrich themselves. They obstructed it in every possible way, and after the First National Congress decided on revolutionary tactics, people of that ilk, knowing that obstruction could not in the end prevail, openly rebelled. Feng Ziyou, Ma Su, and others colluded with Duan Qirui and Zhang Zuolin, and formed a group urging them on. 1 After Yang Ximin and Liu 264 Zhenhuan had colluded with British imperialism to cause trouble in the rear, 2 Liang Hongkai, Zheng Runqi, Mo Xiong, Zhu Zhuowen, and others acted even more ruthlessly in savagely assassinating our brave Comrade Liao Zhongkai. 3 Thus they sought to overturn the Guangzhou revolutionary base at a single stroke. At this juncture, when the existence or ruin, the disappearance or survival of our party are at stake, we cannot but take the sternest measures against those party members who have betrayed the party, in order to preserve our party’s revolutionary position. Fortunately, we can rely on the prestige of the former Director General’s revolutionary spirit, 4 and on the resolute and courageous efforts of all the comrades. In June of this year, we swept away Yang and Liu, and in September we eliminated 5 all the traitors of the Liao affair. Thus the Guangzhou base was returned from danger to security, and the cause of revolution, after a detour, returned to its old course. Thus our unity was tempered, and further advances could be expected. We did not provide for the fact that those people, with their unspeakably evil hearts, would once again collude with Xiong Kewu in an attempt to take Guangzhou from north of the river, attacking from three directions, together with Chen Jiongming and Deng Benyin, under the 265 command of British imperialism, in the hope of destroying our revolutionary forces. 6 Once again, thanks to our comrades’ united efforts, within two months these obstinate enemies approaching from three sides were eliminated and the forces of revolution were strengthened. At this time, a small number of comrades in Beijing once again announced the convening of the Fourth Plenum of the Central Executive Committee. 7 Now it would appear that, in accordance with the decision reiterated at the Third Plenum of the Central Committee on May 21 and May 23, the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee can only be held in Guangzhou. For it has long been decided that the Second National Congress should meet in Guangzhou, and also that a Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee should be held to prepare resolutions for the Congress. On October 30, the Central Committee decided that the Fourth Plenum should be convened three weeks before the national Congress. This being the case, and Guangzhou being our party’s revolutionary base, whereas Beijing is a place where warlords and counterrevolutionaries gather and exert great pressure, and given that the Congress is public in nature, how can we reject Guangzhou and go to Beijing? 8 Manifestly, a band of party members who oppose the party has seized a fraudulent occasion and is egging on a minority of Central Committee members whose revolutionary convictions are wavering, with a view to actions that are not in the interest of our party. One of them is Zou Lu. Now we observe that in our party, from its reorganization to the present, reactionary party members from Feng Ziyou to Zou Lu have consistently attacked our party and its government; they have uttered accusations such as “Communism,” “uniting with Russia,” “accepting Communist elements,” “supporting Communism” and so on. This is a tactic used by the imperialists and the warlords to sow dissension within the alliance of all the classes for the national revolution. Since our comrades have no affinity with the imperialists and the warlords, they should not aid their propaganda , 9 thereby causing confusion in the national consciousness. Moreover, facts are facts, and these rumors cannot survive for long. For uniting with Russia, and accepting Communists, are important tactics of our party in pursuing the goal of victory in the revolution. The late Director General was the first to decide on them, and after they were adopted at the First National Congress, they had an objective basis and a profound justification. Now, today’s revolution is an episode in the final decisive struggle between the 266 two great forces of revolution and counterrevolution in the world. It is different in nature from all other revolutions in history. Consequently, the progress of the revolution is naturally different as regards its tactics. Today imperialism has long since banded together to exercise pressure on our party. If our party’s revolutionary strategy does not take as its starting point union with Soviet Russia; if it does not secure the great masses of the worker and peasant classes as its foundation; if it does not accept the Communists, who advocate the interests of the peasants and workers; then the revolutionary forces will sink into isolation, and the revolution will not be able to succeed. The reason our party could not achieve victory in the 1911 Revolution is that at the time, the counterrevolutionary forces were united on an international basis, whereas the revolutionary forces of our party as yet belonged to no international union. Moreover, within our country, a great mass basis had not yet been called into being, and we were reduced to isolation and therefore were obliged to accept compromises, which ultimately led to defeat. Things having reached the point where they are today, how can we follow along in the same old track? Those imperialists and militarists are truly terrified lest we adopt revolutionary tactics, and they seek on every hand to sow dissension and to sabotage us, with the aim of making our party lose all its friends and allies inside and outside the country, and of placing us once more in our previous isolated situation. Thus the cause of revolution could never triumph, and those people would finally realize their dream of ruling China forever. Their scheme is truly as venemous as this. A small group of our comrades, making inadequate observations, has always been fooled by these divisive policies. Most of the disruption within the party over the years originates with this. We must recognize that in today’s situation, he who is not for the revolution is for counterrevolution. There is absolutely no neutral ground in the middle. But if you want revolution, you must unite with all revolutionary factions internationally and within the country. Only if you unite as one can you fight the decisive battle against counterrevolution without being defeated. Otherwise, there is no way you can avoid defeat. Not only will you be defeated, but you yourself might fall into the danger of sinking into counterrevolution. The cases of all those party members who have betrayed the party, from Feng Ziyou to Zou Lu, are proof of this. The matter of this meeting in Beijing has already been the subject of a severe warning from this committee, 10 and it has moreover been decided that the Second Congress will meet on January 1 of next year. On December 11 of this year, the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee will meet in Guangzhou. We have already telegraphed to all members of the committee in Beijing and Shanghai urging them to come south on that day to participate in the meeting. The majority of the committee members are of the same mind, so originally there was no problem at all. Recently, however, rumors have been rife inside and outside the 267 party, many of them arising from failure to understand our party’s policy. Consequently, we are sending this circular telegram to comrades everywhere throughout the country, regarding the process of struggle with counterrevolution since reorganization and the revolutionary principles adopted by the former Director General. We hope that every comrade will support the Director General’s views and will not be misled by heterodox doctrines . 11 The future of the revolution depends unequivocally on this. The present announcement is sent to make this known to you.

