In Memoriam
Gao Wangling 高王凌 (1950–2018)

[Gao Wangling, photograph from the website: http://www.aisixiang.com/data/112047.html]

Gao Wangling, the initiator and founder of The Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS), died on August 24, 2018 in Beijing. He was 68 years old. A renowned historian of early modern China, he authored altogether fourteen books and nearly one hundred scholarly articles collectively covering three subject areas: the economic history of Qing China, the peasant-landlord relationship in early modern China, and peasants’ counter-actions in modern China.

Born in Beijing on August 27, 1950, Gao Wangling attended high school in Beijing. In 1968, he was mobilized to join the “up-to-the-mountain-and-down-to-the countryside” movement and went to Taigu County, Shanxi Province where he spent several years living and laboring with local villagers as a “reeducated youth.” This experience provided him an opportunity to closely observe the workings of people's commune and its impact on peasants’ reactions, a subject about which he would later devote much of his life to study.

He entered Shanxi University in 1973, majoring in history, and graduated in 1976, the same year when the Cultural Revolution ended. In 1978, with the restoration of graduate education in China, he was admitted into the first graduate class at the Institute of Qing History, Renmin University of China. His MA thesis, based on the study of over 400 local records (fangzhi), examined the impact of rural markets upon local economy in eighteenth-century Sichuan. Upon his graduation in 1981, he joined the faculty of the Institute first as a lecturer and then a full professor. After working at the Institute for nearly thirty years, he retired in 2010 but was almost immediately recruited to join the History Department of Tsinghua University, where he taught Chinese economic history in the capacity of professor with a special appointment.

In 1986 Gao Wangling, then an associate professor at Renmin University, was awarded a fellowship by the Henry Luce Foundation, which enabled him to spend a year at the East Asian Institute of Columbia University in New York for his research on China's rural reform. During his one-year tenure as Luce Fellow, he divided his time among several self-imposed missions. He traveled across the United States, from the east to west coast, conducting research, attending conferences and, most importantly, meeting with China scholars. The list of the scholars he met was long and included such prominent figures as John K. Fairbank, Madelaine Zelin (his host at Columbia), Yeh-Chien Wang, Frederic E. Wakeman (then the President of the American Council of Learned Societies), Jonathan D. Spence, Philip Huang, Philip Kuhn, Ray Huang, G. William Skinner, Te-kang Tong, William Rowe, Cho-yun Hsu, Roderick MacFarquhar, Ying-shih Yu, Albert Feuerwerker, James Lee, Susan Naquin, and Beatrice S. Bartlett. He was hoping to solicitate their support for his wish to set up some sort of transnational network between Chinese and American historians.

His vision for a transpacific network of historians led to the founding of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) in 1987, shortly before he returned to China. Today the CHUS is a vibrant association of more than one hundred professional historians, who are active in both American and Chinese academias, and publishes The Chinese Historical Review, a peer-reviewed journal of history subscribed worldwide. Looking back, it is no exaggeration to say that the CHUS is the most enduring legacy of Gao Wangling's first visit to the United States at the age of 36.

The idea of forming a professional organization among historians, according to Gao Wangling, was born in the conversations among a group of young scholars in Beijing prior to his coming to the United States. The group included Li Ling, Tang Xiaofeng, Yan Buke and Liu Beicheng, each of whom would later become a leading scholar in their respective fields. They felt the need to organize themselves as China was opening up for creating a more liberalized learning environment. Gao Wangling, however, was the one who put the idea into practice on the other side of the Pacific.

Shortly after arriving in New York in September 1986, Gao Wangling learned about the establishment of two Chinese student associations respectively for those who were studying political science/international relations and economics. Inspired and encouraged, he took the initiative to call for an association for historians. The purpose of doing so, he explained in his letter to Zhai Qiang (who was then a graduate student and would later serve as president of the CHUS from 2001 to 2003), was “to consolidate, expand and institutionalize scholarly exchanges” among historians and scholars in other humanity disciplines. But that was not the only goal. A more important goal of organizing was to help meet the intellectual needs of “those young scholars who are still in China” and to make contributions to improving China's historical studies and promoting “the nation's course of modernization.” For these purposes, he urged, “a bridge” needs to be constructed between Chinese scholars and outside academic circles.

[Gao Wangling to Zhai Qiang, November 20, 1986, New York. Provided by Zhai Qiang]

Throughout the winter season of 1986–87, he launched a one-person campaign to raise funds for the envisioned meeting of historians. He wrote and spoke to any Chinese student who would listen to him. He took every opportunity to speak to a large number of Americans ranging from important scholars, heads of professional organizations and executives of private foundations for advice and financial support. People would doubly appreciate his painstaking efforts in this venture had they known that Gao Wangling, for all his eloquent command of written and spoken Chinese, spoke little to no English at this time. But his hard work, together with his passion and idealism, paid off. In the spring of 1987, he secured a grant of $7,000 from the China Perspective, a New York-based non-profit foundation chaired by Liang Heng, whose Son of Revolution (1983) was perhaps the first personal memoir on growing up in the People's Republic of China ever published in English.

