I want to thank Ian Johnson for the clarification. Glad to be corrected on that score (#1). I should not have lumped both obituaries together like I did there. I guess I got hung up on the end where he comes across as a critically thinking scholar, “But now we can see that the past is always changing.” It might be that those things could go together, and perhaps could go together in him.
I feel a bit awkward to bring up criticism so soon after his passing, and so I tried to acknowledge he was indeed a great scholar — but also, deeply conservative, in a truly harmful way. — I’m grateful for the impetus from your obituary — in contrast to the other one, which is also valuable, but does not mention these issues — to look again at the whole idea of “Believing the Ancients,” that Li pushed: One worthwhile piece is Lin Yun’s article 真该走出疑古时代吗?——对当前中国古典学取向的看法 [Should the Era of Historical Skepticism be Transcended?] in Shixue jikan No. 3, 2007, in which Lin argues forcefully and explicitly against Li Xueqin, that no good reason has emerged in the various new discoveries of recent decades (bamboo strip versions of books, etc.) for scholars to abandon their skepticism of the ‘old books’, and the general critical spirit inherited from Gu Jiegang and others. On the contrary, such a stance should to be a permanent stance going into the future.
Yet at the conference on ancient China where I once met and heard Li Xueqin, outside Chicago in about 1992, Li’s chief mantra was ‘wo xiangxin gushu,’ “I believe the old books,” spoken to a roomful of Western scholars as if to correct us foreigners in what he suspected was our wrongheaded stance of looking critically at everything, no matter how revered.
–Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>