Perspectives on a Changing China
About the Book
Perspectives on a Changing China: Essays in Honor of Professor C. Martin Wilbur on the Occasion of His Retirement
edited by Joshua A. Fogel and William T. Rowe
This collection of essays represents current research in modern (post-1800) Chinese history. All contributors are former students of Professor C. Martin Wilbur, one of the great names in the China field over the past forty years, who recently retired from a long tenure as modern Chinese historian at Columbia University.
While diverse in their subject matter, the essays reflect the historiographic concerns of a group of scholars whose views were formed at least partly in response to the view of modern China presented by Professor Wilbur and others of his academic generation. In a sense, the essays constitute the late fruits of pioneering efforts. Appropriately, an important theme addressed by several of the authors is how modern China is and has been perceived. Most of the essays embody, at least in part, a revision of previously held views.
Joshua A.Fogel and William T. Rowe are both Ph.D. candidates at Columbia University.
Published in cooperation with the East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Perspectives on a Changing China
Essays in Honor of Professor C. Martin Wilbur on the Occasion of His Retirement
edited by Joshua A. Fogel
and William T. Rowe
First published 1979 by Westview Press, Inc.
Published 2019 by Routledge
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Copyright 1979 Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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Library of Congress No.: 79-626
ISBN 13: 978-0-367-28270-7 (hbk)
Contents
, James P. Harrison
, Joshua A. Fogel and William T. Rowe
, Olga Lang
, Robert H. G. Lee
, Odoric Y. K. Wou
, William T. Rowe
, Thomas L. Kennedy
, John DeFrancis
, Anita M. O'Brien
, Ka-che Yip
, Jane L. Price
, Joshua A. Fogel
, Li Yu-ning
This book would not have been possible without the constant efforts of Anita M. O'Brien. The editors also wish to thank Dr. Dorothy Borg, Professors Thomas Bernstein, Wm. Theodore de Bary, James W. Morley, Andrew J. Nathan, and Herschel Webb of Columbia University, Gilbert Chan of Miami University of Ohio, Samuel Chu of Ohio State University, Hsueh Chun-tu of the University of Maryland, Ho Ping-ti of the University of Chicago, Allen Whiting of the University of Michigan, and Mr. John S. Service for their assistance in this project.
This volume was financed by the East Asian Institute of Columbia University, and by the personal contributions of the following friends, colleagues, and students of C. Martin Wilbur:
M. Searle Bates
Edwin G. Beal, Jr.
Deborah E. Bell
Professor and Mrs. Thomas P. Bernstein
Hugh Borton
Pauline Ho Bynum
F. Gilbert Chan
Dr. and Mrs. Thomas S. N. Chen
Sister Madeleine Chi
Samuel C. Chu
Mr. and Mrs. O. Edmund Clubb
Gwendolyn F. Dahlquist
Cora Du Bois
R. Randle Edwards
Professor and Mrs. Ainslee T. Embree
Professor and Mrs. Morton H. Fried
Mr. and Mrs. Bernard L. Gladieux
Professor and Mrs. L. C. Goodrich
Sidney L. Greenblatt
Thomas L. Kennedy
V. K. Wellington Koo
Jane Price Laudon
Professor and Mrs. Charlton M. Lewis
Bernadette Y. N. Li
Anne J. Lindbeck
Professor and Mrs. Allen B. Linden
Professor and Mrs. Pichon P. Y. Loh
Kuang-huan Lu
Professor and Mrs. John Meskill
Professor and Mrs. James I. Nakamura
Andrew J. Nathan
Susan W. O'Sullivan
Mr. and Mrs. Russell W. Schoch
Dr. and Mrs. Georges E. Seligmann
Mr. and Mrs. Ichiro Shirato
Professor and Mrs. Paul K. T. Sih
Odoric Wou
Silas H. L. Wu
Professor and Mrs. Ka-che Yip
W.T.R.
J.A.F.
James P. Harrison
Students in the classes of C. Martin Wilbur never doubted the fascination of Chinese history or their professor's vast knowledge of this engrossing subject. As my experience in his Master's-level seminar in the spring of 1960 well demonstrated, however, they did not always share their professor's mastery of its complications. After some minutes of a rather incoherent presentation I made on the extraordinarily contradictory interpretations of the "truth of the Li Li-san Line" of 1930 in the history of the Chinese Communist movement, I recall well Professor Wilbur's terse comment, "Mr. Harrison has shown well an important lesson of Chinese historyits complexity." He could of course have added "confusion," but I appreciated the lesson, which he so aptly restated in his presidential address to the Association for Asian Studies on March 28, 1972:
It is our job to try to understand Asian societies as they actually were in the past and as they really are today; to see them in great depth, in their multi-faceted variety; to view them with sympathy but with historical perspective and detachment.
Such sensitivity to complexities and historiographical problems, together with its necessary complement of brilliant research to unravel key problems of Chinese history, most distinguish the achievements of C. Martin Wilbur. He has helped to clarify key problems from many centuries of Chinese history for readers, students, and friends; for specialists, he has elucidated with particular skill first a crucial aspect of the social history of the Han dynasty, and later, in a series of writings, the remarkable conjunction of events that occurred in the 1920s (during this period, as the son of YMCA workers, he had been himself a student in Shanghai).
Surely it is testimony to an outstanding talent to be able to write the definitive studies of problems separated by the 2,000 years between the Han dynasty and the 1920s. The former work, published as Slavery in China during the Former Han Dynasty, 206 B.C.-A.D. 25 (New York, 1943), grew out of his 1941 doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, the institution where he also earned his Master's degree in 1933 with an essay on "Village Government in China." He did the research for the classic volume on the Han while assistant curator and then curator of Chinese archaeology and ethnology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from 1937 to 1943. A "Contribution to a Bibliography on Chinese Metallic Mirrors" ( China Journal 20, April 1934) and the "History of the Crossbow" ( Smithsonian Report for 1936) offered further testimony to his mastery of ancient Chinese matters.