Richard L. Davis

Reviewed by: Negotiated Power: The State, Elites, and Local Governance in Twelfth- to Fourteenth-Century China by Sukhee Lee Richard L. Davis Negotiated Power: The State, Elites, and Local Governance in Twelfth- to Fourteenth-Century China by Sukhee Lee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp. xiii + 347. $49.95. For four decades, historians of China’s middle period have tried to run before they walked, ruminating on the evolution of the country’s political and social elites at a macro level before building the necessary foundation in empirical research, especially in the realm of local history. Sukhee Lee’s impeccably researched and deftly executed book delivers a major salvo to prevailing assumptions in the field, while providing alternative ways of reading some of the same texts that informed earlier scholarship. This is the rare book where the footnotes are nearly as meaty as the text itself, due to the author’s tendency to consign his most biting criticism to the notes. Lee addresses elite development at Mingzhou 明州, modern Ningbo 寧波, from the Southern Song (1127–1279) through the Yuan (1271–1368), when the fortunes of Mingzhou’s elite families soared to dizzying heights, in pace with Ningbo’s growing economic and cultural development. This is terrain familiar to me as a political historian of the Southern Song. Court and Family in Sung China, my 1986 book on the Shi of Yin county 鄞縣史氏, examines the crème of the region’s political crop—a lineage that produced three generations of chief councilors, five generations of assistant councilors, and hundreds of lesser officials in the course of two centuries. 1 I knew that my limited focus on the political story would prompt later writers to take up the many social history issues not addressed there, such as kinship organization, marriage strategies, and community leadership. Since then, new primary sources have come to light and archeological discoveries made, including a cluster of several dozen tombs dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries in the Ningbo suburbs. 2 At the same time, interest in the wider history of China’s coastal development has been on the rise at home and abroad, especially in Japan. [End Page 227] Robert Hartwell’s seminal 1982 article, “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750–1550” posited a vast chasm between the Northern Song (960–1127) and its successor in the south. His argument presented the elite devolving from its primary focus on political office to a narrow concern with local activities and networks, a trend that continued into the Yuan and early Ming (1368–1644). As the imperial imprint shrunk, the upper classes became increasingly autonomous and self-perpetuating, while the state’s involvement with local society declined. And the examination degree, rather than providing the path for official advancement, became merely a marker of social status. 3 Hartwell focused on marriage networks and community activism in particular to identify the “localist strategies” of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He also pointed to certain institutions as markers of this trend toward decentralized governance during Southern Song times, including the Grand [fiscal] commissariat (zonglingsuo 總領所) (p. 14). Unfortunately, Hartwell’s strengths as an economic historian often proved his greatest weakness when venturing into social and political history. A succession of Hartwell students at the University of Pennsylvania would attempt to apply his thesis to individual locales starting from the late 1970s, including Hugh Clark, Paul Smith, and Linda Walton-Vargo, but his most industrious acolyte is Robert Hymes, author of two books on Fuzhou 撫州, Jiangxi, books loyal to the overall outlines of Hartwell’s work. 4 Hymes also coedited a symposium volume on the “Song–Yuan transition,” while Smith coedited a volume on the “Song–Yuan–Ming transition.” 5 I have long referred to the group as the “Penn School,” though it has expanded to include Columbia University, where Hymes has taught for the past three decades and has produced students with similar interests. Later, Peter Bol at Harvard University, the adviser of Sukhee Lee, the [End Page 228] author of the book under review, succumbed to the sway of Hartwell, whose argument about elite evolution dovetails nicely with Bol’s own work in intellectual history. In “This...

