Mr. Chairman; My Friends:

I much appreciate your invitation to speak today. And I appreciate it even more as the result of coming to know so many of your members in these last years. Our disposition is to attach a good deal of importance to practical economic, political, social, and diplomatic experience in areas of overseas study. I, by contrast, have emerged from these last years, which have been fairly rich in practical experience, with a much enhanced respect for the role of scholarship.

Editor's Note

The following five papers, presented as a panel on March 22,1964, at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington, D. C., are reproduced here at slightly greater length than in their original versions. The panel was organized by G. W. Skinner with the prior understanding that these somewhat longer versions would be prepared for publication in the Journal. The papers were, however, written independently of one another and have not been modified as a result of the discussion. It is clear that several of them use the term Sinology somewhat differently, but that in balance there is more agreement among the authors than might ideally have been planned in order to stimulate the kind of discussion and exchange which a panel implies. There was, however, vigorous discussion from the floor, of which the comments by Benjamin Schwartz, printed immediately following the papers in this issue, are a sample. We will publish in the November issue comments from two others, who will be able to base their remarks on the present printed papers. Others who may wish to send in comments for publication are invited to address them to the Editor.

To use a word from the K'ai-feng dialect, a title like mine must seem a classic expression of chutzpah. “Will Sinology do?” indeed! What could possibly excuse the pursed lips, the nanny-ish condescension to his betters, on the part of someone who has not even gone through the Sinological mill? I should say at the start, then, that “Sinology,” in my reading, is something of a straw man. He is not Maspero. He is not Fritz Mote. But I am not sure (mumbling) that he is not Paul Pelliot, in some of his work. The Sinology that means control of texts is a wonderful means but a weak end. It was a healthy corrective to free-floating literary chinoiserie. Yet, if we may now take the professional standing of the Chinese field as granted, the time is past for texts to be used for spiritual athletics, ascetic proofs of honesty, and thoroughness in the abstract. We need to be honest and thorough not in marching and counter-marching through the literature “because it is there,” but because it relates to intellectual problems, to more than methodology.

I Want to address myself to two points: why I think the study of China requires the study of its history, and why I think the proper practice of the historical profession in general requires some awareness of the history of China. I would argue that the study of change in time is the heart of the historical approach, and that for this reason, history's contribution to the study of China is intellectually legitimate and quite different from that of the more specialized disciplines; and conversely, that the general problems which historians find exciting are nowhere offered in such profuse and interesting combinations, with such abundant documentation, as in the history of China.

In recent years the cry has gone up: Sinology is dead; long live Chinese studies! And in this apothegm, by contrast with its prototype, a fundamental change is implied. Whereas old-time Sinology was given shape by its tools, so that Sinological skills defined the field and became an end in themselves, Chinese studies is shaped by its subject matter and Sinological skills are but means to analytic ends. Whereas traditional Sinology fostered uncritical immersion in a single civilization, modern Chinese studies brings at least that degree of impartial detachment which the comparative method implies. Whereas Sinology focused on China's “great tradition” and strove to capture the very ethos of the literati whose works it studied, Chinese studies today attempts to encompass the entire society and cultural product of China, to study its regional “little traditions” along with the “great,” and to empathize for heuristic purposes with nonélite social groups as well as with the literati. Sinology, a discipline unto itself, is being replaced by Chinese studies, a multidisciplinary endeavor with specific research objectives. As Professor Wright has suggested, what is text for the Sinologist becomes, for the disciplinary student of China, evidence.

I Am the joker in the pack—not simply for the obvious reason that I am not an American, but also, and much more significantly, because I have no right to sit on a platform with people learned in Sinology. That I have been invited to join them says a great deal about American broadmindedness and something too about the underdeveloped state of Chinese studies in my own country. But in a way my disabilities qualify me: I am doubly an outsider (maybe that was why I was asked) and can therefore be relied on to be biased. Prejudice is a condition for argument.

Sinology, and the case for the integrity of it: the one key word in that phrase has been as hard to define as the other has been to achieve in practice. If we can scarcely define it, and if there is no hope of achieving it for the masses, why then talk about it at all in the year 1964?

I believe we can try to define Sinology, and we can point to some who have achieved it in practice. It might have seemed wisest to ask someone who has at least come close to achieving the Sinological ideal to be its spokesman on this panel. And, in fact, I urged that course upon Mr. Skinner when he first asked me to participate. He ruled that out, not so much perhaps for fear that we'd have to import one, or that such a one could be expected to speak in an unintelligible accent and would read footnotes in seven languages from original sources only—but perhaps, anomalous as it is, from the justifiable fear that the real Sinologist might speak in a way that would confuse his own green and well-worked fields with the entire province, or his own home province with the whole realm. And integrity is what we are here to talk about. For it is that integrality of the whole realm, or world, of Chinese studies that I think should define Sinology. Therefore, let someone who thinks he sees a meaningful and universal ideal, but who does not expect the ideal to be judged by himself, discuss it with the freedom that can come from having nothing personal to defend. Otherwise, it would be indeed presumptuous for me to appear here as the spokesman for Sinology; this dilemma of the spokesman vis-à-vis his subject today clearly is one that does not afflict my colleagues on this panel (for reasons at least partially nattering to them all).

