Interview with John Wills Jr.

Date: Dec. 9, 2011 Location: 3rd Conference Room, NTUCSSTime: 17:25-20:45Duration: 3H20M

Interviewee: John Wills, Emeritus Professor, Department of History, University of Southern California

Interviewer: Chih-yu Shih, Chih-yun Chang, Transcribers: Kati Lin, Chih-yu Shih

Shih: Could you being with this journal Itinerario that publishes your interview, which you share with us?

I’m keeping in touch about this early modern maritime history. One time it was European expansion and responses there, too. That’s too Eurocentric. Everybody is responding to everybody, right?

Shih: Do you know how well is the journal been received in the States? Do people pay attention to?

I think it's a specialized… Oh, there is one other kind of connection and that is there is an annual, a biannual meeting in the US of people doing this kind of maritime history. The organization is called FEEGI, the Forum on European Expansion and Global Integration. And they actually make Itinerario their journal. And my colleague Peter Mancall, who is a past president of the organization, whose name I may remember in any minute right now, is still on their board.

Shih: How much involvement were you with journal or academic production in your past?

I have never been a journal editor of any kind.

Shih: Good for you. I just finish a long transnational teleconference this morning with the publisher, incredibly tiring.

Oh, no, absurd. Actually most of my experiences with journals, have been quiet decent as far as getting stuff done and out and so on. Right now I have a long article accepted for publication. That's really fairly research piece for publication and in Toung Bao, a great European Sinology Journal. And they are slow. I don't know what's going on with those people. Actually I was just here rechecking and editing, one of the main reasons I want to spend three days here was to make sure I have all my footnotes from the Palace Museum

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Archives in place along with footnotes from Beijing in the 歷史檔案館. So they are being very slow, but things happen right on schedule, very nicely.

Shih: Do you come to Taipei just for a few of citations?

差不多. I really want to have the .... I look it the way like the footnotes we are looking in this piece. And I think I know I had better notes one time that I can find. I don't trust this stuff. And you know they have all these things, the material, the 18th century archives material, has been digitized. And my colleague at 南港 found me two different levels of access to it. One from 南港, from The Fu Ssu-nien Library at Academia Sinica and one from 近史所. But I want to go the Museum anyway, and I'm going to ask you about the Museum. We are talking it on the way over. I was very much impressed with the situation in the Museum yesterday. But I went on out there, because they understood their own numbers and system. And they could tell me "Oh, those longer numbers are 宮中檔案 These shorter numbers are 軍機處. I said, Ok, now show me this index and show me that index and I can sort it out myself. But this is the material that could give you some more ideas. I'm going to get one article out of it. And it could make somebody’s career because somebody can go through these materials and really cross examine all the documents. Because if you have 20 documents on the topic, and you know Qing 清 documents are very repetitious, because they are always quoting the previous texts, so to keep your attention and look at the place with, oops, there is a significant detail. It's pretty tricky, I have not worked through these documents at that level of detail. If I had done that on this material it would be book-length. This is about 18th century relations with what is now Vietnam and what is now Thailand, and it's the Vietnamese material.

Chih-yun: Which set of materials at 傅斯年圖書館 or 近史所檔案館？They had access to the online stuff, and I was also visiting with people at the Center for Cultural History and whatever that Semi-Institute is called. So, they helped me get started and I couldn't have done it all out there at the museum.

Shih: Do details always play an essential role in your research?

Yes. This very nice young graduate student at 南港 was helping me remember which things to click on and then to get screen that has the whole documents and where to printed it and all this craziness. And I have one thing very uneasy because I did not have the documents or footnotes on these. I was making a connection about who these people were, who were really the power holders in that 雲南、安南 border area in the 雍正 reign. There were people who would now called 壯. The surname is 黃 and wonderfully is the document says these people are, these 黃 Huangs are a 分系 of their descendant branch of the great clan called 儂，農業的農，加一個人字旁，很奇怪. And there was a 儂 leader named, 儂志高…three big revolts in Song Dynasty… [Chih-yun：Ya.狄青考...]

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And they were…, the name always carrying power on the most mountains. I just said, looks, historians are always be gambling a little bit and who this was there. There, that one—that 儂 character--made my day.

Shih: There are always so many details to explore?

Yes. Right.

Shih: How do you know which part of the details you want to concentrate for specific projects, how do you decide?

Well, look. Let’s start at the start, that’ll be nice. You have talked to my friend Blussé and I've been working the Dutch archive materials often on since I was working on my PhD, and I got interested in Fairbank’s questions about the tribute system. That's what this is all about. This is about how Fairbank built the field. And the first place he was… he was always working. He is a man without small talk but he gave what you needed. And, you know, many times in a PhD seminar, the professor wants the students to do the same thing that the professor is doing, study the same thing.

Shih: I do that.

And the core experience for getting started with Fairbank was the seminar on Qing documents, which was about how to read the documents. And Philip Kuhn went on and built that and he has a later version of the study guide for reading of the Qing documents. But as far as content as we concerned, Fairbank’s idea was that “We are the discoverers and the explorers of something so big that is any of you do the same thing that I'm doing, you're letting me down. I want you to go off and discover something else." So Philip Kuhn went off and was inspired in part by the beginning of Bill Skinner’s work on local systems. And Kuhn’s views in Rebellion and Its Enemies Fairbank could not have a clue of…, I mean it could have had a clue because he was a smart man but that was not his thing; foreign relations had been his thing. Thomas Metzger was another of that cohort who went off in quite different directions from Fairbank. I've not kept up with some his later books, but it's a very unusual project of unraveling what Qing political culture had to do with modern China. I think Tom got some of his real mentoring from Robert Bellah in Sociology.

Shih: Ya, he is a Japan expert also.

He is talking about religion and so on but the point was that this was what Fairbank wanted, was the people going off in all directions. So that he did, pull people together in relations to foreign relations. And you read Fairbank, editor, The Chinese World Order straight through?

Shih: I did long time ago.

He did get all these people in the same place. And it didn't work terribly well because a

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lot of those people found it hard to get beyond their detailed scholarship. And when you're doing detail-scholarship in, say, about Qing relations with the Yi Dynasty of Korea, there are a lot of details. So the interaction was not a complete success in that volume. But he did have me and Mancall working on the Russian relations. .Shih: Right. China at the center.

Joseph Fletcher has a wonderful long essay, Joseph Fletcher, on the China and Inner Asia in early Qing times and so on. Fairbank was a very good at getting people in the same place.

Shih: It sounds that you are actually developing subjects from details, instead of looking for details according to your interests.

No, because you got this big picture. You got this "big picture questions", of the nature of the late imperial state. And one of the things I couldn't put it this way at that time was that, no, and if you want to read the very kind of very sweeping survey, readings as we did in those days, you say OK, here is the one period 南北朝, when the country is divided, and there's another time of 五代十國, or again the country is divided in some of those southern pieces, like the so-called Empire of 閩 in Fujian are really very, and 吳越, are very energetic and powerful states. And of course the Mongols have something to do with the unification but then that the periods of breakdown followed by reunification seems to get shorter. And the Ming-Qing transition is shockingly brief, and actually shockingly not violent, except for the coast evacuations from the south coast. So then I discovered these: Dutchmen interacting on that coast, being drawn into the Qing’s effort to destroy the remains of the Zheng Regime. And I said, well what might I find out? So what a kind of a Fairbankian question about foreign relations was going to be "tribute-like", what was the nature of the cooperation when to be... But also what was that China are going to be like because they were dealing with this big generals who were in some place sometimes the conquests generous, especially 三藩 in the south. So there was a big set of Qing questions, and there was a big set of foreign relations questions, which oriented me to what the important details maybe.

Shih: I see.

If there are a lot of conventional old-fashioned histories, particularly when the students were doing the same thing in the seminar and the teacher was. And we are all doing of 14th century of lock land holding in Southern England or whatever. Then they never get beyond the detail, but I think I always have these kind of this, there were questions I was really asked, the maritime question. I didn’t... It took me a long time to realize what they were. Because the fields where I took were all about outside Chinese history was… the expansion of 14th, 15th, 17th in Yunnan. And there was very Eurocentric, it was very much about what the Europeans did, and was not much Asians giving to the non-Europeans, and seeing how this whole process worked. So that came along, and the partly…., you know, this is where you getting into different circles because… I do that

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kind of, to do this detail-scholarship, and read these all Dutch documents, and the archives of the Dutch East India Company. And my fellow graduate students in reading about their relations with those archives were a couple of excellent scholars from India and a couple of excellent scholars from Ghana. So all this sudden you say, ya... And one of the Indians was Om Prakash is kind of the grand old man of the Delhi school of the economic history, of a very successful mentorship. There were a whole world of these people who do these stuff inside become an established part of the South Asian academic world. And then one thing that Blussé comes to be an organizer, right? You see this guy always get another idea and truly involved in organizing other people making something happen. And I guess, what I don't know what he told you about the TANAP program. You remember TANAP? Remember the phrase it's an acronym for To Assure A New Partnership. And they found the money I think, you know, if they all want something it’s hard to turn down. And I think he was quite well connected in the country. And somehow they raised the money, government or some private sources to fund something like 10 or 12 graduate students from around the Indian Ocean and they came all from every place, from Japan to South Africa, literally, and bring them to the Netherlands, teaching the basic history of the Dutch East Indian Company, teach them the language and the scripts which is the first time we look at the pages of these new language. And some basic methodology and then eventually put them through the examination and they write a dissertation. And the books are out, 8 or 9 of them are out. And all but one of them were pretty good. And some are very good. So the whole point was to have these works being done by young scholars from Asia and one of the things is that it's actually, this is basic kind of connections of what this we were talking about in the conference in Hong Kong last week. Asian scholars in fact don't talk to each other very much, of different parts of Asia. It’s true, not even different parts of Southern East Asia. And if these young people got some other kind of training in Germany or Holland or France or England and gone back to their home countries, they never would have heard of each other. But now they have these set of connections I hope they manage to keep up those connections when they're back teaching in Bangkok or Jakarta or Kyoto or wherever I think they're doing some. I was over in Holland for a better part of the year 2005, 2006. It's sort of help keep them interacting and having little seminar once in a while, what they were basically in the archives, trying the pages... So were the evening seminars. And we had a brief talk by a young woman from Hanoi, who was not one of the regular sets; she was there on some kind of brief support, some kind of a briefer project. But she was talking about the river at Hanoi. So here is the big City, it's on the big river. (Ha Tien 湄公河) Part way down the river it's a big wide spot, where is the anchorage for the ships, for the big junks, the big European ships. Oh, I've told it done in the same story.

