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发表于 2015-2-7 05:38:36
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中国大门口的守望者（英文）
哈佛大学荣誉教授 傅高义
【编者的话】1963年成立于香港的“大学服务中心”，在冷战时期是西方中国研究者的大本营。1988年中心并入香港中文大学，更名为“中国研究服务中心”，拥有当代中国国情研究最齐全的图书馆，被称为“中国研究的麦加”。2015年1月，中心举办成立50周年研讨会，多位中国研究领域的世界级学术泰斗齐聚一堂，回忆他们与中心的交往故事。FT中文网获得授权，刊发一组来自研讨会的回忆文章。在60年代积极参与中心创建过程的哈佛大学荣誉教授、《邓小平时代》作者傅高义(Ezra F. Vogel)在发言中回忆了中心的创建和发展历程，以及它对几代中国研究者的影响，本文为他发言的英文实录，原题为“Milestones in the History of the Universities Service Centre”。
It was my privilege to take part in the founding of the Universities Service Centre and its activities over half a century. It is my good fortune to live long enough to join you in celebrating this anniversary. Today it is my responsibility to pass on to you revolutionary successors my recollections of some the major changes during this half century and to endeavor to explain the origins of these changes.
The founding of the Universities Service Centre
We are all beneficiaries of the far-sighted academic statesmen and foundation executives who launched this center. During the Cold War, when China and the West had almost no contact with each other, they realized that someday the West and China would come into contact and that the world would be served by a better understanding of China. As early as 1949, some academics began proposing more study of Communist China. But Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ranting about communist spies and sympathizers infiltrating our government and our universities gave rise to fear that paralyzed anyone who wanted to study “Red China.”
After McCarthy died in 1957, some academic statesmen began to move. In 1959, John Fairbank, who was then President of the American Association for Asian Studies, with the cooperation of the Ford Foundation invited 22 participants to a meeting in Gould House in Dobbs Ferry, New York to consider how to expand studies of contemporary China. After the end of the meeting Fairbank yielded to those who believed that the future of Chinese studies belonged to the disciplines and that the Social Sciences Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies which were organized by disciplines were in a better position than the Association of Asian Studies. So under the Joint Committee on Contemporary China set up by the SSRC and the ACLS, the various disciplines began organizing to promote China studies.
These Western academic statesmen and their foundation supporters realized that for better understanding of contemporary China, they not only needed to build libraries and train university faculty around the world, but they needed to build a facility in Hong Kong to service scholars who could there gain access to materials and to people who had lived in or at least visited China. The academic statesmen trying to build contemporary China studies were aware that in Hong Kong enemies who wanted to destroy each other lived side by side and that it was not even clear who was spying for whom. Representatives from China and Western countries that had fought each other in Korea only a few years earlier lived warily in the same community. Hong Kong was one of the great spy centers in the world, and we academics had difficulty convincing many people that there was a difference between scholarship and spying. Many refugees were reluctant to be seen talking with us for fear that they might be identified as with one side and become targets of retribution. We were walking on eggshells as we tried to expand our contacts while ensuring that people who talked with us did not themselves get into trouble for talking with us.
Yet despite these problems, there was no place in the world where so much information and so many people flowed in and out of China. It was important for scholars to be there. Creating a center was also important for the British government in Hong Kong that wanted to keep track of scholars and was cautious about granting visas for people whose activities they could not follow. For the British government, worried about possible trouble makers and struggling to avoid outbreaks of violence, the center could register foreign scholars and monitor their activities.
Representatives of major media outlets had already gone to Hong Kong in the 1950s which became their base for reporting on China. Governments of the major countries of the world were already using their Consulates in Hong Kong not only to collect materials but to analyze and report on developments in China. The academic world was a step behind the media and the governments.
Many foundations, especially the Carnegie Foundation, supported the effort to develop an academic service center in Hong Kong, an effort coordinated by an organization, Education and World Affairs, led by its president, William Marvel. Although the foundations were all American, Marvel, with the advice and help of academics, decided that the University Services Centre in Hong Kong would serve scholars not only from the United States but from around the world. It would provide books, journals, and newspapers for scholars and offer a select group of them office space. The initial head of the advisory committee was Sir William Haytor who had been responsible for the report that led to designating certain British universities to focus research on certain regions of the world.
