Professor Yang Guoqiang, Department of History, East China Normal University
Professor Wang Jiafan
It has been more than the anniversary of Professor Wang Jiafan's death, but the works published after his death are still circulated and read among readers, and the academic influence left by his decades of accumulation continues. For a scholar, it is already a trace of the body, and it is worthy of this life.
It was not too early for me to meet Professor Wang Jiafan. Although in the mid-1980s I had already studied under Mr. Chen Xulu, mr. Chen's situation was not smooth at that time, and we as students were conscious of being safe, quiet, peaceful, and stable, and never walked around the school and talked about it in all directions. In my memory, except for going to the entrance of the History Department every Monday afternoon to collect letters for Mr. Chen, I have hardly ever entered the courtyard of the History Department. This kind of peace and security is intended not to cause trouble for the student because of excessive movement and blind movement. But the cause and effect are the same, and most of the teachers of the history department are always strangers to me, even the director of the Wu Ze department who is dictatorial and the director of the Xia Dongyuan department who is proud of himself, the former has only seen it once from a distance, and the latter has never seen it once. Because of this self-preservation, Professor Jia Fan at that time was among strangers and had no chance to know him. However, Mr. Chen occasionally commented on the characters, and once said that among the middle-aged teachers of the History Department, Wang Jiafan and Liu Xuezhao's articles were well written, and the comments came from Mr. Chen's mouth, which made me know the name of Professor Jia fan before I knew Professor Jia Fan. In the late 1990s, Professor Jia Fan asked students to bring a conversation and asked me to talk about modern history, so after leaving the school for more than ten years, I had a long late-night conversation with Professor Jia Fan in the conference room of the History Department. On that day, he was concerned about the sushun that emperor Xianfeng was convinced of and died at the hands of empress dowager Xi, and the rise and fall of the political ups and downs of the consequent friendship with Xiantong. After that, the dialogue came from far and near, and the news and old things involved in the academic circles were often the same although the sea and the sky were wide. Compared with the acquaintances who are close at hand and are always unknowable and unpredictable, there is this convergence of the theories of people and the world, and for me, Professor Jia Fan, although he is a first sight, is already like the old knowledge. Therefore, with faith and sincerity, for more than twenty years, Professor Jia Fan and I have been very close. Since I was transferred to East China Normal University at the end of 2008, I have worked with him for ten years at the Simian Institute for Advanced Study of Humanities, and I am particularly close to what he has seen in his academic discipline, and he often feels respect for it.
Professor Jia Fan was born in the late 1930s, compared with the previous generation and the next generation of academics, the changes in the academic environment and academic orientation experienced by their generation in the process of self-cultivation are particularly forced to get out of the jump, so that between the forced jump, the difficult thinking and difficulty of knowing along the way will also be particularly deeply cut into the between yesterday's self and today's self, becoming a process of self-creation with self-adaptation. In the same generation, Professor Jia Fan's self-adaptation and self-cultivation are very obvious. Correspondingly, since the 1980s, he has gone to a higher place in academics step by step. In the case of the twists and turns in between, the process is clearly more arduous than those of the previous and subsequent generations. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, social history rose up in a flurry, bringing a different vision and vision to the field of historiography than in the old days. At that time, I had seen a stack of sociological works on the desk in Professor Shen Weibin's home, as well as his reading notes. For a historian who is more than half a hundred years old, this kind of beginning to enter social history by taking sociology as the path shows the seriousness and persistence of those of that generation who were able to stand on their own feet on the day of academic progress towards a drastic change. And the reason why hard work is hard is also true to this. In this way, Professor Jia Fan may not have the same complex, but as a reader who belongs to the same generation and has made history a career in his life, he can not only meet the back waves of the academic circles one after another, but also be able to establish his heels and become his own, which undoubtedly relies on this kind of seriousness and persistence that refuses to be clever. Both the front and the back are self-conscious, so both the front and the back will have a profound impact. He entered the depths of history through this process, and also formed his own academic style and academic personality in the process. The unity of the former and the latter becomes a constant thing in its learning and something that can exist for a long time after it. In this sense, the remembrance of this day is actually my constant and long-lasting look back.
