Richard J. Smith, born in 1944, studied at the University of California, Davis, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1972. He is fluent in Chinese, French, Spanish and Japanese, and his main research interests are modern Chinese history and traditional Chinese culture, as well as the anthropology of Japanese history and culture. Professor Sima Fu has been teaching at Rice University for many years, officially retiring five years ago.
In 1978, Sima Fu first came to China, and on the streets of Shanghai, he was surrounded by a group of curious schoolchildren.
Sima Fu's book "The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture" Chinese edition, launched by Kyushu Publishing House in 2022.
The English edition of Sima Fu's book The I Ching: A Biography. The Chinese character "Tai" on the cover is one of the Sixty-Four Gua of the I Ching.
The couplet written by Li Hongzhang in Sima Fu's study is "embraced by the wind and embraced by the wind, and there is a love text in the bamboo". Scan the code to see the topic
"Of course I am an old friend of the Chinese people!" The famous American sinologist Professor Sima Fu replied to the reporter's emails usually in English, but the three words "old friend" were specially identified by Chinese, "Since the first time I went to Shanghai in 1978, I have been to China at least sixty times." ”
In the past four decades, he has visited almost all of China's provinces, including Tibet and Xinjiang. It can be said that he is a true China pass. In the 1970s, he was also a visiting scholar at the University of Chinese in Hong Kong for one year. After his retirement, Professor Sima Fu lived in Houston, Texas. He has not been to China in nearly five years as he has aged.
Sima Fu told reporters that his Chinese name was given by his supervisor, Professor Liu Guangjing. "Professor Liu said that the greatest historian in China is Sima Qian, and my English name Richard is simply Rich, which means rich, which has the meaning of learning to be rich and five cars." Sima Fuqian said that this does not mean that the teacher's expectations and high evaluation of him, "This is a joke made by Professor Liu and me, and it cannot be taken seriously." ”
On the academic road, Sima Fu was deeply inspired and guided by Liu Guangjing, Luo Rongbang, Fairbank and Joseph Needham, and published many research works on traditional Chinese culture, with remarkable achievements. He was proficient in Chinese, and was proficient in writing, reading, using Chinese, and allusions were at his fingertips. Because the computer input Chinese a bit troublesome, so the correspondence with reporters, often interspersed with Chinese and English, special emphasis on the words, there may be ambiguity, including the citation of Chinese allusions, will be specially marked with Chinese, and even at the end of the email use "Sima Fu Dun Shou", so that the reporter obviously feels his humble gentleman's style, and he respects the traditional Chinese culture, there seems to be a consistent relationship.
Over the years, Professor Sima Fu has published numerous research works and papers on traditional Chinese culture, including the I Ching, including nine independently signed monographs. Among them, "The I Ching: A Biography" (2013) and "The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture" have won the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award (2016). The Chinese edition of "The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture" was recently launched in China, and it is one of the few works of contemporary Western sinologists that systematically discuss traditional Chinese culture, with a wide range of contents, including language, philosophy, religion, literature, art, and even social customs.
He has received numerous other academic awards, twelve in teaching alone, such as Rice Brown's Highest Certificate of Merit (1992), Alison Sarofim Distinguished Professor of Teaching (1994-1996), Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching/Council for the Promotion and Support of Education, and Professor of the Year in Texas (1998). He has also received several National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship grants. The most recent was the study of the Han cultural circle (2017-2019) in collaboration with scholars from East Asia and Vietnam, and two collections of papers were published.
Gentle and kind, elegant in speech, the interview with Sima Fu was pleasant. In addition to answering questions seriously, he often exchanged views with reporters, and even said of the NBA, "I am a super fan of Yao Ming." Unfortunately, the current Rockets are not doing well. From Mr. Sima Fu, the reporter deeply appreciated his friendship with China: he was happy that the traditional Chinese culture he admired still had a place today, and he was also obsessed with Chinese cuisine, "If I could, I would like to eat Dongpo meat every day."
