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An Unfinished Pyramid in the Field of Twentieth Century Chinese Studies
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Biographical Dictionary of Republican China. Edited by BoormanHoward L. and HowardRichard C.. New York: Columbia University Press. Vol. 1, 1967 ($20.00), Vol. II, 1968 ($20.00), Vol. III, 1970 ($25.00), Vol. IV, 1971 ($25.00). [Cited as BDRC in this article.]
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2011
Abstract
Involving the efforts of over one hundred scholars for over fifteen years, the dictionary is now wrapped up in four giant volumes of more than one million printed words. Its publication not only fills a major void on the reference shelf of modern Chinese history but also thrusts upon scholarly attention many compelling issues by the collective presentation of the biographies of some six hundred Chinese leaders who were active in 1911–1949 in the fields of politics and the military as well as in business and banking, literature, the arts, the press and publishing, education, medicine, and religion. In response to the urgent need for Chinese Communist studies in mid-20th century America, the work covers the prominent figures in the People's Republic who appeared during the Republican (1912–49) period. The concern for contemporary development is also reflected in the omission of many important figures whose career had little relevance to the rise of the Chinese Communist state and in the emphasis on the military and politics. Many native Chinese writers contribute to the dictionary their intimate knowledge of the period as well as their biases, taboos, and myths. Since there is much room for improvement in terms of historical perceptiveness and scholarly balance, three proposals are given, aimed at adding the finishing touch to this monumental work.
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- Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1972
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1 The Chinese Society Bibliography Project, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, under the directorship of G. William Skinner, with which the reviewer has been associated since 1966, is aimed at a comprehensive coverage of the secondary works—monographic publications, journal articles and formal degree theses—on modern Chinese society (1644–1970), in all languages, with computerized information retrieval systems designed for analytical annotations to each entry's geographic and temporal scopes, primary and secondary topics, rural-urban types of location, and the nature of documentation. Among the Project's products will be three detailedly indexed volumes on Chinese, Japanese and Western language works, to be published by the Stanford University Press, with each volume containing more than ten thousand entries.
2 While the text of this article is devoted to the substantive rather than technical problems involved in the making of the dictionary, editorial attention ought to be paid for the future finishing job not only to the rather numerous typographical errors but also to the correct rendering of Chinese characters, e.g., yi (a), instead of huan (b) (II, 38), in the case of Ch'en Yi, Governor of Szechwan under Yuan Shih-k'ai's rule, and mien (c), instead of kai (d) (II, 326), in the case of writer Hsia Mien-tsun, and of restoring Charlie Soong's proper Chinese name, Sung Yüeh (e) -ju from the widely cited but erroneous Sung Yao (f) -ju.
3 One gathers a far stronger impression when he leafs through the 320-page Bibliography, which lists mostly sources in Chinese. Especially when one learns die facts that while most of the contributors are responsible each for only a few entries in the book there are a handful of Chinese writers who contributed a large number of entries, that some senior Chinese scholars who had participated in the project chose to remain anonymous, and that the “Acknowledgement” pages does not cite those who served as critics of individual essays, he senses a still greater influence from the Chinese.
4 It is not difficult to compile such a list. The Oral History Projects on the twentieth-century Chinese politics, for instance, sponsored separately by Academia Sinica's Institute of Modern History and by Columbia University's East Asian Institute, have already contacted hundreds of such informants since late 1950's.