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Life and Times of Chen Hansheng |
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IntroductionDr. Mackinnon has recieved two grants for his project, "The Life and Times of Chen Hansheng." The first is a Fulbright-Hays senior research fellowship from the Department of Education for $59,000 for 6 months of research in mainland China from January to June in 2006. The second grant is from the American Council of Learned Societies program with the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China. The $25,ooo grant is funded by NEH and will allow for Dr. Mackinnon to continue work from July 2006 until December of the same year. Chen Hanseng died in a Beijing hospital on March 13, 2004 at the age of 107. In attendance was the Peoples Republic of China 's vice-premier, Wen Jiabao (no.3 in the formal government hierarchy). Except for an obituary in the Guardian his death went unnoticed in the West. Chen had lived too long, the last of a generation of globe-trotting romantic Chinese revolutionaries. Project DescriptionThe personal side of Chen Hanseng's life story is riddled with pathos. His wife, Gu Shucheng, died during the Cultural Revolution, alone without medical care while Chen was being held for over a year in isolated office arrest. Afterward, he spent years in a rural Hunan labor camp - treated gently he said by the peasants. In the late 1970s he had a celebrated pingfan or restoration in Beijing as godfather of a new created Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. I was with the old man in April-May 1989 during the early stages of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Then, aged 93, and nearly blind but clear of mind, Chen raged wildly, denouncing the government and the military. He was overwhelmed by déjà vu and remembrance of the slaughter he witnessed in 1925 of student demonstrators by warlord government troops in Beijing in almost the same locations. Prof. Chen lived in a third floor flat at Muxudi - the area where the most people, students and bystanders, were killed on the evening of June 4. His family told me that night and weeks afterward , he raged in his nightgown, wandering the apartment house like a blind Lear - cursing the government, his Party, the leadership, and himself for still being alive and bearing witness. He was never himself after those events in my view. By the mid-1990s, mercifully, his mind went numb, leaving him with family and a childlike sense of humor. The project is a biography but not in the conventional mode. The extraordinary chronological and global reach of Chen Hanseng's career dictates otherwise. I propose to research and write a book about Chen Han seng's quixotic march through twentieth century Chinese history. His quest had two foci. The first was to apply the social science tools of his time to the building of modern China . The second was to lay the foundations in the Peoples Republic of China for a more sophisticated understanding of the world at large as China became more isolated in the context of the Cold War. A graduate of Claremont , University of Chicago , Harvard, and U. of Berlin , Chen Hanseng returned to China in 1924 as Peking University 's youngest professor. He had been recruited personally by the university's German educated president Cai Yuanpei to teach world history and political economy. Five years later Chen was in Shanghai as the first head of the Social Science Research Institute under the Nanjing government's newly created Academia Sinica. From this position he organized a series of pioneering surveys of socio-economic conditions in rural China (from Guangdong to Manchuria ). Besides training young researchers, he founded China 's best known journal, Zhongguo nongcun, that published field research on the Chinese countryside and his institute published definitive monographs based on village field work which are still cited today. At the same time , Prof. Chen was active internationally. He managed to finance much of the field work by teams of young scholars through grants from the Rockefeller funded Insitute of Pacific Relations, with which Chen became increasingly involved. In 1937 he moved to New York and began working within the Secretariat of this organization, namely with Owen Lattimore and William Holland. He played a pivotal role in the editing of such publications as Far Eastern Survey and Pacific Affairs, as well as organizing conferences , workshops and the like. By the time of Pearl Harbor, he was representing the Institute in Hong Kong and co-founder of the internationally supported Industrial Cooperative or Gongho movement. . Chen Hanseng spoke fluent English, Japanese, Russian, German , and Mandarin Chinese with a strong Wuxi dialect accent. His publications in all these languages run into dozens of books and hundreds of articles. By the 1950s his students and proteges were so numerous and increasingly well placed that he was and remained a living legend in the PRC. Key economic planners of the 1950s and 1970s like Xue Muzhao, Xu Dixin, and Pan cut their teeth on Chen's survey projects in the 1930s. Premier Zhou Enlai asked him to serve as vice-minister of foreign affairs when he returned to China from New York in 1950. But what Chen wanted and tried to do in the 1950s with the founding of the Institute of Economic Research , Jingji yanjiu so , was the organization of systematic field research on rural China at the village level which would inform the new government about prevailing realities. Needless to say in 1950s China of Mao Zedong and the Great Leap, Chen was never able to organize village survey work. He turned instead to interpreting and bringing the global picture and its realities to a Chinese intellectuals who were growing increasingly isolated internationally. Chen's intellectual interests and political involvements had always been global. Chen pioneered the serious study of India in China , founding the South Asia Institute at Beijing University . His last publication in English, co-authored with Daniel Thorner (Oxford U. Press, 1995), was a regional survey of India 's economic geography on the eve of Independence . In the 1950s Chen edited a massive ten volume series in Chinese on overseas Chinese labor, which is still considered today in China the pioneering work in the field. His publications in Chinese on Europe and U.S. history go back to the 1920s and forward into the 1980s. He founded the Institute of World History in Beijing . Paralleling the intellectual and organizational career was another life as a political activist. It too was global. Chen was an early communist. Influenced in Beijing by Li Dazhao (co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921) Chen joined the Comintern and went to Moscow in 1927. Later in 1936 he moved his membership to the Chinese Communist Party. His close associations on the international Left in the 1930s included Richard Sorge of USSR , Osaki Hotsumi in Japan , Agnes Smedley of USA . From Hong Kong in 1942 Chen advised Laughlin