In the fall of 1963, Marvel dispatched a staff member, Robert Gray, to go to Hong Kong to find quarters and a staff to serve as a center. After some months in which no progress was made, Gray was recalled to New York. Marvel then contacted Jerry Cohen who was then a legal scholar spending the year in Kowloon. Within weeks Cohen, then 33 years old, had rented some rooms in the office building attached to the Peninsula Hotel, hired a small administrative staff and began interviewing a series of refugees from mainland China who had been officials in local governments and had experience in dealing with legal cases.
The move to 155 Argyle Street
Within months, Cohen had arranged that the University Services Centre rent a large independent residence at 155 Argyle St. It proved to be a wonderful location, in the heart of Kowloon, with a small yard, a large kitchen, and some dining and living space that was transformed into our meeting rooms. Former bedrooms were converted to offices and facilities were available to 20 young scholars. It was recognized that the scholars, mostly graduate students, did not have their own funds to pay for rent and the foundations therefore provided the rooms for select young scholars.
Arrangements were made with the Union Research Institute, under the leadership of Anderson Shih, to use its materials. The Union Research Institute had originally been established by the “third force” seeking an alternative to the Communists and the Kuomintang. The Union Research Institute had acquired a fairly complete collection of what was then a small number of English and Chinese language books on contemporary China. It also had a clipping service from major mainland Chinese language newspapers that were sorted into files so that scholars working on a particular topic could go to those files. The available files were modest in number and primitive compared to the electronic files that became available several decades later, but they served as a basis for initial studies for graduate students getting started in their careers getting an understanding of various topics. The Centre worked out an arrangement whereby the materials from the Union Research Institute could be borrowed by scholars at our Centre who used them to develop their understanding of different topics and different localities.
What was then unique to Hong Kong compared to China centers around the world was the availability of refugees for interviewing. There were tens of thousands of refugees. For research purposes, it was fortuitous that in 1962, just before the Centre opened, many refugees had been allowed to cross over the border unrestrained. The vast majority of the refugees had a very narrow range of experience, mostly in their own village. Very few had experience in administrative positions that gave them knowledge beyond their immediate contacts, and it was always difficult to find enough refugees who were informed on any particular topic. Some of the refugees who were especially knowledgeable, like “Lao” Yang and “Xiao” Yang, were hired as full-time researchers. One of the first former cadres whom Jerry Cohen was introduced to was Eddie Chan, who had been a “patriotic youth” from Hong Kong who went to Guangzhou after takeover where he worked in United Front activities until he was criticized for his views. Jerry introduced me to Eddie Chan who was from Guangzhou and served as my research assistant. Later I was able to arrange for Eddie to come to Cambridge, MA where he continued on as my research assistant.
Newspaper runs for several regional newspapers were already available in Hong Kong in the 1960s. As one of the first scholars interviewing in Hong Kong during the first year of our Centre, I found quite a few refugees from Guangdong and decided to do a study of post-1949 Guangdong. In the years after 1964 I kept coming back to Hong Kong during my summer vacation. I completed my first book in 1969, Canton Under Communism: Programs and Politics in a Provincial Capital, 1949-1969. After I returned to Harvard, I was able to arrange for Harvard to get a run of the Guangdong provincial newspapers, especially Nanfang Ribao. Eddie Chan and I would sit together reading the newspaper as he helped me read not only the lines but between the lines. This was an enormous help in understanding the significance the articles. The attention to politics in a particular locality proved to be one of the promising ways of studying developments in China. Lynn White studied Shanghai, Vic Falkenheim studied Fujian, and Ken Lieberthal studied Tianjin.