Judith Farquhar

Previous articleNext article FreeYou Had to Have Been There: Laughing at Lunch about the Chinese DreamJudith FarquharJudith FarquharPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhen I arrived in Beijing in July 2014, a friend who works at a university there told me that, a few days before, a high official in the Communist Party (CCP) headquarters had denounced the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), apparently for being too leftist. My friend said, "We all think this is some kind of black humor on their part." This invocation of black humor—the phrase was in English—instantly made sense to me. Understanding both why the Communist Party needed to be taken quite seriously and why its funniness was also patent, we laughed. But why? How did a dark threat issuing from party headquarters translate into a shared laugh for academics belonging to two different continents and relying at times on a "foreign" language?Much of this essay will be devoted to this kind of question about the translatability of humor, and it will suggest that much more than a punchline is funny.1 Though my friend's remark about party central's attitude toward the left deviations of some social researchers was not exactly a joke, it was certainly a form of levity. The pleasure we felt in our shared ability to appreciate the tortuous (il)logic of an official pronouncement was made possible by a complex shared knowledge of modern Chinese history and institutions and considerable experience of the everyday life of Chinese mass media. It was not only a fieldwork moment for an ethnographer; it was also an expression of a certain moment in Beijing, one that is now past or passing. To get the joke, you had to have been there, and you had to have been then.Anthropologists often remark that jokes are especially untranslatable; some have told me that they seldom really really laugh in the field, experiencing a return to Chicago or New York or their family culture or English language television as a "return to laughter."2 It is as if we never can educate our gut—the place belly laughs come from—to live comfortably either with other people's sober proprieties or with their violations of them. When obligatory and thickly nested local frames are both invoked and exploded in a joke, much of the point is lost on those of us who are not entirely there and then.3 As visitors, we are usually relative newcomers to the world thus framed and thus transgressed, so we don't even see what proprieties and commitments might be at stake. Shouldn't criticism of a research institute issuing from party headquarters in Zhongnanhai be taken seriously? Presumably this news is bad, or black, because the party configures and supports the institutional structures allowing some people to live as intellectuals. If this CCP policy maker is serious, lives and jobs might be at stake. Why is it also possible to see this denunciation as comical? Presumably because some representative of the party has failed to notice that the intellectuals reporting to him have been doing exactly as directed, keeping the Chinese communist dream alive, helping him and his government do their job in a one-party state where all academic institutions are publicly governed. As the audience of this (by now not very funny) joke, I find myself simultaneously worrying about the dark implications of a high cadre's outburst and laughing at the way the weapon has been turned on its user, showing up the fault lines in the party apparatus in a not quite typical example of socialist black humor.4We anthropologists—at our best—are thoroughly relativist in our efforts to appreciate distance and difference; we pride ourselves on being experts at cultural displacement and even transgression.5 Even so, the classic work in anthropology tends to have no sense of humor. When we translate joking behavior from our field sites the humor tends to be read through to find those enframing structures or invariant principles that might be challenged or reinforced (or both at once) by a play on words, a ludic pratfall, or a paradoxical contretemps. Jokes tend to be thought of as a light-hearted text that indexes a very serious context,6 and when they are analyzed to reveal their architecture and foundations, anthropologists and their readers are in danger of becoming numb to all possible pleasure in the moment itself.A. R. Radcliffe-Brown published the classic treatment of joking relationships as two essays in his Structure and Function in Primitive Society. His treatment of a disrespectful or teasing practice, which he found distributed around the world in correlation with certain forms of lineage politics, was markedly scientific and sober. In the two essays, there is one joke described and that only in part:There is space for only one illustrative point. A very common form of joke in this connection is for the grandchild to pretend that he wishes to marry the grandfather's wife, or that he intends to do so when his grandfather dies, or to treat her as already being his wife. Alternatively the grandfather may pretend that the wife of his grandchild is, or might be, his wife. The point of the joke is the pretense at ignoring the difference of age between the grandparent and the grandchild.7In reporting this instance of humorous behavior, Radcliffe-Brown was not trying to suggest that bawdy grandmas and disrespectful youngsters are a universal formation in society. His comparative science worked at another level: once we understand why standards of propriety are relaxed between individuals occupying particular positions in a rigid kinship structure, he argued, we can look for