The Saga of Anthropology in China: From Malinowski to Moscow to Mao

From Malinowski to Moscow to Mao

Gregory Guldin, Gregory Eliyu Guldin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781563241857
• eBook ISBN: 9781315288079
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book studies the development of the four fields of anthropology in China. Looking at both the political and social contexts, Greg Guldin demonstrates how political turmoil has shaped China's twentieth century anthropological landscape.

Part I
Anthropological Life after Death

Focus 1:
Long Live Liang Zhaotao!

The central reception area is crowded with faculty and staff as well as both present and former students. On one side of the U-shaped space formed by the reception area's sofas and chairs sits the honoree, Professor Liang Zhaotao, founder of the department that is now honoring him on his seventieth birthday. Before a large and brightly painted black-on-red banner emblazoned with the character "shou" (longevity), the Anthropology Department's Communist Party secretary rises to greet the 100-plus people who have gathered for the occasion. The Party secretary lists Liang's lifetime accomplishments: establishing the department, discovering the skull of prehistoric Maba Man, and training generations of anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology students. The university Party secretary, rising from the center section, conveys the congratulations of the Communist Party's University Committee to Professor Liang, and asks the university's president if he wishes to speak; he declines, indicating his concurrence with the previous remarks.

Linguistics Professor Zhuang Yiqun, acting as master of ceremonies, then invites me, a visiting professor in the department for the year, to speak. I had been forewarned by Professor Zhuang, so my remarks are ready as I dutifully rise to praise Professor Liang for his single-minded dedication to the resuscitation of his discipline and to inform my listeners of the growing awareness abroad of Professor Liang's accomplishments. Now, finally, Professor Liang himself rises to speak.

First in a low voice, and then more animatedly, Liang Zhaotao conveys his vision of Chinese anthropology. He discusses the connections between ethnology and physical anthropology in his and others' studies of Hainan Island's minority nationalities, and then describes the similar joint use of archaeology, language study, and ethnology. He concludes that, as in America, anthropology in socialist China must be a four-fields discipline but that it must also include history and Marxism.

In an increasingly intense voice, Liang expresses his willingness to serve the discipline, the department, and the university, declaring with a flourish: "Wherever and whatever the school wants me to do, I will go and do it!" Somewhat spent by his own oration, Professor Liang thanks the university Party secretary, and proudly introduces the department's doctoral candidates, including the two or three trained solely in China—a historical first—as well as the graduate students the department had sent abroad.

By this point, the audience's private whisperings have grown louder, and the background rumble continues to grow as the floor is thrown open to anyone who wishes to speak. Fellow faculty and former students (there are quite a few who are both) read poems dedicated to Professor Liang or say a few words in appreciation of the professor's guidance and inspiration over the years. Professor Zhuang then presents Liang with a compilation of theses written by his past and present students. Finally, a large birthday cake is brought out for distribution as the university Party secretary and president bid farewell and leave.

That evening of June 26, 1986, a birthday banquet is held in one of the restaurants on campus. With over a dozen tables, each accommodating a dozen diners, the brief congratulatory speeches as well as an address by Professor Liang are almost completely drowned out by the guests' chatter. This does not seem to bother anyone other than my wife and me, perhaps because everyone else understands that tonight's message is not contained in the speeches but in the fact of the celebration itself. At the head table, a former university president, a university Party vice-secretary, and other university leaders sit, eat, and toast with Liang Zhaotao to make a common and public show of respect for the tireless advocate of the oft-maligned field of anthropology. Just a decade earlier, not one of their predecessors would have openly greeted him.

Chapter 1
A Decade of Changes

Resuscitation

In 1976, Liang Zhaotao was in no position to be feted by anyone, let alone the leaders of his danwei, Zhongshan University.¹ He had been home for only four years, after having been called back from a May Seventh Cadre School in northern Guangdong Province. The mid-1970s were the ebb tide of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the anti-intellectual zeal of that time was abating. Authorities of the Guojia Wenwu Ju (State Cultural Relics Bureau) had decided that Zhongshan University should have an archaeology major and that intellectuals like Liang, despite their uncertain political reliability, were needed to aid in the necessary academic rebuilding.

Archaeology had already been revived in a number of institutes and museums nationwide. So too had paleoanthropology. Ethnology, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology, however, were still banned; officially excoriated as "bourgeois sciences," these disciplines were formally barred in name although their substance was often carried out under other rubrics such as "minority studies" or "nationality work."