Shih: Alright, alright, it's fine.

And then down at the mouth of the river is a fort, so the local authorities gonna stop anybody they don't like, at least checked their papers or whatever. And all a sudden everybody wants to talk about his or her own river. So here is the Chao Phraya at Bangkok. Here is whatever at Surat in Western India. And of course the Pearl Rivers is the perfect example, it is the big…force and the front anchorage of Canton city. So it became part of repeating pattern of how these cities worked, how the cities, the river is an

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important part of transportation, partly because that it's the outflow from a big area of agricultural land, which supports the whole operation mainly. It gives everybody food, chambers for the ships and …for the ropes and all of these stuff.

Shih: I want to go back to this methodological question. You have the bigger picture first, that guides you to the kind of details you will be looking for. But, the “big” picture you just portray, unification, becoming reunified... It's quite much in line with Chinese historiography. (Wills: Sure.) Do you get your “big” proposition from Chinese historiography, or from reading of something else? How did you get this big picture?

You mean historiography of China or historiography in Chinese?

Shih: They are different?

They can be.

Shih: Ok. I mean these concerns offering unification, division, self-transition... The title ( “Why Is China So Big? And Other Big Questions”).

My title, I've better pushing that thing around for a number of papers of various kinds and you saw it. You could have recognized some senses, I bet, because I do repeat myself. Dr. Chang's questions I would love to ask, because it seems like the question to most Chinese that is the question that why is China so big. And the basic Chinese simplified nationalist answers, 我們都是中國人. But if you look historically, you find there is a fair amount of commonality but already some variety of cultures, that you can see how many different Neolithic cultures that they have on the Google, thirty of them or something. Even at the broadest at 戰國時代, there are some cultural variation on the north China plain. And Qing is not, Yuan is not just a Han Chinese polity But there are related cultures and people move around from one of them to another in search of and employments whether as a text collection expert or a poet or a just a higher sort who go out and kill people. And with the dangers of the classic Chinese history of it, it's the danger of the evolving danger of the relation with the 匈奴 and the other peoples of the steppe. That required unity of the people of the agricultural plane of the north China plane in order to keep the 匈奴 from allying with one group and to unify defense. And the firstly outcome has supposed to be obviously the Great Wall. That's a legend to be complicated and partly deconstructed, but there's something to it. There is an imperative there. Yellow River is another imperative. That plain was gradually brought under cultivation as pieces of the work of dike. And the river course was confined so they would not destroy everything everywhere. That doesn't do a thing about the way in which the whole great cultures and political centers in fact of 蜀巴, and of 楚, and of 吳越, got drawn into the 秦漢 Empire. I'm a constant tourist that makes you seeing places in enormous difference. outside 成都, there is a historic site, which one no doubt heard called 都江堰. And it's really quite ingenious how was engineered so that they come keep all these channels cleared out and get the water into the head waters of these huge

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irrigation networks. These things were built during the Warring States times. So there is a great center. The culture of this state of 楚 is obviously very striking and becomes an important part of the culture of Han times. So how come you don't have maybe the big state in the North and then three great states in the middle? Well, you have to go, I think if you really work through the rise and fall of Qin, and the rise of Han, the details will start to help. But the, my gross answer is that all of these peoples of somewhat related cultures have a particular type of kinship system, where you had to marry someone who was 外. So there is always these building of networks that are not given by birth. And you can follow in history of the Warring States Period. The ways that people move and seek employment. Nobody's loyal to their home place. They may be loyal to a principle but above all loyal to their own future, including Confucius; Confucius left and moved when things did work out.

Shih: There was 周, in which Confucius invested with royalty.

And 周 is a dream in the back, but 周 is not a viable living reality. So I mean working these out for particular times is again a matter of detail. But the ability of, would be ministers and would be unifying rulers to find each other, and to form a bond which means ministers and rulers, is really very impressive and the early Qing was superb at it. And they drew in amazing range of people, the people who built the changes, who worked out and tried to get some works done over the next years. So the changes on the coast in the 1680s open for trade. It's a very big deal. Because Taiwan becomes Chinese, don’t tell me that Taiwan was not always Chinese, 真的. But the man who pulled the forces together and made it happen was of course 施琅. And 施琅 was a defector from the Cheng鄭 organization and clearly know how to get people on his side, and the Kangxi emperor to move for him, too. There is a peace is in the 康熙戲劇, where the aged施琅 has been summoned to the Palace in 1688. It's in that book on the war and the year 1688. [Wills' book.] And the Emperor says people told me not to trust you, but I know my man. And he takes off his fur collar and says, Guard, gives this all old gentleman a hand as he leaves. So this is a person out of nowhere. The Qing really had all kinds of people helping them sort out where is the talent. There is a highly conventional 儒學 from Fujian, named 李光地, who's telling the 康熙 Emperor was going on down there and whom to trust. And this is going back and forth you can watch it. So it is utterly given from late Ming which is so tied up, so tied in knots by the political confrontation and by a vary restrict notion of what kinds of people can have political power, right? You're nothing like you been through some of these before. You know these people. What's your angle on these?

Chih-yun: I'm not an expert in early modern. I'm researching Chinese maritime rather hard. The 19th and 20th Centuries – of course – Fairbank's area. So I'm working onnow. I have several projects. First, I'm working on the Robert Hart Dairies, the new ones.

Where did you find them?

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Chih-yun： The Queen’s University of Belfast L.. And then I have, off the records but don't tell anyone yet. I think, first of all, we're working on the new ones. So I have finished volume 9. And we have people to read through 清實錄 and 籌辦夷務史 to make the comparison between Robert Hart's dairy. These two set of materials. And I'm aiming to finish the 9 volumes to the 12 volumes and then maintain as a book like, maybe… I assume John Fairbank was your mentor, right? But your professor did in the 1990s and 1980s to publish it as a book and writing chapters. So I just finish one chapter. The chapter is called The Hart industry and the writing of modern Chinese history. It's basically about the history of editing the Hart's dairies from 1900 to 2011. And the second chapter I'm going to write is… It's a provision of title, named "the enlightened Manchus and the foreigners." Basically I want to talk about how principles, especially 慈禧太后、文祥、寶鋆, their attitudes towards these foreigners. His titles, I think it's in 80s or something... He's title was abolished by 慈禧太后. And after that she was the only decision maker of the court. But her attitude towards these foreigners is extremely open-minded, especially how she responded to the famous, the outsiders’ viewpoints. They already told. So I'm writing chapters about these.

Wonderful revisions.

Chih-yun：And Thomas Wade's 新議略論. The very interesting thing is that I cannot find the original copies of the Outsiders' View. What now I have found is the Chinese version. So what I did before last month, I translated the Chinese version back to English.

And by now you’ve read a lot of diaries and you have a year for what? (What was) the English of the timelike?

Chih-yun：It's like 1860s now. So this is the first project. And the second project is to go through the Returns of Trade and Reports on Trade from 1859 to 1949. It's a huge project so I have two people to help me. So one is to, of course, myself project is to combine and then to organize these trade report and trade return. So the four Korean stations... These are the first ones. And the second subproject is to do the same thing to the two Taiwanese customs, Takow 打狗 and 淡水 Tamsui.

Have you find out anybody to talk in Seoul? I mean to find out who in their academic world is working with?

Chih-yun: I haven't study it yet because the first thing is to, basic to Taipin or trade statistical data, because I'm also affiliated with the GIS center. I love interdisciplinary research, so I device a GIS data set. And I'm asking people to type in everything. I have only three years now. We have a few of decades to got but I think that will be very influential and interesting.

In the early modern stuff, we have the ongoing discussion of what the dimensions were of the silver import to China. And then how you think about the consequences of those

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import. And one of the people involved in that discussion, that Dennis Flynn as an actually economist, Richard Von Glahn as smart in economics as a historian by training, very smart. I think we got the big pattern for 1500-1800 of those silver imports. But then around 1800 there is question that, you tell me if what you come to across, but I haven't come across anything that really seems to do what needs to be done about the problems of the debasement of the copper cash, the 錢. That would getting smaller and less copper in ... Now, here you need somebody really know who to crunch numbers.

Chih-yun：There is one very useful article written by鄭友揆. He seems Chinese. And that article is, I think, he aims to the question you just ask. I'll download that for you, later when I go to professor Shih's office. And he was the one who wrote in 1934 about how to read through the Returns of Trade and Reports on Trade. But the poor guy went to Columbia or John's Hopkins and went back to.. You know him, right?

I know the name.

Chih-yun：And then he went back to mainland China and he was totally screwed by the Communists at that time. But that article is very useful.

If you're trying to figure out…The more you read about late 乾隆, the more it looks like there seemed the enormous demographic expansion into all these frontier areas. And you have, of course, the 彰州 people and 泉州 people kill each other out here. And you have then the Muslims and the Muslim-haters killing each other in the 雲南 mining camps. And you have the whole White Lotus thing, and based on this account of the so-called origin and so-called 天地會 in this incident on Taiwan, make it clear that the Qing officials overreacted, and they set the whole things off. And these 青海 officials are in impossible positions. Because the whole system has been made to work, basically the 雍正 invention, that the emperor and his great governments' generals will talk to each other, will correspond constantly. And many of the letters and memorials are carrying back and forth by private couriers, by household servant, and probably somebody who can pass on the two confidential stuff. And the correspondence between Ertai in 雲南 and the 雍正 Emperor is just astonishing reading. It's just so realistic. But it works as long as those great governments' generals can keep things under control. But when things bigger, starting to spin out of control, then some of them lose their heads because something goes wrong. And they know that so they repress even harder. So by 1800 the whole thing is kind of on edge. And one of the difficulties is that the poor little guy who has to pay his taxes on the silver assessment is finding that the 錢, which he normally uses it to buy a little bit of stuff in the market, that he needs more 錢. So he's been screwed by this debasement of the currency. And somebody in the middle is getting rich.

Chih-yun：That was a huge problem in the 乾隆.

And of course, there's probably something to an opium-related outflow by that one. But

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‘But’, it's part of a bigger process.

Shih: Could I ask when was the first time or early in your career that you first realize this question, the “big” question, first drawing your attention..?. the “big” question, why is China so big. How did you realize there is such a question?

I hardly realize that.

Shih: Many historians wouldn't ask that question.

