By H. Jay Burns
Photographs by Steve Stone ’83

Like the vivid hues of spring’s first flowers, the flashes of color in these images of China three decades ago signal big changes to come.

In spring 1981, Professor of Sociology George Fetter took 27 students to China to observe a country in transition. Looking at these photos, taken by trip participant Steve Stone ’83, you can see how reforms under Deng Xiaoping were steering the country toward world economic power.

You see, for example, billboards offering consumer products, like electronics and clothing, for the first time.

Stone kept his Ektachrome slides safe through the years, digitizing them recently and sharing them with Bates Magazine as the trip’s 30th anniversary got him thinking about the experience.

Another student on that landmark Short Term was Paul Marks ’83, and he was back on campus last fall for the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls as new academic centers.

Marks is now CEO of the global aerospace technology firm Argosy International Inc., based in Shanghai. He’s done business in China since 1988, and at the dedication he spoke about that transformational trip with Professor Fetter.

In 1981, Paul Marks ’83 listens to the Bates guide, Mr. Xu. Photograph by Steve Stone ’83.

Back in ’81, most Chinese citizens still had good reason to blend in with the crowd — politically, socially and even sartorially, by wearing bland clothing. The nation was wary after Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution, which had ended in 1976.

The lingering feeling was that “you didn’t want to be identified as the next possible target if the political winds changed again,” says Margaret Maurer-Fazio, the college’s Stangle Professor of Applied Economics and an expert on China.

Paul Marks, here talking with students during a Bates Career Development Center lunch during his visit in October 2011, has done business in China since 1988. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

If the winds shifted one way, “you wouldn’t want to be accused of being a bourgeois capitalist ‘roader,’” she says. If the wind shifted the other way, “you wouldn’t want to be accused of clinging to feudal Chinese culture.”

So the adults in these photos are wearing mostly unremarkable, drab clothing.

But look at the young children in a traditional classroom: They’re wearing bright orange, blue and rose-color sweaters. A little boy and girl watching a Bates student blow bubbles wear bold red and blue coats.

Like the billboards, it’s a sign of what’s to come.

“In traditional Chinese society, many people would consider themselves lucky to get one new set of clothing each year, on the Chinese New Year,” says Maurer-Fazio, who studies the dramatic impact that economic liberalization has had on China’s labor markets. “And in Mao’s day, the economy was focused on heavy industry, and consumer goods were in short supply.”

In the newly colorful clothing of these children, she says, “you see today’s modern, consumer society.”

“I watched peasants hoe fields adjacent to the runways. The only peasants nearby today are landscapers for the villas by the airport.”

Thirty-one years ago, when Fetter and his students landed at the Beijing Capital Airport to begin their Short Term, the airport wasn’t today’s glorious, gargantuan Norman Foster–designed facility. It was a simpler airport “and a simpler China,” Marks recalled during his address last fall.

“I watched peasants hoe fields adjacent to the runways. The only peasants nearby today are landscapers for the villas by the airport.”

Between Marks and Mike Bonney ’80, chairman of the Board of Trustees, there were jokes aplenty at the dedication ceremony about the Roger Williams’ former identity as a funkadelic dorm, where beer flowed like, well, beer.

As Marks quipped to his friend Liz Drolet ’84, “The contractors handled the remedial aspects of both asbestos removal and beer odor in a technically proficient manner.” The Bill and Hedge, he noted more soberly, are now enlightened by intellect rather than soaked with beer. “Now that’s progress,” Marks notes.

Roger Williams is home to the college’s language programs and Off Campus Study Office, while Hedge houses religious studies, philosophy and environmental studies.

Marks himself was an unenlightened student early in his Bates career. Then came the 1981 Short Term trip to China. It was the second in two years led by Fetter, who once said of his first trip that it was the product of “four years of negotiations and a lifetime of yearning.”

In fact, that first visit was notable enough that Sen. Ed Muskie ’36 spoke about it on the Senate floor. “It is a tribute to Professor Fetter’s commitment to educating American students about a culture so distant but so important in today’s world.”

Children in a classroom wear brightly colored sweaters, a sign of new socioeconomic forces at play.
Photograph by Steve Stone ’83.