American humor, optimism, and the humility and kindness of Chinese intellectuals are evident in Mr. Sima Fu. As he mentioned in his book "The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture", "culture has never been a zero-sum game", and the mutual reference, integration and development between different cultural types is the right way. He was deeply excited and appreciative of the progress China has made over the past four decades.
He specially sent reporters several photos, the cover of his English works, and a collection of Li Hongzhang's couplets. In 1972, when Sima Fu was in Hong Kong, his good friend and scholar Professor Jian Youwen helped him buy this couplet.
Sima Fu sighed, "Even with Professor Jian's help, I can't afford to buy these scrolls today!"
Interview
"Sima Qian's Sima Qian, the rich of the five cars of learning"
Nandu: When did you become interested in Chinese culture? Have you been influenced by someone?
Sima Fu: When I was a junior at the University of California, Davis (UCD), I became interested in China. To be honest, my girlfriend wanted to take a course in Chinese history at the time, and I thought it would be romantic to sit next to her in class. It worked: she and I've been married for 54 years. I love her very much, but I also love Chinese history.
Nandu: What was your impression of China before you started formal academic research? In your initial perception, maybe China is a strange or mysterious country?
Sima Fu: I must admit that before I took the chinese history course at UCD, I knew nothing about China and didn't have any opinions. I just wanted to be a professional baseball player. Very shallow!
Nandu: We would very much like to know, how did your path of academic research in China come about?
Sima Fu: My path of academic research was led by two Chinese-born mentors and two Western-born academic friends. One mentor was Professor Liu Guangjing, and his maternal grandfather was Chen Baozhen, an important member of the late Qing Dynasty; The other was Professor Luo Rongbang, whose maternal grandfather was kang Youwei, a radical of the late Qing dynasty. Two academic friends, one is Professor John King Fairbank, who is Professor Liu Guangjing's mentor at Harvard University; The other was Professor Joseph Needham, both of whom supported and encouraged me to think cross-culturally from a broader perspective on Chinese history and culture.
Nandu: In the course of your research, how did you find and determine your academic research direction?
Sima Fu: Throughout my academic career, I have always been interested in the construction of "Chineseness" and "otherness"—perhaps because I am the "other" who studies "China". My first book, completed under the direction of Professor Liu Guangjing, was given a great deal of advice by Professor Fairbank on Mercenaries and Mandarins: The Ever-Victorious Army in Nineteenth Century China (1978). The book focuses on the Qing government's policy of managing foreign mercenaries from 1850 to 1874, including countering the Taiping Rebellion and other anti-government rebellions.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, my research took two very different but related forms. One is a continuation of my interest in the Qing government's policy toward foreign employees. Professor Fairbank and I shared the same interest, so he co-published three books with me: Entering China's Service: The Journals of Robert Hart (1854-1863) (1986), Andhurd's Diary: Hurd and Early Chinese Modernization (1863-1866). China's Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863-1866) (1991) and H.B. Morse: Customs Commissioner and Historian of China (1995).
The study of Hurd and Mas, combined with my previous research on the Chang Shengjun, led me to explore in a systematic way how specific cultural phenomena formed. This phenomenon in the 19th century is closely related to China's political, social and intellectual life. One of the most important phenomena, seemingly cosmology, is particularly reflected in Chinese ritualism, divination, chronological calendars, almanacs, and maps.
To this end, I searched through the British Library, the Library of Congress, the National Library of China, and the Vatican Archives, and the result was four books I published in the 1990s: Fortune-tellers and Philosophers: Divination in Traditional Chinese Society) (1991)； Cosmology, Ontology and Human Efficacy (1993), co-authored with D.Y.Y. Kwok; I contributed two monographs to Oxford University Press, Chinese Almanacs (1992) and Chinese maps: images of "All Under Heaven" (1996).
My continued interest in the Chinese cosmology led me to the "Easy Study", the study of the I Ching, and published two of my personal favorite books: Exploring the Universe and the Normative <易经>World: Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I-Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China (2008), I Ching: A Biography (2012). Like some of my later works on Zhou Yi, the I Ching: A Biography extended the study of Zhou Yi to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
I then tried to integrate all my previous research into a broader perspective: Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times, (2013), and The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture. (The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Chinese edition of culture, launched by Kyushu Press in February 2022. Editor's Note).
