I heard a few China papers at ASPAC and, though they weren’t all on one panel, they might well have been, because they all dealt with the rural response to changing 20th and 21st century circumstances.

On Friday I heard Soka University’s own Xiaoxing Liu discuss rural responses to the marketization of the labor and agricultural economy in China over the last few decades. She noted that the share of Chinese workers involved in agriculture dropped below 50% in 2003, a critical landmark for modernization theorists: many former agricultural workers have become migrant laborers (more about them below) and the remaining agriculturalists have a great deal of structural and economic trouble: lack of land rights being high on the list. Perhaps more important, according to Liu, is the lack of information. Agriculture in a market economy is a series of educated guesses about what will grow and what will sell: rural cooperatives (of which there were, she noted, many different types) have been trying to improve the quality of the guesswork by pooling information, creating better paths to bigger markets, and building negotiating power. Despite the success of some of these projects, Liu noted that participation rates are still low: “Trust crises are widespread in China,” she said, including financial institutions necessary for long-distance and long-term trade, land rights, and problems of bureaucratic authority.

On Saturday morning I got to hear Kate Merkel-Hess of UC Irvine relate the career of rural reform educator Tao Xingzhi, particularly the short-lived teacher training school he founded in 1927. The “Rural Modern” movement he spearheaded was an attempt to merge rural Chinese values with Western progressivism, and use education to jumpstart rural reform along May Fourth movement lines. Tao’s thought was a combination of John Dewey and Wang Yang-ming Confucianism, among other things; one of the successful innovations of his school was that it was in a rural area, so that the teaching students didn’t get “citified” and resist “returning” to teach in rural areas. The education projects carried out by students at the school often — as rural reform often does — morphed into social reform, including a great growth in self-government in the 1930s. There were some fascinating connections between Tao’s movement and contemporary (and slightly later) CCP shifts — the realization of the potential of rural society for reform echoing Mao’s contemporary reports from Jiangxi — and Tao worked closely with the CCP in the development of preschool and kindergarten in China. His students went on to become very influential in education as well, and the mix of physical education, scientific thinking and access to literacy (some great stuff about the new generation “Thousand Character Readers”) lay a new foundation for modernization in the latter 20th century.

On Sunday I got to chair a session on education in Asia which included a paper by Yi Schuler, from Biola U., on the education of the children of migrant laborers. She started the paper (and the powerpoint) with a great quote:

“Education is a mirror held against the face of a people. Nations may put on blustering shows of strength to conceal public weakness, erect grand facades to conceal shabby backyards, and profess peace while secretly arming for conquest, but how they take care of their children tells unerringly who they are.” — George Z. F. Bereday¹

The critical issue here is the hukou residence registration system which limits social and educational services to the place of official residence. It isn’t impossible to change residences, but it is difficult and rare for migrant laborers, which means that their children, for those who bring them along, are unable to attend public schools. It’s true that the majority of migrant laborers with families leave them behind, but even a small share of the tens of millions (some estimates say hundreds of millions) of migrant laborers bringing children along represents a huge population. Interestingly, parents who are better educated are more likely to bring their children when the migrate, and also more interested in making sure their children get decent educations (which is often difficult in their home villages). Yi’s focus was on Chengdu city, which has taken a much more creative and flexible approach to the education problem (in the absence of a complete abandonment of the hukou system), including supporting unofficial schools in their quest for licensing and better facilities and creating official migrant student schools that draw on government education funds.

1. Comparative Methods in Education, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, p. 5

I’ve been reading Gardner’s Chu Hsi: Learning to be a Sage. The book consists of a long introduction to Zhu Xi and his work (He was the Thomas Aquinas of China, a comparison that does not mean much to American undergrads) and a translation of Conversations of Master Chu (朱子語類) ,thematic selections from Zhu’s many writings and commentaries on the classics.¹ Two of the chapters are on reading, which was a major theme for Zhu and is a major theme for American academics. Trying to figure out what texts our students should read, trying to teach them how to approach these texts and trying to figure out what the heck they did with them as you read their reactions are some of the main things we do. In fact it they are -the- main things, since students will usually forget us, our lectures and our exam questions fairly quickly. They should not forget their encounters with Zhuangzi, Thomas Paine, or Paul Cohen, at least if liberal education has any meaning at all.