similar transgressions in those other societies that share the same kinship structures. In other words, humor functions as "the means of establishing and maintaining social equilibrium in a type of structural situation that results in many societies from marriage."8 Analysis of "joking behavior" in the hands of the anthropologist reveals little more than the dead-serious structural imperatives that constrain and give meaning to social action. Of course there are many problems with Radcliffe-Brown's structural-functionalist privileging of stability, "equilibrium," and systems.9 But though he seldom felt it worth his while to actually present a joke in translation, he does appear to have considered jokes to be translatable once they were understood in context. He presumed that actions that at first appear odd—describing a new policy statement as black humor, for example—should be legible as quite rational and normal, once we understand (soberly, of course) the whole "structural" situation.10In this essay I will continue some parts of this anthropological tradition by presenting some exchanges that had me laughing—really really laughing—with others, in the field.11 On one hand, I follow Radcliffe-Brown's example in showing that locations in space and time, gatherings of place and history, and conventional formalities and proprieties are the irreducible field of the funny. Insofar as joking transgresses the normal givenness of its world, it is thoroughly situated; it behooves us to understand both Rabelais and his world.12 But, on the other hand, I also want to dwell on the joke itself before reading through it to the social field in which it plays and from which its humor may or may not be translatable. I will thus touch only lightly on the contemporary Chinese political terrain across which joking walks and talks. The etymologies of translate and transgress suggest wordplay and fancy footwork, and I want to appreciate these leaps and bounds. At the same time, I will show that joking is done by fully embodied people whose lives are specific to histories and localities and thus difficult to understand in isolation.So let's reconsider the black humor of a Communist Party functionary. What could be humorous about the central governing structure of the Communist Party turning against China's most elite social researchers? Statements like this from CCP headquarters at the time were greeted in the US academy with a very bleak outlook. American China studies specialists expressed fear that we would all be denied visas and our Chinese colleagues would be silenced on every matter of social and political concern. (These fears continue and are intensifying as I write in late 2015, as new anticorruption policies and information disciplines begin to have an impact.) Many of us expected our Chinese academic friends to be sunk in despair. Instead, we have found them sharing hilariously plausible conspiracy theories over convivial meals and speculating about who is the funniest comedian among senior cadres in CCP headquarters, as well as whether anyone in the party compound of Zhongnanhai actually gets the joke.I think you had to have been there, up to your neck in Chinese academic politics for a long time, to see the black humor in the situation. You would have to have known in your own practice that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is the party's kept think tank. You had to be accustomed to CASS's looming presence in the knowledge industry—huge and long-standing and heavily funded by the government. You would have been aware of a large number of prominent intellectuals—philosophers, historians, sociologists, Marxist theorists, social theorists, area studies experts, humanists—whose careers were entirely attached to CASS. You would have known that the leadership in CCP headquarters had often involved CASS intellectuals in the policy process through formal consultation and collection of their research results. And complaints about CASS's internal research funding competitions, in which the aim is to design and propose valid research that answers the questions posed by the state, would be fresh in your mind.The critic who attacked CASS in June 2014 argued, apparently, that too many researchers at CASS are being "corrupted" by their involvement with transnational NGOs and other "civil society" organizations. There was also the suggestion that CASS theorists are too allied with the Chinese New Left, which is well known for its critical stance that favors some old Maoist and socialist values and opposes many of the newer business-friendly neoliberal policies that encourage privatization and market freedoms. My particular friends who were "laughing at [the CCP] Leviathan"13 also knew that a large part of the CASS charge during the last two years or so has been to research "the Chinese dream."14The Chinese dream has been ubiquitous in the PRC mediascape since about 2013; one sees "public service" posters everywhere featuring drawings of fat happy children, assuring us that the Chinese dream is "my dream," or "the people's dream." A very interesting Wikipedia article notes that "according to the party's theoretical journal Qiushi, the Chinese Dream is about Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism and national glory" (among other things, but see the joking conversation reported below). These ideological labels are rather vast and vague, and turning such propaganda categories into socially useful alliances of actors takes creative social research. This is part of CASS's job, but the task has frustrated many in Chinese research units over the last couple of years.15If you had been there, then, the