Ya. It seems to historians that what a stupid question, of course China is so big, because it's China. This is the Chinese answer. You get it into this conversation in Beijing. 這是什麼問題, we're all Chinese. 我們是多民族的國家. And then we have… There's been along with that rhetoric. Some of this comes out of the studies of ethnicity, and the definition of ethnicity in China which of course so. It's not built on nothing. Realities are there, but it's a political project. And it's a political project. It’s to make things visible and legible by the state, right? So, I don't know when did I first ask that question. The first paper or some conference out there where I use that question it's sometime within the last ten years. Why at that time? Actually it's kind of there, in my introduction to Chinese history for beginning students in another thing. Because kind in the introduction to that book, I say there is... the book tries not to go it overarching there. It tries to tell a whole lot of contextualized stories, grabbing young people who are 18 years old and wishing they could be in their computer programming class, not in a Chinese history class. But it's not there. Is there a thread that you can follow through here, which is the changing of the...the changing shapes of the 君臣之道, the way of the ruler and the minister. And the different circumstances, the different kinds of actual political relations that were worked out in that grammar. So in a way it's there and when I, I'm not sure about the January piece but frequently when I say something about when I asked to raise the question again, I would just say for more on these changes, see my Mountain of Fame, chapters 1 through 17. One of the things is that, it seems to me make these really useful, to continue to think about, is that the person I chose to give you a kind of a biographic or one person's view of the enormous of people in transformation after 1895. It's 梁啟超. And 梁啟超 is an absolutely perfect example of the power, of the Qing system to draw the ambition of brilliant young men from a very distant place from the Canton Delta into passing examinations and becoming in an imperial bureaucrat. And he sees and starts to write almost immediately in 1896,1897. It's not going to book and more perhaps to be 新. We have to have a new kind of citizenship that we have to conceive ourselves as one people among many. So it's really quite astonishing to see it through, to see it and articulate it. It's get in the new look, these new journals. They are features of that period. And all across, the Empire in 1902 students are reading, reciting from the classics, and what they really are reading inside their textbooks is a radical essay by someone like Liang. Let me finish it because in a way it's a very small detail but to me it's a very dramatic. 梁啟超's son was 梁思成, the great historian of Chinese architecture. 梁思成 and his wife were best friends of John and Wilma Fairbank when they were first married

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in merely 30s. 梁思成's son 梁从诫 died recently, in the last year. And he was an environmental activist and an organizer of NGOs, who knew just how far he can push the system and get something done without going to jail.

Shih: So he did that in China?

He's still trying to be a 新 man, isn't it?

Shih: That's interesting. A student of mine is working on how current literature evaluates 梁啟超 differently when the authors...Depending on where the authors come from. I think he finds that the American authors tend to read a 梁啟超 as someone who actually represented Chinese historical trajectory. While the Chinese authors used to say 梁啟超 represented something new in order to, in a way, demoralize the Communist regime in which they live now. I am not sure, but it's interesting comparison.

He was a very powerful writer. And he really had his neck for making things clear, getting to the point. Of course that power of writing is even part of the question that why is China so big. People... 梁啟超 grew up speaking Cantonese. And he probably took some kind of course by the time he got to be a 舉人, where he did a crash course to speak, to be able to speak the language he would need to talk to other officials. I have no idea what is his speech was like later in life, probably pretty heavily accented Mandarin. But writing the work... and of course that emerging modern style is a working progress. It changes for it... 梁's not … et cetera. But it's a quite fascinating.

Shih: About 15, 20 years ago Europe started witnessing division on nationalist or ethnical confrontation. At that point this Irish scholar's writing on imagined communities started from...(Wills: Yes.) And then came up your 'big China' question. Does that ring any bell?

Ya! I mean that I think that it's true that something gets into writing. I think Benedict Anderson was really on to something. When he showed, when people are addressed in writing as Indonesians that they say, is that me? And each of them can do that alone. They don't even have to be the same place. And this is, it can happen to a degree in manuscript culture, but printing makes it. Enormous difference… And, I got stuff going on right now, I got to get home and work on. We have.. the early modern studies' people... how do you see the early modern institute...funded a series of four conferences on the global history of printing. And we think we have interests from our publishers to… and so on. So it had a lot of works to do. But when the question becomes...then the question becomes, we know, and the question is constantly asked, OK, Chinese and Koreans were printing from 750 of from mid 唐 on. Why this printing does not have the same transformative impact in the creation of the new forms of political life that it had in Europe? And it really does come back in surprising ways to the contrast between a single center, enormous political entity and the polycentrism of Europe. A great deal of the volume of this enormous amount of woodblock printing in Ming Qing China was guide

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to success in the examinations, model examination essays. Now, I mean, there are calendars, guides for travelling merchants or 武 俠 小 說 , martial art novels. There is a whole range of things. But the volume of demand from these examinations is crucial. While in Europe, what's a good example, the first regularly printed newspaper, the form of commercial news and political news that comes out, I think every 10 days, appears in Holland in 1618, the moment of the outbreak of the 30 years’ war. Now the Dutch trade everywhere, they need to know to have the most up today’s information on where there is danger. They also need to know where there is some down and out German prints who make it and loan some money or sell some old guns or whatever. This is an example. Martin Luther called the printing press god's gift to our cause because not only was that printed sermon or condemnation of the Popes or whatever out there in everybody's hand one by one. But the Germans will mad at as hell about all the money there were going to Rome. So they'll ready to listen to this condemnation of the corruption and the access of Rome. In the longer run, they, this is the prehistory of Benedict Anderson in imagined communities. The person reading a tract or a sermon that says no you not become a true Christian until you do filling the blank. And he goes and does it. He goes and finds the people who will, who he can do it. And there were a volume of this stuff in Europe in 1600, it's just immense. And it again depends on pluralism, and the mount of the contrast in pluralism… Sorry we are keeping each other from eating.你吃你吃.

Shih: The mechanism of the kinship you mention that connects the people who are different in China, perhaps, is a mechanism in making China big. This mechanism did not exist in Benedict Anderson's history, right? Does that explain to some extent that the imagined community in Europe preserves a foundation to separate different groups while that in China the imagination goes into connecting groups through kinship? So, the direction of imagination has been different between Europe and China.

Well, people… they just imagine themselves as good ministers, braving everything to tell what’s right, even the things they know they may lose their heads in process. Or they can imagine they're playing, they're imagining themselves as a martial art hero. And in my mount of thing, I have a chapter about 諸 葛 亮 . And I think he opened up the whole dimensions of Chinese culture, both the idea that the clever persuader is an abnormal person. And the idea that you can...what should we say...that the persuader can got people together in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. You read some 諸葛亮 , 三國 comic books when you're grew up. Young ladies read 三國 comic books?

Shih: We should let you eat before…otherwise it's going to be a very cool box. A student of mine works on different versions of 三國 animation in Japan in different generations and see how the narratives reflected the different ethos of the age. It's interesting to see how 三國 was a historic lesson to be learned in one generation and, gradually to become in today as an exotic story of some foreign land.

Well, of course the whole Beijing, 西安, Hong Kong, movie complex will give you this movies are really for the special effects than for any character building.

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Chih-yun: How many years it takes you to master your Chinese reading, to be able to read the both classic in academic…?

Shih: And you have to read other languages, right? But currently the career pattern of young scholars is changing, very strikingly. There was a small business when I got into it. I believe I am correct of saying that no one in my MA cohort in just out of the college in the regional studies MA program at Harvard had an East Asian language at all. And now, you talk to these young people and they've probably been on a junior year in China. And they're not quite sure what to do next when they go back and find some place to go teaching English in China for a couple of years, and it's a quite different relation. Certainly their spoken Chinese is… You can even follow just in the generation after me, the improvement of the quality of spoken Chinese among American scholars. By the time you got through Susan Naquin at Princeton, is ...maybe a little bit more than 10 years younger than I. I know she had quite a bit as an undergraduate and was out here for quite a spell. Lynn Struve has excellent spoken Chinese.

Shih: Chih-yun , I don't know your impression. My impression is that some of the European institutes really train better Chinese language skill than American institutes.

Could be.

Chih-yun Chan: I think yes and no. I think the continental European do train a lot of really understanding sinologists, but perhaps to say… I got it from Princeton. As far as what I know, I don't think British universities train a lot of students in specializing Chinese language, or literally Chinese language. Not the UK. And I don't understand why.

Shih: Well, I find Russian sinology and also German sinology, and also even Czech sinology do quite well in Chinese. When I talk to American scholars, some of them speak better than read. Many of European sinologists seem to read better.

There is a... the word "sinology" is just not current in the US. And it certainly is current in Germany, for example.

Chih-yun: I also think the meaning of sinology is changing recently because I graduated from Chinese literature department. I was like, in front of you I can say that, but when I was young as 15 years talk about sinology. It's basically like 小學 , like 國學 . But now Chinese studies, contemporary Chinese studies is characterized as sinology. To me, it's pretty shocking because to my personal definition, it's not sinology.

You can read a lot of what appears on the Chinese on the Chinese blogger sphere, without knowing whether the classical allusion might be because the person who wrote it

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probably doesn't know it is a classical allusion.

Now, do you tell me about the project this is part of, where you had Blussé talked to you, so on and so forth?

Shih: I started around 8 years or 9 years ago, trying to compare how different scholars study China, how their studies influence or are influenced by Chinese under their study, as well as their interactions with Chinese scholars or scholars elsewhere on China. In the beginning, it was just a very simple question. Then, it's getting deeper and deeper, becoming a civilizational agenda--religion, language, and institution. Everything comes into play. It's no longer political economics project. It's more an individualized kind of intellectual history--a kind of mini mechanism of connecting and reconnecting China to the world. And, how China has become multi-sighted reconceptualization of one's own imagined spaces in the world, or how that affects our China scholarship. And I carry out this project as a tourist. I am just visiting the other person's intellectual history, to know how different China could be. What China could represent as well as how one could argue about its presentation? it depends.

You have no doubt encountered in my generation, and on down to roughly late of Blussé's generation and a little bit beyond the fascinating results of our having spent time in Taiwan, because we couldn't get to the mainland. And I think of a fair number of us agree, that the younger generation may have visited Taiwan but may not spend much time here or pay much attention to it.

Chih-yun Chan: It's very different now.

They don't have an ear for what this, how these different potentialities of Chineseness, that the way it works out and has continued to work out. Because of course in the 70s when I was first came here, it was still very much the 國民黨 repression. But you could already sense both the human energy and people thinking for themselves, that was going to be released. And of course the release did not need to happen as neatly as it did with under 蔣經國. And he really...I... there are a number of people around his times who said no to totalitarianism after them, Gorbachev, Frederik Willem de Klerk in South Africa. I think 經國 belongs to their company. And I put him along with some other people in chapter titled, I think, the Kuomintang legacy in the Mountain of Fame, where I suggested that in his life experience he knew how to run a police state and he also knew what it would like to be a victim of a police state as he had been in Siberia. It's still... the potential was so obvious here and continuous to be aware of that not only because I've come here from time to time because I live in southern California. And there's a huge transatlantic Taiwanese society as well as a lot of people whose names are begin with Z and Q in Southern California.

