History of Sinology/Chapter 6

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Chapter 6: Cold War Sinology — Divided Fields, Competing Paradigms (1945–1990)

1. Introduction: A Discipline Transformed

The Second World War destroyed the institutional foundations of European sinology and created the conditions for a radical restructuring of the field. Between 1945 and 1990, the study of China in the West was reshaped by three forces that had little to do with philology: the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the consequent closure of the Chinese mainland to most Western scholars, and the massive expansion of American higher education under the stimulus of wartime and Cold War government funding. The result was a discipline that, by 1990, bore little resemblance to the classical sinology of the pre-war era. The small, internationally connected community of philologists who had dominated the field from Chavannes to Pelliot gave way to a far larger, more diverse, and more fragmented enterprise — one in which the very name “sinology” became contested.

The account cuts across the national traditions treated in the country chapters (Chapters 7–18). Its concern is not with the internal development of individual national schools — for which the reader is referred to the relevant chapters — but with the structural changes that reshaped the field as a whole: the Fairbank revolution in America, the ideological constraints on Soviet sinology, the division of the German field between East and West, the impact of the Cultural Revolution on Western access and scholarship, the emergence of Taiwan and Hong Kong as surrogate research sites, and the debates about the nature and purpose of China scholarship that these developments provoked.

2. Post-War Reconstruction of European Sinology

The scale of the losses inflicted on European sinology by the war and its antecedents can scarcely be exaggerated. In France, the near-simultaneous deaths of Pelliot (1945), Maspero (1945, at Buchenwald), and Granet (1940) left the field depleted of its three greatest figures (see Chapter 5, section 12.3). In Germany, the forced emigration of a generation of scholars, the destruction of major research libraries, the deaths of Otto Franke (1946) and Alfred Forke (1944), and the physical devastation of universities had reduced four decades of institution-building to rubble (see Chapter 7, section 5). In Britain, sinology had never possessed an institutional base comparable to the continental powers, and the war years had further weakened what little infrastructure existed (see Chapter 9, section 7).

The recovery of French sinology was remarkably swift, owing largely to the efforts of Paul Demiéville (1894–1979). Born in Lausanne and trained in Paris and Hanoi, Demiéville was one of the foremost Buddhist scholars of the twentieth century. His deep knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan enabled him to work across the full range of East Asian Buddhist traditions with an authority matched by few contemporaries. He succeeded Maspero at the Collège de France and served as co-editor of the T’oung Pao.

Under Demiéville’s leadership, French sinology maintained its distinctive character — the commitment to philological rigour, the preference for deep engagement with primary sources, and the tradition of humanistic breadth — while adapting to the transformed post-war environment. He initiated major collaborative projects, including the Anthologie de la poésie chinoise classique (1962), and trained a new generation of scholars who would carry the discipline forward: Jacques Gernet, Léon Vandermeersch, and others who would eventually hold chairs at the Collège de France and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

The recognition of the People’s Republic of China by France in 1964 — one of the first Western nations to do so — opened new opportunities for scholarly exchange. A cohort of young French scholars travelled to China in the 1960s, including Anne Cheng, Marianne Bastid-Bruguière, Marie-Claire Bergère, and Lucien Bianco. For a full account of post-war French sinology, see Chapter 8, section 6.

The reconstruction of German sinology was painfully slow. As Hellmut Wilhelm (1905–1990), Richard Wilhelm’s son and then professor at the University of Washington, observed in 1949, “the pace of recovery of German sinological research is still remarkably slow” compared with the general revival of German academic life. The primary reason was a simple lack of qualified personnel — the émigrés had not returned.

In West Germany, sinology organised itself around three centres, each with a distinct intellectual profile. Hamburg under Wolfgang Franke (1912–2007) continued the tradition established by his father Otto, focusing on Ming and Qing history, the overseas Chinese, and modern Chinese intellectual history. Munich under Herbert Franke (1914–2011; no relation to the Hamburg Frankes) became the southern stronghold, specialising in Song and Yuan dynasty history. Beginning in the 1960s, the number of sinological professorships in West Germany grew steadily; by 1967 there were thirteen professors across eleven institutions.

A decisive experiment in restructuring was launched in 1964 at the newly founded Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where an Institute of East Asian Studies was established on the model of American “area studies.” This interdisciplinary model — bringing together specialists in language, literature, history, philosophy, religion, art, law, economics, and sociology under a single institutional roof — represented a deliberate break with the traditional Lehrstuhl system and foreshadowed the broader transformation of Sinologie into Chinawissenschaften (see section 7 below). For a full treatment of post-war German sinology, see Chapter 7, sections 6–7.