Zhu Xi was somewhat critical of reading. Book learning is a secondary matter for students. ( 4/1) since moral principle is originally complete in man, and does not need to be added from outside. Despite that he spends a lot of time on reading, since it is the a way to have contact with the sages and worthies. It is worth a lot of work.

Here’s what is necessary: one blow with a club, one scar, one slap on the face, a handful of blood. Your reading of what other people write should be just like this. Don’t be lax! (4.14)

American teachers would be happy to be able to inculcate that type of spirit. Zhu also has some handy advice  for students on how to approach a text.

4.11 In reading, you must look for an opening in the text; only then will you find the moral principle in it. If you do not see an opening, you’ll have no way to enter into the text. Once you find an opening, the coherence of the text will naturally become clear.

This is something teachers work on a lot the point is not just to run your eyes over the text it is to “enter” it and figure out what it is doing. You want to reach the point where you can look at the text like a scholar.

4.12. When scholars first look at a text, they see only a confused mass. In the course of time they come to see two or three chunks. But only when they see ten or more chunks will they make progress. It’s like Butcher Ting cutting up the ox—it was best when he no longer beheld the whole ox.

O.K., we know where we want to end up. How do we get there?

4.35- T0 be a man is just to be a man, to read a book is just to read a book. Ordinarily, if a man reads a book ten times and doesn’t understand it, he’ll read it twenty times. If he still doesn’t understand it, he’ll read it thirty times. With the fiftieth reading there’s sure to be some understanding. If with the fiftieth reading he’s still in the dark and doesn’t understand, it’s that his psychophysical stuff² is no good. Nowadays people have yet to read a book ten times, and they say they can’t understand it.

Hmm. Not much like modern advice to students. If it first you don’t succeed try the same thing fifty more times. If it still does not work you are stupid. Still, he does complain about these kids today at the end, so he is not entirely unlike modern teachers.

Zhu Xi would not have been at all impressed with modern ideas of cultural literacy, the idea that to be educated one needs to read widely in a lot of texts to understand the cultural context in which to place whatever one reads. He favors much more limited reading.

4.21. Generally, in reading, students should keep to these three [dicta]: (1) read little but become intimately familiar with what you read; (2) don’t scrutinize the text, developing your own far-fetched views of it, but rather personally experience it over and over again; and (3) concentrate fully, without thought of gain.

4.22. Best to read less but to become intimately familiar with what you read. That children remember what they’ve read and adults frequently don’t is simply because children’s minds are focused. If in one day they are given one hundred characters, they keep to one hundred characters; if given two hundred characters, they keep to two hundred characters. Adults sometimes read one hundred pages of characters in one day—they aren’t so well focused. Often they read ten separate pieces when it would be best to read one part in ten.  Extend the time you give to your reading; limit the size of your curriculum.

You don’t want to read widely, you want to read a handful of texts and really understand them. This is almost the opposite of how we encourage our students to read. We want them to come up with their own theories, and like it or not we do encourage them to think of gain by giving them grades. This is one of the main things that makes Zhu Xi not a modern liberal of any sort. Unlike us he has a canon, a relatively small collection of texts that should be the basis of your education. These are not texts you should question in the sense of standing above them trying to pull out material you can use, but rather to mold yourself to it.

5.37. The problem with men is that they feel the views of others alone may be doubted, not their own. Should they try to reproach themselves as they reproach others, they may come to realize their own merits and demerits.

Despite not being a modern liberal, the goal of his education is the same as our liberal education, to study a handful of works well enough that we can understand other things that we encounter.