Shih: So you really benefit from this comparative perspective, comparing many different places. You also mention that in particular period you compare different nation states how they managed things differently. And, that brings you again to details of different countries, different nations. Did that mean you really need a language skill that enables

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you to read? (Wills:?

No, not always. They know better have somebody around to help you. I don't read Russian. But, I have some good...

Shih: But you need the grant to do that, right? You need to fund it to...

No you need colleagues.

Shih: OK. That's good to know.

And not only, when I was doing the 1688 book, there is a piece that worked out quite well in the book about, about Istanbul. And there were something in the sources for that chapter, that… oh! I know what it is. I was able to get a handle on it to start with a, there was a recollection written by a Turk, who was taken captive in the wars in the Balkans and was lost among the Christians in various ways as a captive and as a servant and whatever for about 15 years, before he got back. And then became a valuable interpreter obviously perfectly German, and wrote a memoir of his experiences, which has been published and has been translated into German. So I can read the German, and I also had a colleague who could look quickly at the Turkish. It's OK.

Shih: Fairbank has another student from China, 黃 仁 宇 , have you heard about this person, who wrote...?

1587. Ray Huang.

Shih: He appears to be one of the less successful students of Fairbank?

I don't know. He went his own way I could never figure out.

Shih: I read his memoir and he wasn't very happy with Fairbank, I think. I think that he tried to publish his work, at least he suspected that Fairbank and his colleagues, probably were in his way, and then he couldn't get even a tenure, who was laid off because the colleague he taught decided that the board couldn't afford anyone who taught histories outside of America, because it didn't have money to hire. So it laid off those people who taught other parts of the world.

I have not read the memoir and just barely met him. I have no idea what would have happened. 1587 is an interesting and eccentric book. And the financial administration started to seem to be the first rate of detailed history; I have a very worthy contribution. You know down to the 80s, the experiences of Chinese who wound up trying to teach in the US were extremely varied. And of very few of them wind up feeling completely at home. One of the more successful of them out of the Fairbank shop was 劉廣京 K. C. Liu. He had a small but successful PhD program, which was again largely immigrant Chinese at Davis. And, in case he was a very careful, diligent, gentle sort of person. And I thought he was very well-adjusted. But someone like you told me that he was just, he

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never...he always feel like he was in exile and he never knew what was going on. And there are any number of cases of scholars, firm, China before 1949 from Taiwan and the 50s and so on, who feel that way. I don't know if 張灝 (1'28'35) did. He was certainly successful in the US and part of the good program at Ohio State. And then you have the new wave of people coming out of China in the 80s. And many of that did not have a clue about what kinds of questions we work, of what was expected of them. And some of them succeed brilliantly, learning very very fast. And there were people who just never understood what was expected of them, who have sometimes left academic life entirely to become librarians and so on. Then after another 10 years you get people who had PhDs from the US start going back to teach in China and having their students read their books, telling them stories about what it is like and the possibilities of success go up. Shih: Have you advised any Chinese students?

There are great success stories I won't get in to the nonsuccess story. There are great success stories at USC. It's more Charlotte Furth’s success story than mine because she was the mentor, that's a fellow name Liu Xun, who was written about Neidan Daoism in the 20th century. And you would think “what?” There was a whole bunch of people in Shanghai, they had a journal, all the stuff going on. It's ridiculous. So he is a very smart fellow and he got the book done and he is tenured at Rutgers. I don't know what his name's character is. It’s X. And there are quite a few around like that, are doing, setting in quite well.

Shih: So he or she is in history at Rutgers?

"He" is in history.

Shih: It's a He. Sorry, we're keeping you from eating. 這個好吃. This looks like 山楂. It's very good. I don't know if we can find out English (hawthorn).

Chih-yun: Basically my PhD thesis talks about the 20the century Chinese maritime customs form 1900 to 1970s.

Where was that? In what University?

Chih-yun: University of Bristol, and I'm revising my thesis to a book and then try to finish that by the end of March 2012. What I want to discuss with you is that in my book I argue that basically in the 19th century after the Opium War, the Qing court devised a model to dealing these Western affaiars. The model that I coin it is indirect control through delegation. And then in the 20th Century it was very successful that Chinese products customs who was the most successful case. And then in the 20th Century, the Chinese government decided to regulate this over powerful model. So the new policy reforms were launched.

After 1905?

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Chih-yun: After 1901.

OK.

Chih-yun: So the 稅務處 , the port of taxation administration was set up to be intended the inspectorate trustees. And then, in my thesis, my argument was that, so the Chinese government devised three different strategies to regulate these old powerful models of indirect control of that notation. The first way is to change the head. And the second way is to set up a redundant agency that eventually the agency could replace the old agency. And the third way is to train a staff to replace the foreign staff or some provincial staff.

I see. It's very important.

Chih-yun: Ya. So these three ways they use, the Chinese government use these three ways.

What was the first one, sorry?

Chih-yun: The first one is to just fire the head.

Like Robert Hart ?

Chih-yun: Ya, Like Hart, or like Francis Aglen. So this is what I'm try to argue from.. Basically I'm arguing from 1900 to 1950s, the governments were using these three ways to regulate every over powerful agencies.

Fairbank in all his writing about this has… keeps discovering these bits of what he would sometimes call Dyarchy, one former or another of separation and delegation of this particular function. And one of his models' setting was an excellent model, is the 理藩院. There were no Chinese. 理藩院 I mean no Hans. Sorry, one of us…, but there were no Hans. And as far as I can figure the whole thing was run in Manchu. So he was on to something, wasn't he? In saying the Qing has these models of how to deal with something different by certainly quitting, having highly trusted insiders and/or outsiders like Hart.

Chih-yun: Ya, highly trusted head. To me, Hart, I think the Qing court treated Hart as an insider. Hart was so trusted, completely trusted.

I wonder how...strange old guy.

Chih-yun: Ya, and this is another very interesting detail is that his nephew, Frederick Maze became the Inspector General in the 1930s. And after the second Sino-Japanese War, the Inspector later was isolated in the Shanghai Concession. So he told his British colleagues that we Irish because Maze and Hart. He said that "We Irish are milked by our mothers’ political flair." So, I don't... There must be some differences, very significant distinction between being an Englishman and being an Irishman.

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Well, I'm not a little bit. I don't know the fine points of usage. But what he is not saying is we Ulsterman.

Chih-yun: Ya, we Ulsterman. That's the better word to say that.

But it makes difference whether you say "We Irish" or "We Ulsterman"

Chih-yun: I can't. I have to check it up.

Detail. Detail has emerged. Yes

Chih-yun: Ya, I have to check it, I have to. I'll find the probe. It should be Ulsterman.

Have you been up there? You’ve been over there because you find some stuffs in the library.

Chih-yun: Yes, a lot, Stanley Wrights's paper.

Strange down place it must be.

Shih: Do you know Akira Iriye? He's also a student of Fairbank. Or Hirano Kenichiro, who teaches first at Tokyo, then Waseda, but he just retired in his 70s?

No

Shih: Both Fairbank's students in the 60s.

I left the residence there in 1963. This we never to return.

Shih: OK. Kenichiro was in Harvard around 63 or 64.

Ya.

Chih-yun: So when Fairbank started to edit all the Hart's correspondence or Hart Diary, you were not around?

No.

Shih: We study one of the Korean scholars on tribute system who contributes to Fairbank’s volume.

Chun Hae-jong

Shih: Chun Hae-jong . Yes, we have a master dissertation focusing on him.

I know. In another of your papers you cited a whole bunch of his journal articles.

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Chih-yun: I found your mentor's paper in the 1930s published in China, the creation of the inspectorate customs in Shanghai.

I couldn't swear to have it .. I don't know either way.

Chih-yun: Ok. I found it in the library. There's one article on 南開 and another article in China's Social Science and whatever Journal. There are two articles. The definition of the foreign inspector is better status. That's in another article, when his name was 費正敬 not 費正清, in the 30s.

Some of those people, the emigrate, who wind up at teaching in the Harvard, 楊聯升 was a completely brilliant old-styled sinologist but also modern intellectual, who was interested in everything, and was a really... had a lot of personal grips that was something about… there have been children who stay and, somehow, got left behind in China, and who will write him in telling him that he should come home until built the new China. He was... There was one semester when he was teaching at Harvard, psychological.

Shih: His name was 楊?

楊，聯合國的聯，and then…

Shih: rising

Right, rising.

Shih: I think I know the name.

And then the person completely strangely different character who was... I don't think he had a regular faculty appointment when he was very much around. This was 洪 業 , William Hung, the creator of ...He's been biographied in English. There is a book talking about him. 1He was being of the college at Yenching. And he was a wide-ranging classical scholar, and very convinced Christian. And he really had the idea for taking...when he saw what was available, for Western classical Medieval Studies and so on where every great texts had an index, he created the Harvard Yenching, 燕大, and the idea of these indexes, we still use to the various texts. And he was slightly theatrical very outgoing. And his great friends at Harvard Yenching was a professor-friend, Francis Cleaves, a great Mongolist. And he would come down the hall every afternoon. It was time for him and Francis to go ahead to. And he would greet Francis he hadn't see him say "Oh, Francis, how are you this afternoon, nice to see you.” (loud) Lovely man. He gave me my Chinese name.

1 Susan Chan Egan, 1988. A latterday Confucian: reminiscences of William Hung, (1893-1980), Harvard University Asia Center.

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Shih: How do you get to know these colleagues who eventually help you out, almost everywhere in the world, for your research and bringing you to their homes?

Oh, the Blussé thing. That was a huge.. I promised Leonard I would tell everybody the rest of the story, because I was starting and I know we would all be understood... In 1972 or 73, I came move here for a first visit. I've gone to Holland for dissertation research. So I had got here much later than most of my cohort had. And we had a fourth floor walk-up apartment on 龍 泉 街 66 巷 1 號 . Did I tell the story in here (a printed interview elsewhere)?

Shih: You told the story and he also recalled bothering other friends like you in their first encountering.

I'm so glad that he acknowledges his elder brother. So that's where all started. And then this just does go on. You've taken the measure of this man. He's extremely funny. Sometime about 20 years ago, I don’t know why I was in Holland for.. And he’s always had a sailboat. He's a very bunch of...

Shih: From his family tradition.

