Reflections on Fabio Lanza’s The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Martha Winnacker joined a nascent CCAS at the end of her first year of graduate school at Berkeley in late spring 1968. She was active in the Berkeley chapter through summer 1970, when she dropped out with the intention of returning at some unspecified future date. She was also active in the Tokyo chapter from 1972 until 1975, still planning to resume graduate study when she returned to the United States. In 1975, she joined the staff of the Indochina Resource Center (later Southeast Asia Resource Center), a peace movement organization with offices in Washington and Berkeley, instead. She joined the BCAS editorial board shortly afterward. Funding for the Indochina Resource Center disappeared by the mid-1980s, and her later career took her out of the field of Asian Studies. She served in administrative positions at the University of California Office of the President, taking time out to become an attorney and attempt to establish a late-life career in legal aid and public defense. Now retired, she does pro bono legal work with community organizations serving low income clients and serves on the Board of Directors of Critical Asian Studies.

Notes

1 Lanza 2017.

2 As Lanza describes in his book (Lanza 2017, 216, footnote 55), in 1971 the Bulletin published a special issue on how government priorities had shaped funding in the China field both through direct federal grants and through putatively independent entities such as the Ford Foundation and the SSRC. Thereafter, for much of the period from 1972 to 1974, CCAS attempted to launch a boycott of those funding sources, an effort that ultimately proved impractical in the absence of alternatives but which became extremely divisive in 1973 when support of the boycott became a requirement for participation in a CCAS-sponsored study trip to China.

3 While reading his book, I could not help but wonder if he had used citation database software that encouraged him to string together quotations containing the same keywords without attention to context.

4 Volumes 7–15 (1975–1983) of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars included 204 research articles, of which only forty were focused on China. Of the 150 articles that appeared in the first seven volumes of BCAS (1968–1974), only twenty-eight focused on China.

5 See http://criticalasianstudies.org/about-us/.

6 BCAS 10 (4): 1978.

7 Two groups of CCAS members traveled to China before American scholars were normally able to do so; a third trip planned for 1973 was cancelled by the Chinese after multiple postponements. For a brief period, it was possible to imagine that affiliation with CCAS might become a significant asset for scholars seeking permission to conduct research in China.