4.38. [ Zhu quotes Shan-ku] “I don’t know which of all the Classics and all the histories I’m most intimately familiar with. In general, students are fond of breadth but often lack detailed understanding. They spread themselves over a hundred different books, which isn’t as good as having a detailed understanding of one—and if they still had the strength afterward, they could turn to other books. In this way, even if they were to wade and hunt through numerous works, they’d still get the gist. It seems that if our reading of books is based on our capabilities we will benefit from each and every passage, but if the books overwhelm us, even when we’re finished with them we’ll still be vague about their meaning.

This is the heart of liberal education. Undergraduate education is intended to lead the student through understanding a tiny handful of books (more than one, but then we have no canon) so that they reach the point where they can understand whatever else they may read. This is why college professors rarely take classes from their colleagues, despite the fact that we get free tuition. Why bother having someone lead you through a text when you can do it yourself? This is also why picking books for an intro class is such a trial. If this is going to be one of the six or seven books that make the foundation of a liberal education is this really the one I want? We do want students to re-think themselves as they read these books, just as Zhu wanted.

5.33- The problem students have with reading is simply that they wish to advance and are unwilling to retreat and reread. The more they advance, the more their reading lacks understanding. It’d be better if they were to retreat but fully comprehend what they read. In general, the problem is that they stick to their opinions and are unwilling to give them up. It’s just like hearing litigation: if beforehand the mind supports proposition B, it will simply search for the wrongs in A; and if beforehand it supports A, it will simply discover the wrongs in B. Better to put aside one’s views toward A and B and slowly examine them both. Only then will one be able to dis tinguish right from wrong. Heng-ch’ii said: “Wash away the old understanding and bring forth new ideas.” This statement is extremely apt. If one doesn’t wash away the old understanding, where will the new ideas arise? Students today have two kinds of flaws: one is that they let themselves be ruled by personal prejudices; the other is that they embrace received theories. Even if they wished to shake free of these, they’d still naturally be troubled  by them.

So Zhu does favor something that is not unlike our modern liberal education. His goal however, is not ours. We want to turn people into constant readers who are always dipping into this and that. He is not.

5.38. …He also said: People are afflicted with a desire to speed through [what they read]. I once read a collection of poetry with another man. He routinely skipped over the titles of the poems. Not even to read the titles of the poems—what kind of reading of poetry is that? I once saw the inside of Kung Shih-chih’s sedan chair. There was but one text to read, which shows he was focused and calm. He added: Normally when a person goes out, he places three or four texts in his sedan chair. He reads one book, and when he gets bored he reads another. What kind of effort is this?

How many books are you reading now? Probably too many. There is a lot more of interest in Gardner’s book, but I think I will take Zhu’s advice at least for a while

4.54 People beyond mid-life shouldn’t read much; they should simply turn the little they do read over and over in their minds. They they’ll naturally understand moral principle.

1. The full text of his conversations with his disciples was compiled after his death and a thematic edition was published in 1270. Garner works from Chang Po-hsing’s 18th century abridgment with additions of this own.
2. qi

Reading through 中华民国文化史 (Cultural History of the Chinese Republic)¹ I found something interesting in the section on 国术. 国术 is a term for what today would be called 武术, i.e. martial arts. Although there was a lot of interest in physical education in China in the 20s and 30s traditional martial arts were not part of this, as they were often seen as backwards peasant stuff. The Guomindang did make some efforts to encourage the modernization of the martial arts, however, setting up the 中央国术馆 (Central Martial Arts Academy) in Nanjing in 1927. Eventually there would be provincial-level organizations as well. At first the Academy seems to have been organized like a traditional martial arts school with masters and disciples but in 1929 it was reorganized as a more modern type of school. The top rated teachers were 王子平，吴图南，姜容燕，胡容华 (女), 陈志和 (女) the younger teachers included 张文广， 李锡恩，傅淑云 (女) As the (女) indicates two of the top five teachers and three of eight were women.

