View the H-Asia Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Asia's April 2007 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Asia's April 2007 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Asia home page.
H-ASIA April 10, 2007 Further perspectives on Chinese Scholars and Chinese History *********************************************************************** From: Qin Shao <shao@tcnj.edu> Dear Colleagues, I wish to make a few points that seem to be missing from the discussions initiated by Professors Thomas DuBois and Yang Bin so far. On the representation of Chinese scholars at the AAS annual meetings: One basic fact is that unless being invited, one has to propose a panel in order to be considered as a potential panelist. The question is therefore this: how many Chinese scholars have proposed panels for the AAS meeting in question? Personally, I have had very positive experience with AAS panel proposals. Incidentally, at the recent AAS Boston meeting I was on an all-Chinese -historian panel. More to the point, except for Prof. Wen-hsin Yeh who chaired the panel, we all came from PRC in the mid-1980s and early 1990s to complete our graduate studies in the US and thus belong to the group Profs. DuBois and Yang Bin specifically referred to—Hanchao Lu (discussant), Di Wang, Xin Zhang, and myself. On the representation of Chinese historians at major research universities in the West: While Profs. DuBois and Yang Bin may be the first ones to raise the issue publicly, others have quietly noticed it for some time. Ever so observant and informed of American academic culture, the late Michigan State Univ. historian Stephen Averill and my doctoral adviser mentioned to me in the late 1990s that with only one exception (at the time), those historians who came from PRC after China’s opening and graduated from American universities had all been teaching at smaller colleges (some of them have since changed jobs), and that none of them received a job offer from the nation’s elite universities. Almost ten years have passed since then, but Prof. Averill’s observation by and large remains an accurate reflection of the reality in American colleges today. Also since then I’ve had a number of casual conversations on this phenomenon with my friends, both American and Chinese historians, none of whom disputed the basic fact—the absence of historians from China at America’s elite universities. In fact, as late as in last November, I was told that at Harvard the history of each country is taught mostly by professors from that country except for the history of China; a fact that is easy to check if anyone is interested. Of course, we are talking about Chinese historians on the faculty of the history department of various American teaching institutions, not Chinese scholars generally. What is interesting in this regard is that the situation in other fields of the social sciences and humanities (not to mention science) is quite different from that in history—Chinese scholars from PRC who came to the US since the mid-1980s are at lease represented at America’s major universities in the fields of political sciences, literature, anthropology, and Sino-US relations. At issue is perhaps not representation but qualification. If my reading is correct, one of the main questions raised by Professors DuBois and Yang Bin is whether qualified historians from PRC were not given the opportunity to work at the top universities which often have the best resources for research and teaching. The question is provocative with too many implications to engage here (I do hope the research the students of Profs. DuBois and Yang Bin are conducting will help shed some light on the issue). At the same time, I must also point out that a number of American scholars whose scholarship I deeply admire have been teaching at smaller colleges, though some of them did so probably by choice. On whether great Chinese teachers were a thing of the past: China has never been short of great teachers, even during and after Mao’s Cultural Revolution. For many Chinese intellectuals, pursuing and transmitting knowledge is simply a way of life. In 1980, I studied for my MA degree with the late Prof. Xian Tianyou in Shanghai on the history of the Qin and Han dynasties. The reading list he provided covers literature from pre-Qin all the way down to the Ming and Qing dynasties. At our weekly one-on-one meeting, Prof. Xian would sit in his study with his eyes closed while listening to my report, mostly in silence, and remained so if I didn’t have anything interesting to add to the subject I was studying. Only when I had something new to offer, would he open his eyes and ask, “Tea?” He compelled me to think critically and to come up with fresh interpretations even on a subject that had been studied for almost two thousand years. To those who know about his work, Prof. Xian’s own contribution to the scholarship on the political economy of the early Han dynasty and the causes of dynastic changes and peasant uprisings in ancient China remains important to this day. Prof. Xian was not the only great teacher in China from whom I benefited, and I’m not the only one among China's "lost generation" who have encountered such teachers. Teachers like Prof. Xian are not only erudite scholars, but inspiring mentors. The fact that Western scholars didn’t know about them doesn’t diminish their greatness and their profound impact on their students. Because of the research training we received from them, some of us had already published extensively before going abroad. Such training also to a large extent helped compensate our tremendous disadvantages when we came to the West, of which language barrier was only a small part. Thank you, Qin Shao The College of New Jersey ************************************************************************* To post to H-ASIA simply send your message to: <H-ASIA@h-net.msu.edu> For holidays or short absences send post to: <listserv@h-net.msu.edu> with message: SET H-ASIA NOMAIL Upon return, send post with message SET H-ASIA MAIL H-ASIA WEB HOMEPAGE URL: http://h-net.msu.edu/~asia/
|