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Questions to keep thinking about
Lü Wenhao is an associate researcher at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. (Photo taken in front of Huizhou Capital on December 5, 2021, photo / many)
Lu Wenhao: Historians always look back at the past from the present, and the questions raised by the real society often inspire us to ask questions of history. One of the most hotly debated issues in recent years is how to increase the willingness of young men and women to have children so that the mainland society, which has fallen into severe aging, can maintain its vitality in the coming years. As a researcher of modern Chinese social history, I also think about it from the perspective of my own professional research.
For a long time in the past, birth control and population control have been the focus of many benevolent people in modern China, but I have noticed that the international vision of the sociologist Mr. Wu Zelin in an article published in 1948 to discuss the Chinese issue is surprisingly forward-looking. Although he was still thinking about how To Control Fertility and Control population size in China at that time, he was well aware of the law of population development in developed countries. He noted that in industrialized countries, where people's living enjoyment is increasing, girls' education is becoming more common, and reproductive abstinence is extremely easy to promote, "in this socio-economic system, personal pleasure becomes the goal of work effort." The extended family of children around the knee becomes a burden that both hinders their economic enjoyment and constrains their free movement". Based on the experience of developed countries, he believes that changes in production methods, the improvement of living standards, and the improvement of educational facilities are the direct causes of shrinking families and reducing fertility, and "do not need the government to work hard to promote them." Aren't we now walking on the path that Mr. Wu Zelin foresaw more than 70 years ago?
Mr. Wu Jingchao, a sociologist who has studied a lot in recent years, also has this characteristic, he is very familiar with the modern development history of developed countries, the latest situation, and the latest measures, and always discusses the way out of The China issue in the world pattern. Very few of us do that right now. This inspired me to think that when formulating the national social science development plan, we should pay special attention to the tracking and study of the historical experience and practical problems of the developed countries, because the problems they encountered yesterday may be the problems we encounter today, and the problems they encounter today may be the problems we encounter tomorrow.
Qiu Luming is a professor at the Department of History at Fudan University.
Qiu Luming: In the past two years, my main energy has been on the collation of ancient books, and I have completed the "Notes on the Entrepreneurship of the Tang Dynasty" and the "Compilation of Epitaphs of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms" (in cooperation with Xia Jing), which should be published this year. The problem of thinking is mainly from the literature, which can be classified into two ends, one is how to better sort out ancient books, in my opinion, not only includes interpretation, punctuation, proofreading, and through notes, publishing historical facts, so that researchers can better understand the politics, system and even personnel relations behind the historical materials, is the higher goal of ancient book collation, incidentally can also be proposed, the current academic evaluation system, the ancient book collation and research work is very unfair. Secondly, I will think more about how to use more sophisticated analysis to strip away the source level of historical materials and determine the source and reliability of different records, if implemented in the Tang Dynasty I studied, it is actually to reveal the historical source level and interlacing relationship between the historical records, the correct history and the inscriptions.
Feng Lijun is an associate professor at Shaanxi Normal University.
Feng Lijun: What I continue to think about in 2021 is still the specific problem of the direction that I have been insisting on in the past few years. For example, the relationship between the Tang Dynasty and East Asia, and the problem of East Asia and the inland Eurasian region in the western Pacific Ocean, which were connected by the Tang Dynasty. Secondly, I am also thinking about many problems outside my own research field - although I have not written, such as the history of historiography in East Asia, the chinese literature in the Chinese character cultural circle, these are the places where the later research will continue to exert efforts.
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Books to watch
Lü Wenhao: Huang Minlan's Collected Works of Historiography (edited by Zuo Yuhe, published by Social Sciences Academic Press in August 2021) is a heavy academic work with more than 500,000 words, bringing together the 30 most important historical papers of Mr. Huang Minlan (1953-2016) from 1985 to 2011. When Mr. Huang was 15 to 24 years old, he went to the countryside of northern Shaanxi as a Beijing Zhiqing to join the team, and he had a deep understanding of the hardships of grass-roots society, and in the era of reform and opening up, he took historical theory and historical theory as his profession, and paid more attention to thinking about macro theoretical issues in professional research, which was quite homely and country-like. On the basis of the comparison and analysis of the social structure of China and the West, she summarized the characteristics of ancient Chinese society, that is, the hierarchy with power as the core, and implied a critical meaning. A number of papers have been involved in the hot debates in the academic circles at that time, such as whether ancient Chinese society was a "feudal society", whether the ancient Chinese political system was "absolute monarchy", and re-evaluating the historical role of the peasant war in ancient China.
Huang Minlan's Collected Works of Historiography, by Huang Minlan, Social Sciences Academic Press.
