Philip A. Kuhn

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Philip Alden Kuhn
BornSeptember 9, 1933
London, England
DiedFebruary 11, 2016(2016-02-11) (aged 82)
Other namessimplified Chinese: 孔飞力 or 孔复礼; traditional Chinese: 孔飛力 or 孔復禮; pinyin: Kǒng Fēilì
CitizenshipAmerican
ChildrenAnthony Kuhn
Academic background
Alma materHarvard University
Georgetown University
Doctoral advisorJohn King Fairbank, Benjamin I. Schwartz
Academic work
DisciplineHistory; Sinology
Sub-disciplineQing dynasty history
Overseas Chinese history
InstitutionsUniversity of Chicago
Harvard University
Doctoral studentsTimothy Brook, Timothy Cheek, Prasenjit Duara, William C. Kirby, Daniel Overmyer, Hans van de Ven, Arthur Waldron

Philip A. Kuhn (September 9, 1933 – February 11, 2016) was an American historian of China

East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.[2]

Kuhn was praised by his colleagues.

Peter Perdue wrote that Kuhn "shaped the field of Qing history more profoundly than any other scholar of his generation."[5]

Personal life

Kuhn was born on September 9, 1933, in London.

Washington Post. His mother was a writer who served as information director of the Office of Community War Services during World War II.[6]

Kuhn attended

Woodrow Wilson High School and then received his A.B. from Harvard College.[7]

In 1954, Kuhn studied Japanese and Japanese history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He enlisted in the United States Army, serving from 1955 to 1958. During this period, he studied Chinese and Chinese characters at the Defense Language Institute in California.

1958, Kuhn received his M.A. from

John K. Fairbank. He married Sally Cheng (程吾) in the 1960s and had one son, Anthony Kuhn, a journalist.[8]

That marriage dissolved in 1980. He also had a daughter, Deborah W. Kuhn, with his second wife Mary L. Smith.[citation needed]

Academic career

Kuhn taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1978[2] where he attained the rank of Associate Professor in the Department of History. While at Chicago, Kuhn published in 1970 Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 as part of the Harvard East Asian monograph series, which led to his being granted tenure and a full professorship.

In 1978 Kuhn returned to Harvard, where he succeeded his mentor John King Fairbank.[9] From 1980 to 1986, Kuhn served as director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.[10]

Impact and evaluations

A pioneer of

modernization. That is, he did not favor either the traditional Chinese framework of the dynastic cycle or the Cold War American framework of Western impact and China's response. Kuhn's dissertation research started with local militarization that put power in the hands of local gentry at the expense of the central government.[11]

This doctoral research resulted in book-length chapters on the

Western imperialism but "what was happening in eighteenth century China?"[12]

When the Beijing archives of the

sorcerers were stealing the souls of children, laborers, fishmongers, landlords, and the wives of grain transporters by cutting their queues or lapels, igniting panic in the countryside. Outsiders who were suspected of this witchcraft were arrested and tortured, and some were lynched. When skeptical mid-level or provincial bureaucrats initially resisted this local response because they regarded local beliefs as superstitious, the emperor threatened them with punishment or even death if they didn’t find the alleged sorcerers and eradicate this menace to his imperial order. Kuhn uses detailed reports filed by officials at all levels to describe local society and bureaucratic tensions between local, mid-level and central bureaucrats in response to the emperor's paranoid demands. Kuhn shows how the Qing bureaucracy worked in order to shed light on the theoretical question first posed by Max Weber on the nature of political power in China.[4]

Manchu ethnic sensibility and imperial loathing of the south and its soft blandishments.” Kuhn “constructs a social history of contagion at one level, an operational history of power at another, and then watches with benign irony as the subjects of both intersect at ever-ascending levels of victimization.”[4]

The book's central theme is the relation between the power of the monarch and the restraining power of the bureaucracy.

zero-sum battle for power. [14]

Jonathan Spence's review in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies also praises Kuhn for drawing attention to the often neglected role of shamanism and sorcery in late imperial China. He lauded Kuhn's treatment of hair and magic, especially in the thinking of the Manchu emperors, making the stealing of the queue an especially sensitive issue.[15]

