Ray Huang

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Ray Huang (

macro-history
.

Early life

Ray Huang was born in

Hunan Province, in 1918.[1] He was the oldest of three children. His father, Huang Zhenbai (黄震白), was an early member of the revolutionary group Tongmenghui but became less active in the group over the years. Ray Huang grew up in Hunan and went on to study electrical engineering at Nankai University, Tianjin, in 1936. At the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938, he returned to Changsha
and wrote for the Anti-Japanese War Report (《抗日战报》).

Soon afterwards, Huang entered the

Allied occupation of Japan from 1949 to 1950. However, with the loss of Mainland China in 1949, the Nationalist Army in Taiwan was purged of political opponents in 1950. Huang's superior in Japan
was accused of Communist links and so Huang was discharged from the Nationalist Army in 1950, which ended his military career.

Academic career

Huang went to the United States to study

Chinese history. At the University of Michigan, he received his bachelor's degree in 1954, his master's degree in 1957, and his doctorate in 1964. He was appointed visiting associate professor at Columbia University in 1967, and a professor at the State University of New York, New Paltz Branch, from 1968 to 1980. He was a research fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research
at Harvard in 1970.

He worked with the leading American

John K. Fairbank. Nevertheless, Huang and Fairbank disagreed in research methodology. Fairbank liked concentrated analysis in short time frames and limited areas, but Huang liked synthesis covering broad time periods (though Huang's classic work 1587, a Year of No Significance
had a very tight focus).

In 1972, Huang went to

Ming China
, and he published one of his major works, Taxation and Finance in Sixteenth Century Ming China, in 1974 (translated into Chinese only in 2001).

Huang returned to Cambridge in the mid-1970s and contributed two chapters to the Ming Dynasty Volumes of The Cambridge History of China. Around the late 1970s, he retired from teaching and focused on writing instead and even occasionally contributed to a column in Yazhou Zhoukan. Nonetheless, he often travelled to Taiwan even after his retirement to give lectures and participate in various academic exchanges.

His other works include The War in Northern Burma (1946), 1587, a Year of No Significance (1981) (also published in Chinese as The Fifteenth Year of Wan Li/《萬曆十五年》, 1985), Broadening the Chinese Field of Vision (in Chinese, 1988), Chinese Macrohistory (1988) (in Chinese 1993), Conversations about Chinese History on the Banks of the Hudson River (in Chinese 1989), Discussions of Here and There and Old and New (in Chinese 1991), Capitalism and the Twenty First Century (in Chinese 1991), From a Macrohistory Perspective in Reading Jiang Jieshi's Diary (in Chinese 1993), Contemporary Chinese Outlets (in Chinese 1994), The Affair of Wan Chong (in Chinese 1998), Yellow River Blue Mountain: Record of Huang Renzi's Recollections (in Chinese 2001), and Bianjing Unfinished Dreams.

Personal life

Huang married Gayle Bates (1937–2000) in 1966. The two had a son, Jefferson, a longtime administrator at

heart attack
in 2000.

Books

  • 1587, a Year of No Significance. First published in English (Yale University Press, 1981), with Chinese (Wanli Shiwunian) and other language translations.
  • China: A Macro History
  • Fiscal Administration during the Ming Dynasty
  • Conversation on Chinese History by the Hudson River (in Chinese)
  • Broadening the Horizons of Chinese History: Discourses, Syntheses, and Comparisons
  • Capitalism and the 21st Century(in Chinese)
  • The Grand Canal during the Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644 (Doctoral dissertation)
  • White Jasmine of Changsha (Novel)
  • Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China

References

  1. ^ a b 宁乡四中的三个名人 (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 2004-06-01. Retrieved 2003-11-21.
  2. ^ "Meet Our Admission Officers | Claremont McKenna College".
  3. ^ "Gayle Huang Obituary (2000) - Beech Bluff, TN - The Jackson Sun". Legacy.com.
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