Currie, Pres. Roosevelt's special envoy to China on a fact finding mission. Between 1945-49, while a visiting professor at U. of Pennsylvania , Johns Hopkins, and Washington ( Seattle ), he led the Chinese Communist Party's underground organization in the U.S.A. , influencing an important generation of returned students. I believe I am unusally well placed and equiped to conduct a study of the life of this remarkable man, with the background to see his life in the full context of the twentieth century history of China . The germination of this project was in 1975 when I first met the old man (then 78), hanlao as we always called him. At the time I was researching with my wife, Janice MacKinnon, a biography of Agnes Smedley which was published in 1987 and well received (two New York Times reviews, translated six languages). While working and living in China from 1979 to 1981, I visited Chen Hanseng weekly and interviewed him in a very systematic fashion. In 1985 I was living and working again in China . I collected an extensive bibliography of his published work , interviewed myriad colleagues, students, and friends, and worked with Chinese biographers and bibliographers . In the late 1980s I discovered a trove of Chen's English correspondence over a three year period in the 1930s in the Columbia University Butler Library - in the archival papers of the Institute of Pacific Relations . In the 1990s administrative work at the university and other scholarly interests - namely scholarship on the China-Japan War of 1937-45 - occupied my time. This work is coming to completion with publication of edited books and a ms on Seige of Wuhan in 1938. With a Fulbright in China for the spring of 2006 I can devote full attention to the research and writing of the life and times of Chen Hanseng. It is imperative that I spend six months in China for a variety of reasons. The first is that his publications in Chinese are incredibly diverse and today almost impossible to find outside of major Chinese libraries in Beijing and Shanghai . I have already copied what can be found in the U.S. from Stanford-Hoover and Harvard-Yenching Chinese language periodical collections. Many of the journals in which he published extensively in the 1920s and 1930s had very short runs. Secondly, as indicated above, I am close to the family. I visit often, most recently a few weeks ago. This gives me unique access to family papers, an opportunity which is important to exploit now before a change of generation takes place. Moreover, a Chen Hanseng archive and study center is being established at Beijing University ; and likewise a Center in his name has been established at Suzhou University (near his hometown of Wuxi ). This summer I became affiliated with both projects. My Chinese colleagues are very interested in the international materials I have collected over the years. So indeed what I am proposing is a collaborative project. Six months in China on a Fulbright would permit me to work closely with the core of interested Chen Hanseng scholars and followers, as well as pursue the unique library sources and family papers that can be found only in China. The details of six month Fulbright in China would run as follows. I would first establish a base and working relationships in Beijing in January and February. Office space (and possibly computer) has been made available to me at Beijing University 's Center for Premodern History ( Gudai shi yanjiu zhongxin) with which my institution has an exchange agreement. I will also be working at the Beijing University library archive on Chen Hanseng - in fact they want me to help put it together. I have lived on and off in Beijing since the 1970s, speak and read Chinese with reasonable facility, and so the adjustment should not be difficult. I would expect in March to move to the Suzhou University guest house and work on Chen Hanseng's Jiangnan roots (the neighboring city of Wuxi ). I shall also search the extensive periodical collection at the Shanghai municipal library for the more obscure of Chen's work. I shall be hosted at Beijing University by the University's library director, Prof. Dai Longji, so the necessary introductions should not be a problem. Returning to Beijing in April, May , and June , I should be able to wrap up research, paying special attention to the Beijing Municipal Library and its massive periodical collection (the biggest in China ) which I have used before. The existing literature on Chen Hanseng outside of China is fragmentary. Today he is best remembered in the West by scholars like Philip Huang, Ramon Myers, Kathleen Walker, and others for field investigations of rural conditions in the 1930s. At that time these studies, and Prof. Chen personally, were the major influence on R.H. Tawney and his classic work , Land and Labour in China (1934). The institutional aspects of his role as founder of modern Chinese social science have merited a chapter in a recent book by Hsu Shaochuan. I have published a few short pieces on Chen in Chinese and English. What I propose in this study is to contextualize his career - to explore the symbiotic cross influences between Chinese tradition (Chen was classically educated by tutor in Wuxi ), modern nationalist May 4th impulses, Western intellectual currents, and international politics that framed his life. This will include consideration of the failure, then renaissance in a rather distorted form of modern Chinese social science in the Peoples Republic of China . At the same time I want to tell the adventure filled and tragic story of his life as an activist and public intellectual. He barely escaped arrest and probably execution a number of times - sometimes by sheer luck. Finally, Chen's life is best understood by exploring the clash between international revolutionarly romanticism of the early half of the twentieth century with the narrow, hard headed nationalist intellectual and political concerns of the latter half of the twentieth century. In retrospect, Chen Hanseng was the last romantic - a romantic internationalist he would say. In my mind he was the last of the romantic generation of global revolutionaries of the John Reed, Agnes Smedley , Osaki Hotsumi, Emma Goldman, Borodin, Richard Sorge variety. By a strange twist of fate, Chen Hanseng somehow survived into the 2lst century. Survivng for five decades in the PRC turned him into a revolutionary fossil. But Chen Hanseng had always been slightly out of place, in the West as well. His was the kind of romantic quest that linked social injustice and economic inequality at the global level to the idea that with greater understanding of injustice and oppression , the international political will and means to find solutions would follow.
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Project Staff |
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Principal Investigator |
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Dr. Stephen Mackinnon |
Contact Information |
Dr. Stephen Mackinnon |
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