This work, in turn, inspired me to start writing two other books. A book, tentatively titled Science and Medicine in Chinese Popular Culture 1600–1800, explores these topics through an examination of Chinese daily books and other common sense manuals from the late Ming to early Qing dynasties. The other is tentatively titled China: The Land of Ritual and Right Behavior—an explanatory study of the Ritual System of the Qing Dynasty that focuses on themes of order and disorder, orthodoxy, and heresy, inspired by a maxim by Zeng Guofan that I saw in my early studies of Chinese cosmology: "Heavenly Heart Is Disgusted."
Cultural understanding from "The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture"
Nandu: Your book "The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture" has just been published in China. You have a deep understanding of traditional Chinese culture and its evolution during the Qing Dynasty, which is difficult for even ordinary Chinese scholars to do. I greatly admire your research because culture is a very broad concept and doing cultural research is a very challenging subject. How long have you been preparing for this book? Why did you choose such a challenging topic?
Sima Fu: It's great that you can say that. My own feeling is that I may have only touched on the superficial issues and stopped trying to stop (hopefully I did more than scratching my boots). In any case, I think, to be precise, my entire academic career has been in preparation for writing this book. But my main motivation for writing this book was to explore how Chinese studies were "decomposing"—the concept was first proposed in American sinology by Paul Cohen in his monograph Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past) (1984). ), the concept is used for the first time.
Kovan opposes the "China-centric" approach to Chinese history, arguing that dealing with the vast diversity and complexity of Chinese society requires breaking it down into smaller, easier-to-interpret spatial units. While this approach has obvious merit, I believe that the dialectical relationship between holistic research and particular cases must be balanced at the same time. After all, without an understanding of consensus, consistency, and continuity, how can we discuss China's richness, diversity, and change? For example, what exactly makes words like "China" and "Chinese" meaningful?
Nandu: The Qing Dynasty was founded by the Manchus (nomadic peoples in the north), and there is both inheritance and integration with the traditional Chinese culture in the Central Plains. How do you evaluate the impact of the collision between different cultural types on the formation of traditional Chinese culture?
Sima Fu: On the question of how to think about the complex "culture" of the Qing Dynasty, I believe that there is a productive middle ground (the middle way) between scholars who emphasize "Sinicization" and scholars who emphasize "Manchuization", the former how Ping-ti Ho and Huang Pei Huang, and the latter such as Mark Elliott, Pamela Crossley and Evelyn Rawski. Arguably, the key to the Manchus' political success lies in their ability to tap cultural links with "non-Han ethnic groups within Asia, and to distinguish non-Han regions from the pre-Ming dynasty's pre-Ming dynasty." Of course, the Kangxi Emperor and his successors were passionate protectors of Chinese culture, proficient in Chinese, very respectful of Confucian values, familiar with Chinese art and literature, and willing to employ Chinese scholars in government agencies at all levels. An important point for me is the emphasis of the title of Ollid's 2009 book, Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World. The Qianlong Emperor and his successors, for pragmatic reasons, presented the "Chinese (Han)" side to their subjects living south of the Great Wall; The "Manchu" and other ethnic sides were presented to subjects in other parts of the empire.
Nandu: The Qing Dynasty is a historical node in China's transition to modern times. There are mutual tests and entanglements between Manchu culture and Han traditional culture, between China and the Western world. As a Western scholar of China, how do you see cultural conflicts around the world?
Sima Fu: I think it's always bad to be in conflict with each other, and it's always good to understand each other. Each culture is seriously integrated with other cultures, learning from them and drawing nourishment from them, but often the "culture war" is preventing these mutual understandings, which is a big problem in the United States at present. Statism can be a healthy, positive thing, but, like everything else, if pushed to extremes, it is very dangerous and destructive.
Nandu: Compared with Chinese scholars, foreign scholars have certain obstacles in language mastery, literature collection, and cultural background understanding. What advantages and disadvantages do you think Western scholars have in studying China?