In Britain, the Second World War demonstrated the cost of the nation’s neglect of oriental studies. During 1940–1941, only twenty-six students across all British universities were studying Chinese. The Scarborough Report (1947) called for properly funded departments of oriental studies, and the resulting expansion at SOAS and other institutions attracted a new generation of scholars. The Hayter Report (1961) called for further expansion, including the creation of area studies centres. Under its influence, SOAS established regional research centres, and a Contemporary China Institute was founded in 1967–1968 with Ford Foundation support.

Two European émigré scholars had brought continental philological standards to British sinology: Walter Simon (1893–1981) at SOAS and Gustav Haloun (1898–1951) at Cambridge (see Chapter 5, section 12.2). Their successors — Denis Twitchett at SOAS and Cambridge, David Hawkes at Oxford — would produce works of lasting importance, though British sinology never achieved the institutional depth of the French or American fields. For a full account, see Chapter 9, sections 7–8.

3. The Fairbank Revolution: Area Studies versus Classical Sinology

No individual has exerted a greater influence on the institutional development of American China scholarship than John King Fairbank (1907–1991). Born in South Dakota, educated at Harvard and Oxford, Fairbank chose modern Chinese diplomatic and institutional history as his field — a research orientation that was, as Zhang Xiping observed, “completely different from traditional sinology, with its focus on philological and documentary analysis of ancient Chinese history and culture. It was an entirely new experiment.”

After wartime service in the Office of Strategic Services and as scientific attaché in China, Fairbank returned to Harvard convinced that American understanding of China was dangerously inadequate. He set about creating a new model for the study of China: “area studies,” an interdisciplinary enterprise that combined history, political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology, focused on modern and contemporary China rather than the classical civilisation, and oriented toward policy-relevant knowledge.

The institutional framework Fairbank built was formidable. At Harvard, he established the Committee on Regional Studies: East Asia (1946), which offered interdisciplinary graduate training. He trained a cohort of students who would populate departments across the country. The founding of the Far Eastern Association in 1941 (renamed the Association for Asian Studies in 1956) provided an organisational home, and its journal, the Far Eastern Quarterly (renamed Journal of Asian Studies in 1956), became the most influential English-language periodical for Asian studies.

Fairbank’s vision was institutionalised nationally through the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which provided federal funding for language training and area studies centres at American universities. The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation contributed additional millions. By the mid-1960s, the United States possessed more specialists in Chinese studies than the rest of the world combined.

The development of American China studies in the early 1950s was severely disrupted by McCarthyism. The accusation that American China scholars had “lost China” by providing insufficiently anti-Communist analysis became a potent weapon in domestic political battles. Several prominent China specialists were persecuted for alleged Communist sympathies; the Institute of Pacific Relations was forced to dissolve under political pressure. The diplomat-scholar John Carter Vincent was driven from the Foreign Service; the journalist Edgar Snow was hounded into exile; Owen Lattimore, the leading American specialist on Inner Asia, was subjected to years of investigation.

Yet McCarthyism proved to be a temporary interruption. Paradoxically, the very hostility that McCarthy directed at China scholars ultimately generated increased government support for China studies, as the strategic imperative of “knowing the enemy” outweighed ideological suspicion. By the late 1950s, funding for Chinese studies had expanded dramatically, and the field entered a period of unprecedented growth. For a full account, see Chapter 17, sections 4–5.

The tension between the Fairbank model and the older philological tradition came to a head in a famous exchange in the pages of the Journal of Asian Studies in 1964. The debate was framed by a question that had become urgent: what was the proper relationship between the study of China and the academic disciplines?

The anthropologist G. William Skinner argued that the social sciences should make more use of China as a case study, implicitly questioning the utility of sinology as a self-contained field. Benjamin I. Schwartz replied that the disciplines were too often treated as ends in themselves, neglecting the distinctiveness of the Chinese case. Frederick W. Mote, a specialist in traditional China, spoke up for sinology, which he saw as a field or discipline in its own right: “If it means anything,” he asserted, “sinology means Chinese philology.” Denis Twitchett issued what he called “A Lone Cheer for Sinology,” defending the value of close textual work against the tide of social-scientific generalisation.

The debate was never definitively resolved, and the tension between “sinology” and “Chinese studies” persists to this day. In practice, the Fairbank model triumphed in the United States, where the majority of scholars work on modern and contemporary China using social-science methods. In Europe, particularly in France, the philological tradition has proved more resilient. The outcome has been a productive division of labour, but also a certain mutual incomprehension between scholars trained in different traditions.