Having secured the grant for the meeting, Gao Wangling then formed a preparatory group that included Tang Xiaofeng (State University of New York at Syracuse), Li Yan (University of Connecticut), Gao Zheng (Yale University), Chen Yong (University of California at Irvine), Cheng Hong (University of California at Los Angeles) and myself (I was a first-year graduate student at Columbia). Throughout the spring and summer of 1987, we, as a group, had accomplished a large number of what seemed to be impossible tasks—registering the proposed organization with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a non-profit association of scholars (Li Yan singlehandedly took care of all the paperwork and even paid the legal fees out of her own pocket), securing meeting venues free of charge (with the help of Professor R. Randle Edwards, the director the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School and a member of the East Asian Institute), networking with any Chinese students and scholars of history that we knew across the United States, finding a hotel with an affordable rate so that we could put up out of town participants for three nights in New York City, and, to save money, shopping roasted ducks and other food in Chinatown for the meeting's welcome banquet.

Miraculously, the meeting took place on September 5 and 6, 1987 at Columbia Law School, with over one hundred Chinese students and guest participants from more than thirty universities across the United States attending then opening session and a dozen panels on specialized topics. A business session was held on the final day that formally established the organization of CHUS and elected its first board of directors. The opening session of the meeting was featured with several keynote speeches respectively delivered by Professors Randle Edwards, Ray Huang and Te-kong Tong. But it was Gao Wangling's opening remarks that had captured the attention of Zhongbao, a Chinese newspaper based in New York. The newspapers reported the two-day event with a bold-faced headline announcing that the newly organized historians’ association would uphold the principle of “academic independence” and explore “new perspectives” in historical research. An idea conceived in Beijing finally bore fruits in New York.

[News report from Zhongbao on the founding meeting of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS), September 8, 1987, New York.

Source: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1610374054367542593&wfr=spider&for=pc]

“Academic independence” and “new perspectives” could also be used to characterize the contributions Gao Wangling made to his specialized fields of study. For economic history of Qing China, his Chinese Economic Development and Government Policy in the Eighteenth Century (十八世纪中国的经济发展和政府政策), published in 1995, has been regarded as a courageous and solid reinterpretation of Qing's economic history. By combing through hundreds of thousands of imperial and local records, the book documented how Qing emperors and their bureaucrats made decisions in agriculture as they confronted problems regarding opening of new lands, grain production, immigration, and handcraft industries throughout the eighteenth century. Rejecting the long-held notion that traditional Chinese state was a politically backward entity that was slow in responding to crises, he argued that Qing governments actually played a more active role than scholars generally acknowledged in directing and interfering with China's rural development. It was in this book he advocated the use of a “positive perspective” (正面观察) instated of relentless criticism and denial, in studying China's past.

His Economic Development and the Ordering of Regional Development in Traditional Chinese Economy (经济发展与地区开发——中国传统经济的发展序列), published in 1999, reinforced his argument for finding a useful and valuable past in historical studies. After examining patterns of rural development in Sichuan, Guangdong and Jiangsu, he concluded that the traditional Chinese economy was not an uniformly stagnant and static existence as people had thought, but instead, it was a complex and rich structure with regional variations that actively sought to respond to different challenges with flexibility and strengths. Variation and complementarity under a centralized state rule helped strengthen, instead of weakening, the traditional Chinese economy. He urged scholars to answer the question of how early modern Chinese economy had managed to feed one-third of world's population with a limited share of world's arable lands. Historians, he wrote, had much to learn from history if they were willing to adopt new perspectives.

The subject to which Gao Wangling believed that he had made the most original and influential contribution was the study of peasants’ fanxingwei (反行为) – a term that has no English equivalence but may be translated imperfectly as “counteractions” or “counter-behaviors” – under the system of people's commune. For people who are familiar with James Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985), what fanxingwei represents could well be identified with peasants’ overt and covert resistance to oppressing power as described in Scott's study of rural Malaysia. Gao Wangling rejected the identification and defended the originality of his creation of the term, which he articulated out of spontaneity in the early 1990s in his conversation with Du Runsheng 杜润生, the legendary social investigator of Chinese rural life and a major advocate of rural reform in the 1980s. In his A Study of Chinese Peasants’ Counter-Behaviors, 1950-1980 (中国农民反行为研究 [1950–1980]) published in 2013, he defined fanxingwei as actions taken by peasants, either individually or collectively, in their dealing with state authority, to gain and protect their own material interests without openly or directly questioning the legitimacy of state policies or state's power to enforce them. Peasants practiced fanxingwei, in his view, on daily basis as a behavioral pattern although mostly in a nonviolent, evasive and sometimes even deceptive way. Such behaviors or actions would surely erode the determination of the state or even compel the state to change policies, but they would not make powerholders feel vulnerable or threatened. For much of the two decades since his invention of the concept, Gao Wangling was mostly alone in discussing fanxingwei. Not until recently did scholars begin to embrace the term as a key concept to genuinely understand and uncover the “hidden” history of rural China. Still, others are expecting Gao Wangling to say more on this. It is at this juncture that his untimely death may have left the construction of a full and theoretically rigorous argument incomplete. But he had laid the groundwork for others to continue the explorations of new perspectives.

May Professor Gao Wangling rest in peace.