Having known Professor Jia Fan for many years, I am impressed by the curiosity that has always been around him for decades. As an academic character, when academic theories, academic concepts, and academic methods outside the region have entered into the order since the 1980s, and each school has its own theory, curiosity will be directly transformed into the attention to these foreign things, and the pursuit of inquiry. Therefore, for more than forty years, various genres have risen and fallen, and Professor Jia Fan has used most of the kung fu for the parts that intersect with them. This kind of kung fu is integrated into self-cultivation and self-cultivation, in which words and things and words are rationalized into enlightenment, often to varying degrees of perspective, affecting his observation, examination and interpretation of history, and from shallow to deep and innovating in the cultivation of old theories. And with the observation, examination, interpretation, ploughing, as well as from the shallow to the deep and the introduction of the old out of the new, is from the outside of the words and things and the words of the reasonable are digested, and internalized by digestion, in the ups and downs of the genre can be accumulated in the historical study of the Chinese, as the "Heart King Ming" ("Jingde Chuan Lantern Record") said that "the salt taste in the water, the color is rubber and blue, the decision is there, not see its shape", once integrated, it is no longer hue. Without hue, it is precisely because it has become one's own.
In this regard, as a kind of academic beings, what has become contrasted with it is that for more than forty years, there are many theories, methods, and genres that have been introduced into China from other countries, and there are many people who hope to use it to turn iron into gold, and there are many people who tie dragons and snakes with their bare hands. In the meantime, each genre has attracted attention, so that teachers often follow students, and the various theories that have arisen and fallen with foreign theories, methods, concepts, and vocabularies that arise from this up and down are rare to have people who can be pertinent and ploughed to the hearts of the people. Professor Jia Fan is different in that his curiosity about new knowledge begins with questioning and questioning, and both questioning and investigation are related to the existing academic thinking and academic structure of the individual, and the interval formed by this makes him always maintain a kind of thinking and judgment while accepting new knowledge, rather than taking faith as an attitude and taking refuge as a position. It is because the new knowledge from outside his pen is controlled by the problems generated by himself in the process of reading history, so the distinction between the end and the end of the body is clear. The intersection of problems and new knowledge will help to create and thus be able to stand outside the people who came before them and outside the people of the time. But the difference between the creation and the transfer of the original meaning is that he is still interpreting Chinese history in terms of Chinese history. Therefore, Because of the curious side of his scholarly character, Professor Jia Fan can become the person of his generation who can respond freely to academic changes in the forty years of academic flux. Correspondingly and in line with this, he likes to study, especially with the fact that he is ten, twenty, and thirty years younger than him, and that the late students and descendants who believe in his faith in the midst of academic flux listen to each other and listen to the words without hindrance, so as to see their familiarity with all kinds of new knowledge. But for him, this kind of scholarly curiosity is at the same time a kind of search that is attached to the people, events, processes, and relationships in history, so that it always has its own origin under his feet. If there is a source under the feet, the quest can go far with curiosity, and the depth is deepened, but in the end it will still return to the place where the source is. Therefore, Professor Jia Fan, who often pursues inquiries with curiosity, can always keep the purpose and position of a Chinese historian in his heart, and will not lose his true face in the academic flow. A hundred years ago, the new cultural movement rose up in a majestic way, causing Liang Qichao to "lead him to self-proclaimed", and then "the teenagers noisily said that Liang Rengong ran with us". Later, Jin Yuelin commented on Hu Shi's Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy, saying that "when we read that book, we inevitably have a strange impression, and sometimes we simply think that the author of that book is an American who studies Chinese thought." These two great figures in cultural history, with their own ideological traces, truly illustrate the difficulty of seriously accepting new knowledge and still being able to lose oneself on the day of academic flux. By comparison, Professor Jia Fan, who has seen himself as a teacher, a reader, and a small person, has obviously done a better job in this regard.
In October 2016, Wang Jiafan (second from left) and Cheng Nianqi (first from left), Liu Chang (third from left), Yu Yunguo (second from right) and Yang Guoqiang (first from right) in Songjiang, Shanghai.