Richard Nixon had made his historic visit back in 1972, but it was a trend toward people’s diplomacy — nongovernmental exchanges such as those by Fetter and his students — that did much of the real work of normalizing relations between the U.S. and China through the 1970s and into the ’80s.

Marks’ parents initially objected to his going to China. Up to that point, “my academic performance was not stellar,” Marks said. A long trip to China looked like a boondoggle.

But Fetter had faith in Marks even though there was little obvious reason for it (which is the whole point of faith, anyway). He called Marks’ parents, promising that the experience would change the course of their son’s life.

It did. “Everything was different and amazing,” Marks recalled. During five weeks in Beijing and other cities, “I became hooked on China. I wanted to understand this chaotic, totally different world.” Marks had grown up in New York City, where the music of the city was honking horns and emergency sirens. Beijing was a “city of bicycle bells — not the Beijing of today.”

In cities and villages in 1981, bicycles were still the dominant mode of transportation. Beijing was “a city of bicycle bells,” Marks recalls, “not the Beijing of today.” Photograph by Steve Stone ’83.

Marks returned to Bates eager to learn Chinese, but Bates didn’t have a Chinese language program. What the college had, as noted in the 1981 Catalog, was a “Self-Instructional Program in Less Commonly Taught Languages.”

In practice, the “program” was a black book in French professor and foreign-language chair Dick Williamson’s office, which he would flip through to find someone able or willing to teach a language not offered in the curriculum of French, German, Russian and Spanish.

Marks’ first instructor was the wife of a Taiwanese dentist in town. She tried to teach him Mandarin, “and I tried to teach her how to teach.” Marks was soon joined by CJ May ’80 as the college’s first students of Mandarin.

For Marks, the late Williamson’s help, along with Fetter’s and history professor Ernest Muller’s, represented the college’s can-do spirit. It’s also “typical,” Marks says. “Professors go beyond the call of duty to find opportun-ities for their students to engage, explore and find themselves.”

Today, Marks says he’s encouraged by strides in Chinese instruction and Asian-focused academic programs and opportunities at Bates. “You can be quite proud — I am quite proud — to see where the college’s journey has arrived.”

Back in 1981, the Bates group’s official guide, Mr. Xu, told Marks that foreigners never learn their language. Marks rose to the challenge, betting the guide five bucks that he could indeed learn Mandarin.

“Mr. Xu owes me five bucks. Or 31.7 RMB.”

Margaret Maurer-Fazio, the Betty Doran Stangle Professor in Applied Economics, has led or co-led seven Fall Semester Abroad and Short Term programs to China. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Bates economist Margaret Maurer-Fazio has tracked China’s economy since the early 1980s. Like an angler pulling trout from a roiling stream, Maurer-Fazio has drawn valuable research from the tumult of China’s economic liberalization. She specializes in certain aspects of the changing labor market — rural-to-urban migration, gender and wage issues, the treatment of Muslim and other minorities, the work course of urban Chinese women.

A member of the Bates economics faculty since 1994, Maurer-Fazio last year was appointed Betty Doran Stangle Professor in Applied Economics. She first visited China as a tourist in the early 1980s, and has had a ringside seat as three decades of economic liberalization have transformed the nation literally from the ground up.

Following are edited excerpts from a conversation last May with staff writer Doug Hubley.

Maurer-Fazio: It’s mind-boggling to see a country change so rapidly. I grew up on Vancouver Island; I could go back to Vancouver today and recognize a lot of buildings that I used to see as a small child. But Shanghai looks completely different. For a long time, Shanghai needed to put out new city maps every three months.

The first time I went to China, you couldn’t really buy anything. There wasn’t much for sale. And now it’s a consumer’s paradise. Nanjing, where we have based our Fall Semesters Abroad, now has a subway. Around one of the downtown subway stops, there are underground malls that have hundreds of very small stores. One of my favorite examples is a store called, in translation, the “Korean Cell Phone Beautification Store.” The whole store was kitsch for cell phones, but it wasn’t just kitsch — it was Korean-style kitsch! It was that specialized.

I’m pretty sure that the Chinese generation gap is larger today than it has ever been in any country. Young people are so conspicuously consuming, but their parents’ generation didn’t have those kinds of resources. And they just treasured education. Yet today you’ll see young people addicted to Internet games, to the degree that they may even drop out of school.