It is particularly worth mentioning that Mr. Huang was known in the industry for his studious and critical spirit in his youth, but unfortunately he was seriously ill in middle age and had to fight against the disease for a long time, but Mr. Huang took reading and thinking as the biggest spiritual sustenance, and his body did not release the volume with a slight improvement, and he could not leave the key, and most of the papers included in this collection of papers were written during her illness. This is a theoretical exploration work that condenses the rich social experience and academic accumulation of a scholar, and under the current situation of increasing academic specialization and often absent theoretical thinking, re-reading this book can stimulate readers to pay attention to those theoretical issues that affect the overall situation while engaging in the study of specific problems, thereby strengthening the reflective awareness of historical research. Mr. Huang and Shi Tiesheng, a writer who is also a young man in northern Shaanxi and seriously ill, are confidants, and they encourage and help each other to compose a song of life full of willpower. Her tenacious willpower and pure academic spirit are still inspiring to us today. Mr. Huang's serious illness greatly limited her space and the heights she could reach, and it was natural that her career was bumpy because of her critical spirit, and it was only natural that her books did not become the object of hot discussion. An ordinary researcher who has no job, no right, and no students, because of the value of her thinking, because of her spiritual appeal, can receive funding from the unit on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of her death, and her collection of papers edited by colleagues will be a great comfort for all scholars who care about the fate of the country.
Qiu Luming: From the perspective of my reading, it is mainly concentrated on professional reading, and the limited idle books I read, I feel that there is value in recommending to the public is Yang Xiao's "Re-walking: Looking for southwest United University on highways, rivers and post roads", and I don't know how much public attention this book is. This book takes the author's re-entry of the route of the "Xiangqian dian tour group" of the Southwest United University as the main trunk, interspersed with a large number of memories of the masters and students, and forms a polyphonic narrative, which has both a sense of history and an observation of China's real society, and is quite exquisite in writing.
"Re-Walking: Finding the Southwest United Congress on Highways, Rivers and Postways", by Yang Xiao, Casting culture | Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, May 2021.
Feng Lijun: I read Wang Gungwu's "Wang Gengwu on World History." Of course, it has not aroused heated discussion, it is not easy to read, although the form of the book is extremely relaxed, it is an interview quotation, but because of this, it shows the thinking and observation of a scholar who has accumulated a deep accumulation for many years. Structural thinking about Eurasian history is superb, historical, original, and therefore classic.
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Lv Wenhao: The domestic original works I look forward to seeing in the future are a large number of solid and meticulous national research reports. The research report I hope to see is simple, full of facts and data, and I do not want to see the so-called "research reports" that do not have many objective materials and express a lot of feelings. Recently, Professor Wang Chunjie of Jiangnan University edited a collection of college students' family history and family affairs, "The Years of fathers: Oral History of the Post-Zero Generation" (Shanxi People's Publishing House, November 2021), which was strongly funded by the School of Marxism of the university, although the scope of the survey needs to be expanded and the depth of the investigation needs to be improved, but the spirit of striving to seek facts and figures has given me a ray of hope. I hope that this kind of work can get more attention, and this kind of project can get more support from relevant departments, and it is no longer Professor Wang's "one person fighting".
"The Years of the Fathers: Oral History of the Post-Zero Zero Generation", edited by Wang Chunjie, Shanxi People's Publishing House, October 2021.
Qiu Luming: If you say what kind of original works you expect, it is actually very simple, the "good" works that you expect, if you look at it from the standpoint of professional researchers, you can be sure that in the past two decades, there have been many specific advances in academic research, whether it is the excavation of historical materials or the revelation of the complexity of historical figures and events, there are greatly surpassed by predecessors, and many wonderful papers have been produced. But strictly speaking, there are not many good works. To take the simplest example, in the past two decades, we have done a lot of wonderful and delicate research on the materials and details of the activities of the people involved in the May Fourth Movement. However, in terms of works, the best May Fourth work is still Zhou Cezhong's "History of the May Fourth Movement". This emphasis on specific case studies, the impact of the academic atmosphere and the evaluation system on papers, in fact, this also causes a disconnect between the academic community and public perception. We need to have more good books before we can talk about which type of good books we hope to have. If from the perspective of social value, it is very meaningful for works such as Lan Xiaohuan's "Staying in The Inside" to connect the public and the academic community.
History of the May Fourth Movement, by Zhou Cezhong, translated by Chen Yongming and Zhang Jing, Sichuan People's Publishing House, July 2019.
Feng Lijun: Historical intellectual original narrative works. Note that it is not the kind that is popularized by the scholars' monographs, but the real original historical writing, which is good-looking, deep, and easy to read.