A sailing person, and we had a… we took a day. And he had this very slow old sailing boat with, making its way on the canals and having a little motor if there was no wind at all. And we passed this row-boat, and a young man was lounging in the back of the row-boat, and his girlfriend was pulling on the oars as we passed Leo said in Dutch “An ideal marriage”.

Shih: You're right, conferences all these...You will meet people, like you and me last week.

Exactly. This very...What I really like about that conference, Chih-yu, last week was these people who are doing urban history from the bottom up. I thought that was very encouraging. Some of the rest of it, I mean, you do the high theory better than most people do.

Shih: I doubt.

I mean, I actually ask the question at one point, why did anybody read this stuff, you know? These Japanese in the 1930s, and all these people who would spend half of their lives reading Mahayana Buddhism and then take of Hegel. Please. Under your guide I can see why this, there are some clues there to Japan’s strange relations to China and the strange relations to the world. But not all of the papers dealing with those things, they seem to be talking with each other.

Shih: I have a bunch of Indian friends doing urban studies from bottom-up.

Ya, there are some of people worked there, and other people still, because I like this bridge.

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Shih: It's very anthropological kind of studies.

Ya. And one of these got some of the best details in this conference about a, how the lives of little people can be changed by forces completely beyond their control. From Sri Lanka, whose name of Perera Nihal… After the Tsunami, which really just wiped out this coastal fishing village, the government made a decision that the village is going to be rebuilt of 3 kilometers back from the beach, so they would be safer. Even though there is no other tsunami are reported or evidenced of in the historical records at all. This looks like a very geologically rare event. And the government seems to, as Nihal says it just been these guys coming in from Colombo and they don't know what's going on and they don't have any use for these village people. They don't think they know anything. What happens is that, now, it used to be out on the beach, everybody would be literally out there watching for signs of the fish schools and rarely put out nets, and so on. And the men and women are all out there, kind of working together, kind of watching. And of course the men do all of the heavy lifting all the nets in. But then everybody's involved and handling the catch and so on. So now, the women stay back in the village and the men go down to the beach to watch and completely, completely disrupted social and political relations of the village. And some of the women are going to start taking some control over schooling or some other important things without separation. You would never see this if you weren't out there, ready to watch these people. Was his PhD in anthropology?

Shih: I think he teaches in the States.

He teaches in the States. This is kind of interesting.

Shih: Oh, this dissert is called Crataegus. I just check on the Google.

As a person's name?

Shih: No, this is the dessert.

Oh, I see. By the way I did know Iriye slightly. Yes. I'm sorry I thought that I was not connecting. I didn't actually see that much…

Shih: Ya, he's active

Enormously successful.

Shih: Ya. He has a very active theme, trying to sell I think some kind of the centrist position to make peace in the world. Speaking of this urban people and these Sri Lanke people you mention commitment and contingency as factors that fit in your research. When I read through this text you also mention that you're reading of the China's revolution and Confucius while you were in the Army that sort of sensitizing you to ....

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This would... I think if there had been of Asian history taught at the University where I was an undergraduate, that there is a fair chance that I would have tried at once when I would have said "Wow, this is for me." But it was not taught at all. And the university was a big successful State university, it was not quite on a par with Michigan or Cal Berkeley, but it was very solid institution. And they had no Asian history in that department, now they have, had, usually two China scholars in the department Ron Toby doing Japanese history. Some times a second Japan's scholar. Don't they think of anybody doing Korean? But, certainly you can get the bug and by now if you were out at a good liberal arts college anywhere in the States the chances there would be an East Asia historian in the department are very high, maybe just one. So I don't know what made this all smarter about Asia, I mean, the connection between that what's out there in the public consciousness is not perfect. And John Fairbank also was an opponent of the Vietnam War, and tried to say this wouldn't have happened if we did have more knowledge of Vietnam. I think that's over-reading what knowledge can accomplish in the face of political power in delusion.

Shih: He said that after Vietnam or ?

During the war, and some of these would like to think that there are...that some of our delusions about the Middle East are the product of the ignorance, and the ignorance, certainly massive, still, but I think the connect between a sense of understanding of...you're long-lasting historical nuts and a contemporary problem that seems to require some action. It ought to be... If you read anything about Afghanistan, you should know to be very careful, trying to impose a completely classic model of centralization that no account of the ethnic differences in the country. And wherefore you want to see, and of course at a more proximate political level, if you didn’t have a square somehow, what you are going to do with the Pakistani military. And then Iraq, you don't have to read very much to find that's a five-hundred-year old Sunni-Shiite flash zone, along that line, and that you are going to release, you're going to wind up a game of a Shiite influence.

Shih: Well, I guess it depends on how we start our... what's the starting assumption. If we assume we know them and we have the knowledge, that's completely different from if we start from we don't know them so we have to find out. You have to compare. Professor, you have this experience of making comparison so you already know that there is a limit of our knowledge and experience.

Yes. America, again why is China so big. America and China and Russia are very big. And one consequence: that is that a lot of people out in the middle of that country have rather little sense of any place outside the US. And of course all politics are local everywhere. You elect your national assemblymen so because he's going to get the bridge built, that you've been wanting for ten years. That doesn’t matter where you are. But we have in the US some rather substantial number of members of Congress who have never had a passport. Which I still find just mind boggling. what did I say? And I think, I mean, Taiwan in its all the peculiar of its political situation is strangely deeply rooted in the history and culture of the Hans in this place, in the Taiwanese culture, whether you're part of or not. It's all around you. You know where it is. And it's strikingly cosmopolitan

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because, for a great many kinds of business dealing, tourism, you get on a plane, you used to go on a plane when you go to Hong Kong or Osaka, and now I'm just made time down, I'm going to be amazed sitting there tomorrow morning watching these airplanes going to China. It's still.... And you tell me why, what that's doing to people's sense of themselves? I mean, they certainly not saying it's us against them, nor “We, I want to be a part of them.” Neither.

Shih: How does that make your big China theory?

There is a lot of new history...this is post of all this. New interest in generalizing history, in the history of empires, there's a book by two historians named...Oh! Jane…What’s her…(transcriber: Burbank) The other author's name is Frederick Cooper, Empires a global history, something like that. 2Quite recent, Princeton Press. And they made two points. The first is looking around you. The Jane person, whose last name I can't come up with, who is a Russia scholar and Cooper is an Africanist. They do very different things. Look around at the 19th and 20th century, and most of the historical works has been history on Empire. And one feature of Empires at works by treating different groups of people differently, by differentiating. They also worked by finding intermediates, intermediaries, by finding agents. And no empire ever worked without finding intermediaries and putting some trusts in them. And the Qing was very good at this in inner Asia and superb at Mongolia. Maybe they had a little bit too much confidence in their ability to keep heart of a country on a leash, but didn't work out too badly as you said for forty years. And one of the fascinating thing about that then is that, if this is going to work you have to give some agency, some ability to do something, to that intermediary, who may eventually, if he doesn't get...he may decide to play along the system or he may decide to break away from them. But he is not just being repressed and told what to do. The Brits in India built up a whole world of Indian lawyers, Gandhi, Nehru's father, they built up a whole world of printers in the vernacular in Hindi or in Urdu. Because they thought they got licenses to print it and they could find out what's the Indian were thinking, and if they didn't like it and they could shut it down. Well, it's sort of work and sort of … out of hand. And that's history and over time how Empires' worked. So I think the idea that people here should look at the greater China and say "We are different but not perfectly different, not entirely different," or "I don't want to be so different that I can make that deal or buy that Taiwan house and so go to Shanghai or whatever. It’s completely normal."

Shih: There are...cannot connect. I try to find ...

I think the name is Burbank, Jane Burbank, I think. Nobody wants to be a friend of an Empire. This is the difficulty was this historiography. We are all anti-imperialists, right?

Shih: About this constant reference to a bigger picture when you study China, how difficult is that in your profession? Or, do most people read just concentrate on their own agenda?

2 Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Princeton University Press 2010.

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I don't know... in...one of my... eight or ten years ago, a graduate student, David Bello wrote a book talking about opium and the limits of Empire. That was basically based on the Beijing archives. But it has a sense of India and the place of the opium question and the state's fiscalization, its focus on getting revenue from opium. That is very strong. It depends on the way particular PhD programs were at that level. There has been some pressure in the nature of the profession for more young professors to be able to do some teaching in what we call "world history". And that pressure has come from the bottom-up, from secondary school curricular and teacher training for secondary school teachers, because there has been a sense in America that you ought to read not just teaching at European heritage but a heritage that will mean something to those young people sitting in front of you, whose grandparents, who are grew up in Korea or China or West Africa or say Nigeria... one of the Nigerian peoples... or the island of Tonga in the south Pacific or whatever. There is an organization in the US, it called the World History Asociation, it's set up in the US, some international membership. It has a journal, Jouranl of World History and a website, H-WORLD. I don't know how frequently that takes hold at the level of the graduate training because it of course the level of what is needed to keep up with Qing, or with this history of Australia and New Zealand or South Africa or Brazil or whatever is constantly rising. Now Irvine has made a very strong commitment at the PhD level to world history. And I think if you look at there we' talking about in their statement of their program, you would find that somehow everybody is going to do some of that. The University of Minnesota has a very very large department and a very very large library, good university. And the people in charge of a dissertation completion seminar that was funded by Mellon Foundation, I guess, as meaning a couple of other people to come to talk to this summer group of these young people who were, or supposed to be working hard on a dissertation and presenting them to each other and trying to stay interactive and stimulating each other. I know I gave one of my “why is China so big?” talks there, to those young people. And out of the 16 of them only one was a China scholar, but they all got it because coming through the Minnesota PhD program, they had all have, at least one quarter as a teaching assistant in the World History Survey. Now when you do that, all of a sudden you're studying Ming China with a Ted Farmer and you look at the syllabus next week and you say "Oh, gosh, we are doing the Ancient Empire of Songhai in West Africa. What's that?" Google, Wikipedia, three books, OK. "I can stay and have little refreshments." So you get used to do things slightly different way. And I think it's very healthy. I mean, as you notice, I sometimes come back to finding one character in the text, or one out of the way facade. But I think it's very healthy to be able to pan out to those larger…

Shih: But then you're also pay attention to, what is mentioned here, the contingency or human commitment that people matters. So you have to look at individual characters--how to survive their lives. Does big picture...?

Right. And sometimes during a position where the traces they make affect a lot of other people. But at least they're indicative of a lot of people are experiencing.

Shih: Is this your philosophy and also philosophy of teaching, or?

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Yes, because I think that one thing...I'm not sure there are going to go away with much... I hope it go away with some fresh knowledge of how China got to be what it is, that can help them think about it if they ever have to think about China or about China's relation with the US or whatever. But I think, they...absolutely want them to go away with having a stretch their more imaginations.