ridiculousness of this CCP leader's criticism might have been quite clear. His was a paradoxical critique: the Communist Party suddenly found its kept intellectuals, its policy mouthpieces, to be too darn socialist. And this was a charge by communists against communists, disvaluing the earnest labor of perhaps the only group of intellectuals in the twenty-first century who were still trying to make a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist social theory a plausible guide for the people of a modern nation. The unsettling message of the joke is: "All critics of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'—otherwise known as neoliberal laissez-faire market piracy—Beware!" Some Communist Party leader might tar you with the brush of "civil society," revoke your research funding, and make it nearly impossible for you to make the Chinese dream your own. Especially if some people fail to realize that he must have been joking.But what about the Chinese dream; is it a joke all by itself? This was the subject of the jolly conversation to which I want to devote the remainder of this discussion, partly reporting what was said and partly sketching the explicit and implicit elephants in the room as we talked. (An elephant in the room is a pretty good joke in itself, with its juxtaposition of large and small, wild and domestic, lovable and terrifying, and undeniably visible yet totally ignored.)Later in July 2014: My collaborator Lili Lai and I are in Kunming, Yunnan, which is rather far from Beijing and the CCP headquarters at Zhongnanhai, at a university where I gave a talk. We went to a department-sponsored lunch, in a restaurant's private room, with five college teachers. I asked them, what is this Chinese dream I see all over the billboards and on TV? What is included in it?The charming senior professor at the table, Professor He, said "I haven't got a clue, I'm no Communist. Ask a Communist! Teacher Li here is a party member, ask her."Teacher Li admitted, however, that she also wasn't sure, but she hazarded a guess: "Freedom? Justice? Equality?" Teacher Chen, another colleague, followed up with a reference to last year's big propaganda category: "Surely it also includes a 'Harmonious Society'!"This remark broke everyone up, especially Teacher Chen himself, whose face split into a huge grin with a giant belly laugh. In a place like Yunnan, more multiethnic, rural, and subject to borderland conflicts than many Chinese provinces, these intellectuals were understandably sardonic about the party's multiyear (and now not very evident) harmonious society campaign. By 2014, none of us were seeing public slogans about social harmony any more. Moreover, the harmonious society had not, we guessed, been subsumed within the newly ubiquitous Chinese dream. Propaganda history doesn't seem to work that way. So Teacher Chen's joke, in a few words, dredged up a bit of arguably "tragic" history—the harmonious society had never really been achieved, after all—to suggest that the Chinese dream was bringing it back as farce. The logic of the Eighteenth Brumaire is never far from contemporary Chinese senses of history—or senses of humor.As we continued to talk about the "meaning" of the Chinese dream, everyone realized that they had no idea what this ubiquitous term the Chinese dream was supposed to include. Not only was the referent lost, nobody present had—up to this point—cared at all what it was. And this was the cause of a lot more laughter. Unforced, uncynical, trusting laughter, unafraid of seeming childish. Our amusement (or in this case I should perhaps say their amusement) stemmed from a shared awareness that we were not properly receptive subjects of the propaganda state. After all, it is the party-state that talks of the Chinese dream, so it seemed like we ought to care. And know what all the fuss was about.I said, it sounds like there's nothing especially Chinese about this Chinese dream. Is it different from the American dream? So our group went to work trying to the American dream. Teacher has in on the of individuals their way up to and through and but I told her I thought it was than the American dream is that every can get this I was a much Chinese state the state that a few can get first everyone will get or at The of an American dream with the Chinese dream, we could would place on a neoliberal terrain that at the logic of more or to the but we had not the of what the specific of the Chinese dream might thought it was that they be of it but they also of propaganda language with and a sense of My at that are specialists in words, after all, and they found it that there's a whole of language that been them, even though it is got her and the Chinese once in a while would ask her if found a and she would say with an of no has of she said, but none of it Teacher party her and this would have the Chinese dream in she knew the The Chinese dream, she said, an of the values of national national and among the social The was a little that to this this kind of knowledge is the of official Professor He said she must have thought we were a on her or her a whole group of official information from a How is situation was it actually was we were on Teacher very sober and already Even as our she seemed serious on the subject of the Chinese dream, Professor He that she a joke was being on We could all understand the "I not of the who thought she might be the of a The of all this wordplay were the but Teacher would have had to have been there to see everyone as a party Teacher Li had through of political since the Chinese dream was by the Propaganda in These are to everyone in a leadership get the