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I have been trying to think of how to respond to Magnus Fiskesjö’s remarks, which astonished me because they seemed so totally off the mark and indicated that he was not really acquainted with Li Xueqin’s publications. Thus, his response to Ian’s Johnson’s clarification is useful in at least giving me some idea of where he is coming from. I do not know the context of the statement Li made to this group of Western scholars about believing the ancient texts, but it does show that he was never a sycophant whatever his audience.

Li was not a deeply conservative scholar. He was, in fact, steeped in the Gushibian. He once told me that he had read every word of it as a teenager and it was surely one of his inspirations for entering the field. He was also acquainted with Western scholarship and made a point of introducing it to his students and encouraging them to read broadly. However, he did not see Doubt Antiquity as standing for healthy skepticism, as Western scholars tend to, but as a specific set of arguments about the ancient texts. With the discovery of excavated texts, beginning with Mawangdui, he increasingly began to doubt the validity of those arguments. Nevertheless, Li did not, simply revert to accepting the tradition uncritically. Leaving Behind the Era of Doubting the Ancients (Zouchu yigu shidai 走出疑古时代) is not, as Fiskesjö stated, a book that Li wrote, but a collection of his essays on various topics. In the eponymous article (originally a talk), Li did not call for giving up skepticism and believing the ancient texts (xin gu 信古). He advocated using two-pronged evidence of archaeology and transmitted texts, which he called, shi gu 释古, “explaining the ancients,” after Wang Guowei. He did think that the Xia Dynasty was historical. I am well-known for having written about the Xia as a myth, but there are legitimate scholarly reasons for identifying Erlitou culture with a Xia Dynasty, even if I don’t think they are correct. Continue reading →

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>

Two small clarifications about Magnus Fiskesjö’s post (“Li Xueqin dies at 85 [1]”):

1. My piece in the New York Times did not fail to mention how Li “actively helped build up and promote the currently dominant reactionary view of culture and heritage.” In fact, I wrote in the 1st paragraph of my New York Times obituary that  Li helped change the focus of Chinese historiography “toward emphasizing the wonders of the country’s past, a traditionalist approach in line with the Communist government’s efforts to identify itself with ancient China.” 

I also devoted a large chunk of the obituary to his work in pushing 信古, including his work on the Xia-Shang-Zhou project and how it was criticized by many scholars.

1. Professor Fiskesjö’ perceptively asked about the Guardian’s statement that Mr. Li was 86 years old. I wondered about this myself. This was the age given by the official obituary in China, which adopts a way of dating people that I’ve found common in China. It isn’t quite the traditional way, as the person doesn’t gain a year right after 過年, but instead the age is simply calculated based on the birth and death years (in this case, 1933 and 2019). And so the obituary might have simply adopted that. However, Mr. Li was born on 28 March 1933, and as a western publication the Times used the western way of only adding a year to someone’s age after they’ve passed their birthday. Hence, to us, he was 85 years old when he died. 

best regards,

Ian Johnson <iandjohnson@gmail.com>

Both the NYT and the Guardian obituary, below, give credit to Li Xueqin for his wide-ranging scholarship, but they fail to mention how Li also actively helped build up and promote the currently dominant reactionary view of culture and heritage. Li helped theorize this view, which holds sway in the wake of how the Chinese Communist party abandoned “class struggle” as its theoretical framework. It’s strange not to go into these aspects when remembering a grand scholar.

Arguing that we should ‘leave behind’ the healthy skepticism of the ‘Doubt the Ancients’ movement (against other outstanding scholars of ancient China, such as Lin Yun, who’s argued we have no reason to give up that skepticism), Li even wrote a book under the title Leaving Behind the Era of Doubting the Ancients (走出疑古时代).

It must have been this refusal to think critically about culture and history (which I once witnessed, live at a conference near Chicago), and instead embrace the classical heritage uncritically, that paved the way for his theorizing of the harmful current biologistic-nationalistic view of cultural relics as the blood vessels of the nation, somehow itself a living organism. Continue reading →

Source: China File (2/16, 19)
Roderick MacFarquhar: A Remembrance
February 16, 2019
By Bao Pu

Ellen Wallop for Asia Society. Roderick MacFarquhar with his former student, political scientist Minxin Pei, at Asia Society in New York, February 28, 2017.

Bao Pu is the Publisher and Founder of New Century Press in Hong Kong, best known for its Chinese-language memoirs and historical and political titles including Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s Great Famine. Bao is originally from Beijing, but has lived in the United States and Hong Kong since 1989. He studied economics and public administration at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, is a veteran of human rights advocacy, and previously worked in various consulting and managerial positions before becoming a publisher. Bao was awarded the Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award in 2010.

When Roderick MacFarquhar passed away on February 10, 2019, I was left with a deep regret: that our friendship had been too short.

“He can be very intimidating. Don’t be put off by it; it’s just a mannerism,” Nancy Hearst, the librarian at Harvard’s Fairbank Center, warned me before taking me to meet him for the first time.

I had under my arm the manuscript of the memoir of Zhao Ziyang, the deceased former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, ousted in 1989 for refusing to carry out the military crackdown of the protesters in Tiananmen Square. I had planned to publish it to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests, and I wanted MacFarquhar to write an introduction for the English version, which would be published as Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang. Continue reading →