Unwelcome heroines : Mao Dun and Yu Dafu\u27s creations of a new Chinese woman

In this essay, I examine fictional works by two of the most influential and progressive male writers of the period—Mao Dun and Yu Dafu - to explore issues concerning the emergence of the new Chinese woman. My study will focus on Mao Dun’s story, “Chuangzao” [Creation], published in 1928, and Yu Dafu’s short novel, Ta shi yi ge ruo nuzi [She is a weak woman], written in 1932. I look at these writers’ depictions of two different types of woman and contemporary Chinese men’s reactions to a new gender relation. Male intellectuals, while heralding the advance of a new Chinese woman, were far from certain about the future of this new woman, and were troubled by further prospects of change once the “genie was out of the bottle.” They were, understandably, apprehensive over their own position in the new world order of the two sexes. Male anxiety, compounded by contemporary social and political situations, manifested itself, in part, in a shift of focus from women\u27s individual emancipation to women\u27s collective role in mass liberation. In other words, whereas nationalism remained an overarching concern, the projection of male anxiety onto women in these texts subsumed women’s individuality. In the 1930s, the May Fourth belief concerning the contribution of women\u27s liberation to national rejuvenation was being replaced by a proletarian conformity that erased gender differences. Such a shift was by no means unique; as Wendy Larson points out, the period from 1925 to 1935 [was] a transitional time when both writers and critics aligned themselves politically and socially, for or against a ‘new’ kind of socially engaged writing, and willing or unwilling to follow an overt political cause in their works”. The objective of my inquiry into this widely acknowledged shift is to investigate how two representative male writers1 works reflected conflicting and confused theories involving the incorporation of women into the project of nation building

Local Taxes and Parental Choice of Education: The Case of Pennsylvania

In this paper, we empirically examine the link between local taxes and education choice. Due to the endogenous relationship, 2SLS estimation is applied to correct for simultaneous equations bias. A total of 500 school districts in the state of Pennsylvania during the school years 1999-2000 to 2001-2002 are selected for a case study. Results indicate that local taxes per student are positively associated with private school enrollment rates, implying that increases in these enrollments greatly benefit public schools through tax support.Local Taxes

Implications of grade inflation: knowledge illusion and economic inefficiency in the knowledge market

In this paper, we adopt the neoclassical model of consumer choice and view students as a utility maximizer to investigate two implied issues caused by grade inflation – knowledge illusion and economic inefficiency in the knowledge market. These issues are important because they negatively impact the quality of higher education and weaken the signaling role of educational credentials in screening workers. More importantly, students eventually suffer a loss in well-being in the knowledge market and become less productive and competitive in the labor market.grade inflation; knowledge illusion; economic inefficiency

Application of a static game of complete information: economic behaviors of professors and students

The economic behaviors manifested between professors and students may be viewed as a game, with both behaviors endogenously correlated. In this paper, a static game is applied to address this behavior and determine the Nash equilibrium. Both professors and students choose their best strategies (i.e., optimal efforts) to maximize their payoffs. Consequently, theoretical analysis suggests that professor's evaluation and student's grade are endogenously correlated. More importantly, an innovation is offered here that is useful in constructing empirical models for the further investigation of this issue.Economic behavior; Static game; Student evaluations of teaching