language of policy understand its and think through to and the in this the Chinese are one of the that institutions of government and give them But they are also where everyone is a little and the are even in for the to up and the and for those in to look the other way. not as if Teacher Li had these some new and even at times thought about the implications of principles like for her work at a university in Kunming, in that was being by our joking however, was a perhaps especially because we are all academics in like of our work the social that (or the of even as we realize that everyday life everywhere and such Though we don't it much in our shared field at that the work of a between life and between and words, is what we and This labor of to a world is what we as social are all So this of good before at the was an to notice little or really about the in which we We the and jokes that all the of modern over and the I have a and reading of Chinese state propaganda from the Maoist This from the rather of some experts on the Chinese of the Maoist and I that propaganda like the now the Chinese dream, are a form of even though they do not in a of that the and one in the classic and especially their happy were in the present of Chinese lives and But these happy socialist were not to be a news they were not to they were a more than the of the contemporary Chinese to with the people's toward a The of a socialist propaganda is its of an situation that can be read as being within the of its a little more and collective good should they all the that up to a everyday can be like that, I don't know whether the of the Chinese dream on to the for of for my But it was that no one the as state A dream possible I contemporary my colleagues would to the being for them by the state Propaganda is not to suggest that academics in China are by the state. To make their relative distance from the (or of a little I want to another joke that up at that same all, and not to too much of the on our friends on the proprieties of with A few had to be however, so at one point Lili to me in a to our colleagues at the I followed with a of my I them good my own Professor He I should have said I was them "my own He told a very joke, he said, in this a a of a and who while a in Beijing actually in the The official got all not what one to the leader in the He you actually to the your own He analyzed this He said everyone this because the is a and a it partly the presumed of even the most in this so far from Beijing, the of (and of much dark And of course it a on the part of who they are being by who are in senses of the But it also a to see the national leadership as made of and rather than and and In some then, this joke about in the was the same one that had been our academics in to other that they have no of the meaning of state on The referent of all the has not only for intellectuals but even for government can the and the attached to the that the of state really is made of has not even serious they are to be about official At they have the college really jokes there so different that transgressions in one appear only as in the there within some that an at its but that appear only as or in another Is state propaganda a joke or are there or that appreciate its the of The joking I have in this essay to such some in which a whole situation in contemporary China is into a specific After all, those of us at were all Chinese world of contemporary At that none of us felt especially to the black humor New sociologists, issuing from party headquarters at The we had as we to the Chinese dream can be in the world that we had in and some of the we when it was history, like the can get policy of the be taken for among We shared a so some did not to be there was an in this a of pleasure in sharing our to laugh at and to make of official and of the time, the values of socialism and the Chinese dream are part of the we while we our life and work in Chinese But the by joking conversation a distance between even when these are is to it was only because we could laugh at the central state propaganda that we knew we were to at a from the state could be the other to our we laughing for different or in as we worked to the Chinese dream? this a case of same different any maker of jokes really know if those present are laughing with him or at There may have been some of at that in But that we all knew from and with in embodied practice, that jokes are not supposed to translate it that we all found a way to really really laugh about research state and the of those a it must be that we were not really laughing about such we were laughing within them. This was more than a collection of critical in paradoxical or we were not sharing or If our had been about politics, the of that all would have been more there, for could much more knowledge about academic life in a Chinese than I have so there were certainly I And there may have been among these colleagues the and convivial of our conversation that even as a could not but that may have everyone There is much that we did not have in yet our of the and both and The that we so with so much is the that we were all there and all then, the big joke of state for from within the in the Chinese Communist Party propaganda apparatus get the they see the of the situation in which values are as a shared dream for The is that they do they are not in a structural to share the of the in the is not to the is it would not do for him do to in wordplay or paradoxical The that modern of do are different from but not than those of or be an of the of in Jokes up at all in the everyday life of state in as they do in other modern