4. Soviet Sinology and Its Ideological Constraints

Soviet sinology had deep roots in the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing and the great nineteenth-century scholars Bichurin and Vasilyev (see Chapter 16, sections 2–3). After 1917, Chinese studies in the USSR came under the sweeping guidance of Marxism-Leninism, and the field was caught between scholarly ambition and political servitude.

The leading figure of the transitional period was Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev (1881–1951), a student of Chavannes who had studied in Paris alongside Pelliot, Maspero, and Granet. Alekseev brought the methods of the French philological school to Russian sinology, establishing a tradition of precise textual scholarship that survived, in attenuated form, even under the most oppressive ideological conditions. He considered Pelliot his closest friend throughout the rest of his life.

Soviet sinology was concentrated in two centres: Leningrad (the Asiatic Museum of the Academy of Sciences, later the Institute of Oriental Studies) and Moscow (the Institute of the Far East, established in 1966). The theoretical foundation for all Soviet studies of Chinese society was Lenin’s version of the Marxist theory of socio-economic formations, which became an unchallengeable paradigm in the late 1930s. The “Asiatic mode of production” debate — whether China’s pre-modern economy constituted a distinct mode of production or conformed to the standard Marxist sequence of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism — was settled by administrative fiat rather than scholarly argument, with the partisans of the Asiatic mode defeated and, in some cases, repressed.

The ideological constraints on Soviet sinology were pervasive. Scholarly works, even those with no relationship to contemporary politics, required the citation of Marxist classics in the foreword and conclusion. Researchers were expected to demonstrate how Marxist-Leninist thought had been helpful to their investigations. Manuscript reviewers for the Academy of Sciences regularly returned works with instructions to add ideological framing.

Yet Soviet sinologists developed strategies to pursue serious scholarship within these constraints. Some confined their Marxist citations to the introduction and conclusion, leaving the body of the work to speak for itself. Others chose topics — historical phonology, classical poetry, archaeological chronology — that were sufficiently remote from contemporary politics to escape close ideological scrutiny. The result was a body of scholarship that was uneven in quality but that included, at its best, work of genuine distinction, particularly in the fields of ancient Chinese history, classical literature, and Chinese philosophy.

The Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s had devastating consequences for Soviet sinology. Scholarly exchanges with China ceased, and the political climate shifted from fraternal alliance to bitter hostility. Soviet sinologists were now expected to produce work that supported the official line of ideological criticism of Chinese Communism. The demand for “China watchers” who could analyse contemporary Chinese politics led to an expansion of the Moscow-based Institute of the Far East, but this came at the expense of classical sinological research.

After Gorbachev came to power, ideological manipulation nearly completely disappeared, and Soviet sinologists were able to engage more freely with international scholarship. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created new challenges — funding dried up, many scholars emigrated, and institutional continuity was disrupted — but it also liberated Russian sinology from the ideological constraints that had distorted it for seven decades. For a full treatment, see Chapter 16.

5. The Netherlands and Scandinavia: Continuity and Innovation

The Netherlands, which had maintained a tradition of Chinese studies since the seventeenth century through the Dutch East India Company’s engagement with the Chinese populations of the East Indies, played a distinctive role in post-war sinology. The University of Leiden, where Schlegel had co-founded the T’oung Pao in 1890, remained a centre of philological sinology. Erik Zürcher (1928–2008), who held the chair at Leiden from 1962 to 1993, produced seminal work on the introduction of Buddhism to China (The Buddhist Conquest of China, 1959) and served as co-editor of the T’oung Pao, maintaining the journal’s tradition of multilingual, philologically rigorous scholarship. Kristofer Schipper (born 1934), who held positions at both Paris and Leiden, spent eight years as a practising Daoist priest in Taiwan and led the monumental Projet Tao-tsang — an analytical catalogue of the entire Daoist canon — under the auspices of the European Science Foundation. For a fuller treatment of Dutch sinology, see Chapter 10.

In Scandinavia, the post-war period saw the transformation of the tradition established by Karlgren. Göran Malmqvist (1924–2019), Karlgren’s student at Stockholm, shifted the focus of Swedish sinology from historical phonology and classical texts to modern Chinese literature. His election to the Swedish Academy in 1985 — the body that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature — gave him an outsized influence on the international recognition of Chinese writers, most notably in the award of the Nobel Prize to Gao Xingjian in 2000. Malmqvist’s career exemplified the broader transformation from classical sinology to modern Chinese studies that characterised the Cold War period across Europe. For a fuller treatment, see Chapter 14.