Some like Dick Solomon, Mike Oksenberg, and Mike Lampton were interested in foreign policy as well as domestic policy. Some scholars like Bill Parish, Martin Whyte, Deborah Davis, and Charlotte Ikels examined family and local community organization. Stanley Rosen and Suzanne Pepper worked on education, and Susan Shirk worked on school classmates, Andrew Walder on factories, Jean Oi, Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan and Dick Madsen on rural organization. Some local scholars in Hong Kong like Ambrose King, F.C. Chan, Byron Weng, and K.C. Kuan, joined in our deliberations. Together we gradually built up a more rounded understanding of Communist organizational structure and life in China after 1949. Today we have far more materials available on China and we can visit directly places in China that were closed to us in the 1960s. But we have reason to be proud of our achievements. I made my first visit to Guangdong in 1973 and spent much time there in the 1980s, but as I look over what I wrote in 1969 in Canton Under Communism, before I had a chance to visit Guangdong, I feel even now that thanks to the materials and the refugees I met at the Centre and the discussions with fellow scholars, I got the basic story right. I know many of you have had similar experiences. The interaction between all of us at the Universities Service Centre, pursuing so many different topics from so many different disciplinary perspectives, not only raised the level for all of us, but forced us to see our individual topics in relation to broader developments in China, without regard to disciplinary boundaries.
Since we could not then observe developments in China, from the outside we honed our skills in textual analysis, paying attention to changes of wording that signified changes in policies. We learned how to follow the political campaigns through various stages and to see the annual and five year rhythm of planning cycles. We expanded on Franz Schurmann’s insights about the importance of propaganda and organization at the center of Communist Party activities.
The availability of facilities at the University Services Centre, combined with the written materials and borrowing privileges from the Union Research Institute, along with office space at the Centre and access to refugees who came to be interviewed, paved the way for a rapid growth in the number of scholars who studied contemporary China. In 1958-59, Franz Schurmann was a lonely scholar trying to study contemporary China in Hong Kong, with the help of the Union Research Institute. After he returned he urged the establishment of a center that would allow more people to come. The opening of the Centre paved the way for a rapid growth in the number of scholars who came to Hong Kong to study contemporary China. Within six years, by March 1970, some 250 scholars had used the Centre. Among those, 109 were American graduate students and 17 were non-American graduate students. Of the 250 scholars who came to the Centre in these early years, roughly one-third came from some fifteen countries other than the United States.*
The Centre became a favorite meeting place for others in Hong Kong, --Consulate officials, representatives from the media, and even some business people in Hong Kong --whose job it was to follow the developments in mainland China. The Centre became the gathering place in Hong Kong for serious discussion of developments in China. The scholars at the Centre in turn benefitted from the close interaction with government and business officials who were following developments in China.
A small number of senior scholars, including Lucian Pye and Doak Barnett spent time at the Centre in the 1960s. But overwhelmingly, we young scholars, graduate students or junior faculty, were the core of the Centre. We became a scholarly community as we talked China over the lunch table, brought in visitors to speak, presented our topics for criticism and suggestions from each other, and passed on bits of the latest information. There was no hierarchical structure among us. We were all learning together and none of us had authority over anyone else. When we opened in 1964, we knew precious little about the fundamentals of Communist rule. We were excited as we learned new pieces of information, put together our basic understanding of the structure of Communist rule, and followed the tumultuous changes taking place in China.
When the Centre opened in 1964 it was clear the Great Leap Forward had led to disasters, and in our early years we were striving to comprehend the depth and scope of the disaster. We lived amidst the stories of heroic escapes of refugees and learned from them of the starvation that had cost the lives of others around them.
Within two years after we moved to Argyle St., the Cultural Revolution broke out. Initially we could scarcely believe that leaders like Peng Zhen, Yang Shangkun, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping who played such a prominent part in Communist history were under attack. Initially a few scholars found the rallying cry of “to rebel is justified” attractive, just as they believed that rebelling against those who waged war against Vietnam was justified. Before long, however, it was difficult to admire the chaos that Mao had brought as Red Guards split into factions struggling against each other. Nearly all of us scholars at the Centre opposed the American pursuit of the Vietnam War, especially the bombing of Cambodia and the use of napalm, but we differed, sometimes passionately, in how vehemently to express our opposition. The drama that was going on in mainland China was echoed in our excitement as we tried to discern the patterns, the scope, and the impact of the Cultural Revolution.
