[4] John Gittings wrote that the book went "far beyond the stereotypes offered both by the communist regime and its critics" and that it probed the "tensions between a new 'socialist' emphasis on women's participation in economic and political life and a relatively unchallenged structure of gender and generational relationships in the family.
"[1] During the following years, Davin wrote articles and chapters that analyzed marriage migration, domestic service, and welfare entitlements for Chinese women workers.
"[6] Dorothy Solinger in China Quarterly wrote that the book was "more for the initiate than for the specialist," but "rich with observations and covers every major topic that touches on internal geographical movement in China since the late 1970s," including the demographic traits of the migrants, state policies, the reason farmers leave the countryside and to come to the city, and the images of these migrants in the media.
The senior Mao scholar Stuart Schram both praised and criticized her 1997 biography, noting that Davin's target audience was those "without a prior knowledge of Chinese affairs".
He said that writers of brief studies like hers often assume that "because the reader belongs to the uninitiated, he or she is also a semi-literate and write in basic English," or authors may take space limitations "as a pretext not merely for simplifying controversial issues, but for presenting only one side of them."
"[9] Schram then added that the book's greatest weakness was its treatment of the Yan'an period of Mao's career, in which Davin did not mention the single most important theme, that unlike the International Faction, who had parroted the Marxist dogma they learned in the Soviet Union, Mao had "creatively developed Marxism in the context of Chinese history and culture."
By contrast, Schram continued, the chapters on Mao as the ruler of China "deal subtly but forcefully with all the major issues."
(p. 77)[10] In 2013, Davin published a short biography Mao (Oxford University Press, Very Short Introduction Series; 2013) John Gittings wrote that the book "rejected current appraisals of Mao as no more than 'a Chinese Stalin with a taste for killing', while recognising that his flawed and contradictory character brought great harm to China..."[1] The scholar Gregor Benton commented that sometimes "resisting a jumbo-history doesn't necessarily produce a compelling focus and can lapse at worst into patronizing simplification," but that in this case "a broader picture remains unremittingly central, though not at a cost of nuance and some speculative reflection.
"[11] Davin was married three times – first to William (Bill) John Francis Jenner, a fellow scholar of China; then to Andrew (Andy) Morgan; and finally in 1997 to Owen Wells, a probation officer.