During his stay in IHSS this fall, Michael A. Szonyi, Professor of Chinese History and former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, was engaged with our academic community vigorously, joining the panel of “South and North in Chinese History” Panel at Beijing Forum and giving two splendid lectures on Chinese local history ranging from the Ming dynasty to the twenty-first century.
In the session titled The Guardhouse and the Manchurian City at Beijing Forum, Professor Szonyi gave a talk by beginning with the concept of the guardhouse system in the Ming Dynasty and constructed the shared historical context of the Ming guardhouse amidst the division between the geographical divide of South and North. The guardhouse system was not only a military system but also an administrative and social system. Thus, it influenced, in all manners, the creation of the relationship between the state and the society, as well as local identities. In the South, the guardhouse system impacted the formation of families; in the North, there was another concept of “menhu (门户)” working in parallel logic with the guardhouses. This proves that the guardhouse system in the Ming dynasty significantly influenced the familial relationships of the northern regions, even though the discourse on such topics used different phrases to designate what happened in the North vis-à-vis the South.
Professor Szonyi’s lecture on the diaries of an extremely ordinary peasant Hou Yonglu(侯永禄) provides a unique perspective to revisit the Chinese modern history through the lens of a local farmer in northwestern Shanxi Province. Such a diary unrolled abundant details about how the common Chinese people are molded by major historical events and how they in return influenced the development of such incidents. The lecture particularly investigated the lasting impact of the familial structure on people’s daily life. While engaged in close cooperation with the Center for Research on Local Historical Documents at Xiamen University(厦门大学民间历史文献研究中心) for the last couple of years, in another lecture Professor Szonyi shared his new ideas of how to approach a large corpus of local historical documents in Yongtai area of Fujian province(福建永泰地区), which nears ten thousand in quantity, covers a wide range of types, including land lease, family genealogy, account books, book of renqing（人情簿）, etc., from Ming Dynasty to modern times. Previously these documents are studied as the testament to the contemporary social economic realities. Professor Szonyi switched the focus onto the problem of the “information ecosystem” that such land contracts constitute, which requires of us to think about these documents in relation to one another and in bigger context to figure out their preservation, circulation and utilization.
Lately Professor Szonyi has been writing a book about the contemporary rural society in China to the general public in the US. In an IHSS seminar he shared his motivation as well as his latest thoughts. Right from his beginning of the academic career, he has been interested in how Chinese normal peasants tango with the big history. With great academic freedom after retiring from Fairbank Center and inspired by the late Professor Vogel at Harvard, he feels propelled to take on such challenge. After analyzing the potential problems of narrating Chinese rural society within the frame work of three separate periods, namely the early twentieth century, Mao era and time after reform and opening up, he proposed to anchor his study on the continuing role of familial structure within rural community and looking at inequality from a long-term perspective. While ambitious about his work, Professor Szonyi is fully aware of his challenges in terms of theory, writing to the general public and politics itself.