When the announcement went out that China had won the bid for the 2008 Olympics, there was enormous national pride. So what has happened in the last few months, the protests of the torch run and the local suppression of demonstrations, was totally unexpected by the Chinese leadership, I think.

It may end up that hosting the Olympics turns out to be very negative for the way China is viewed by the world. I think the Chinese are worried about what may have been sacrificed in order to have a smoothly run, efficient Olympics.

With faculty colleagues, Maurer-Fazio has led seven Fall Semester Abroad and Short Term programs in China. She speaks of “amazing synergies” that come out of these visits; for example, she involved FSA participants David Kampf ’05 and Deirdre Grant ’05 in a formal assessment of a pilot ecotourism project in Ganzi, a county in western Sichuan. The project is designed to boost the local economy while protecting both the area’s natural wealth and its indigenous Tibetan culture. The first Westerners to experience the project, the 2006 FSA group put it to the test.

Maurer-Fazio: We took the group to experience it and to give feedback to Wang Wei, a conservationist who is running the project. First we invited him to Nanjing to tell us about the project, and then we traveled to the area together. We went to the Wolong Nature Reserve, the famous panda reserve, and then traveled for a couple days through some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen in my life: mountains, rolling grasslands, rivers, different kinds of flora and fauna. It is just breathtakingly beautiful.

The students really had a great time. Once we got to the base camp, in Yajiang, one group of energetic and athletic folks went on a 17-kilometer hike up to more than 4,000 meters and stayed overnight in a yak shed, and hiked down the second day. They got to a high-altitude lake. For them, the hike was the adventure.

The project was designed to employ local people but not leave a huge imprint on the local area. It’s intended to bring in tourists who would not do a lot of damage — it’s a very fragile high-altitude ecosystem. So, people who were willing to rough it and didn’t need all kinds of amenities. Part of the marketing was to bring people to where they could observe the local culture, which is predominantly Tibetan, and there was certainly an effort not to have it sinicized, but to keep it in its local form.

The 2000 FSA group visited the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in the northwest. A student on the tour, Anna Purtell ’02, was so intrigued by the region that she wrote her thesis about occupational types and compensation there. That project launched Maurer-Fazio and fellow Bates economist Jim Hughes on a series of collaborations that’s still going strong, including a project investigating labor force participation among ethnic minorities, of which China recognizes 55 different groups.

Maurer-Fazio:We find that over time urban women have dropped out of the labor force in considerable numbers in China, pretty much across all ethnic groups. In the late 1990s, the government laid off huge numbers of workers from state-run industries. Women lost those jobs at a disproportionately high rate and then had a harder time finding new ones than men. So a lot of women got so discouraged that they left the labor force.

But it turns out that married women are dropping out of the labor force in ways quite different from single women, across all ethnic groups, and we think this reflects a resurgence of traditional expectations about gendered household roles and the return of married women to “home production” — housework, child care, and so on.

Ethnic women have dropped out at slightly higher rates than the majority Han women. Ten of China’s ethnic minority groups are Muslim, and of those, two of the larger ethnic minorities are the Hui and the Uyghurs. Hui women have dropped out of the labor force at rates almost 20 percentage points higher than Han women.

This was a really surprising result, because the Hui are very well-integrated with the Han in many parts of China. In many parts of China, they may be the only ethnic minority that a Han person would see. And they speak Chinese and they use Chinese language. We’re thinking this may be a robust cultural or religious difference that surfaced when the state relaxed its control over individuals’ lives.

For the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, we found that men tended to drop out of the labor force at 20 percentage points more than Han men had over the same period. And we have some evidence that this is very discriminatory. There has been a lot of in-migration of Han into Xinjiang, and we think it’s very much that the Uyghur men are getting closed out of particular labor markets. So we have a project for the next year, where we’re looking into that in more detail.

Jim and I have a good partnership. We tend to share the analysis and the writing. And he’s really good at the labor literature and I’m very good at the China literature, so I can contribute things that are very specific to China. And he’s very, very good at the econometric analysis. So our work is very complementary, and not particularly set roles.

In their China visits, Maurer-Fazio encourages her students to drop their preconceptions and really perceive what’s around them. She boils the concept down to seven words of antimetabole: “Learn to observe and observe to learn.”

