Preface to the China Memoirs Series
One of the most important types of materials for studying the history of any country consists of the private documents of the people who lived in or were closely associated with the country in question: diaries, letters, personal notes and memos, family budget books, and so on. Usually such writings were not created with the intension that they would become public records or much less historical artifacts. Nevertheless, they provide firsthand and intimate details that can hardly be extracted from more formal documents. To give just one instance, Sir Robert Hart (1835–1911), inspector-general of the Chinese maritime customs, left a rich mine for historians in the form of a seventy-seven-volume diary covering more than half a century of his life in China. His correspondence over three decades with his assistant and friend James Duncan Campbell (1833–1907) are now indispensable sources for studying the history of the Chinese imperial maritime customs and the diplomatic history of the late Qing dynasty.
Memoirs about China are often related to or primarily based on the above-mentioned types of materials. The value of such writings consists in more than simple facts and figures. Because memoirs involve storytelling and therefore, inevitably, individual sentiment and expressive positioning, they provide detail and context on hard data, bringing a human touch to historical source materials that otherwise can be dry and lifeless. Memoirs (in particular, autobiographies) also connect the dots in an individual’s life, tracing a portrait in words of both the individual and the time in which she or he lived.
Since World War II, the study of China (or, in an old-fashioned way, sinology) has boomed in the United States (and in the West in general). Unlike in the prewar era, when information about China was mostly provided by missionaries, diplomats, journalists, tourists, tradespeople, and other non-academics, in the postwar era the most valuable and reliable information and analysis has come from the flourishing and vigorous academic field of Chinese studies. The founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Cold War, rapid social changes in the United States such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests, the “opening” of China in the post-Mao era, China’s resurgence as a global power in the twentieth-first century, all have contributed to the rising interest in China and the development of China studies.
The pioneers in the field in the early decades of the postwar era felt that reminiscences and reflections on the past were appropriate or even necessary. In that regard, John King Fairbank (1907–1991), generally considered the founder of the field of modern Chinese history in the United States, set a fine precedent by publishing his memoirs in 1982, soon after his retirement from Harvard University. More recent examples in this vein are Paul A. Cohen’s critical review of his historiography on China and his “China-centered” autobiography. In addition, works in that genre but directed at least in part at the general public—such as Tim Clissold’s Mr. China and Richard Baum’s China Watcher, among others—have been published in recent years. Since most of the China scholars and experts in the West are non-Chinese, these memoirs chronicle not only lives dedicated to the study of a complex country, but also the trajectory of the authors’ mental journey through their profession, a passage that changed them in the process.
The China Research Center (CRC), founded in Atlanta in 2001 by Dr. Penelope Prime, an economist who began studying China in the 1970s, is the right place to take on the mission of helping to publish China-related memoirs. Our goal for the China memoirs series is to provide a stable and enduring platform for various types of China experts (or “old China hands,” if we can still use the term to describe China experts in the postwar era) to present and disseminate their memoirs and autobiographies. With our inaugural volumes, Crossing Borders: The Making of an American Asian Specialist, by John W. Garver, and China On My Mind, by Mary Brown Bullock, the China memoirs series is off to a strong start. The series promises to be a valuable home for those who wish to share with readers their lifetime experiences and knowledge about a country that is, depending on one’s perspective, so far yet so near to us.
Hanchao Lu
Director
China Research Center
1 Hart’s diaries are now housed in the Special Collections & Archives of Queen’s University of Belfast, his alma mater. Part of his diaries have been published (with annotations); see Katherine F. Bruner, John K. Fairbank, and Richard J. Smith, eds., Entering China’s Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854–1863 (Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986), and Richard J. Smith, John K. Fairbank, and Katherine F. Bruner, eds., Robert Hart and China’s Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863–1866 (Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991).
2 See John K. Fairbank, Katherine F. Bruner, and Elizabeth MacLeod, eds, The I. G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868–1907 (2 volumes; Harvard University Press, 1976). See also Robert Hart and James Campbell, Archives of China’s Imperial Maritime Customs: Confidential Correspondence Between Robert Hart and James Duncan Campbell, 1874–1907 (4 volumes; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1990–1993).
3 John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (HarperCollins, 1983).
4 See Paul A. Cohen, China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past (Routledge, 2003) and A Path Twice Traveled: My Journey as a Historian of China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019).
5 Tim Clissold, Mr. China: A Memoir (Harper Business, 2006), and Richard Baum, China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom (University of Washington Press, 2010).