And while the chaos was enveloping China, many of us continued our efforts to understand the basic structure of Chinese life, the nature of Party life and organization, the structure of the government, the relation between the center and the localities, the nature of local organization in communes, state factories, urban neighborhoods, families and friendship groups.
Despite what differences we had among ourselves in our evaluation of what was going on, what united us was our effort to gain a better understanding of China and the excitement of probing the mysteries. While we were learning, many of us were also thinking about what our countries could do and should do to develop better relations with China.
Travel to China, 1969 on
Those of us studying China in the 1960s thirsted for contact with Chinese communist representatives in Hong Kong and an opportunity to visit China. We invited Chinese communist representatives in Hong Kong to visit the Centre and give talks but in the 1960s none of them accepted our invitations. As China began opening up. British, French, Canadian, and then selected American groups had opportunities to visit China. Once the first delegation of the Committee for Concerned Asian Scholars, which included many of our Centre scholars, had an opportunity to visit China at the time of Kissinger’s first visit to China, we Centre scholars became an audience to listen to those who traveled to China and then stopped in Hong Kong to report on their trip. Our Centre became a stop for delegations going to China who stopped on the way in to get from us a briefing on what they might look out for during their travel in China. Throughout the 1970s China gave out very few visas and all of us eagerly sought an opportunity to get on some delegation that was allowed to visit.
By the 1980s some of us had opportunities to stay in China for months or even longer, but most archives in the mainland remained closed and even libraries that began to open in China, were not as well organized as our USC library. Before the end of the 1980s, many of us in universities in the West took advantage of summer vacations and sabbaticals to go to China. Given the little time we could take off from our universities, we often spent more time in China than at the Universities Service Centre.
And once China began opening up, the significance of refugee interviewing began to dry up.
As China began opening in the 1970s, scholars who profited from the Centre, played an important role as our countries began to expand their relations with each other. Richard Solomon was able to use his insights about Mao and other Chinese leaders and about Chinese patterns of negotiation as a staff member advising Henry Kissinger. Mike Oksenberg became the strategist at the White House under President Jimmy Carter for normalizing relations between the United States and China. Mike Lampton, as president of the US-China Friendship Association for a decade, played a critical role in linking Chinese and American political, business, and academic leaders. Jerry Cohen, Stanley Lubman, and others advised foreign firms about the legal issues they would face as they entered China. Bernie Frolic, who had served as head of the Centre for a year, was later assigned to the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, linking scholars from China and the West. David Wilson who frequently visited the Centre played a key role in negotiating the Joint Declaration between Britain and China over the future of Hong Kong and later served as governor.
But the indirect results of our work at the USC had an even broader impact. We who took part in the Centre in the 1960s and 1970s built the courses we taught on China around what we had learned from the Centre. In the summer of 1964, I left Hong Kong after my first year of research by boat, and on the boat I spent a few hours each day writing the first draft of the first course I taught on Chinese communist society. And we wrote books that became core volumes for those studying China. And even if the heads of foreign governments and congressmen and business leaders who visited China and dealt with Chinese representatives did not read our books, they benefitted from staff members who had read our books and from briefings by those who drew on what we learned at the Centre.
The growth of our library collection
By the 1960s as the hope for a third force in China disappeared, the Union Research Institute began to decline and could not keep up with the purchase of new materials being published on China. Our Universities Service Centre therefore began to develop a small library of reference materials for use by scholars at the Centre. In the first decade of our Centre, the Centre directorship changed often, but from 1974-1988, John Dolfin, who had been a graduate student at Columbia University in Tibetan studies, was director. He provided stability and direction for the Centre. He became a storehouse of information for scholars coming to the Centre. He advised the new arrivals how to go about research, how to make contacts, and how to find people to interview. He was always on the lookout of opportunities to purchase written materials for the Centre. He found an opportunity to acquire a huge collection of Chinese regional newspapers, unrivaled in any scholarly center anywhere. By the late 1980s the Centre had a huge and excellent library collection, with a local newspaper collection unrivaled in any library anywhere.