The Chinese translation of Soulstealers sold more than 100,000 copies. Some readers saw contemporary relevance. One of the book's translators, a history professor at East China Normal University, wrote in a postscript to the 2011 edition that the

mass hysteria described in the book has often recurred in China, and that this hysteria "reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s in the unprecedented Great Revolution." One online discussion drew 10,000 comments. One wrote "On the rare occasions when a rebellion was successful, that success merely produced another imperial court," and quoted Kuhn's book as an explanation: "Because the empowerment of ordinary people remains, even now, an unmet promise."[16]

Kuhn's last book, Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (2008) is a comprehensive study of the

Chinese diaspora, that is, the historic movement of Chinese out of China. Gong Yongmei notes that a "distinctive feature of Philip Kuhn’s scholarship is the importance of interpreting history from a theoretical paradigm..., a characteristic typical of American Chinese studies. In general, advanced theory and interpretative models are two remarkable advantages of American Chinese studies, and these are reflected in the analytical tools Kuhn draws on and the disciplines he borrows from in his research on Chinese immigrants: historical ecology, anthropology, sociology and religious studies.[11]

Kuhn's students hold professorships at universities in Asia, North America, and Europe, among them: Cynthia Brokaw, Professor of History,

Man-houng Lin, first female president of Academia Historica and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica; Hans van de Ven, head of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Philip Kuhn, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 30+ works in 90+ publications in 7 languages and 2,900+ library holdings.[18] Kuhn published numerous articles and five books, as well as chapters in Cambridge History of China.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

Notes

  1. ^ a b "纪念孔飞力："他者"所提供的"反向东方主义"情节" [In memory of Kong Feili]. Sohu (in Chinese). February 16, 2016.
  2. ^ a b Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, In Memoriam: Former Fairbank Center Director, Professor Philip A. Kuhn (1933 - 2016) Archived 2016-08-09 at the Wayback Machine;retrieved 2016-02-08,
  3. ^ Wakeman, Frederic. "That Old Chinese Black Magic," New York Review of Books (US). May 16, 1991; retrieved 2011-05-09.
  4. ^
    S2CID 147524424
    .
  5. ^ Perdue (2016), p. 154.
  6. ^ "Delia W. Kuhn, Writer, 86," New York Times (US). December 19, 1989; retrieved 2011-05-09.
  7. ^ "《孔飞力》". 中国网 (in Simplified Chinese). 网易. Archived from the original on 2018-02-09. Retrieved 2010-11-04.
  8. ^ "Asian History Carnival #14 (Straight Outta Beijing...)," Archived 2008-11-22 at the Wayback Machine Jottings from the Granite Studio (blog), May 15, 2007; retrieved 2011-05-09.
  9. ^ Hays, Laurie. "Kuhn to Teach China Courses Next Year," Harvard Crimson (US). April 5, 1978; retrieved 2011-05-09.
  10. ^ Suleski, Ronald Stanley. (2005). The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, p. 75.
  11. ^ a b c Gong, Yongmei (2014). "Beyond the cookie-cutter application of Western concepts to China". Chinese Social Sciences Today (Social Sciences in China Press. translated by Zhang Mengying. from 研究视角独特 反对套用西方学术术语 Yanjiu shijiaodute fandui taoyong Xifang xueshu shuyu.
  12. ^ Cohen, Paul A. (2010). Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press.
    ISBN 9780231151924., pp. 68-69
  13. JSTOR 2165948
    ., p. 1472.
  14. ^ Kahn (1991), p. 665.
  15. JSTOR 2719182
    .
  16. ^ "In a Harvard Scholar’s 18th-Century History, Glimpses of Modern China", Kiki Zhao New York Times March 1, 2016
  17. ^ "Interview Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine," City Class Issue 1 (viewed February 17. 2016).
  18. ^ WorldCat Identities: Kuhn, Philip A.

References

External links

Eileen Chow, "In Memoriam. Professor Philip A. Kuhn (1933–2016)," (February 16, 2016) Medium

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