The leitmotiv of the panel as a whole may be found in Mrs. Wright's phrase: “All history is implicitly comparative.” This particular apothegm should be pasted into the hats of all students of China. Mrs. Wright's hat clearly needs no such adornment, but it may well be the best way of distinguishing between a Sinology that is indeed not enough (in Mr. Levenson's sense) and a body of learning which should rightly stand at the very head of scholarship. Mr. Skinner tells us that “there is nothing particularly exceptional about Chinese villages when compared to those in other peasant societies. …” But surely the exceptional quality of the Chinese village is the fact of its incorporation within a greater whole, in cultural terms, which is, at least in degree, without parallel anywhere. Is this not part of the point, and a most convincing and important one, of Mr. Skinner's argument? I can only echo and applaud Mr. Freedman's final sentences, and commend their eloquence: “Cooperation which amounts to ingestion is cannibalism. The usefulness of social science to Chinese studies depends on its being allowed to be itself.” Amen. The point of no return in the care and feeding of scholars who concern themselves with China can be determined only by a very nice measure, to which I can provide no key—but I would emphasize that it is indeed a critical measure, and that it is just as critical for other disciplines as for anthropology.

The following represents an amplification of some rather poorly expressed remarks made at the panel on Chinese Studies and the Disciplines at the recent meeting of the Association for Asian Studies.

The essential point (banal but nevertheless true) is that whatever a man's discipline, the broader and deeper his general culture—his “general education,” the more willing he is to bring whatever wisdom he has to bear on the subject he is treating. Whether this wisdom derives from the “methodology” of his discipline or not, it increases the likelihood of his saying something significant. Conversely, the mechanical application of an isolated “discipline” narrowly conceived in terms of a selfcontained “model” or “system” to a culture (whether contemporary or “traditional”) which has not been studied in any of its other aspects by a person of limited culture may lead to sterile and even preposterous results.

The Zaibatsu are said to be reviving in Japan. In his widely-read Nippon Keizai Nyumon (Introduction to the Japanese Economy) Professor Nagasu wrote in 1959:

The Zaibatsu have steadily built their power and have revived. No, more than that. Before the war, the Zaibatsu had to share their hegemony with large landowners and were under the Emperor and the militarists, but now there are no militarists or large landowners. The Emperor, too, has become an accessory. The power of Japan now rests squarely in the hands of the Zaibatsu, the sponsors of the Conservative Party.

Studies of Asian agriculture have argued that land-tenure systems have often retarded agricultural development, in that unequal land distribution and widespread tenancy have given peasants little power to resist landlord efforts to squeeze and rack-rent them. Because landlords have been disinclined to devote their wealth and energies to improving the land, agriculture has stagnated and peasants have became poorer. A conspicuous weakness in this argument is that it begs the question whether a land-tenure system of more or less equal holdings best promotes agricultural development. The land-tenure system influences income distribution in agriculture, but it is impossible to say how a given income distribution influences landlord consumption, saving, and investment decisions unless more is known about the social and political institutions of a given rural society.

The general purpose of the Community Development Programme in India is to induce village communities (through extension methods and offer of financial and technical assistance) to participate actively, and to take initiative ultimately, in matters which directly concern their welfare. The approach to community development administration has been to create within each district separate administrative units for rural planning and development called blocks; to give each block a unified organization consisting of government personnel specially trained to work with village people; to provide each block with assured funds according to the provisions of schematic budgets formulated by the Government of India; to establish it as the common agency for all development departments working in rural India; and to ensure its efficient working through a series of co-ordinating committees and controlling authorities at the district, state, and national levels. National objectives have been stated in the five-year plans in terms sufficiently flexible to allow adjustment within each state to suit local circumstances.

China is known for a long and outstanding tradition of historical writing, but it has been only in this century that an examination of history has developed in periodicals. The earliest of these periodicals was Hsin-min Ts'ung-pao, which was published in 1902 in Yokohama, under the chief editorship of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. Since that time, there have been numerous other periodicals, the most recent being Wen Shih, first published in October 1962, in Peking. Little effort seems to have been made to study the development of these historical journals. There have been many discussions of Chinese historiography, by Ku Chieh-kang, Chin Yü-fu, Wei Ying-ch'i, Teng Ssu-yü, and J. Gray, to name a few, but these scholars have largely overlooked periodical writings.

The study of Chinese differs in some important respects from the study of the other languages that figure importantly in American college curricula. This is because the structure and nature of the language itself are so different, and because Chinese culture is so distinct. Santayana said that to learn another language is to acquire another soul; we might add that in the case of Chinese there is less certainty about which is the possessor and which the possessed.