【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.
No comments:
Post a Comment