The National Interest
Spring 2001

China and the Historians

by Charles Horner

 

Sinology as a Chinese Vocation

. . . For the past four centuries, the study of China has been an international undertaking with non-Chinese having the dominant, though not the exclusive, influence over the world's perceptions of the country and its history. This has been especially true since the mid-nineteenth century, given the enormous difficulties that the collapse of civil order and the subsequent Maoist brutalities presented to any Chinese who might be interested in learning about their own tradition. Those of us outside the country had to develop a kind of self-reliance, relying more on ourselves than we might have had times been more "normal." For example, in the United States the professional study of China and the university teaching that derived from it were initially and importantly the work of American missionaries resident in China and, later, their China-born sons. C. Martin Wilbur (1909—97) and A. Doak Barnett (1922—99) are representative examples, though, in citing them, one should not gloss over the enormous influence of Chinese scholars based at universities in the United States from, say, 1930 on. After all, these men were old enough to be among the last to receive classical Chinese educations, yet still young enough to be Chinese pioneers in earning doctorates from American universities.

Beyond their role as China scholars, Americans of backgrounds similar to that of Wilbur and Barnett also filled important positions in the U.S. Foreign Service. Most of the so-called "old China hands" were China-born, and that influence was felt even after the reopening of the U.S. embassy in Beijing in 1979, as if a kind of restoration had occurred. The man who had closed the embassy in 1949 was J. Leighton Stuart, a prominent China-based Presbyterian educator who was president of Yenching University when General George Marshall sponsored his appointment as ambassador. Since the post was reopened after "normalization", three of the ambassadors who served there were China-born: Arthur Hummel, Jr., J. Stapleton Roy and James Lilley.

The establishment of the PRC, and especially its deep isolation from the Western world in general and the United States in particular, destroyed the human linkages that had dated from the mid-nineteenth century. The sociology of American sinology also changed, tracking larger changes in American higher education and its new post-World War II meritocracy. Just as the student bodies in the Ivy League became less predominantly old-line Protestant, so too did the field of China studies, sometimes establishing new ties between ancient intellectual traditions. Back in 1992, for example, the late Benjamin Schwartz, professor emeritus of Harvard and one of America's greatest sinologists, noted that, "Some of the most meaningful encounters between the Jews and China have occurred only in recent years, as the number of scholars of Jewish origin who are interested in both traditional and modern China has grown significantly". . . .