I was shocked to learn that my supervisor, a world-renowned historian, one of the pioneers of contemporary Western "Chinese Studies", and the famous proposer of "Questions about Chinese Studies", Professor John Mark Dutton Elvin, passed away in Cambridge on December 19.
Professor Yi Maoke is one of the pioneers of modern Chinese studies and the history of Chinese civilization in the West. Dr. Joseph Needham of Cambridge University put forward the "Needham Problem" on the development of ancient Chinese science and technology: why did China be at the forefront of the world's science and technology before the 15th century, but failed to take a step forward and independently develop a modern scientific system?Professor Yi Maoke put forward the "question of Chinese studies": why did China fail to achieve European-style scientific and organizational changes after achieving the "medieval economic revolution"?Weber, a well-known German sociologist, also raised the "Weber's question" for China.
Professor Yi Maoke has advanced the study of Western Sinology and Chinese history to a new dimension. His "Model of Chinese Historical Development" from the perspective of the history of civilization ** model of Chinese historical development, put forward some insightful theoretical views on the development of Chinese civilization, such as the current new domestic "World History" to mention, his theory about China in the Qing Dynasty into the "high equilibrium trap", the need for reform and opening up, absorb foreign, especially European science and technology, in order to break the bottleneck of traditional science and technology development, people** Explosive growth and the inability to expand agricultural land led to the stagnation of China's per capita GDP during the Qing Dynasty.
Dr. Joseph Needham of the University of Cambridge, who had devoted his life to the history of Chinese science and technology, once said with emotion that he had married himself to China, and Professor Yi Maoke also devoted his life to exploring the development of Chinese civilization and regarded the pursuit of the development of Chinese studies as the value of his life. The front page of Yi Maoke's Patterns of China's Historical Development was published in 1972, at a time when China was in a period of economic stagnation during the Cultural Revolution. His theory can also be said to come from a sinologist's ardent hope for China after studying the tortuous development of Chinese civilization for a long time, hoping that China can implement reform and opening up, and promote the further development of civilization by integrating into the world economic system and learning from and absorbing advanced science and technology from outside. A few years after the publication of this book, China began to open up to the outside world on a large scale in 1978, and after more than 30 years of sustained rapid economic growth, China finally became one of the world's top economies.
In 1987, I was pleasantly surprised to win a very high-level scholarship like the Rhodes Scholarship out of many contenders, and I contacted Professor Imoko,** under his guidance to pursue a PhD at the University of Oxford. It was with great joy that Professor Yi Maoke had never accepted an international student from China before, so he accepted me.
I remember that year, after more than ten hours of air travel, I came to Oxford University, which was like an alien planet, and the next day Mr. Yi Mao Ke couldn't wait to meet me. When I walked into his office on the third floor of an old monastery, his eyes lit up with the joy of seeing his own children.
He told me about the experience of visiting Shanghai in the 70s of the 20th century, China was his academic mecca, in the 70s, there were very few foreign guests who came to China, he was received by the VIP version, walking on the streets of Shanghai, and the crowd of onlookers was always with him, like watching monkeys, three layers inside and three layers outside. He was a little frightened, but he was deeply honored.
It has been said that the University of Oxford is one of the world's academic centers and one of the most gentlemanly cities in the UK. It was a great privilege to study at the old Oxford, but it was also extremely difficult to get a doctorate. Statistics show that half of all graduate students in Asian liberal arts ultimately fail to successfully pass the PhD** defense.
As soon as Oxford entered the school, he immediately thought about determining his own research topic. Professor Yi Maoke put forward suggestions for my research direction, and he believed that I should choose a topic with a wide range of topics, so that I can adapt to academic development and social needs after graduation, and expand to different neighborhoods. After the conversation, he politely escorted me out of the office, and when I passed through every door in the hallway, he always took the first step, opened the door, and let me go first. The English gentlemanly demeanor embodied in the teacher was contagious to me from that moment on. It is important to know that he was already a very famous scholar at that time.
For the first year after that, I met with him almost once a week to present his book report. In retrospect, it was his guidance that helped me to build a high level of theoretical understanding of the world and Chinese history. I remember the first week, he asked me to read Kuznets's Modern Economic Growth and Eisenstad's Comparative Sociology of Chinese Civilization. One of the main points of Kuznets's book is that if a society is to maintain economic growth every year, it must constantly absorb and use the advanced scientific and technological knowledge created by the rest of the world. At that time, China was at the stage of systematically introducing and absorbing advanced science and technology and industrial technology from Europe, the United States, and Japan.
After the surprise of successfully studying at a world-famous university, it is a painful and stressful process Xi of learning new knowledge. The burden of reading several original English books a week weighed me on eating too much. In the late '80s, before computers were commonplace, I had to read seven or eight thick English books a week, and I had to type out my reading reports on a typewriter and hand them to my teacher. The University of Oxford has an elite education, and the teachers are very busy, in addition to supervising graduate students, they also have to provide weekly face-to-face tutoring to undergraduates. However, Mr. Yi Maoke was still very meticulous and strict in his reading and criticism of my book report, always finding the superficiality of my description and analysis, pointing out to me which books to read and which scholars had already achieved research results. To this day, I still miss the teacher's extremely high water comment. His comments were sharp, but always very inspiring, and gradually guided me to discover the truth of history and form insights in my thoughts. I still have in my bookcase the book report I typed out on my first semester at Oxford, which contains a large number of comments from Mr. Imoko. Looking at these manuscripts soaked with the teacher's hard work, it is quite sad. It was the guidance of my teachers at a very high level from the very beginning that laid the foundation for me to develop my research skills at the doctoral level. The University of Oxford's positioning of the PhD** is to add new knowledge and new interpretations to the academic field.