Maurer-Fazio: The Western press tends to present China as some sort of unmitigated environmental disaster. But during the “Sustaining the Masses” Short Terms [which brought students to China to study environmental and economic policy in 1999, 2001 and 2004], students saw how engaged the Chinese were in mitigating environmental problems. We visited places where people, especially particular individuals, had come up with solutions that both benefited local residents economically and protected the environment.

When we met on campus for the 2004 Short Term, students were sure that every piece of clothing produced in China came from a sweatshop. And when we got to China, we took them to a garment factory. It was well-ventilated, well-lit, people were happy, the factory had a long list of people waiting to get jobs there. The income was not particularly high, but was a lot higher than the income of local farmers. I thought the working conditions were really good.

But students, just because it was textile work, assumed it was a sweatshop. And when we took them to this factory, they felt justified in all their preconceptions. ‘Look! A sweatshop!’ [She laughs.]

Until they saw the alternative. Just a few days later, we went to a rice-growing area. It was transplanting season. When students saw that, they suddenly thought those factory jobs looked pretty good. That was interesting to see. It was like light bulbs going on when we visited the rice paddies.

So, see what you’re seeing, think about what you’re seeing, ask questions about it. Rather than, on a field trip, falling asleep on the bus or just listening to your iPod — on the journey itself you want to observe what’s going on around you. And that’s not something that young people automatically do. I think it is a learning process.

Interview by Doug Hubley

VIEW SLIDE SHOW: Inside China-Photographs from the 2006 Bates Fall Semester Abroad trip to Ganzi Tibet Prefecture, western Sichuan Province.

Professor Margaret Maurer-Fazio inaugurates her tenure in the newly established Betty Doran Stangle Professorship in Applied Economics at Bates with a lecture at 4:30 p.m Friday, Feb. 1, 2008, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Maurer-Fazio’s talk is titled China: A Journey of Teaching and Scholarship. A reception will follow in the Chase Hall Gallery. The event is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6237.

The talk will cover what Maurer-Fazio describes as the “exciting synergies between teaching in China, taking students to China, and my research agenda.” A member of the Bates economics faculty since 1994, Maurer-Fazio studies the dramatic impact of the liberalization of China’s economy on that nation’s labor markets.

She has investigated the roles of education and of rural-to-urban migration in wage determination, the extent of gender differentials in wage structures and regional differences in labor markets. Her most recent research looks into the treatment of Muslim and other ethnic minorities in China’s labor markets and the changing work course of urban Chinese women.

“To her work, she brings novel and complex empirical techniques that result in new and important insights into one of our world’s most changing and powerful markets,” says Jill Reich, dean of the faculty at Bates. “Maggie is deeply devoted to her students, drawing them into the intellectual excitement of her expertise in ways that are transformative and creative.”

Maurer-Fazio’s teaching includes courses on economic development, the Chinese economy, the Japanese economy and the nexus between environmental protection and economic development in China. During her time at Bates, Maurer-Fazio has taken Bates students to China and Taiwan for several Short Term courses and for the Bates Semester program in Nanjing. That program, which Maurer-Fazio has co-directed with other Bates faculty four times, offers intensive language study and courses in Chinese culture as well as economics.

Maurer-Fazio not only organizes and leads international conferences in her field of expertise, but also helps Maine high school teachers learn about China. She was integral to the development of the college’s Program in Asian Studies and has chaired that program. She also serves as associate dean of faculty.

With Sarah Cook, Maurer-Fazio is co-editor of the volume The Workers’ State Meets the Market: Labour in China’s Transition (Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1999), and she has published many articles in economics and China journals.

She holds a doctorate degree in economics and an advanced certificate in Asian studies from the University of Pittsburgh. She studied Chinese at the Inter-university Program for Chinese Language in Taipei. She received both her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in economics at the University of Western Ontario.

The Betty Doran Stangle Chair is made possible by a generous gift from Trustee Bruce Stangle ’70 and his wife, Emily Siegel Stangle ’72, of Belmont, Mass. The chair honors Bruce Stangle’s mother, a daughter of Irish immigrants who became a successful businesswoman, community volunteer and mother of five. The Stangles’ gift recognizes a member of the Department of Economics who exemplifies the breadth of intellect of Bates teacher-scholars and who has an impact on the world.