This actually surprised me a lot. In movies and fiction there may be a lot of female martial arts experts, and there were certainly some in reality as well. Still, this ratio strikes me as a little high. In 1933 there was a national martial arts exam and of the 427 competitors only 9 were women. Was this part of an attempt to modernize the martial arts? Was it a regional thing, since the academy drew heavily from the Northwest and followers of 张之江? Has anybody written anything on this?

1. 编 史全生，吉林文史

Here are a few cool tools for those of you (like my students) who are learning Chinese.

Beijing sounds is a cool blog about how Chinese is spoken in Beijing, with soundclips to help you learn the true Beijing hua

Pinyin News Thrilling updates from the world of Pinyin This is connected to PinyinInfo, which has cool tools

Chinese Pera-Kun Dictionary. This will let you mouse-over Chinese text and see an English translation. (works with Firefox)

And of course, the Asian Studies Toolbar 

Tomorrow I get to teach Confucius to my Rice Paddies class. This used to be a fairly easy thing to do, until the unspeakably annoying E. Bruce and A. Taeko Brooks published The Original Analects It is a very good book, but unfortunately it is based on the (correct) view that Analects as we have it is not the words of Confucius, a man who died in 479 BC, but rather the ideas of a school of thought that were written down over a long period of time and attributed to a semi-mythical founder.

This is to some extent not news. It has long been accepted that at least some bits of Analects are much later than Confucius, and that some classical texts were created through accretion over a period of time (Guanzi, the outer chapters of Zhuangzi, etc.) Applying this model to the Analects is of course going to ruffle feathers, but there is nothing revolutionary about the idea itself. It does present problems, however, for those who want to teach the period. While we are in the process of deconstructing and reconstructing Confucius what do you do in class? There are two poles to this debate. One is the E. Bruce Brooks position, which seems to be that until you have the philology 100% down you don’t say anything Another pole is the Charles Hayford position. Long ago, after reading Luke Kwong’s Mosaic of the Hundred Days in a graduate seminar I asked him how the book would change his teaching of 1898. He said in effect that at least for this semester he would not change anything, since he was not sure what to make of things.

I tend towards the later pole. Part of teaching is presenting (in various ways) a somewhat coherent narrative, and if you really wanted to you could immobilize yourself as a teacher by pointing out all the problems with your views and the general fraudulence of your existence. On some topics and in some types of classes that is what you should do, but then in other circumstances you have to come up with something.((Frankly if some students come away with anything that is fine. If some of them leave my class thinking that the Dong Zhongshu or Zhuxi version of Confucius is the timeless truth of the Sage, well, that is something. I can use a pretty broad brush when I want to.)) Just ignoring recent work is a fine solution for a while, but it becomes increasingly embarrassing. When you buy a new house you can blame awful interior decorating decisions on the previous owners for a couple of years, but after a while you need to make some changes or admit this is the best you can do.

In the case of Confucius the accretion theory actually helps. You need to get into Confucius somehow, and one of the few lines that Brooks and Brooks identify as being from Hillock himself is Analects 4.1

The Master said. It is best to dwell in ren. If he choose not to abide in ren how will he get to be known? 子曰：「里仁為美。擇不處仁，焉得知？」

 

Others translate this differently, but I like the Brooks translation best one because it seems to be a better reading of the text (quaint, I know) but also because it works well to tie Confucius to the earlier, supposedly simpler age of the Western Zhou that he was trying to revive. Here the early, ‘real’ Confucius finds the meaning of ren¹ unproblematic. You either abide in it or you don’t, all the later Mozi stuff on proving things to be true is later, as is all the Mencius and Xunzi stuff on human nature (where you start from). He also has a pretty straightforward idea -why- you should do this. If you behave well this will be noted by those around you and be rewarded. Heaven and man have not yet parted ways, and virtue will be rewarded. This will very much not be the position of the later Confucius, who will go on at some length about how you should be ren even if (as you should expect) people hate you for it. 4.1 is Confucius at the opening of the age of philosophers.