Shih: Do you compare students twenty years ago, does your mission of teaching about China change, because of the characters of the time of the student are changing as the society has been changing?

Well, I had an awful lot of ethnic Chinese students in my survey classes over, not from the beginning, when the beginning for me is 1964, 65. But certainly from the mid-70s on...I look out and see... you know. And I think it's a problem that the American universities would like to think they do a great job on...but it's really... it doesn't always work, which is taking all the ethnic diversity they have counted as, and turning it into interchanging and mutual education... I mean, USC has a lot of Chinese students.

Shih: I know. My son once wanting to go…

Well, and one of the things that USC has but Irvine doesn’t is big time football, and a home-game Saturday on the USC campus with all the lawn and the band playing and the cheering and everybody off to the stadium and so on. It's really quite a spectacle and there are a lot of very smart young people who just think that’s great fun. And that may even be one reason why they choose to come to USC rather than to Irvine that doesn't have big-time football. But I'm… so, I mean, American football is a crazy game, and nobody else plays. And it takes some explaining for anybody to know what's going on. And there has been talking about…, at least make a possible for some of our international students to get a taste of it, going to one game and know or get a sense of this weird part of the American university life. But there is anecdote evidence; of course there is a lot of drinking on the campus on most, a lot of yelling, a lot of noise. And I've heard it said that there are a lot of young Chinese women hiding out in their dorm rooms, who are not going to confront all that. And if you thought about it, you can think about ways to do it. Since there is without they're getting in any place where there is out of their comfort zone. But then I look at these Chinese young people in my class and some of them were, hmm.. fourth generation of Americans, who spoke no Chinese, occasionally there were somebody who just graduated from 建國 or 北一女中 , and knew more Chinese poetry than I did by a long shot. And it should be able to draw some of them out about family, about mourning , about family ties if you touch it right sometimes it would work, but not very often. So that changed a bit... And then, I mean, you know, you're all been places where the people around you are speaking a foreign language, another language in which you're not comfortable. And you, maybe you speak that language somewhat and you supposed to be learning it. But at the end of the day we are going to somebody to speak Chinese to, right? And relax. I found the same way the other way around even here or in Beijing.

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Shih: Ya, right. Speaking of family background..., your family background, according to this previous report your father is an agricultural economist. How about further back, do you have any family history to share?

This is the greatest expansion, the first great expansion of higher education in America. It's my parents' generation. It was very unusual and actually it was fairly unusual in those even before that generation for both of them to get from a farm situation to college and my father and all three of his siblings graduated from college. My mother and her sister, I think, Ah...! I think one of the brothers graduated from college, but there were not many other families in this little town, where the young people went beyond high school. So it just quite, and of course by my generation, given apart from the fact that I was there for these young people whose fathers were professors, and were obviously going to be academically ambitious. Of the numbers of people, who were going to college were expanding enormously. There had been a huge expansion right after the War World Two, when there was government support under the G.I. bill for a lot of those men to go back to college, and just ballooned in numbers of students.

Shih: You are born before WWII?

Yes.

Shih: But then the generation after WWII, they later turned out to be the radical in the 60s, which were a few years younger than you are.

Yes, it's quite different.

Shih: And you were already starting teaching them?

Yes, and there were signs for that when I was still around Harvard.

Shih: Did Fairbank encounter severe resistance from...?

Yes, they tried to make Fairbank out to be a tool of this establishment and so on. And of course he did advise to the Department of State when the Department of State would listen to them, which was all of this. And I think he had a kind of detached view of the whole thing that the young people had a point. I'm not… he’s written about it. I can’t…

Shih: Did you encounter anything during those years? When did you start teaching China affairs? Did you start teaching China in the 60s?

Ya. It wasn't particularly because of China, because it was there for university as a whole. For the Kent State May, 1968, there was no violence on the USC campus, but there was a lot of unhappiness and there was a demand made by radical student groups that students be permitted to take the, whatever the days are on this you have to look at the chronology, take the grades they had at that time before final exams, as a final grade, and go off and engage in political action. And the president of the university...I was in the

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auditorium, the president of the university, who was a medical man, one of the first real upgraders and builders in the university, looked at these radical students and said "I've heard your requests that you're be allowed to dot dot dot, and I will do so." So, all of the student radicals were on their feet with their red-arm bands around their arms, cheering the president of the university. He co-opted the whole thing. And that was part of it, because it was in fact a very conservative campus, and the numbers were not what they would have been at UCLA, Berkeley, or Michigan. So, it didn't really impact on… What we had to do is in those days, was to say "OK, here is the thing, called the, if you teaching in Chinese history survey and come down to the last two weeks, here is the thing called Cultural Revolution. And here is what the Chinese say they're up to and why they're doing what they're doing. And they read a couple of these statements, see in this, and pay attention. So that was a necessary exercise, but then it comes…, then of course it was very interesting ten years later in my first visit to the Mainland was in 1979. And the few visitors, guests from the Mainland maybe before that, but not much, to have people say "Oh, we said that because we have to survive. We didn't believe a word of it." So, I think we were playing honestly and saying pay attention to what they seem to be saying. Now it did split, for some people of Philip Huang at UCLA, a very fine historian of modern China. He was something close to being a committed Maoist. And then there were people on the other side, and not at UCLA but for example, Thomas Metzger was on the faculty in San Diego, and was not buying any of it, and ultimately became really a very strange kind of neo-conservative, very strange perception of the world. And I don’t think I saw him much of time in those years, but he's a very smart fellow. So if really it changed, Harold Kahn at Stanford, very important, very fine Qing scholar. And he was caught up in some of this agitation, and somehow windup never writing much more, after all of this emotional violence in his life, a very gifted mentor of graduate students. But it certainly changed his life.

Shih: Did you get a chance to interact with people like James Peck?

Oh, only, slightly in distance, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars always had a counter convention down the street, from an AAS meeting. And I went off to a few of those sections, and listened to this way and that, but not really very good political commitment.

Shih: One of my mentors used to be part of that, Peter Van Ness.

I know that name, yes.

Shih: He was my teacher at the University Denver for a full year. He used to be my advisor but then he went back and forth between the States and Australia. So he eventually...I had to switch. He has been very encouraging and inspiriting in all these past 30 years nonetheless. He's telling people today that I abandoned him. I say "No, no, no, you abandoned me." When I arranged my colleagues to interview him just two years ago, he would twice move very close to the microphone and say, "He abandoned me." Anyway,… what an enjoyable relationship between he and me, professionally as well as socially.

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Well. I don't know what kind of full cross section you get of people's lives in those times. I think, I'm not the only one who took it as an exercise in understanding and interpretation of what was going on in China. But you knew so little, you know so little. I started at Harvard in the fall of 1958. Notice the year. And they interviewed… Fairbank, and at least one other interviewed each new MA students and Ben Schwartz, who was a lovely man, who was already well into the broad thought in ancient China project, was done with 嚴復...came in his eyes just… like something big is happening, we don't know what it is, and we had nobody underground in China, not a single report. Now, there maybe a few spies with CIA men on something. I think that’s highly likely. The Kuomintang probably knew something and had…, was probably some report getting out here somehow, but nothing in public. Eventually the Japanese media would provide some reportage out of Beijing, but especially full of the Great Leap which is, of course, the Great Leap happened out in the villages. The disasters affected everybody. But the worst of it was out in these remote villages, where there was no replacement for that loss of supply. So you just did this almost this black box for some...

Shih: Were you aware, when you first arrived in Taiwan, there was a campaign against Fairbank, sort of a mini-campaign? There was even a book about how bad this person was.

Well, yes, Fairbank thought he must been doing something right from both sides for mad at him. I don't recall this specific stuff in Taiwan. And of course that was the year that Taipei lost diplomatic representation, lost Washington's recognition. There wasn’t in this, both Washington and Tokyo switched to Beijing. And of course the fact the way Taiwan has survived that as a non-recognized nation state. This is highly professional foreign policy community. I've just saw something about the re-establishment of, in Taipei times of the last couple of days, the re-establishment of relation with Saint Lucia.

Shih: Oh, well, really? Nobody celebrated that.

Under 160,000. I've been to Saint Lucia. I've seeing the ROC flag flying in front of the ambassador's palace, really quite funny. It's a beautiful place, very nice people. But of course, it doesn't matter. Exact just to have it be able to say that somebody recognizes us.

Shih: Facing this black box, when or ever did you feel comfortable with studying China?

See, I think I'm not sure about my whole cohort. But I think it's a marker that I was ready to commit myself to study a place in books. That is as far as I knew at that moment. I would ever get to see, because it was so darn interesting in the books. And at that point, as in 1958 I've never been out of North America and the degree of out and about in the world, that is so common among young people now was just that... not part of our expectation. But, if I had had experience of India as now I had some experience of India, and I have... There's always something about everyday in India that makes me angry. And I don't think I would have been motivated to study India by having been there. But I certainly...the people I began studying in books about China are the people who continue

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to make sense to me in all the greater China versions down today.

Shih: Are they really different people compared with Americans?

Not usually. I mean you have to hear certain things. But not... certainly no basic difference. I want to mention one thing before I promise Ms. Lin I would because of her interest. I also have to make remind of myself that I've...This is a title I keep getting wrong. It's directly irrelevant to this question of what academics have to offer an understanding of China and the World today. We ran a conference at USC in the spring of 2008, where we brought together some of the very good historians and political scientists who study Chinese foreign relation past and present. Just simply ask these questions. They asked what was the state of… and what’s Ms. Lin breathed the words 'tribute system' and we agreed, at most, it needed a lot of deflating and qualifying to make any sense of it. But we did finally get a small book out, what I was the designated editor and in this title "Past and Present in China's Foreign Policy: From 'Tribute System' to 'Peaceful Rise'". So look at Amazon, it's out there. And there are other people in this book, they are wonderful, Harry Harding, Peter Perdue, James Hevia. Brantly Womack is my real discovery nowadays on Chinese foreign relation, how to think historically about Chinese foreign relations today. I'm very pleased this all went well.

Shih: I read about your wife being a library researcher in this biographic note. What have she been involved?

Well, I think she will tell you that her life from age 20 to 40 or 50 was entirely in the wake of the imperatives of my beautiful career, plus the imperatives of child raising. It was a very difficult and stressful combination. And then she always has been a person who is very much at home and the detail end of things. And probably it would have, if she had made a career choice at the beginning, it would have been as a librarian. But then a very strange feature of American society, where we are all... we moved around a lot, we moved away from our family on our journey. Many of our families are immigrant families, two generations back, if not more recently. And sooner or later somebody gets curious about the genealogy, about the family background.

