Jim is disappointed, as most of us specialists are, in the use of prefab, conventional narrative objects in the book —Confucianism, the “tribute system,” supposed millennia of cultural and political continuity —and generally what John Wills, 30 years ago, was criticizing as the “reification” of China in preference to the actual history of states and societies based in what is now geographical China. Yes, these do appear and reappear in book after book, and we all write reviews attempting to clue readers that this is not the only way to see China’s history. Few of these books are written by people who are leaders in the field of early modern or even modern China. It’s not “we” who are doing it. In fact, in follow-up tweets Jim very reasonably points to the Harvard series including the books by Tim Brook and Bill Rowe as books he approves of (but Bill gets no mention in this review as having made such an effort at all).

So a distorted notion of what is going on in the field is a problem with the review. This “we” —it is not actually historians of China who are being addressed. Not Paul Cohen, not Bill Rowe. Not Peter Perdue, who gets only a mention, for an old article deconstructing the “tributary system” concept (which is a standing concept only in the corners of the field where Jim is looking). Who is “we”?

But I don’t find it the most striking problem.

Jim is not an elderly man, and he is probably aware that he works in a field in which a very substantial portion of the most prominent scholars are women. But in this long essay, the only women he mentions are 1) Merle Goldman, who appears as John King Fairbank’s sort of editorial assistant for the China: A New History, and 2) a shortish list of women whom he compliments for doing “women’s history.” He wants you to note that women’s history is not trivial. But he doesn’t want you to be very clear about the ways in which prominent women in the field of Chinese studies have in fact already taken apart the narrative he criticizes. But those women —the ones who are not helpers or who have not been working steadily and successfully to change the old narrative of China— are disappeared. Only Jim appears as the critic of all the “lazy” narrative stuff. We haven’t all been lazy.

Students who have been doing my China history courses at Dartmouth would not recognize the “we” Jim is addressing. Textbooks are not a big part of the courses, but the texts have been Valerie Hansen’s The Open Empire (which takes them to 1600) and my The Wobbling Pivot, which takes up in 1800. I’m not the only one using this textbook (which wasn’t actually written or marketed as a textbook). My students would recognize Jim’s “we” only as the former historiography that they hear about at pertinent intervals in the course, not as the historiography written or taught by their professor.

As for The Wobbling Pivot, Paul Cohen, who himself is not given full credit by Jim for dismantling old narratives, pointed out in his review of the books what was going on in the book —a new narrative of what we call “China” in the modern period. He wasn’t completely happy with the new narrative (I’m also afraid he read a not completely corrected reviewers version of the fist edition). His criticisms have been influential in shaping the new edition of The Wobbling Pivot, which will cover not 1800 to the present but 1900 to the present (because my forthcoming history of the Qing will cover the 19th century). But Cohen was able to figure out (ten years ago) that what Jim wants to happen in the field was already happening. There is no monolithic Chinese culture, no absolute Confucian anything, no tributary system, no irrational rejection of Macartney, no fatal obstruction by the Empress Dowager, no parochial 1911 Revolution… I could go on. In fact, that theme of new concepts, narratives, characters, and occasionally sources comes up pretty frequently (whether for good or for ill assessments) in reviews of my books. Nobody thinks I am part of Jim’s “we.”

As for Hansen’s The Open Empire, this is the second time in a month that I have had occasion to refer to her in reference in genteel misogyny in historiography —not practiced by old men, but by merely mature men who should know better. In the first (https://www.suduri.net/comments_7.html), I had to point out a vicious and dishonest characterization of her book The Year 1000 was used, gratuitously, along with similar defamation of Carol Delany, in order to excoriate another historian to whom they had virtually no connection. As I commented, this genteel misogyny encompasses not only malicious and gratuitous misrepresentation, but also hypercritical views of women’s work and failure to acknowledge women’s achievements at all (often while appropriating their interpretations). That is what has happened to her this time. Allow me to express some perplexity.

It may not be coincidence that in these two cases involving Hansen occur in the English-language historiography of the Islamic world and of China, in which it is easier to practice passive sexism because not many readers out there know what is actually going on in the field. I’ve now gone through a whole career of graduate work and teaching and this is not any better —it might be worse. In the 1970s Mary Wright, Nancy Lee Swann (whom somebody on Twitter recently thought they had discovered), Tu Lien-the, and Marie-Claire Bergère were all recognized as seminal contributors (even if they couldn’t attend faculty meetings, in Wright’s case), Since then, Evelyn Rawski, Susan Naquin, Susan Mann, Mary Rankin, Beatrice Bartlett, Lillian Li, Catherine Jami, Madeleine Zelin, Ann Walthall, Laura Hofstadter have been among the most prominent figures reshaping a narrative of the Qing —not Qing “women’s” history, as Jim would cast female participation, but in the shaping the broad Qing narratives of economic, social and political history. For earlier periods, Pat Ebrey, Valerie Hansen, Naomi Standen, and others have made essential emendations. Together they have promoted attention to non-elites, non-majority cultures, alternative accounts, closer adherence to sources and facts than to received wisdom, all of which has generated new broad narratives.

Now, I do think Jim’s point here is about textbooks and trade books —the kind that are likely to influence readers outside the field. But it is not the case that these authors, male and female, have not contributed at that broad level. Rawski and Naquin’s Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century already broke that ground in 1987, putting study of the eighteenth century on quite a different footing. Hansen’s The Open Empire was published in 2000. The Wobbling Pivot in 2010. Ebrey and Walthall published Modern East Asia from 1600 in 2013. None of these books are slaves to the “lazy” narrative that Jim regrets and attributes to “us.” It is something else altogether that they have in common. As I wrote in HJAS (review of Cambridge History of China, commenting on this problem of disappearing women scholars as a general practice of the CHC series), “We really must redouble our efforts to induce women to take an interest in Qing history.” (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725776/pdf) The editors queried it, but I responded at the time that the irony would be obvious to any reader. But, maybe not. It is embarrassing for a historian who is a woman to have to write a blog entry like this in, as one says, this day and age. But things don’t always go forward.

Jim’s “we” is by induction reduced to trade writers who haven’t caught up, IR writers who used hackneyed histories of China as a crutch, or to the disappointing cohort of mature and younger men in the field who are still working in the old mode of ignoring, belittling, and gratuitously criticizing the work of the women who have already done what Jim says “we” still need to do.