I’m hoping this will make a good intro. We have a nice little quote (Confucius works well for putting quotes on the wall and reading them together) and our first untranslated term in a context that encourages us to dive into what ren is. That will lead us into ideas about self-cultivation and what sort of person Confucius thinks you should make yourself into. Questions about your life’s course and what sort of person you should become are interesting to a certain type of 19 year old. Then, finally, some politics, which should be the most alien part of it for them, but might make more sense if it is grounded first in personal behavior, which is, as Brooks points out, more or less the way the school developed, only coming to be concerned with state policy and cosmology and such much later. In the long run the accretion approach may make teaching easier.

Further updates if events warrant. If nothing else I can bring up the first part of 5.10

Zai Yu slept in the daytime. The Master said: Rotten wood cannot be carved; a wall of dung cannot be decorated. What is there in Yu for me to reprove.? 宰予晝寢。子曰：「朽木不可雕也，糞土之牆，不可杇也；於予與何誅！」

 

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1. humaneness is a common translation

Jeremiah from Granite Studio has  post about the debate in American universities about the relationship between education and training. Anthony Kronman claims that American universities spend far too little time teaching students about the meaning of life and far too much time doing research and teaching people how to have successfully careers. Kronman claims that our reluctance to teach students the meaning of life has weakened the humanities and made us subject to “being hijacked for political ends” He is particularly hard on how America’s humanities faculty have ceded their position to those in the university who value research and careerism (which is sort of rich coming from the dean of Yale Law School) and longs for the return of the pre-1870 university with its single, coherent curriculum, clear moral sense, and lack of interest in either the German innovation of research or the modern American consumerist idea of students choosing their own majors. Lots of people in America talk like this, but I find most of this sort of rhetoric to be faux-nostalgic blovating. I actually think education as opposed to training is important, and I’m glad places like St. John’s, Wheaton College and Northland exist, and I’m glad many students at other schools learn things beyond preparing for a career, even if they were not planning on it. but I can’t imagine a national Ministry of Higher Education forcing the current American higher-ed system in a pre-1870 direction.

Jeremiah claims that looking at China is worthwhile when thinking about this (which I agree with), and Chinese intellectuals spent an awful lot of time talking about the purposes of education and above all the relationship between education as moral cultivation and education as getting and doing a job. In fact Chinese scholars talked so much about this I am going to limit myself to one figure, Zeng Guofan.¹ Zeng one of the most important provincial officials of the mid-19th century and responsible for putting down the Taiping Rebellion and restoring the fortunes of the Qing dynasty. As patriarch of his family he also left a lot of writings about proper education and its purposes. Of course many of the educational debates of the Late Imperial period seem to have little contact with ours. The debate on the role of philosophy vs. literary skill, learning of the mind vs. learning of the heart, etc. all of these seem rather distant to us. Like Anthony Kronman, however Zeng thought education had two purposes, to advance virtue and to prepare for a vocation. In his case the vocation was government service and the gateway to government service was the exams and the 8-legged essay. The 8-legged format could be and was criticized for encouraging students to strip-mine the classics for clever tidbits they could toss into their essays. Some would say it was possible to have a good career without really becoming a good person. Zeng, of course did not see it that way, as he did not draw a sharp divide between exam learning and moral learning. The exams really tested your worthiness, in his view. If you could write a good 8-legged essay you were a good person, and fit for government work.² If you were successful at learning it would help you even if you were not lucky enough to pass the exams and instead had to work as a private secretary or a teacher.

If the farmer works hard at plowing, there may still be famines, but there will surely be years of good harvest. If the merchant adds to his stock of merchandise, there may be times when sales are slow, but there will surely be times when the market in unimpeded. If the scholar is excellent in his vocation, how could it be that he will never obtain a degree? Even if he never obtains one, are there not other paths to livelihood? Therefore, the problem lies in one’s not being excellent in work.

If you did not want an official career, like his son Qihong, study became even more important as the road to happiness.