Shih: Multiculturism.

And then you go out and there are, of course now, there are vast databases online. And then there are things like this entirely volunteer staffed librarian in their things, like in many cities where we can go on and look up. Maybe they have the old county history done in 1960 of the county where your family or your grand father was living in 1960. So you look at it to see if he's there and maybe a little bit about what the place was like. Because what you learn is, this is a ..., we've gone through this fast transformation whereas most of our grandfathers were living on farms, and where almost none of their descendents are living on farms. And this is one of the most widely pursued amateur hobbies in the United States--genealogy. And if you go you ask few educated people, if you mention the word in the presence of ten people, somebody is doing it. And of course every answer leads to two new questions, slightly to lead you back to a native place

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abroad. One branch of my wife's ancestors came was an Ulsterman. And we're not trying to follow them because the Ulstermen are extremely unimaginative about what they name their children and their...quite impossible number of William Connells, who cannot be separated from each other. But another side is...involve several different places in Germany where we've now… couple of them we have, one in Germany and one in France but both German-speaking, one in Germany and one in Alsace. We've had human connections with that people.

Shih: How about your connection in China? Is there in genealogy or...?

No, there's none.

Shih: I mean social as well as academic or professional connection?

Only to the degree that, I mean there is this implicit this...I think it's an important piece of America, and I'm not sure how many people would applied to, of my graduates, my professional cohort, or the next one after. But especially in the American, in the big State Universities, that had the big engineering schools, of the big business center in economics programs, of the big applied disciplines, of all kinds, in the 1950s, I say something like this in this piece, in the 1950s, a very large part of the world wanted to be modern and was convinced the America knew how to be modern. So the way you do it is you come to America to study engineering or business or public administration or what have you. And this agricultural economics department, my father was part of, was a collection of very much small town people, who probably had never thought much about going anywhere abroad or had any kind of foreign connections. The world came to them. And my Dad had students from South Africa, from Iran, a lot from India, they had a big connection with the agricultural college Uttar Pradesh, a huge Indian state. And one of my college roommates was a Shanghai refugee, who was an engineering graduate student. So the shape of that has changed, and actually some of the numbers have grown, the interactions between, let's say those Chinese students and non-Chinese on a place like Illinois or Minnesota, or Berkeley, has so grown, because it's so much easier to stay in this big community of Chinese-speakers. And you get good advice about how to survive in American university but getting all from people who shared something with you and her, and getting in a language where you will understand every nuance of what's been said. So the gain in numbers has not produced again in interaction, whereas the people we knew, I knew best, who was memorable in a way, was a very very smart fellow from South Africa. He was a very much old country, old-styled segregationist toward Africans. And very much small town people, he and his wife couldn't stand being away from family, they basically adopted by parents, or they were all in Champaign Urbana. So this a very close and fine relation that we went on for a long time. At the same time I'm sort…, I was in my parents' living room. I didn't know what kind of students and others gathering it were, when an African-American student walked in. And the Afrikaner almost bolted out, almost, was not going to be socially speaking to someone with the dark skin. So here he had really had to confront himself. And I don't know what actually the last time I was in touched with them was after my mother died in 1990, and I sent them a notice we got a very gracious letter back. It was 1990. It says "Well, big things are happening in our

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country. We just have to see". I don't know how it...some of the old hardcore Afrikaners left the country. It's not been in a happy place for many of them. But this was very much... We get a sense of this in terms of one to one human connection.

Shih: For people who study China like you, do you often benefit from some of the network in China?

Oh, yes.

Shih: And some, actually many, have even married Chinese wives. (Wills: Certainly so.) But it appears that your connection or networking basically is outside of China, such as in Indonesia, in India, in the Netherlands and…

All around the South China sea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Beijing, especially at the 清史研究所 in 人大.

Shih: How do you feel in connection with Chinese scholars changed over time, who affect your...

Not usually. We know a little bit more of what each other is doing, because the publications get back and forth. And more of them have been to the US, and that's started very early. The first time I was in Mainland China was with a Frederic Wakeman’s, Ming-Qing historians delegation at 1979. This was early days for us. We were the… I think two of the French historians had stuck their noses into the archives as before we got there. But we were about the first foreigners to get a look at what they might have at 歷史檔案館 and so on. Some connections to individuals started then. Actually I've not kept up these connections. There was a nice man at 人大, who did early Qing work named 林鐵軍 . And saw him on several visits, and always very cordial. I don't think there is great deal of intellectual exchange. You gave some talks, got some good questions to ask, which was very episodic.

Shih: Do you go more often now or...?

No, not more often.

Shih: That's interesting, because most people probably go often now. Is it because the nature of your research becomes so global?

Ya, I think you hit it. Doing it more global history has been taking lots of my time.

Shih: I can imagine. I have the same experience that I used to go to China ten times a year, going into mountains. Now I'm working on this intellectual history around China. I am going to India, Vietnam, or Mongolia. I no longer go to China frequently. It's interesting to study China but by moving a step away from the territorial China, we discover multiple Chinas outside of the territorial China. That's eye-opening.

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That's true. Have you had some interesting contacts in Singapore?

Shih: Yes, I guess you must have known Wang Gungwu.

I have known Wang Gungwu forever, right.

Shih: We interviewed him. But his interview is never complete. He's keeping adding things as we keep tracking.

Oh, he's got a lots of stories to tell.

Shih: Right.

Well, if he really told all the stories about being VC at Hong Kong, something he's been through some strange political moments.

Shih: I know. I think he with friend...

No, he would not.

Shih: I was actually curious about that particular politics. I ran to him in the Denver Airport, when his host was supposed to pick him up, but they didn't show up. So I had to find where his host was, but during that twenty minutes of waiting, I was trying to explore some of the political things I heard about him from other places. He was quite careful about it.

No, he's a very political animal, but he really wanted to be VC at UHK through the handover, and to watch history happen. I don't know what... I was more in touched with the people at Singapore four or five years ago when I was on visiting committee for the History Department...pass through a couple of times. They ought to, they know it, they got the money. They got the infrastructure to be the center, the world-class center of studies of Southeast Asian history in the region. I mean, the guy of this visiting committee, I forget the fellow's name but the fellow teaches at NUS. I think he's a Brit. He's doing World War 2 history and post-war history with a certain amount of military stuff. He can put the class on a plane and go and take a field trip to Dien Bien Phu, for pete’s sake.

Shih: So rich.

He's rich but also it's close. It’s two hour flight and you're there. And of course they have watched Malaysia and all their constantly aware of Indonesia and all. It's many, many, many strengths. But at the same time, it is ... NUS is a national university. And it's very tied with the tie to the establishment and the government. They were still having trouble with the status differentiation between professors who are Singaporean and professors who are foreign. And if they wanted ...if the minister called a historian or a political

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scientist whom he knew, and wanted consultation right now or boom, you go. There's just so tightly tied to the national government. And one of my colleagues on that committee was from Canberra. He said ours just the same. If you're in the big university in the capital, they've got you. So I don't know if it's going to work out as it ought to. And it ought to be a major center of Chinese studies.

Shih: Nevertheless, the term 'Chinese' is very sensitive in Singapore. They're trying to avoid that term. It causes confusion when they say East Asia, instead of Chinese studies. And they recruit people from everywhere to study China, but not stay for tenure. No tenure position is at the EAI, and reports have to be in English with scientific methodology. (Wills: Exactly. ) So, the government makes sure that they're studying China from some external position; but on the other hand, they recruit primarily diasporic Chinese scholars from foreign lands, in supplement from China in order to make themselves different or in the more informed position than, so to speak, foreigners. They seem to be in between. When Lee Kuan Yew goes to China, he never speaks in Chinese or in Mandarin, (Wills: Really?) he always speaks in English.

So as to speak in public?

Shih: It's interesting that it's a deliberated signal just as the social science method, English in writing, refrain from calling theirs China studies, and non-tenured position, all to make sure that nobody would dominate intelligence on China in Singapore.

Wang Gungwu of course was the perfect representative for that, because he's a school master’s son from Ipoh, in the tin-mining country, London PhD, of first book on Five Dynasties, a very nice work on, kind of interpreting the 五代十國 period. And then he goes into this China abroad stuff. And of course did that, that long spell in Canberra.

Shih: Yes, he single-handed created the school of 南洋 . Na-yang studies in Singapore. John Wong is another figure at East Asian Institute, who grew up in Hong Kong, received his PhD in Canada. (Wills: I don't know that.) Actually he was the person running EAI. Wang Gungwu did not run daily operation...John Wong was the person who advised how to write the policy papers and on so. And he's very cautious about their connection with China. But after he retired, he was constantly invited and consulted in China. He becomes very open about his attachment to China, but that was after he was retired. You could see how...somewhat the intellectual self submerged in one’s career in the sense that people don't want to sensitize their identities.

Excuse me for going back for late 18th century, but that's rising to know something. We're gradually getting a sense of the enormous importance of the Chinese in shaping a continental South East Asia from the 1500s on. And one big piece of that, is that there was a Chinese settlement at the west edge of the Mekong Delta, pretty close to what another Viet-Cambodian border, at a place called Ha-Tien, which is 河 仙 . And it had only a very loose relation with any of the surrounding monarchies. It was basically self-controlling, and quite self-consciously maintaining Chinese culture, as the numbers of

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emigrants from China, a group in the 18th century. A lot of them were moving into the Mekong Delta, basically doing the renovation work, bringing this delta under cultivation. The people at Ha-Tien were from 雷 州 , the people over forty hundred miles away at Chantaburi now in Thailand were from 潮州 . The 潮州 people were moving into Siam like mad, and they still very important in Siam. Comes the collapse of old Ayutthaya under Burmese invasion 1767. The person who seized power of temporary…, turned out temporarily as the Burmese withdrew, Taksin, not quite the same name as the recent premier. He had a Chinese father, as he sought but did not fully get the recognition of the Qing Court as King of Siam, he used the Chinese name 鄭, and the Court kept him kind of, at a distant state. They recognized him as a 國家, but not as 暹邏王. At the same time, the 潮州 people and the 雷州 people at Chantaburi and Ha-Tien were started to fight with each other. They basically destroyed each other. Ha-Tien was wiped out and not rebuilt, but other emigrants, largely Fujian emigrants, were very important in the advising of the new Nguyen Dynasty as it grew in Vietnam after 1802. And one of the people there we can trace again, surname 鄭. So, and the Qing Court looked all this and they took their information wherever they can get. And they don't say "Oh we are not going to talk to him because he's an immigrant, he's left imperial territories to live among the barbarians", none of that nonsense. They can get the information, they'll get the information. So this fluidity that you're describing in this John Wong, keeping a low profile, and then becoming a big deal of different context, sounds to me very much like some of these people who are figuring out these games.

