Apr 26 2007
Handicapped historians
Golfer is off to Byron Nelson tourney in Irving Texas, playing and entertaining his clients. Just the other day we talked about handicap, a practice of giving advantage to a player of lesser ability to level off the playing field. … I thought about Chinese historians in China: on the surface, they should be the one dishing out handicaps to their western counterparts. After all, they live in the same house their subject used to occupy, mutter the language their subject spoke, drink from the same well and travel on the same route. But it seemed to me they actually don’t. The Chinese history and European history academics in China don’t have enough access to resources that are at the finger tips of the Western colleagues. I am not sure it’s lays in the quality of the education, diligence of the individual or else? An European history professor at Renda once complained that his only way to make impact on the subject among the Westerners perhaps is his capability to write about, i.e. Chinese point of view on NATO, ‘but I have no access to those kind of information. All top secrets!” On top of the yeshi, we set hurdles to confine them. Neat.