In the early days of his studies, Professor Jia Fan focused on Ming history, and especially on economic history. Historiography, as a discipline for many years, has been in the vertical decomposition of the boundaries of the broken dynasty, and in the horizontal decomposition of political history, economic history, cultural history, foreign relations history, and so on. Therefore, in the midst of it, focusing on the economic side with Ming history as the focus, it has become an academic process that is both selected and limited. As far as the various stages of history and the various aspects of society are concerned, this kind of study, which focuses on one and one aspect of history, often deepens and is more detailed because of its concentration, and the argument often has its own victory. However, as far as the vertical flow of thousands of years of history and the horizontal convergence of thousands of years are concerned, each keeps a paragraph and a side, and will become the limitation of its vision due to the limitation of the object. What is constituted between the two sides is a contradiction inherent in the academic itself. Professor Jia Fan not only reads history in the vertical decomposition and horizontal decomposition, but also deeply cultivates along the inner layers of historical cause and effect and logic, and will reflect this two-sided contradiction with the endless inability to decompose and the impermissible decomposition of all ends, and he can especially know the strengths and weaknesses in this. Therefore, his study has a center of gravity and orientation, and can use it to see itself and stand on its own in the academic circles, but from a general point of view, this center of gravity and orientation has not become the scope of his determination, making him confined to one end and one side of historiography. Since the 1980s, he has taught courses on the theme of General Theory of Chinese History, and year after year, the deepening of the history of Integration and Governance and the deepening of lectures have become the same process. Later, at the request of the publishing house, he wrote a book based on the painstaking efforts accumulated over the years, during which the writings lasted for more than ten years. This kind of persistent upward and downward search, directed by the general theory of history, and its ceaseless ideological labor, are aimed at understanding the history of China that has lasted for thousands of years in the course of change.
In my impression, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Professor Jia Fan was attentive to the social history that was emerging at that time. Unlike Professor Weibin, who took theory as the way to get started, he more obviously entered the social history in the extension of the economic history of the Ming Dynasty. Mr. Chen Xulu also advocated social history in his twilight years, and especially expected the political history, economic history, cultural history, as well as the historical content of population, party, race, immigration and other historical contents in social history, so as to show the whole and process of history. If Professor Jia Fan writes about history, and his intention is to connect the economy with the characters, with the politics, with the culture, and with the bitterness of the people, then his intention is to social history, and his intention should be closer to what Mr. Chen Xulu saw and thought, and the main purpose is to regard social history as a historical framework that can be penetrated, so as to understand Chinese history and understand Chinese history as a whole. But after the 1990s, theories and methods that came from exotic countries surged in, each stirring up for a while because of the reasoning of its words, and it was inconsistent with its own. After that, the connotations of social history are constantly derived and derived. To cite its examples and major points, at least the "long period" of the French school of annals, the "model" of Skeenjah, regional history, and going to the fields and villages to find temples, etc., extending further afield, as well as the history of life, the history of artifacts under the name of cameras, bicycles, records and so on. In the historical theories of the time, they can be compared with the rise and fall of the world's fortunes and the ups and downs of political affairs, and they are both gushing and exciting. To be fair, this derivation and derivation from the introduction of theories and methods has actually expanded the margins of the present man's view of history, and in its case the greater ones has provided a perspective on history that has never been seen before; for the smaller ones, most of the resulting fragments of detail and knowledge not yet pondered for a long time are provided.
The origin of cause and effect, these theories and methods of migration can be said to be reasonable, because they are deeply connected with their own social history and culture, and are formed in response to the problems arising from their own social history and culture. But their social history and culture are not all the same as our social history and culture, and the problems they face are not necessarily equivalent to our problems, so this theory and method move into China, on the one hand, it is stirred up by the reasoning of its words, and on the other hand, it is inconsistent with its own, which shows that theories and methods can be moved into China, but the problems faced by theories and methods and the social history and culture to which they originally belong cannot be moved together. Then the process of migration cannot but become a process far from its source and a process of constant abstraction. Correspondingly, under the intersection of the momentary and inconsistent, the increasing formatting and technicalization of various theories and methods comes from the fact that it is difficult to see the local knowledge and local knowledge that can constitute the deep meaning and humanistic connotation behind it. Compared with the social-historical consciousness that intersected in the eighties and nineties, this process is clearly very different from the name.
