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Fall, 2010 Courses
History 114. China, Origins to MingLecture with discussion sections. This class offers an interdisciplinary approach to Chinese history up to the Ming Dynasty. Topics will include archaeological and mythical origin stories, ancient philosophy, literature, Buddhism, political and economic change, and material culture. Assignments will provide opportunities to learn and demonstrate empirical knowledge, analytical thought, writing skills, creativity, and historical empathy. No prior exposure to Chinese history is assumed.
591P History Writing & Political Engagement
This seminar will challenge the notion that good historical writing must be politically neutral. We will read different types of historical writing that pursue explicit political agendas or advocate for specific causes; we will discuss how the authors manage (or fail) to take a stand while upholding rigorous standards of evidence and argument. Students will write several papers (including a short opinion piece, a historiographical essay, and a longer argument paper with primary sources) on a topic of political interest to themselves in a historical context they have previously studied or are currently studying. Success in the class will depend on the student's willingness to complete weekly assignments in a timely manner, recognition of the need for both political passion and scholarly responsibility, and ability to identify a promising topic and pursue it on a semi-independent basis (with guidance from the professor).
Recent years have seen a flood of U.S. media reports on the dangers Chinese industry and agriculture pose to American consumers and Chinese people alike. Among many examples, melamine-tainted food has poisoned American pets and Chinese infants, and farmers in one area of Sichuan have been compelled to pollinate each pear blossom by hand, replacing the bees lost to insecticides.(1) Amidst this din, it is hard to recall that just a few decades ago, in the early years of U.S.-Chinese rapprochement, scientists from the U.S. looked to China for inspiration in the effort to overcome dependence on chemical pesticides and develop agricultural practices less damaging to human health and the natural environment. As a 1975 delegation of U.S. entomologists reported, "Clearly, the Chinese have progressed beyond levels attained in the United States both in widespread enthusiasm for integrated control and, in many respects, in the application of the ecological principles fundamental to its development."(2) Also largely forgotten is the model that developing countries sought in Chinese agriculture: the leader of the Food and Agriculture Organization's 1975 mission to China expressed his intention to "grasp the meaning of the egalitarian and anti-elitist society that the Chinese are trying to build" and came away feeling that "given a vision, hard work, and self-reliance, mankind can still climb out of the cesspool of poverty."(3) Reading such reports, not to mention accounts from the Chinese state itself, creates a picture of Chinese science and society that seems impossible to reconcile with what we have since learned about the failures and persecutions of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), as poignantly summarized by Ma Bo, an urban youth who participated in agricultural work during that era: "We had wreaked unprecedented havoc on the grasslands, working like fucking beasts of burden, only to commit unpardonable crimes against the land... The depletion of resources was staggering; the waste of manpower, mind-boggling; the financial losses, incalculable." (4)
Some of the brightness of the earlier picture can be attributed to selective reporting in Chinese state propaganda and to the rose-colored spectacles through which foreigners viewed the recently "reopened" China. But the propaganda of the Chinese state was not all lies, and what the foreign scientists witnessed when they traveled to China was not a complete charade. Chinese agriculture, even while relatively isolated by China's unique position in the Cold War, had undergone its own "green revolution." Chinese scientists and rural people had developed a diverse array of techniques for combating insect pests. Large numbers of Chinese people -- most notably rural youth -- had participated in what was known as the "great revolutionary movement" of scientific experiment.
That these experiences are hard to remember today makes a historical reconstruction all the more significant. My next book, "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Encounters with Scientific Farming in Socialist China," will tell the history of "scientific agriculture" (kexue zhongtian) in socialist-era China by weaving together diverse experiences and perspectives and by teasing out the temporal layers of narrative, since the stories people tell about that time have changed dramatically along with the political transformations of the post-Mao era. In tracing the paths of colorful historical characters connected through a web of relationships that cross national and class boundaries, the book will offer an engaging story meaningful especially to the many Americans who traveled to China in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, it will provide a critical historical analysis with clear significance for pressing political and environmental issues China and the U.S. now face.
The book will begin with a chapter relating the experiences of Western agricultural scientists who visited socialist China. The second chapter will turn to the perspectives of Chinese agricultural scientists -- some of whom interacted with the Western scientists and appear in their published reports, but whose own accounts, related after the Cultural Revolution, typically differ in profound ways. A third chapter will examine the involvement of rural people (peasants) in agricultural research and their experiences with the resulting new agricultural practices. Next I will take up the story of the "educated youth" who participated in vast numbers in agricultural scientific experiments and whose diaries, memoirs, and oral histories offer rich -- and often interestingly contradictory -- evidence of the significance of these activities. I plan to conclude the book with a "bug's-eye view" of the changes to agriculture -- a kind of ecological history with insect control science at the center.Current Research and Related Publications
Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Encounters with Scientific Farming in Socialist China
"The Very First Lesson: Teaching about Human Evolution in 1950s China," in Dilemmas of Victory, ed. Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
"Labor Created Humanity: Cultural Revolution Science on Its Own Terms," in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, ed. Joseph Esherick, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Ph.D. Dissertation (UCSD, 2004): "The People's Peking Man: Popular Paleoanthropology in Twentieth-Century China"
"Fishing and Fishers in Penghu, Taiwan, 1895-1970," East Asian History 23:109-128, June 2002.
"Breeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place in a Chinese County, 1929-1937," The Geographical Review 92(1): 1-22, January 2002.
Selected Earlier Publications
The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Winner of the 2009 Allan Sharlin Award from the Social Science History Association.