Bruce Stangle graduated from Bates with a degree in English and earned both a master’s degree in management and a doctorate degree in applied economics from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. In 1981 he co-founded Analysis Group Inc., an economic consulting firm that now employs 350 consultants in nine offices in North America.

He serves as chairman of Analysis Group and is a member of the visiting committee for the MIT economics department and the board of directors of Wellington Trust Company, a private money management firm. Emily Stangle graduated from Bates in 1972 with a B.A. in sociology.

Written by economist Howard Bodenhorn of Lafayette College, the 2001 study, Economic Scholarship at Elite Liberal Arts Colleges: Are Other Economists Paying Attention? measured the influence of 439 economists at liberal arts colleges. Bodenhorn concluded, “Although prominent economists at elite research universities produce the most influential scholarship, economists at the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges make significant contributions to the literature.” Ranking the publication record not by the number or books and articles, but by the frequency with which others cite their work, the study seeks to measure the quality and influence of the department’s scholarly output, rather than its quantity.

David A. Aschauer, the Elmer W. Campbell Professor of Economics at Bates, was the top-ranked full professor among liberal arts colleges. A former Federal Reserve senior economist, Aschauer has taught at Bates since 1989. His teaching and research interests center on macroeconomics, financial markets and public finance.

Aschauer’s scholarship represents only a part of his department’s publication record. Michael Murray, the Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics; Margaret Maurer-Fazio, associate professor of economics; and James Hughes, associate professor of economics, all have substantial numbers of citations.

Murray’s work concerns public economics, urban economics, econometrics and urban development. Maurer-Fazio’s research focuses on labor-market issues in China. Hughes specializes in labor economics and health care economics. “We were quite pleased with the results of the study,” said Hughes, who is also the department chair. “People have been working hard to complete and publish their work. It is nice to see that other economists have been paying attention.”

Hughes also noted that the rankings did not include the publications of the department’s newest member, Associate Professor Lynne Lewis, a well-respected and highly productive environmental economist. “If you include Lynne’s work, our ranking would be higher still,” said Hughes.

According to Bodenhorn’s findings, the 10 most productive liberal arts economics departments in the 1990s were Wellesley, Bates, Wesleyan, Colby, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Smith, Lafayette and Swarthmore.

Bodenhorn’s study cites 1999 research by James Baughman and Robert Goldman published in Change, a journal of higher education, that shows a high correlation between faculty publication records and college rankings. Prestigious baccalaureate liberal arts colleges have faculty publication records comparable to some research and doctoral granting institutions, Baughman and Goldman concluded.

Phillips Faculty Fellowships at Bates provide a full year’s paid leave, with additional funding for scholarly research, enabling fellows to travel, pursue scholarship and interact with other leading scholars in their field. The fellowships are part of an ambitious initiative of awards, honors and opportunities for faculty and students funded by a $9 million endowment bequest from former Bates President Charles F. Phillips and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips, in 1999.

Maurer-Fazio will continue her research on the integration of China’s urban labor markets. Working with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, Beijing University and Australia National University, Maurer-Fazio’s work focuses on the experiences of and interactions among rural-to-urban migrants and employed and laid-off urbanites. The researchers will investigate the status of traditionally more-privileged urban workers in comparison to rural migrants. Maurer-Fazio and her colleagues will also explore how managers view the contribution of migrants and resident urban workers to the production process. The researchers will consider how increasing numbers of laid-off urban workers have been faring with their changing status.

Lopez will explore the impact of globalization and European integration on contemporary understandings of Spanish national identity. Her premise is that one of the most important changes brought by the rapid transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain concerns the reconceptualization of national identity. Lopez will investigate how Spaniards identify themselves in relation to their region, their nation and Europe. She will also explore how identifications with macro (Europe) and micro (different autonomous regions within Spain) “nationalisms” function to include and exclude different groups within and outside the borders of the “new” Europe. Finally, Lopez will consider how these issues manifest themselves in cultural products such as television programming, magazines and fictional narratives.

President and Mrs. Phillips, longtime Auburn residents, officially served Bates from 1944 through 1966; Charles died in March 1999 just months after the death of Evelyn, his wife of 65 years.

In addition to the faculty fellowships, the Phillips Endowment Program supports student fellowships and two endowed faculty professorships, as well as academic programs recommended by the dean of the faculty.