Delia Davin was a writer and lecturer on Chinese society and particularly Chinese women's stories.
14 Facts About Delia Davin
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Delia Davin was one of the first foreign scholars to consider the impact of the policies of the Chinese Communist Party on women.
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From 1988 until her retirement in 2004, Davin taught Chinese history at Leeds University, where she became a chaired professor.
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Delia Davin was head of the Department of East Asian Studies and deputy head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures.
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Delia Davin was born in Oxford, England, to an expatriate literary family of Irish descent who had emigrated from New Zealand.
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Delia Davin's father Dan Davin was an editor at the Clarendon Press and her mother Winnie Davin was an editor at Oxford University Press.
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Delia Davin left school at the age of 15 and finished her high school studies through evening classes.
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In 1975, Delia Davin returned to China and worked as a translator for the Foreign Languages Press, a position arranged for her by her friends Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, who were translators.
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Delia Davin was one of the first scholars to study Chinese Communist Party policies on women and the problems of working them out in practice.
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Delia Davin explained that the book followed policies from the 1930s until 1949, but spent the most time and detailed analysis on the 1950s.
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Delia Davin, Hershatter continued, acknowledged the great changes brought about by the new "Party-state", and described the contradictions between the reformist Marriage Law and the realities of its results; women in the countryside were caught between economic independence and their continued fixed place in patrilocal families.
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Delia Davin's jointly edited book China's One Child Family Policy was one of the first studies of the early effects of that policy.
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In 1999, after tracking the changes of the post-Mao economic reforms, Delia Davin published a second major study, Internal Migration in Contemporary China, that used field research, interviews, and published media.
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Delia Davin died of cancer at home in Ilkley on 13 October 2016, aged 72.