Since you are not interested in degrees and positions with emolument, you must read more of the ancient books. You should frequently hum verses and practice calligraphy so as to foster character an sentiment; there will be enjoyment in store for you for your lifetime and to spare

Our modern attempts to make students value study as a road to joy have not seen much success, and I don’t think anyone today sees a direct connection between moral education and landing a job. Zeng certainly did, and would have seen little point to a division between Gen Ed and a major, or worse still a multiplicity of majors. He did recognize the importance of specialization, but in an almost religious sort of way. One should start a text, and read through it carefully, stopping and re-reading any sentences that puzzled you until you understood them and then moving on. On should read only one book at a time. This is entirely different from the way we encourage students to approach texts. We encourage them to mine them for the information they want, molding texts to their purposes rather than assuming that texts are things that they should mold themselves onto

Zeng admonished his family to study, but backed up his words by continuing his studies throughout his life. Like most literati he practiced his calligraphy daily, and throughout the war years he continued work on his Random selections from the Classics, history and various writers. He apparently though that liberal study was part a life-long process of self-cultivation, which is not usual with us. I rather doubt Anthony Kronman is showing up at the freshman seminars at Yale in hopes of becoming a better person and dean.³

This is just China, of course, but I think the Western model of education before 1870 has a lot in common with this. You really can’t have meaning of life education without a common agreement on what the good life is and a society which values those who have learned about it. We just don’t have that and are not going to any time soon. This is a capitalist society, and universities sell what people want to buy Student demand drives what is produced in American Higher Ed, and will for the foreseeable future. I’m glad almost every college in America has some sort of baseline Gen Ed program (our concession to the meaning of life), and while I may disagree with how some of them are run, I also realize that liberal education is a poor sister to the football team and the Law School and always will be. American students will always be able to choose a major, rather than having the proper course decreed for them,

Ours is also at least rhetorically an egalitarian society, and it’s hard to see where the teachers for meaning of life education would come from. For Zeng Guofan this was not a problem. He increasingly came to be free of doubts, and was quite willing to set himself up as a sage, and in fact this was the point of traditional education. As Confucius put it, only the ren can love or hate others, i.e. the point of education is to reach the level where you are a superior being who can judge others. I for one would feel quite reluctant to grade students in a Meaning Of Life class. I can certainly assess how well students can explain the Self-Strengthening movement, or how well they write, but to award someone a B- in Meaning of Life would seem to be antithetical to most of what I think a faculty member should be. Not everyone thinks like this, of course. Nabakov’s vision of a college with “murals displaying recognizable members of the faculty in the act of passing on the torch of knowledge from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Pasteur” is popular it its way with a lot of faculty but most of them seem to be people like Ward Churchill. Churchill is criticized for politicized teaching, and Kronman claims to oppose that, but I don’t see how you can square non-politicized teaching with knowing the meaning of life. Zeng Guofan certainly thought students were learning how to be better people outside the classroom and would have had no problem judging them on how they behaved outside class.

I think liberal education is important, and I am happy that so many of our students seem to be getting it despite our repeated failures to figure out what it is or how to teach it. I don’t think that abstract wishing for the pre 1870 world is much help, however. While we may draw on old ideas about education and the Good Life we have to think seriously about the context these ideas came out of and how we have to adopt them.

1. I will also limit myself to one source on him, Kwang-Ching Liu “Education for Its Own Sake: Notes on Tseng Kuo-fan’s Family Letters” from Elman and Woodside eds. Education and Society in Late Imperial China California U.P, 1994
2. Even Zeng came to doubt that the 8-legged format could embrace all knowledge, but he never became Wu Jingzi
3. I could be wrong about that, of course

While here in Shanghai I have been doing a bit of research. My new project is on 训练 and military training during the War of Resistance Against Japan, and in particular in the activities of Hu Zongnan. Turning ordinary Chinese into soldiers was a big deal during the war, and Hu was in charge of a number of institutions that were supposed to deal with this. Here are a couple of cartoons.¹ This first is about joining the army.