Thomas Kelly

PUTTING ON A PLAY IN AN UNDERWORLD COURTROOM: THE ‘‘MINGPAN’’ (INFERNAL JUDGMENT) SCENE IN TANG XIANZU’S MUDAN TING (PEONY PAVILION) THOMAS KELLY University of Chicago This article is an attempt to present a new way of thinking about courtroom trials in traditional Chinese theater. I look at how one playwright, Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550–1616), used meta-theatrical devices to comically deflate and satirize judicial authority. At the same time, however, I argue that he used the scaffolding of the courtroom trial to experiment with theatrical scene composition in the chuanqi 傳奇 drama form. Tang not only used a theatrical idiom to parody the procedures of the courtroom, he looked to the format of the trial to stretch the representational possibilities of the dramatic medium. Questions of what constitutes juridical authority and what grounds an act of adjudication are equally pertinent to the role-playing of the courtroom and the illusionary domain of the stage in his most famous play, Mudan ting 牡丹亭 (The peony pavilion; preface dated 1598). I focus specifically on how these themes are treated in the complex courtroom scene in the twenty-third scene of the play, ‘‘Mingpan’’ 冥判 (Infernal judgment). The scene as Tang wrote it, I suggest, displays a heightened awareness of how dramatic representations of the law in both the world of the living and the dead can call into question the nature and artifice of the theater itself. THE ‘‘MINGPAN’’ SCENE IN TANG XIANZU’S MUDAN TING Tang Xianzu’s Mudan ting returns time and again to question the verifiability of characters’ testimonies and the disputed status of actions taken within the world of the play.1 The burden of proof falls on the two lovers, Du Liniang 杜麗娘 and Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅, who each must justify and corroborate their testimony before juridical authorities and also prove to family and friends who they are from Scene 16 on. Liu not only has to prove his credentials as a promising scholar to Miao Shunbin 苗舜賓 when the latter is inspecting jewels (Scene 21) and metropolitan 1 As Tina Lu has argued at length, questions of personal identity are at stake throughout the play: Are characters who they claim to be? Can we trust their outward appearances? These questions assume an added urgency in the underworld trial scene, which Lu only discusses in relation to issues of counterfeiting and slippage between material and nominal worth in the determination of monetary value (see Tina Lu, Persons, Roles and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan, [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001], pp. 106–13). CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 32.2 (December 2013): 132–155 # The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2013 DOI: 10.1179/0193777413Z.00000000010 civil service examination candidates (Scene 41), he also has to prove that he is not guilty of robbing the grave of Liniang, the daughter of (the play’s chief patriarch) Du Bao 杜寶. Liu is arrested (Scene 50) and undergoes harsh interrogation and physical torture by Du Bao (Scene 53). It is not until the final scene (Scene 55) that Du Bao’s charges against him are finally dismissed by the emperor, even if this does not lead to Du Bao recognizing Liu as his son-in-law. Du Liniang never suffers judicial torture,2 but she also is required to repeatedly prove that she is who she claims to be and that her love—a love that both kills and resurrects her—is genuine. Although the final scene is initially presented as a contest between the counterclaims of Du Bao and Liu Mengmei, and it seems that Du Liniang only attends as a witness (she even arrives unescorted), after her arrival the key question becomes whether she is presently a ghost or not.3 Prior to that, however, Liniang is the main ‘‘defendant’’ in ‘‘Mingpan,’’ the play’s most elaborate and complex courtroom scene, a scene that appears almost half-way through the drama and marks an important turning point in the narrative.4 Earlier, Du Liniang encountered her lover in a dream (Scene 10), was unable to repeat the experience (Scene 12), became love-sick enough that she felt the need to paint and leave...

Shitao Huo

Economic decentralization in China has created autonomous leverages for the provincial governments, and it is through bargaining, concessions, and cooperation with the provincial governments that the central government has promoted rapid economic growth. These are the existing cases of coalitional politics within Leninist reform. However, such phenomenal circumstances have not been given serious consideration by most current students of the China’s reforms, who usually neglected the irreversible political transitions away from Leninism in Communist countries; nor do my findings support theories of political development, which see political coalitions only as alignments between the state and organized social interests, such as parties and interest groups. The deficiency of both types of explanations prohibits them from correctly explaining new political events in the Chinese economic decentralization. The question thus raised is: how a coalitional politics is formed between the central government and the provincial governments, through which unorganized social interests are articulated, by provincial institutions, in state policy making in Leninist China? This book answers this question by examining and critiquing competing explanations of political transitions and existing methods of studying transformations in central-local relationships in China. It applies an interactive dimension in power restructuring approach, and a multidimensional policy (fiscal, finance, investment, foreign trade policies) analytical method within the context of political coalitional theory. It has found that the history of the Chinese political system has been one of the continuous human desires for freedom from the centralized kingdom, and of consistent efforts by the political center to find institutional remedies. Reform experiences suggest that the transfer of economic power from the center to the provinces has established institutional foundations for political coalitions between the central and local governments. The provincial governments, as representatives and articulators of local interests, have been encouraged by an agenda of economic decentralization, and have interacted with the center through informal and formal ways, in bargaining over rational policy. The contradiction between Mao’s political legacies and a common desire for reform is largely responsible for such a unique political coalition during this transition. The cases of Guangdong Province and Shanghai Municipality have been utilized to illustrate the general framework and overarching hypotheses of this study.

