Comments on: Where’s my check?

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:40:00 +0000

The name doesn’t ring a bell, actually, and — though I can understand where you got the idea — I actually don’t believe that all Marxist-oriented or -derived scholarship is necessarily bunk.

By: Juan de la O

Juan de la O — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:28:12 +0000

Jonathan Dresner,

Should I assume then that you are in disagreement with Hart-Landsberg, who does take a Marxist approach?

Less dramatically than the FEER article, I can only say that from some years experience in Latin America, more than methodological bias can be present. We should struggle to avoid such yet, in some cases, it assists in offsetting overstatements that have been taken into commonplace. ‘Centrisms’ and unreasonable reason seem all too plentiful throughout modern academia.

By: lirelou

lirelou — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 05:21:44 +0000

Yan Xichan, according to this website, which is devoted to debunking myths, the “Great Wall of China” cannot be seen from outer space. see: http://www.snopes.com/science/greatwal.htm Of course, not having gone up and looked myself, I can confirm neither hypothesis. I’ve also seen sites which take serious contention with “China’s 5000 years of history”. More to the point of the post, I found the FEER’s question to be an important one. While my own degrees are from modest, regional universities, I do believe that the Ivies are important. They are (presumably) best positioned to recruit the very best Chinese scholars, particularly those who have made a name for themselves internationally, and to fund the publication of works important to Asian historical studies. Like it or not, there is a recognized pyramid of educational institutions, and the Ivies are at or nearest the top. It does not surprise that most Asia academics in the U.S. are American. I would hope that they were selected on the basis of their scholarship, and not on the basis of a patronym or ethnic classification. That said, any Asian scholar worth their salt will possess the required language skills. This does not mean that they must be native or near-native in skills. Indeed, my experience with native speakers is that they often come with cultural biases which color, at best, or blind their capability for independent, detached analysis. But Asian scholars must have the minimum language skills required to conduct and confirm their research.

By: Jon Fernquest

Jon Fernquest — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:29:24 +0000

IMHO more effort needs to go into translations of Chinese historical documents because there is a lot of bias in secondary sources.

What amazes me about Chinese history over long stretches of time are the great number of Socrates-like ministers at the imperial court who essentially drank their cups of hemlock
rather than cave in to political pressure, and maybe this challenging of orthodox norms has probably gone in long historical cycles, maybe there is not a lot of this nowadays. The complicity of the PRC government in the production and uncritical suppport of the Gavin Menzies Ming history and Geoff Wade’s critique of it, is one example. Anyway foreign scholars, like De Toqueville for American history, will always play a role in making Chinese history more multi-faceted and nuanced, and that includes non-PRC, and ethnically Chinese historians, and scholars working in the histories of adjacent territories, peoples, ethnic groups, e.g. Vietnamese, Mongolian, Burmese, Zhuang, Tai histories, that share a common history, that paradoxically often reads entirely differently depending on which side of the border you’re reading it.

By: Andrew Field

Andrew Field — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 05:17:38 +0000

Glad to see that I’m not the only one who feels that blogging is a great way to discuss academic issues (and popular ones) in our field. Keep up the good work!

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:42:35 +0000

In such an approach there is essentially no difference between true history and fictitious history or alternative history.

This is a common conclusion of people who are just beginning to realize that history is not just about “facts” but about causality which requires judicious weighing and interpretation of the relative importance of sometimes ambiguous, incorrect or misleading sources. But there are reasonably clear standards of evidence by which we judge the material and adherence to those standards is one of the most critical components of evaluating the scholarship of others. It’s not at all “ethereal”: actually, it’s based on considerable weight, and the evaluation not of single pieces of evidence but of evidence in groups and in relation to each other, and the more evidence you have, the more reliable your evaluation of it.

There are scholars whose ideological approach to history is closer to alchemy — both Marxists and neo-Cons, among others — but the mainstream of the Western academy is practicing something much closer to a social science than a literary art.

By: J Chan

J Chan — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 20:47:14 +0000

Thus 1949 and beyond does not (and cannot) change history upto 1949, but rather the ‘interpretation of history’ depend on when the interpreter of history existed, and I would also add that not only does ‘interpretation of history’ depend on the time but also on space, for it would depend on which country the interpreter of history found himself in. In such an approach there is essentially no difference between true history and fictitious history or alternative history. This sounds more like political studies (with its various forms of propaganda) than history. If one adopted such an ethereal approach to the study of ‘history’ as an intellectual subject, then by comparing with, say, ‘modern day chemistry’ with ‘alchemy’, what you call ‘history’ here should perhaps be renamed ‘alhistry’.

By: Alan Baumler

Alan Baumler — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 19:37:00 +0000

I also did not see the FEER piece as a hack job, although it was brief and under-supported by academic standards, as one might expect from a magazine. He is mostly talking about contemporary research, and I don’t know as much about that as I should, but a lot of what I do see on China looks different than what (little) I read about U.S. social science research. Speaking truth to power is a pose that American academics seem to like at home but not to like as much in China.