Questions to keep thinking about
Lu Dapeng is a historical non-fiction author and English-German translator. Translations include "Mediterranean Epic Trilogy", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Plantagenet Dynasty", "Peloponnesian War", "Isabella: The Warrior Queen" and so on.
Lu Dapeng: Because I was inspired by the German TV series "Babylon Berlin" and became interested in topics such as police, organized crime and criminal cases in Weimar and Nazi Germany, I spent a lot of time collecting information in 2021, wanting to know more about these topics, and maybe write a related non-fiction work.
Xiao Gongqin is a historian and professor in the Department of History at the School of Humanities at Shanghai Normal University.
Xiao Gongqin: Classic writers use "dead grasp the living" to express an old traditional culture, including ways of thinking and values, before their real death, there is often a stage of suspended animation. Old, traditional ghosts at this stage will be resurrected under certain conditions, from suspended animation to resurgence. This is a phenomenon worth studying in the study of culture, and I have a great interest in this question. This is also the question that I have thought about the most over the years, that is, the social and cultural conditions for the resurrection of the old traditions.
Books to watch
Lei Yi is a researcher at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Lei Yi: There are still many good books in 2021, and there are three that are impressive, one is "The Banking Industry in Modern China" published by the Social Science Literature Publishing House, written by American scholar Cheng Linsun. The author was originally a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, who studied China's modern economic and financial history and consulted a large number of relevant historical materials. At the end of the 1980s, he went to the United States to study and completed this work under the guidance of Professor Ke Weilin, a well-known expert in modern Chinese history at Harvard University. China's modern banking industry, that is, a new type of financial institution, began after the fiasco of the First Sino-Japanese War, but developed rapidly after the Xinhai Revolution. This book proves with a large number of materials and analysis that in the following decades, in the era of political turmoil, national peril, and war that have not stopped since the beginning of the People's Republic of China, the first generation of Chinese financiers laid the foundation for modern financial institutions with their own insight, wisdom, courage and responsibility. The process is tortuous and inspiring.
"Banking in Modern China", by Cheng Linsun, translated by Xu Ang and Yuan Xujun, Social Sciences Academic Press, January 2021.
"The Rickshaw Puller in Beijing: Citizens and Politics in the 1920s" is a masterpiece of the American sinologist Shi Qiande, and after the original book was published, it had a great impact on the field of Chinese studies in the United States, and famous artists such as Fairbank, Shi Jingqian, and Zhou Xirui wrote articles and recommended it. In 1991, the book won the Levinson Prize from the American Association for Asian Studies. The book focuses on the little people in the torrent of the times, cutting from the rickshaws and coachmen in the streets, hooking up with policemen, businessmen, politicians, warlords, etc., and meticulously depicting the life, political order, and social changes in Beijing in the 1920s. The author further explores how rickshaw pullers try to get to the center of the political scene, revealing how the power of the times is deeply felt by ordinary people. The translation of the book was introduced by the Jiangsu People's Publishing House and published in the "Overseas China Studies Series".
I have read the English version of this book, and the Chinese version has been read more carefully, almost word by word. It can be said that I have read countless books in so many decades, almost all of them are read in a glance and ten lines, but I have read this book almost word by word, and I feel that this is one of the few books I want to recommend in 2021. Why? First of all, rickshaw pullers are extremely social and public. It was imported from the outside, a new thing produced by Chinese modernity, and caused a squeeze and exclusion for traditional industries, such as those who used to push unicycles or catch cars, and they had to compete with each other. With the development of the city, there were trams later, and this relationship between rickshaw drivers and trams was this, and rickshaw pullers became weak and backward, and they were going to be eliminated.
The Rickshaw Pullers of Beijing: Citizens and Politics in the 1920s, by Shi Qiande, translated by Yuan Jian, Zhou Shuyao, and Zhou Yumin, Jiangsu People's Publishing House, September 2021.
Finally, the book is written about the 1929 rickshaw driver riot in Beijing, smashing trams, hitting tram drivers, and hitting tram company owners. Schiender takes this whole process of change as an excellent theme. There are games, there are struggles, there are interests between them, and when the collective struggles with the tram, the coachman and the owner of the car dealer stand together. So one of the benefits of this book is that it's all about everything, and it's not limited to the car dealership.
He gave some examples that I hadn't paid attention to before. Some big intersections have shops, some sell noodles, some sell steamed buns, they don't have guilds, but naturally at this intersection a cut is formed, and this intersection is decided by a few people. He noticed this game of power relations. I think this book is not very thick, and it is rare to have such details.
"Chronicle of Mr. Chen Mengjia", published by Zhonghua Bookstore, author Ziyi. Mr. Chen Mengjia is a genius scholar who has studied new poetry, ancient history, archaeology, paleography, opera criticism, and Ming Dynasty furniture. So many achievements have been made in so many ways that his life came to an abrupt end in 1966 at the height of his creative years, at the height of his fifty-sixth birthday. The author has studied Chen for more than 20 years and has specialized research papers. This book is "to say but not to do", more than 400,000 words are all information, to paraphrase the current popular saying: full of dry goods.
"Chronicle of Mr. Chen Mengjia", by Ziyi, Zhonghua Bookstore, June 2021.
Lu Dapeng: In 2021, I read a German history book, Das Buch Alice, which I thought was very interesting, but I have not seen a Chinese translation so far. The book's author, Karina Urbach, is a German historian who teaches at the University of London. Alice, her grandmother, a Viennese Jew, wrote a cookbook about Viennese specialties in the 1930s, and when the Nazis came to power, her recipe was "Aryanized", in other words, the publisher republished it under a new title, and the author's name was changed to a person of German descent. So the author of the Allah was obliterated because he was Jewish. Karina Urbach proceeded from this family history and found that this phenomenon is by no means an isolated case. The intellectual property rights of a large number of Jewish authors were infringed upon by Nazi-era publishing houses, and the same book was renamed and re-titled. To this day, many large publishing houses in Germany are still secretive about this phenomenon, refusing to apologize and "return things to their original owners". This book is a very rigorous academic work, interesting to write, and the topic is relatively new, I think it is very worth recommending.
Cover of Das Buch Alice.
Looking forward to the original work
Lu Dapeng: Looking forward to original works that are both academic and readable. Of course, I would most like to see my first original work, The German Nobility: A History, come out in 2022.
Xiao Gongqin: I look forward to works that think independently, be calm and objective, transcend the left and right extremes, judge and reflect on the historical lessons experienced by China in the past two hundred years with pragmatic rationality, and reveal the real problems of China on this basis. I believe that such works will appear sooner or later. Because China is a great civilization, the history of China in the past 2,000 years since the great unification proves that Chinese intellectuals will be reborn in any environment and will not perish.