Lei Qiang’s painstakingly assembled chronology of Yuan Tongli (1895–1965) is a treasure trove of modern Chinese intellectual history in the broad transnational sense. It not only features one of the foundational figures in modern Chinese library science but also reveals the wide scholarly networks Yuan benefited from and sustained over China’s tumultuous twentieth century. Drawing upon his own extensive professional and personal networks in and out of China, Lei collected and combed through a staggering number of published and unpublished primary sources from East Asia, Western Europe, and the United States. Using Yuan’s own words and his correspondence with a number of Chinese and non-Chinese intellectuals, the chronology paints a vivid picture of his development as a student, scholar, and librarian.
The five-volume set follows the typical format of a chronology for a Chinese intellectual luminary. Beginning with forewords—including those by Yuan’s family members—and a brief biography, it devotes most pages to reconstruct Yuan’s life based on his activities each year, set against a wider historical context. Lei carefully gleans these activities from his sources and provides useful notes on particular names and events mentioned in relation to Yuan. At the end, readers will also find select correspondence between Yuan and some 70 intellectual figures around the world and across the ideological spectrum, as well as the informative name indices organised by Chinese, Euro-American, Russian, and Japanese groups. The sheer amount of work in preparing these volumes is almost unbelievable, explaining the decade required to assemble the pieces. Given the immense value of this work for detailing intellectual chronology, its publication also raises the question of why this genre remains more of an East Asian tradition than an established form of modern scholarship.
Lei’s intellectual chronology in a way provides a critical insight into this question. As noted by Yuan’s son in his foreword, after settling in the United States in 1949, Yuan had to accept positions that he was vastly overqualified for, such as cataloguing Chinese materials at the Library of Congress. Men like Yuan were forced to enter into the entrenched hierarchy of knowledge in the United States, which tended to underappreciate traditional genres like intellectual chronology as mere sources to be subject to more rigorous analysis by more current methodologies. Interestingly, some of Yuan’s interlocutors in the set had similar observations. Chiang Yee, a Chinese artist and critic who was attempting a precarious move from Britain to the United States in the 1950s, confided to Yuan that the awkwardness of ‘asking people for money’ exacerbated the general disrespect towards the work of exiled Chinese intellectuals (p. 2199). As the pace of professionalisation accelerated for China studies in US academia after the Second World War, traditional knowledge forms, including the intellectual chronology, were no longer considered bona fide scholarship in and of themselves. Also cast down in the new hierarchy was the traditional Chinese intellectual whose works had not been validated by the peer-review process. Chiang Yee himself struggled for years to have a more secure position at Columbia University for exactly these reasons. Based at the Library of Congress, Yuan was to a degree removed from the stringent tenure requirements of the research university, deemed the pinnacle of the mid twentieth-century US knowledge economy. But as a scholar without requisite research monographs, he was also marginalised in the conventional narrative of the development of China studies in the United States, despite his pivotal role in building its critical infrastructure.
A similar process of marginalisation also applied to particular public-facing institutions like the China Institute in America, a topic studied by the reviewer and confirmed by Lei’s chronology. A pioneer organisation with significant participation by US-educated Chinese that promoted public understanding of China in the United States, the China Institute started issuing bibliographies useful to scholars and students of China not long after its founding in 1926. At the time, there were few other organisations or individuals doing such work. As a good friend of the China Institute’s long-time director Paul Meng (Meng Zhi, p. 728), Yuan had some of his correspondence with Americans delivered to the institute as early as the 1930s. By the 1950s, when Yuan settled in the United States and started working on the massive China in Western Literature (Yale University Far Eastern Publications, 1958), the China Institute had long since stopped issuing similar bibliographies. It was also no longer in a financial position to support such activities (pp. 1912–1913, 2154–2155), as such efforts had fallen under the purview of universities and research libraries.
In a different light, Yuan also witnessed the changing centres of China studies in the world during his lifetime. Since his first post-college job in the 1910s, working for Tsinghua School—the preparatory school for Chinese students studying abroad in the United States supported by the Boxer Indemnity—Yuan established deep connections in the United States. But until the full-scale Japanese aggression in China in 1937, a significant portion of Yuan’s international collaboration was with various European institutions. Not incidentally, the most authoritative bibliography on international sinology in the first half of the twentieth century remained the French scholar Henri Cordier’s Bibliotheca Sinica, which had started in the late nineteenth century and was last published in Paris in 1924 not long before his death. Yuan’s China in Western Literature was intended as a continuation of Cordier’s work and was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, which had made China a priority for its international programming before 1949, and was at the time re-evaluating its strategy in the early Cold War era. This shift also signalled the profound changes in international politics and economics that would elevate the United States as the new hub of China studies in the world by the mid twentieth century. At almost the same time as the publication of Yuan’s tome, the Ford Foundation together with the US federal government became the most important supporters of China studies and area studies in general in the United States and emphasised the policy utility of knowledge on China. Under the aegis of the Joint Committee on Contemporary China, administered by the American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research Council, new social science–minded bibliographies with a subject index (Yuan’s bibliography only included a name index) started to come out in the 1960s.
Yuan’s life and career were part and parcel of the educational and cultural engagement between China and the outside world for much of the twentieth century. Motivated yet not trapped by nationalism, Yuan exemplified a generation of cosmopolitan Chinese scholars who were equally at home in China and abroad. Lei’s tireless efforts over a decade have made it possible to appreciate this legacy of two-way scholarly collaboration and give us a sense of possibilities as further changes await the relationship between the Chinese intellectual tradition and an ever-changing world in the twenty-first century.