Shih: Ya, right, contingency.

Where either-or, ethnic, identity kind of things, does not work.

Shih: I'm equally interested in why and how you find or discover this lesson? Did you just discover what you just said by accident?

I discovered it by reading every god damned document on microfilm that was indexed as 外交，越南 in the number one.

Shih: So who long you spent there?

About four months.

Shih: And you can memorize that?

Take notes. And it's something as striking and interesting.

Shih: How many places like this you have been spending certain amount of time there to read archives, Vietnam, Taiwan?

I know Vietnam. I learned a little bit from a few manuscripts in the HanNom Institute.

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But that's really...there is a huge job to be done. If anybody wants to really sort out what happened in the botched 1788 invasion, and to, I gave this commercial at Nangang yesterday. So, this is the same. Somebody ought to do it. Somebody from here can do it. Somebody from here can do it, because you need to have...you have full collaboration of the Vietnamese scholarly establishment. Because there's going to be 碑文 all over out in the countryside.

Shih: Really? In Chinese?

I mean it's occasionally strange characters, but it's basically Chinese. That's say, the evil forces of the tatar were coming over the hill. And all of the sudden, the god of this place, appeared in a sky and smoked at them, they all fled. There's going to be all these lord and legends. The Vietnamese victory of 1788 is big deal. So even in agreeing on what happened between whatever you get out of the Qing records and your 莊吉發 has written one of the best accounts, what can be known. And putting that beside what the Viets are going to tell you about the wonderful victories against enormous odds over great Qing is going to be quite challenging, but the Viets think that people from Taiwan are as viscerally opposed to big China as they are. So I've been told several times, I gave a talk some years ago in a South East Asia Studies Center at 暨南大學 . And they sent, it's a contemporary oriented thing; they sent students on study projects and internship and so on in Vietnam. And the Viets just assume that...they share this deep anti-China...they embrace Taiwan people. So somebody from here has a real opportunity. It would not be easy.

Shih: We have so many Vietnamese in Taiwan. And, the center of Chinese studies at the Vietnamese Academy of Social Science. Actually they orient the institute of China studies, though a big project, toward studying Vietnamese spouses in Taiwan.

This is a kind of piece of how empire works in Vietnam. I was just reading...I want my best ways of keeping up with the world is the weekly at London called The Economist, very smart and intelligent. They had a piece about recent studies of trans-national marriage. And of course a lot of it is a husband from a relatively rich country, and a younger woman from a poor country, who may be exploited and mistreated in a variety of ways. So there are a lot of things to worry about in all this. But some fellow, I think from here, was quoted the same, who was in international business no reason. There are five people in the world who won’t cheat me. One is my Vietnamese wife and another is her sister. So this is absolutely crucial part of his hopes for survival and profit in this world. And this again, this is absolutely a piece of the history of the empire. We are not just as formal rule but as asymmetrical relation of all kinds. You're, not all of your custom agents, maritime custom collectors in out ports were living sort of lives are waiting for their wives to arrive from Belfast or whatever.

Chih-yun: They always had trans tons to buy, always. That's a real, a part of Robert Hart's diary were deleted. That period was the most crucial time. That gentleman is suffering from this, but does he really need to study that period but..

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Oh, no.

Chih-yun: And no one can find it out.

It may just be burnt.

Chih-yun: Very very possible.

Shih: It looks like you've been in Taiwan quite often, perhaps upon invited lectures or self-sponsored research, tours over the years. Is this right since you first arrived in 70s?

I'm sure there is a passing through things. And then in the… We started to get opportunities to go to China in the 80s, the Stanford Center sent up a special program; basically we were medium spoken Chinese, as summer program. And I think there were five others out there in the summer of 84, doing that and talking to each other a lot, making a lot of Taiwan friends at the center and in all kinds of another ways. And then, I don't know how many times, I haven't traveled enough in Taiwan since that first staying when I was here with the family. And we went down to Tainan and we went down to Taidong up in the mountains as tourism stuff, enjoying the view. And then seeing the change, to come to the city where, as it was laid down in the 70s, all these street names are the names of Mainland cities, and you're on 徐州路 you said? And 龍泉 is a small town in Zhejiang. And you got the sense that all down I didn't realize until I saw Shanghai, with that old downtown area, was trying to look like Shanghai as which is built up in the 50s. But then it came back in the 90s, I was here for some meetings; there was an international congress of historians of Asia, here sometime about 15 years ago. And Charlotte Furth was here for that and something else for one of her friends, taking us all to one of these tea houses at the mountains.

Shih: Who?

Charlotte Furth and a friend of Charlotte, I'm also. 熊秉真Shih: 熊秉真.

Angela 梁, she knows several important people. And here was the setting up in the hills, where being Taiwanese and having all this Taiwanese natural beauty around you, and all these Taiwanese dishes, these Taiwanese antiques, what was it all about, as if people even from elsewhere had embraced Taiwan as their place. And I thought it's quite interesting. And I don't think it's much study. For me ask a little, I asked Ms. Lin coming up, she didn’t know what to make of what I was at. Yesterday I was out at the Palace Museum, and doing this work in the library, and then we did go over and spent an afternoon in the Museum. And the Museum was really crowded; it was really full of people. And it was largely groups.

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Shih: From China.

From China? Is that it?

Shih: I think so.

真 的 ? I mean I couldn't tell because they have…Some of them were obviously local school kids. These larger groups are middle-aged people. So they're running what kind of tours?

Shih: A short tour, running through, as the tourist guide may say, "That isn't worthy of viewing, go around, go around." They all want to see the pork jade and the cabbage jade. And they buy things.

They've got this stunning exhibit now. I haven't thought about the China angle. Of course it does it, because they have the signs that say “please keep your voices low", lots of luck, hum?

Shih: A kind of the tourist guide.

Ya. Ok, I absolutely did not think of…They're being tourists from the Mainland. So what's a three-day tour kind of thing?

Shih: No, usually they’ve got ten or twelve days.

Really, so they go down the island and all kind?

Shih: It depends. Some just stay in the North and some go island wide. It depends on the program.

This is..You got to get a student on this. This is a major culture phenomenon.

Shih: Oh, yes.

Does anybody talk to these people to find out what they make out this place?

Shih: I think there are exchanges. Here and there, especially with peddlers.

I've read somewhere that one thing that happens when people get here from Mainland is they close the door of their hotel rooms and turn on the talk show and watch politicians.

Shih: Ya, they do that.

I don't want to make any, hold out any great, great hopes for the impact that on people's thinking in China, but they certainly can't deny this place is Chinese, especially as they

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don’t just look at 香港.

Shih: There's some positive impact on Taiwan in the sense that people would behave like a gentle, decent person when they face Chinese tourists, because they want to portray themselves as a higher society, certainly behaving more decently in front of the Chinese tourists. (Wills: How nice.) Before you go, I want to ask one more question. How would you take your research on the big China in your whole career? Do you think that's a climax, or that's just say sub-project? Does that characterize your research?

I'm very happy...If somebody wanted to know what you’ve done, I would say well, took this young family off to Holland and we were quite isolated, then I was almost every day in the archives. But I came back with a box of notes like this I'm still working on. And the founding in a badge of this documentary reading like that is absolutely fundamental. And here the monograph to prove it. But then, just in things that came out just in the last year, just then end of 2010 in the beginning of 2011. Anyway, the book I just mention to you about history in China and the Chinese foreign relations, as a kind of a, all of this has to do with the world today, and with policy. But then also for the big picture of what's these archive investigation of my work part of we took four chapters from the Cambridge history of China and got them out as this book, which got my name on that as editor, called "China and Maritime Europe, 1500-1800". And I wrote two of them basically, and one of them as a co-author, but that was a long time ago. The Qing chapter, the Qing in the Maritime European, that I wrote is so far only available in that form. That volume of the Cambridge history was not out. I wind up trying to do a brief, big picture of the Canton trade of 1800, and relying on the Louie Dermigny’s old books but also on Paul Van Dyke's work. Paul put me straight on a couple of things about what happened with the dissolution of Cohong 公行 in 1770s and so on. But also in doing that, I'm not an economic historian, but I say "Ok, I know enough to show you what's the changing composition of that stream of export is." That's being paid for of the stream of imports rather. They’re paying for exports which are by those through the late 18th century are mostly tea. And it turns into of a very neat looking biography, which Paul and other people eventually correct in various ways. But it's very striking because the silver import levels off as a certain level. And they continue growth in the amount of funds available for the purchase and export of tee, comes from India long staple cotton, opium to be sure, rather surprising amount of English woolens. So there is a continued growth of this commodity import sector, which you have to and figure is right there in Morse and in the East Indian Company’s trade to China. And I think maybe a few from there. Ok, so do I have this right? No idea. I did the best I knew how, but let's see how all these pieces fit together. I will stop with one Macartney story in this connection. And it's the connection with that stupid invasion of the Vietnam in 1788. Ok? The invasion of Vietnam was supposed to restore the Le Dynasty to the throne, and to drive back the rebel Thai Son brothers which is 西山 (West Mountain). It was very quickly seen to be a very bad idea. And I just found the joint memorial by 孫士毅 and 福康安 我們 joint memorial, which says "oh, we don't need to find a military solution because 阮 惠 has returned to completely royal obedient." The next step is to make sure that 阮惠 presents the Thai Son leaders, presenting himself as an appropriately penitent of the Great Qing for acceptance

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as 安南王 , which he does and says "Oh! But if your King will come in person and be present at the 80th birthday celebrations of the great emperor, that would make everything just wonderful." Now the chances that 阮惠 himself went, when he was still just barely on his throne, are very slight. There are many hints that there was a cousin who was a near double. The amount of documentation generated by that embassy in Beijing and here is staggering. There must be, I saw... I counted it up over 150 documents just in the indexes here. And I think there is another couple hundred in Beijing. They're incredibly anxious about these going exactly right, and being exactly recorded right. And the sense that we almost make it complete access as ourselves in her pull off something that has the right appearances, is the immediate background of the reception of Macartney, four years later. I just think you better see both in those in time together. And in this world, one of the first memorials in favor of the invasion comes from 和 珅 himself.

Shih: That’s why it is called "global history" instead of Chinese history.

And to do this, you don't have to do this for every kind of Chinese history, but to have it in the back of your mind and say "Oops, there is a connection across a frontier, one form or another."

Shih: Well, we hope that we'll have time to meet again sometime.

I hope so.

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