You will note that the guy in the first frame (upper right) is wearing a tie, and seems to be a modern-educated middle class type of person. One of the issues for the Nationalist was convincing 青年, which technically means youth, but really means educated youth to join the army. Hu Zongnan’s schools wanted only Upper Middle school grads as cadets, and their goal was to turn idealistic intellectuals into soldiers² In the lower right the cadets are seen “graduating” and getting a diploma, just like military academy was a proper goal for an educated youth. I am particularly interested in why frame 2 (upper right, the training they got) so seldom led to frame 4 (Lower left, kicking the snot out of the Japanese.)

Some of the problems trainers faced are displayed in this cartoon.

Here a cadet is invited by a comrade to go out to eat, and by frame three (middle right) he is exclaiming that he has eaten twelve bowls of rice. In the next frame he is complaining that his tummy is bothering him, but his friend just orders more soup. Needless to say this causes problems for our hero on the march the next day, and he gets a well-deserved dressing down. This is quite typical of how quite a lot of cadets viewed military training. The point was to do it and get the status of a party cadre and then stuff yourself with food on the nation’s dime. Even the Communists had huge problems with cadres and the banquet culture. You can almost see the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s attempts to turn his party members back to service as a goal rather than banquets and “using the back door.”

1. both from 王曲, the official journal of Hu’s #7 military school outside Xian
2. Of course they often had to settle for those of a lesser “cultural level”

A lot of discussion of who China scholars in the U.S. -really- work for. (Hint, it’s not Cleo) One thread of the discussion, from Far Eastern Economic Review, via Cliopatria, asks if China Scholars have been bought off by the CCP. This focuses more on general research on contemporary China, but the point of the piece is that China scholars have become adept and not asking the type of questions that might annoy the state, and are thus complicit, at one remove perhaps, in what it does.

Another thread started on the H-Asia discussion list. Yang Bin and Thomas Dubois brought up the question of why Chinese scholars are “under-represented” in the field. Qin Shao refined the question by pointing out that Mainland Chinese scholars who got Ph.D.s in the US have often found work at smaller schools but almost none of them are in the Ivies. Andrew Field tenatively suggested that this might be the impact of the Cold War origins of China studies in the U.S., i.e. that “Mainland Chinese historians, schooled in the rigors of Marxist (Maoist?) historicism and sympathetic to the Chinese revolution of 1949, might constitute a threat to the anti-Communist agenda of the US government.” (I think he is trying to make the point less crudely than that.)

Most of the people involved in this discussion are quick to deny that they are interested in casting aspersions on anyone or creating flaky conspiracy theories. In reading all this stuff not quite implying that there is something wrong with the field I am reminded of Orwell’s observation that if the British Trotskyites really -were- in the pay of Hitler, or anyone else, they would at least occasionally have some money. Sadly, I suspect that nobody in Washington cares enough about China scholarship to do much about it.

Even more sadly I suspect that there is some truth to the suggestion that Western academics are so timid they would avoid topics for fear of annoying Beijing, even if Beijing is not actually saying anything. As China becomes a more and more ‘normal’ state and is less and less interested in controlling scholarship on a lot of topics this may not matter.

In part I think there is no problem to be explained. As Robert Hymes pointed out in the H-Asia discussion, most of the people who teach history in American universities in any field are Americans. Still, I think it is likely that part of the reason is that there really is a national, or at least regional character to academia. (I’m a native speaker of English and I find the British university system incomprehensible.) Chinese and American academics in China and America are quite different, ask different question and answer them in different ways, value different sorts of publications, teach differently and are supported by the state and society differently. Thus it seems unlikely that it would be easy to move back and forth between the two worlds, and in fact few people do. (The Japan/Non-Japan Japanese studies gap is a good example I think, as there you have two different worlds and there is no reason to think it is temporary.)

Is this parochialism? Is it good or acceptable if it is? Is it fixable or worth fixing? Is focusing on the Ivies a good way to ask this quesiton?