Yong Chen

Because of the authority decentralization of the collecting military funds,Local finance was gradually forming during the time of Xian Feng and Tong Zhi regimes in the late Qing Dynasty.Customs revenue,as an important source of the central finance,was also included in the financial unit in the centre of local government.This article selected three cases and tried to display various benefit disputes between customs of different provinces,such as the tax source division and taxation distributing.These benefit oppositions between customs of different provinces appeared a more relaxing tendency of fiscal relations between central and local governments in the new history circumstances.

Mingguang Chen

The financial management system enacted in the early period of the Tang Dynasty was characterized by centralized revenues and expenditures.In such a system,local governments were not entitled to financial revenues autonomy and were subject to financial supervision by the central government.Owing to the relatively sound legal foundations of the financial supervision,local government officials were not often found to commit illegal financial acts.However,in the relatively late period of the Tang Dynasty,with the decentralized financial power,usual financial supervision over local governments by the central government were nearly suspended,which in turn caused the birth of a new financial management system in which the central government and local government saw to their respective financial revenues and expenditures.Thus,there were corresponding changes in the bases of the financial supervision over local government by the central government,supervising subjects and the areas of supervision.

William Α. Joseph, Christine Wong, David Zweig

Introduction - new perspectives on the Cultural Revolution, William A. Joseph et al. Part 1 Politics: learning from trauma - the Cultural Revolution in post-Mao politics, Lowell Dittmer Cultural Revolution radicalism - variations on a Stalinist theme, Andrew G. Walder agrarian radicalism as a rural development strategy, 1968-1978, David Zweig the Cultural Revolution as an unintended result of administrative policies, Lynn T. White, III factional politics in Zhejiang, 1973-1976, Keith Forster. Part 2 Economics: neither plan nor market - Mao's political economy, Carl Riskin industrial policy during the Cultural Revolution - military preparation, decentralization, and leaps forward, Barry Naughton the Maoist reconsidered - local self-reliance and the financing of rural industrialization, Christine P. W. Wong central-provincial investment and finance - the Cultural Revolution and its legacy in Jiangsu Province, Penelope B. Prime. Part 3 Culture: arts policies of the Cultural Revolution - the rise and fall of Culture Minister Yu Huiyong, Richard Kraus models and misfits - rusticated youth in three novels of the 1970s, Richard King dramas of passion - heroism in the Cultural Revolution's model operas, Ellen R. Judd.

Michael Mann

In this chapter I discuss the emergence and development of the two major decentralized civilizations of the first millennium b.c. , Phoenicia and Greece. I concentrate on Greece because it is considerably better documented: We can distinguish the principal phases of its dialectic of development. I argue that the massive contributions of both peoples to the development of social power is to be attributed to the decentralized, multi-level nature of their civilizations, appropriate for taking advantage of the geopolitical, military, and economic legacy of their region, especially that bequeathed by the Near Eastern empires of domination. I suggest that two principal dialectics can be discerned in the emergence of Phoenicia and Greece as “leading edges” of contemporary power. The first, discussed briefly and tentatively, concerns the possibility that these civilizations were part of a macro historical process. In this case, decentralized multi power-actor civilizations lying on the marches of established empires of domination exploited the success plus the institutional rigidity of those empires to “emerge interstitially” and establish their own autonomous power organizations. After a long, successful process of power development, however, their own organizations became institutionalized and rigid. Now they become vulnerable in their turn to new empires of domination lying on their marches. Such a process can be traced in the first millennium b.c. The extent to which it was, indeed, part of a macro historical process will be left to the concluding chapter. The second dialectic concerns that “middle period” of developmental success.