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Abstract
This article is a tribute to James Z. Gao, a founding member of CHUS and the organization's first president (1987-1988), who passed away in 2021. It traces his life, education, and teaching career in China and the United States in the context of China's social and economic changes during his lifetime. It also describes his success as a history educator in the United States, focusing on the pedagogy and teaching methodologies that Gao applied to making his history courses meaningful and inspiring to his students. Gao devoted his academic career to searching for a paradigm to better explain the role of modernization and revolution in the transformation of China in the twentieth century, and the third part of the article illustrates such a commitment and his scholarly achievement.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Liang Kan and Laura Liu for sharing with me the information about James Z. Gao’s life and education in China. Laura also directed my attention to the memorial tribute from Ding Jian, Gao’s friend and colleague at Peking University, that contains rich details about Gao’s formative years at Beida as a scholar. I also want to thank Wang Xi, who, like Gao, is one of the founding members of CHUS, for spending so much time reading and editing the first draft of my article. His insightful suggestions for revision are deeply appreciated and have been mostly adopted.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 James Z. Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou: The Transformation of City and Cadre, 1949–1954 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 5.
2 Jeffrey Herf, “James Z. Gao Obituary,” The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association: Perspectives on History volume, vol. 60, no. 1 (January 2022): 28. The biographical information offered by Liang Kan and Laura Liu has also helped with the narrative of Gao’s childhood.
3 Ding Jian, “Gao Zheng shengping jieshao (Introduction to Gao Zheng’s life),” kks zixunwang (kks news), last modified December 3, 2021, https://newskks.com/other/612275.html.
4 James Zheng Gao, Meeting Technology’s Advance: Social Change in China and Zimbabwe in the Railway Age (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997), 5.
5 Herf, “James Z. Gao Obituary,” 28. Also see Ding Jian, “Gao Zheng shengping jieshao.”
6 Qian Ning, Chinese Students Encounter American, trans. T. K. Chu (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 95.
7 James Z. Gao, Historical Dictionary of Modern China (1800-1949) (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009), 531.
8 Gao, Meeting Technology’s Advance, 5.
9 Stacey Bieler, “Patriots or Traitors”? A History of American-Educated Chinese Students (New York: Routledge, 2014), 351.
10 Wang Xi and Yao Ping, eds. Zaimeiguo faxianlishi (在美国发现历史：留美历史学人反思录 Discovering history in America) (Beijing, China: Beijing daxue chubanshe (Peking University Press, 2010), 503-505.
11 Herf, “James Z. Gao Obituary,” 28.
12 James Z. Gao, “Lishijiaxue de shengying yujing (历史教学的声影语境 Teaching history with image and sound),” in Zaimeiguo jiaolishi (在美国教历史：留美历史学人反思录续集 Teaching history in the United States), eds. Wang Xi and Yao Ping (Beijing, China: Beijing daxue chubanshe (Peking University Press, 2022), 1.
13 Zheng Gao, “Chinese Soup and American Taste: Teaching Chinese History in American Colleges,” (conference paper presented at Meiguo daxuede jiaoxue (美国大学的教学 Teaching at American universities), Kent State University, 1994), 1, 5.
14 For example, when teaching modern Chinese history to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Maryland, Gao incorporated a significant number of photographs taken by Sha Fei in the Communist-controlled areas in North China in the late 1930s and early 1940s into his presentation. To Gao, images like photographs can not only supplement historical texts, but they can also be read and interpreted independent of the texts – they themselves are wordless texts. See Gao, “Lishijiaxue de shengying yujing,” 9-13.
15 Ibid., 1, 8.
16 Jeremy Brown, “CHUS Zoom Meeting to Commemorate Gao Zheng,” email to Zhiguo Yang, November 5, 2021.
17 James Zheng Gao, “From Margin to Cutting Edge: The Search for a Paradigm in Chinese Historical Studies,” The Chinese Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 137–44.
18 Gao, Meeting Technology’s Advance, 180.
19 Ibid., 178, 181.
20 Ibid., 186.
21 Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 51, 63.
22 Ibid., 72-73.
23 The Chinese translation of The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou was published in Hong Kong in 2019, and Li Guo Fang, the translator, renders the transformation of rural cadres that Gao describes in his book as 蝉变 (chanbian, shedding its skin when a cicada emerges as an adult) in Chinese, a reference implying the abandonment of the old identity and the gaining of a new one. To Gao, what chanbian defines is slightly different from what happened in Hangzhou. While keeping their rural and revolutionary identity to legitimize their hold on power, the Luzhongnan cadres also adapted themselves to the local culture and social customs and became “comrades of Hangzhou.” They ruled Hangzhou with their dual identities. Ibid., 259-61. Also see Gao Zheng, Jieguan Hangzhou: chengshigaizao yu ganbuchanbian (1949-1954) (接管杭州：城市改造与干部蝉变, 1949-1954), trans. Li Guo Fang (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2019), xxvii.
24 James Z. Gao, “The Call of the Oases: The ‘Peaceful Liberation’ of Xinjiang, 1949-1953,” in Dilemma of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China, eds. Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), 195-6.
25 Gao, “The Call of the Oases,” 197-202, and Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 213.
26 Having said that, Gao believes that the modernization narrative can better enable historians to reveal new facts and offer new interpretation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century China and the daily lives of the Chinese people. James Z. Gao, Historical Dictionary of Modern China, xi.
27 Gao, “From Margin to Cutting Edge,” 142–44.
28 For example, to collect empirical evidence for his research on the impact of railways on Zimbabwe and China, he interviewed the locals and conducted social investigation in Zulu or Chinese language along the trunk lines in two continents. Gao, Meeting Technology’s Advance, 5.
29 Herf, “James Z. Gao Obituary,” 28.
30 Gao, “From Margin to Cutting Edge,” 144.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Zhiguo Yang
Zhiguo Yang is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and has been teaching Asian history, modern China, and modern Japan there for the past two decades. He has conducted research on the post-World War II U.S.-China relations and the labor movement in Japanese cotton mills in Qingdao in the 1920s and 1930s and published journal articles and edited book chapters about the history of Qingdao beer brewery industry, post-World War II U.S. military presence in North China cities and anti-American nationalism, and the development of Japanese textile industry in Qingdao during the interwar years and its impact on Japan–China relations. He was the president of CHUS between 2019 and 2022. Correspondence to: Zhiguo Yang. Email: [email protected]