BEIJING, July 18,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- In a post uploaded on the Moment
of his WeChat account in January
2024, Michael Szonyi, a
professor of Chinese history and former director of the Fairbank
Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard
University, was bending down in front of a stone tablet
covered by Chinese characters to decipher the inscription without
suffering from any distractions. This is just one shot of his daily
research work in East China's Fujian
Province, where he has spent most of his life.
When talking with the Global Times in an exclusive interview on
Monday, the Canadian scholar articulated one of prominent effects
of his years-long research into Chinese history and his multiple
visits with his students to China.
"No matter how difficult the relation between two countries is,
there is still room and value in person-to-person engagement," the
57-year-old noted.
"I am hopeful that over time US-China relations will be improved
or stabilized. I think when that moment comes, the kinds of
personal relationships that I build and that my students build and
the Chinese students who come to America build will provide the
basis for mutual understanding in the future."
'Honorary Villager'
In June 2024, Szonyi received a
gift from the local government of Yongtai county of Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. He was dubbed as "Honorary
Villager" to pay tribute to his contribution to preserving and
conducting research around Yongtai's historical archives, which
date back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and records almost each
aspect of local people's life such as account books for running
business and genealogy for maintaining bonds in clan.
In the scholar's eyes, the Yongtai documents are a unique
collection that allow outsiders better understand how a local
ordinary family rose and fell, and how they dealt with variety of
problems during daily life.
"The first characteristic is that we can use the documents to
trace a single family or even a single plot of land over a very
long period, in some cases from the Ming Dynasty all the way to
1949 and even beyond. And this gives us all kinds of new insights
into how traditional Chinese economy and traditional Chinese
society operated," Szonyi said, unable to help gushing over the
value of these relics in the interview.
Though he first arrived in Fujian in the 1990s, Szonyi's story with
Yongtai documents started in 2016 when he was captivated by the
original relics and a string of field investigations with
researchers from the Xiamen
University kicked off in 2017.
The total number of documents the team have collected since that
time is near 100,000. There has even been a snowball effect: As
people heard that the scholars were interested in these documents,
more people came forward saying that they also had a box of
documents in their attic.
Szonyi recalled that an elderly villager, who had two chests of
old documents that had been stored in his house for hundreds of
years, said that these things with possibilities of vanishing in
dust finally had come to life because of Szonyi and his team's
interest in them. The conversation helped Szonyi find another
meaning to research on the documents.
Through a string of monographs focused on the local history of
Fujian, the value of Szonyi's
research has been gaining traction. He used the Yongtai documents
for a graduate class at Harvard
University, and led Harvard
students to the county to carry out further research.
A different perspective of history
The Yongtai documents are mostly about the lives of ordinary
people, and so-called nobodies in history, which cater to Szonyi's
perspective in discovering Chinese history.
"There has been so much of history told from the perspectives of
political elites, the emperor and the literati, but when we look at
the lives of ordinary people, we can get a very different
perspective of history and how history unfolded," the scholar
noted.
He chose to go deep into Chinese rural areas, talk with local
residents in fluent Chinese and insist on taking field
investigations as one of the major research methods, even if he had
to face some unexpected situations like sleeping on the opera stage
in a village temple with many horses years ago.
Thanks to years long close and frequent contact with ordinary
Chinese people, Szonyi captured something keeping still while
something having changes in Chinese society.
Szonyi saw that Chinese rural people have a remarkable
connection with their own history. "Probably my biggest impression
that I get from studying rural society in late imperial
China is of the tremendous
creativity of Chinese people in using different kinds of cultural
resources to deal with the challenges they face in their everyday
experience," he recounted, a tradition which has been inherited
across generations.
The professor saw the impact of economic development and
opening-up and reform in China's
cities as well as in rural areas. Under the changes spawned by
economic soaring, he called on the conservation of diversity of
traditional Chinese culture across different places in the country
to keep their uniqueness.
Szonyi also saw China's
endeavors to promoting exchanges with other civilizations around
the world. He advocated to increase people-to-people interaction
through ways such as onsite visits, instead of just watching short
clips on social media platforms.
The Chinese government published a series of policies to expand
the number of ports that adapt the 144-hour visa-free transit
policy to 37, embracing guests from around the globe and hailing a
rising number of people-to-people exchanges.
The scholar has already planned out his next works to be
published. "It will be about a study of the history of modern
China from the perspective of
rural society. I hope it will be a contribution to scholarship and
to mutual understanding."
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SOURCE Global Times