At the universities, "worker-peasant-soldier" (gong-nong-bing) enrollees filled the seats in the recently reopened classrooms and maintained a properly revolutionary guard over the intellectuals returning from their "reform through labor" stints in the countryside. Academic journals began tentatively to publish again, although the social sciences lagged behind the natural sciences by a few years. The climate was improving—indeed merely the fact that universities were reopening was a positive sign—but the oppressive fear that things could quickly turn ugly again had not dissipated.

Then in mid-December 1978 came the turning point in China's post-Cultural Revolution history. The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress reoriented the Party and the country to pursue "socialist modernization." Class struggle was to be downgraded, income was to be linked to output in agriculture, and some of de facto leader Deng Xiaoping's allies were returned to key economic and political positions (Rosen 1984:6; Rozman 1987:637).

These moves had been foreshadowed the previous year when that same Party congress had adopted a program to build a powerful, modern, socialist China by the year 2000 A.D. Chairman Hua Guofeng had stressed a major role for the masses in the transformation while Deng had emphasized a greater reliance on nonpolitical experts. By late 1978, however, Hua was clearly eclipsed by Deng and changing policies began to show the shift. In November all remaining "rightists" were rehabilitated and soon after the Third Plenum meetings ended, the class designations of former exploiters who had "behaved themselves"—not given cause for renewed offense—were likewise removed. It seemed that a change was indeed in the offing, and this was confirmed with the December meetings (Rosen 1984:6–7).

The new emphasis on technical expertise demanded a radical reorientation of the educational system from an emphasis primarily on politically correct attitudes and behavior to one focused on academic and disciplinary competence. Secondary schools—and even primary schools—geared themselves to help students climb the educational ladder (Rosen 1985:817), and in no endeavor was this more important than in preparing students for the restored nationwide university entrance exams. Potential college students were no longer required to work for two years before matriculation and, for the first time in three decades, the children of the old elites could apply to universities without restriction (Pepper 1984:3).

The social sciences began their renewal during the same period. Foreign and overseas Chinese visitors had long suggested that the development of the social sciences should accompany the emphasis on the growth of the natural sciences—that both were necessary if China were to truly modernize its society. Deng Xiaoping and one of his top advisers, Hu Qiaomu, were won over; Hu, a key figure himself in the Party's Propaganda Department and in the Ministry of Culture, issued the order to reestablish the proscribed disciplines. During the fall of 1977 a national meeting held in Beijing approved the revival of the social sciences. International relations and area studies, legal studies, demography, sociology, political science, and eventually even ethnology, anthropology, and psychology were resuscitated.²

Only after 1978, then, could realistic reevaluations of sociology and anthropology be contemplated; only then could there be a public debate—for the first time since the "Hundred Flowers" period of 1956–57—on the intrinsic merit of these disciplines to a socialist society. Of the two fields, sociology was the first to reemerge. Under the sponsorship of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), which had itself just emerged the previous year from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS, also called Academic Sinica), a March 1979 "Conference to Revive Sociology" was held. With Hu Qiaomu himself in attendance, the decision was made to set up the Chinese Sociology Research Association (CSRA) with a fifty-member council and the venerable sociologist Fei Xiaotong (Fei Hsiao-t'ung) as president.³ In 1982 at its first annual meeting the CSRA promptly changed its name to the Chinese Sociological Association (CSA) (Chu 1983:4; Liu and Feng 1986:562–63; Yan 1990:14; Yuan 1983:21). The pioneer sociologist Wu Wenzao (Wu Wen-tsao), who attended the founding meeting, was profoundly moved when he addressed the conference regarding "sociology and modernization" and was finally able once again to speak publicly about matters sociological (Wu 1986:93).

Having been proscribed in 1952 and then excoriated as an incorrigibly bourgeois field of study in the late 1950s, sociology could only have been revived with the express approval of the highest authorities in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as Hu's attendance at that 1979 conference indicated (Chu 1983:8). Fei Xiaotong's rapid return to not only acceptability but political prominence thus symbolized the new respectability of sociology and the social sciences and made easier the revival of sociology departments, institutes, and journals.⁴ Fudan University set up the first sociology department in 1980 and was soon followed by similar departments at Beijing (Peking), Nankai, and Zhongshan universities. October 1981 saw the inaugural publication of Shehui (Society), China's first sociology periodical in decades (Chu 1983:9; Huang 1986:4; Yuan 1983:20).

These early years of transition, however, also tested the emotional and professional stamina of scholars as the political winds would blow first one way and then another. Fei, for example, had initially been encouraged by developments to revive sociology and therefore had invited Yang Qingkun (C. K, Yang) of the University of Pittsburgh (and of Zhongshan University before the revolution) to come to China to give seminars in sociology. Fei, however, was criticized for his efforts "to bring capitalism back to China." The seminars were canceled and Yang had to wait a few more years before he could give such talks.