Sima Fu: I completely agree with the reasons you mentioned, studying Chinese culture is a huge challenge for Western scholars. But meeting these challenges is one of the things that makes Chinese studies so interesting and rewarding.
Personally, my "strengths" are also my "weaknesses." On the one hand, I am an "outsider" who will never know China the way I did with people who grew up and were educated in Chinese culture. My views on China come from academic research, and relatively limited life experience (my travels in Chinese mainland and Taiwan, and my year in Hong Kong). On the other hand, if I could, I would rather say that my view of China would be relatively objective — as the Chinese proverb goes: bystanders are clear.
What bothers me most about Chinese historical research, and even in the study of history in general, is the way in which so many scholars tend to draw lines of interpretation too sharply. As I have already mentioned, a prominent example is the debate between "Sinicization" and the "New Qing School of Historiography". Some Chinese scholars, especially Li Zhiting, have gone to extremes in their critique of Western Chinese scholarship—especially personal attacks on individuals such as Ou Lide and Ke Jiaoyan, who are actually divergent in their interpretations. This sentence is a bit ambiguous. I would like to point out that although scholars like Li Zhiting tend to classify scholars such as Ou Lide and Ke Jiaoyan as "New Qing Historians", the fact is that their views are very different. Ollid and Ke Jiaoyan (and others) have important differences in their views on Qing history, which can be seen very clearly in Ke Jiaoyan's interviews. In other words, not all of the adherents of the "new Qing history" described by critics like Li Zhiting agree on all historical issues.
The integrity and enduring nature of traditional Chinese culture is "quite remarkable"
Nandu: As a scholar of China, what is your objective assessment of Chinese culture as a whole? What are its advantages and disadvantages? What is its place in today's world?
Sima Fu: In general, I think that traditional Chinese culture is quite remarkable in terms of strength, integrity and staying power. As we all know, it is not static, and it never is; Each culture has evolved with the changing historical environment. In my opinion, Chinese culture has long had a clear place in the modern world with its emphasis on universal values, such as respect for learning, morality, courtesy, and specific values such as benevolence, righteousness, and filial piety— although, I think, we all agree that filial piety has traditionally come in rather extreme forms.
Nandu: Listening to you talk about your research so much, it is actually quite profound for Chinese readers, and it is necessary to have a very deep understanding of Chinese history and philosophy in order to gain something. Let's talk about something lighter. Have you visited China many times and had impressive exchanges with your Chinese counterparts?
Sima Fu: I have been to China at least 60 times, starting with my first visit to Shanghai in 1978. I also spent a year at the University of Hong Kong Chinese (1971-1972) completing my doctoral dissertation while teaching both Chinese and Japanese history. I have learned a lot from my Chinese colleagues, not only in formal settings such as academic conferences, but also in private conversations with them. These times I often feel a bit like a class door axe!
I have traveled to almost every part of China, including Tibet and Xinjiang, and I have seen things that I have only read in newspapers or books before, which has benefited me a lot. I also had the opportunity to talk to people in everyday life on the streets, temples, restaurants and various tourist attractions. It is easy to overlook that most tourists in China at that time were Chinese.
Nandu: Do you have many students who are interested in Chinese culture? Do you have any other advice for them besides academic guidance?
Sima Fu: All my students have found something interesting in Chinese culture, whether they are Chinese (more and more people are Chinese). I think my role is to encourage them, to think carefully and critically about why they are gaining this interest and what it has to do with their own lives (or not). A fundamental question that I often ask my students to ponder is: How do Chinese understand the world around them at any given historical moment, and how do we evaluate their exploration of meaning without being imprisoned by our own set or sets of values and conceptual categories? My goal, of course, is to make them think not only about Chinese culture, but also about their own culture.
Chief Planner:
Rong Mingchang Liu Jiangtao
Planner: Wang Haijun
Co-ordination:
Liu Weiming Huang Qian
Inscription: Cao Baolin
Written and translated in this issue:
Nandu reporter Liu Weiming