In my opinion, Professor Jia Fan's later familiarity with social history has not regained the enthusiasm he saw in the first place. This difference between the past and the present reflects that his academic ambition to find cause and effect for thousands of years of history has always remained unchanged. Therefore, his association with social history was not intended to be social history for the sake of social history, but to achieve coherence and synthesis of historical research in social history. As a practical example, he ruled Jiangnan history with Jiangnan people, divided by categories, which can be classified into the scope of social history, but in terms of academic vision, he never focused on local knowledge. The history of Jiangnan in his mind has always been a side of Chinese history, so that jiangnan history has always been a part of the whole, and it intersects with the many changes outside Jiangnan and grows in the same process. Therefore, only in the whole, partial, change, and intersection of the meeting can we deeply understand the history of Jiangnan and truly explain many problems in Chinese history. Comparing the social history of each genre in this day, it is obvious that the number of paths is different. Therefore, Professor Jia Fan's marriage to the social history is different from before, which shows that he does not regard the self-righteous social history of man as a kind of Dafa, compared with the fact that he places it at the top and regards it as the root, and the tide goes unshakably, and has always been focused on the embrace of thousand-year history and seeking its cause and effect. Therefore, there is the accumulation of his life's efforts, the accumulation of time and yin, and the accumulation of ideas, and the book "General Theory of Chinese History" that reflects his academic ambition and academic height. More than 2,000 years ago, Sima Qian expressed the wishes of a historian with the words of "investigating the times of heaven and man, through the changes of ancient and modern times, and becoming a family". For more than two thousand years after that, this wish has long been with generations of historians, becoming an unquenchable spiritual tradition and the supreme realm of historiography. However, with this spiritual tradition and the realm of historiography, it is produced in the words of a family that records history and discusses history between two thousand years, and only then can there be works that have been washed over time and can be passed on to future generations. If the historical context of the past two thousand years has been followed by the academic embrace of Professor Fan, he is obviously still in the inheritance of this context, and the book "General Theory of Chinese History" is exactly the change of ancient and modern that he has realized in his own time and along his own path of governance. As far as its long-lasting and deep diligence is concerned, it has become the result of thousands of hardships.
General Theory of Chinese History (Revised Edition), by Wang Jiafan, Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, June 2019 edition, 606 pages, 99.00 yuan
Chinese culture is based on the essence of learning to become virtuous, believing that true learning can be transformed into virtue. Professor Jia Fan has been reading all his life, and at the same time, he has been reading all his life and his temperament has changed in his temperament. As far as I can see, the most direct influence on him in this face is Mr. Lu Simian and Mr. Chen Xulu, who have been in harmony with learning and morality for decades. The wisdom of this process begins with learning and returns to morality, then Mr. Lu's gentlemanly personality and Mr. Chen's gentlemanly personality will transform Professor Yujia Fan's gentlemanly consciousness, and then he is standing in the academic circles, and when he is everywhere, he is both gentle with ease and affinity, and rigidity with self-respect, self-reliance, and self-improvement. The Song people commented that the characters like to talk about meteorology, and I think that Professor Fan, who is introduced to the commentator, is the same source of warmth and rigidity, which constitutes a kind of intellectual weather that he has obtained from reading. If he often calls himself a "countryman" to look at what he has in mind, he can see a reader from the rural society of Jiangnan who has always remembered the original in his heart. In the era of endless migration, people have their own roots and have thick accumulations. Therefore, the warmth, rigidity, and not forgetting the original convergence of personality make him clearly different from all kinds of small intellectuals with skin on the outside and no texture on the inside, and he is often remembered behind him.
Editor-in-Charge: Huang Xiaofeng
Proofreader: Yan Zhang