Ethnology also began to reemerge in 1978 with the increasing reappearance of minzu yanjiu (nationalities studies). Soon thereafter, Nationality Research Institutes in Beijing and the provinces were revived under the independent aegis of both the government's Nationality Affairs Commissions and CASS. Senior scholars like Yang Kun and Wu Wenzao began once again to train students and teach courses in ethnology. Ethnology (minzuxue) as a field was soon explicitly recognized with the emergence of such a specialty or department in a few of the recently revived nationality institutes. When CASS formally established a department of ethnology in its Nationality Institute, ethnology's twenty-year official banishment was clearly ended.⁵

Senior ethnologists, however, were cautious during these early reform years. Even after the Chinese Association of Ethnology Studies (Zhongguo Minzuxue Yanjiu Hui) was established, older scholars were advising people "not to use those three words"—he three characters of min-zu-xue (ethnology). With the vice-chair of the Nationalities Affairs Commission still declaring ethnology to be a "capitalist class discipline," many were frightened of too close an association with this successor organization to the original 1930s Chinese Ethnology Society. Long a pariah field, ethnology was only slowly emerging into political respectability.

By contrast, archaeology and physical anthropology did not suffer as much during the pre-reform era, so their growth in the 1980s was not quite so dramatic as that of fields that had been banned. Archaeology expanded into the universities with a Department of Archaeology established at Beijing University and with archaeology sections emerging in History Departments in nearly a dozen danwei. Museums and Cultural Relics Bureaus and teams, however, continued to employ most archaeological workers.

Physical anthropology continued in a few key centers in the country, with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology being the most noteworthy, Kunming's Zoology Institute expanded its work in primatology when it set up a primate biology section in 1981, while two danwei in Shanghai, Fudan University's Physical Anthropology Teaching Laboratory and the Museum of Natural History, continued their involvement in anthropometrical and other biological anthropology research and teaching. Medical schools also remained prominent in the training and employment of those whose specialties touched most closely on medical and biological anthropology.

Linguistics, the last of the four American fields, is similar to physical anthropology in China in that it does not currently exist as a free-standing academic department in any Chinese university. Beijing University does offer a linguistics major in its Chinese Language Department, and many other schools offer linguistics courses in the curricula of their Chinese Language and Literature Departments. Linguistics is coming back as a field in China in the post-reform period, but its advance is comparatively slow.

As for anthropology itself as a coherent and separate field, the picture has been a bit more complicated. When CASS was carved out of CAS in 1978 and began to set up constituent institutes, a number of scholars suggested that anthropology be revived. The National Nationalities Research Planning Meeting held in Kunming in April 1979 also witnessed many specialists' calling for anthropology's return amidst the general discussion of the use of the social sciences in implementing the Sixth Five-Year Plan regarding nationalities work.

The leadership in Beijing—at CASS, in the Party, and in the government—however, were reluctant to set up a field they did not clearly understand. They knew what minzuxue was—the study (xue) of nationalities (minzu)⁶—but what exactly was the scope of renleixue, the study of renlei (humanity)? Besides, there already existed archaeology, paleoanthropology, ethnology, and sociology—did China need yet another similar discipline?

Fei Xiaotong, after initially supporting anthropology's revival in 1979, is reported to have changed his mind by 1980. From then on, he was among those who opposed anthropology's return, arguing that it could not be shorn of its colonial background. Some explain Fei's opposition to anthropology as deriving from his British training, which made him more disposed to sociology and social anthropology than the American-modeled cultural anthropology of the southerners; others speculate that Fei believed until sociology was secure in China, there was no need to waste energy reviving yet another controversial discipline (Huang 1983:4–5).

Whatever the reason for his opposition, in 1980 Fei was not yet powerful enough to veto all academic moves he did not favor, even if he had wanted to. Other social scientists certainly disagreed with his arguments about the inapplicability of anthropology to the Chinese scene. The ethnologist Qiu Pu and Zhongshan University's Liang Zhaotao, for instance, both maintained that developing ethnology and anthropology that were both Chinese and Marxist was quite possible and indeed nec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Map : Provincial Boundaries and Major Cities of China, 1993
• PART I: ANTHROPOLOGICAL LIFE AFTER DEATH
• PART II: IMPORTING DISCIPLINES, 1898–1949
• PART III: EARLY PRC SOCIALISM AND THE SOVIET MODEL, 1949–1960
• PART IV: “MAOIZED” DISCIPLINES, 1957–1978
• PART V: NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIES: A CHINESE MODEL?
• Postscript
• References
• Glossary
• Index