Mr. Yi Maoke was born in Cambridge, the ivory tower of Cambridge is "108,000 miles" away from China, but he has a special love for Chinese civilization. In 1968, he received his Ph.D. in Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge. During this period, he went to the United States to conduct research under the guidance of Professor Fairbank, an American sinologist. He also conducts research on French history. Under the influence of the atmosphere of emphasizing theoretical thinking at Cambridge University, the teacher's research is different from most Chinese historians in the United Kingdom and the United States, but has a rare theoretical height and comparative vision.
Once, when we were walking around the old campus of Oxford University, I said to Mr. Yi Maoke that your book "The Pattern of China's Past History" is the most theoretical work on Chinese studies since the famous scholar Weber's sociological comparative study of Chinese civilization and religion. Teacher Yi Mao Ke smiled.
Some of the important theoretical ideas put forward by Mr. Yi Mao Ke in many of his books are still not backward after half a century, but they are also very insightful. He put forward the cultural orientation of Chinese Confucian intellectuals, who regarded the maintenance of the unity of Chinese civilization as their highest social responsibility, so that after the 9th century, Europe began to become a number of small countries, but China was still on the road of maintaining a system. He also pointed out that in the 10th century, there was a commercial revolution and a transportation revolution in China, which led to the formation of a unified national market. In particular, he mentioned that the excavation of the Grand Canal in the Sui Dynasty linked several major agricultural economic regions in China.
He also wrote the history of China's science and technology, proposing that in the 13th century, China had advanced to the threshold of modern science and established the world's first mechanized industrial system. He refers to the extremely high per capita steel production in the Song Dynasty, the large amount of coal, and the invention and application of machinery represented by the water-powered mechanical mill and the water-transported armillary sphere.
Although Oxford and Cambridge are world-renowned academic centers and ideal places to do research, teachers still want to live and think in a wider place beyond such an ivory tower. He then moved to the Australian National University as a leading expert on the history of Asia-Pacific and Chinese civilizations. Mr. Yi Maoke's research not only has a grand vision, but also combines the aspects of sociology with the meticulous combing and empirical interpretation of the red tape of the original historical materials. He is always exploring new areas of research.
When he left Oxford that year to dine with us, he told me that he was doing research in the field of ancient Chinese medical history, and that it was only after the publication of his book The Retreat of the Elephant that I learned that my teacher's final choice of focus was Chinese environmental history and climate change. The teacher once again opened up new fields, and this book, like his "Chinese Historical Development Model", has attracted wide attention after its publication and translation. The book "The Retreat of the Elephant" describes the changes in China's climate over the past 2,000 years, and the elephants that could have lived in northern China, Henan and other places, because the climate gradually became colder, migrated south step by step, and finally found a suitable habitat in Yunnan and other places. A few years ago, a group of elephants out of the habitat of Yunnan and wandered north, which attracted the continuous attention of the first in China.
After retiring from the Australian National University, he returned to live at the University of Cambridge, where he lectured at the Needham Institute, a world-renowned institution for the history of Chinese science and technology. He was deeply interested in the fact that ancient Chinese science and technology were once very developed, but in the end they were not able to develop their own modern scientific system on their own like the West, and he wrote several very in-depth articles and showed them to me.
After his retirement, the teacher also organized a lecture entitled "East Meets West: The Jesuits in the Late Ming and Early Qing Dynasties" in the famous Natural Science Museum of Oxford University, which exhibited a large number of **, introduced the development of Chinese science and technology in the late Ming Dynasty, and the missionaries' interpretation of Chinese science and technology.
University of Oxford's "East and West Science and Technology Encounter" exhibition.
The Theory of China's "Medieval Urban Revolution" was also put forward in the "Chinese Historical Development Model", which believed that the "medieval revolution in market structure and urbanization" was one of the important manifestations of China's economic revolution since the 10th century. This book and his research on the urban history of Shanghai have had a significant impact on the urban history of late China, leading the study of ancient Chinese urban history in a certain sense, and providing an important theoretical framework for the analysis of this field.
He repeatedly emphasized that Chinese civilization is the most important and interesting part of world civilization, and that an important task for historians is to "place Chinese history in a more carefully studied and broader context of world history" to reinterpret it. At one time, he was one of the editors of the well-known historical theory journal Past and Present. The editorial board of the journal brings together progressive scholars from inside and outside the UK, including the famous British Marxist scholar Hobsbaum.
In 2002, my Ph.D. book "China's Pursuit of Modernity" was published by the famous British publishing house MacMillan Pargrave Press.
At the beginning of 2020, when I saw my teacher for the last time at the University of Oxford, he was still in good spirits and reported to him the publication of his other monograph, "The Resolution of Joseph Needham's Problem: A Historical Reflection on the Lack of Scientific and Technological Innovation in Ancient China", and the teacher was very happy.
Today, I also flipped through the unbound proof-edition of the "Map of Chinese Culture" given to me by Mr. Yi Maoke on my bookshelf. The teacher has passed away suddenly, and not only is it sad and tearful. Tang Shi said: "Teacher, so preach, teach, and solve doubts." Another Tang poem that deeply misses the teacher says: "When he suddenly met Manjushri and opened his eyes, he should remember the teacher's heart when he was young." The teacher's kindness is unforgettable, and I wish the teacher good in heaven.