The move to the Chinese University
For many years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, our Centre was under great financial pressure. Many foundations, including the Ford Foundation which was then our main supporter, believed that their mission was to start new projects. For a few years, as they put it, they would water the tree but if the tree was to survive beyond the first few years, it should generate its own financial support. In the 1970s as people could begin going in to China, the Ford Foundation wanted to help scholars who were beginning to travel into China, and in the 1980s it played a key role in training Chinese in fields like economics and law that would assist China in its transition to taking broader part in world activities. All this was good for the field of Chinese studies, but it created problems for our Centre for Ford wanted to end its support for our Centre. In the 1980s our director John Dolfin had to scrounge for funds to keep the Centre going. Our budget was pared to a bare minimum. Year after year we had to consider the possibility the Centre might close down and we had to appeal to the Ford Foundation and various other foundations to rescue us.
In the late 1980s, the Hong Kong government and the Chinese University of Hong Kong began to consider the possibility that the Centre be moved to the Chinese University and that the collection become part of Chinese University of Hong Kong. David Wilson, then a key political official in the Hong Kong government, not yet governor, played a key role in getting the government to commit funds necessary to supporting the Centre to be moved to the Chinese University. At Chinese University, FC Chan, a physicist who gradually transformed himself into a leading specialist on Chinese culture and contemporary China, who was registrar at CUHK, played a key role in gaining support within the university to support the Centre.
Many of the materials from China were not available from regular book stores and collecting materials became an art. Jean Hong who worked as a research assistant at the Centre from 1979-1983 became a treasure in collecting materials, and in 1988 came back to the Centre where she presided over the growth of the Centre library as a major resource for scholars working on contemporary China.
In 1988 the Centre moved its library collection to CUHK where it became part of the CHUK Library. This facilitated the expansion of the collection of materials for the use of scholars studying contemporary China. Jean Hong who worked as a research assistant at the Centre from 1979-1983 became a treasure in collecting materials, and in 1988 came back to the Centre where she presided over the growth of the Centre library as a major resource for scholars working on contemporary China. She realized that developing the collection required not only buying books through ordinarily book-buying channels but keeping the lookout for other materials that could be useful for scholars. She realized that the collection of these materials relied on the cooperation of scholars, and she took initiatives to strengthen the sense of community among scholars using the materials. She began to use the internet to control of information that made the material accessible to scholars. Scholars from mainland China began coming to the Centre for they found that the collection was more comprehensive than collections on the mainland, better organized, and easier to use. H. C. Kuan and his successors played a role in building programs around the Centre that maintained it as an international center.
The next half century
We who are assembled here to celebrate the first half century of the University Service Centre can take pride in our achievements in promoting better understanding of China in a very critical period of the transition of a unified China into an active participant in world affairs. We are dedicated to achieving a deeper understanding of China with the belief that objective understanding can lead to wiser decisions of benefit to all countries. We who have used the Centre in its first half century have benefitted enormously from the wise academic statesmen and foundation and government executives. We who benefitted from what an earlier generation created have a responsibility to do what we can to see that the Centre continues to play an important role in the future.
Now that the field of Chinese studies has blossomed around the world, the Centre is no longer the only important gathering place for those doing advanced research on contemporary China. But China is so important to the world, that we need multiple centers that can help advance the understanding of China. Our responsibility is to help the Centre realize its greatest potential to continue enhancing our understanding of China. Hong Kong is no longer a place for interviewing refuges, but it still occupies a unique location in a city that remains a gateway to the mainland and, a city based on the rule of law where there are is a free press. Our Center faces difficult decisions: we must decide how much of the collection can be made available to scholars around the world electronically. We must decide how to select and purchase new materials from the vast sea of information and writing about China. We must consider how to use the leverage from the location of these materials here in our Library to bring together for study groups and conferences for scholars of contemporary China. I believe that if we succeed in our efforts to solve these problems that it will not only benefit foreign countries but will benefit China as well. I hope that all of you who are here today will join us in doing what we can to assure the vitality of our Center in its next fifty years. Wansui.
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发表于 2015-2-7 05:37:10