Within mainland China today the ratio of Westerners to Chinese is probably no greater than it was in Marco Polo’s time seven hundred years ago. Sino-foreign contact is so minimal that it almost meets the old Taoist stay-at-home ideal, “to live hearing the dogs bark in the next village but never go there.” Peking and Washington indeed monitor each other’s barking, but they meet
A few weeks after Jonathan Spence, the celebrated historian of China, died at Christmas, ChinaFile began collecting reminiscences from his classmates, doctoral students, and colleagues spanning the five decades of his extraordinary career as a scholar, teacher, and author.
An empathetic approach to history | Milestones | Yale Alumni Magazine yalealumnimagazine.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yalealumnimagazine.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
When I began teaching Chinese history at Harvard in 1936 my first students turned out to be the brightest I would ever have Theodore White as an undergraduate and Mary Clabaugh as a Ph.D. candidate. Mary Clabaugh was a Vassar graduate from Tuscaloosa who came to study international history but turned to China when she heard about it. She married another Harvard graduate
Jonathan Spence ’65 Ph.D., Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, whose scholarship shaped the field of China studies for half a century, died Dec. 25 at home.