6. GDR versus FRG Sinology

The division of Germany after 1945 created two parallel sinological traditions that developed in strikingly different ways.

East German sinology inherited the Leipzig tradition of Conrady and his son-in-law Eduard Erkes (1891–1958), who directed the East Asian Institute from 1947 to 1958. Erkes maintained his pre-war insistence that ancient China had not experienced a slave-holding society in the European sense, contradicting the orthodox Marxist periodisation — a remarkable act of intellectual independence under GDR conditions.

In the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China was the GDR’s most important ally, and large numbers of East German students were sent to China for language training. These students — including Mechthild Leutner, Helmut Martin, and Brunhild Staiger — acquired firsthand experience of Chinese society that their West German counterparts could not match. However, the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s had devastating consequences for East German sinology. After 1963, student enrollments were drastically reduced, and the Leipzig department was effectively shut down. Erkes’s chair remained unfilled for twenty-five years — a devastating blow. By 1964, there was only one sinology professor in the entire GDR.

The GDR produced one unique institution: the classified journal Aktuelle China-Information (1971–1989), published with the notation “confidential — for official use only.” Over eighty issues, it carried more articles on China than all other GDR publications combined, yet most East German sinologists had no access to it. For more detail, see Chapter 7, section 6.3.

West German sinology underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1960s and 1970s. The student protests of 1968 had a particularly intense impact on Chinese studies departments, where protesters borrowed freely from the iconography of the Cultural Revolution: red flags, portraits of Mao Zedong, and the “Little Red Book.” Students demanded that sinology departments turn their attention from ancient texts to contemporary China, from classical Chinese to modern spoken Chinese.

The lasting legacy of 1968 was the acceleration of a transformation already underway: the shift from classical Sinologie to Chinawissenschaften (China Studies), a broader, more interdisciplinary enterprise incorporating social-science methods and focusing on modern and contemporary China. In 1967, only one of the thirteen sinology professors in West Germany worked on contemporary issues. By the 1980s, the balance had shifted decisively. For a full treatment, see Chapter 7, section 7.

In the United States, while the Fairbank model dominated the institutional scene, important centres of classical sinology persisted. At Berkeley, the tradition established by Boodberg and Schafer (see Chapter 5, section 7.3) continued to produce philologically rigorous scholarship on pre-modern China. Edward Schafer’s The Vermilion Bird (1967) and The Divine Woman (1973), with their virtuoso combination of philological precision and literary elegance, demonstrated that the classical tradition was not merely surviving but flourishing. At the University of Chicago, Herlee G. Creel (1905–1994) founded a school that remains prominent in early Chinese history, intellectual history, and archaeology. Creel’s conceptual debates with Boodberg over the nature of the Chinese script — what Honey characterised as the debate over “ideography as idolatry” — engaged fundamental questions about the relationship between writing and thought that resonated far beyond sinology.

At Yale, George A. Kennedy (1901–1960), born in China to missionary parents and trained under Otto Franke in Berlin, had established a tradition of philological instruction that emphasised the practical mastery of Chinese reference tools. His An Introduction to Sinology (1953) became a standard textbook. And at Columbia, L. Carrington Goodrich (1894–1986) continued the tradition inaugurated by Friedrich Hirth, producing the monumental Dictionary of Ming Biography (1976) that became an indispensable reference for all scholars of the Ming dynasty.

7. The Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Western Access and Scholarship

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) had a profound impact on Western sinology, though the mechanisms were indirect. The most immediate effect was the near-total closure of China to Western scholars. Fieldwork in the People’s Republic, which had already been difficult, became virtually impossible. Chinese libraries, archives, and archaeological sites were inaccessible. Chinese scholars who had maintained contacts with Western colleagues were persecuted. The destruction of cultural artefacts during the “Four Olds” campaign — books, manuscripts, temples, artworks — represented an incalculable loss for scholarship.

An entire generation of Chinese scholars was silenced. Universities were closed, professors were sent to the countryside for “re-education,” and scholarly publication in China ceased almost entirely. The disruption of Chinese scholarship in the humanities and social sciences during the decade of the Cultural Revolution created a gap in the intellectual history of modern China that has never been fully bridged.

The impact of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese scholarship itself was even more devastating than its effects on Western access. China’s leading sinologists and humanists were subjected to public humiliation, physical abuse, and imprisonment. Libraries were ransacked; rare books and manuscripts were burned; university presses ceased operation. The social historian Gu Jiegang, the literary scholar Yu Pingbo, and dozens of other eminent scholars were persecuted. Jian Bozan, the distinguished historian, was driven to suicide. The interruption of scholarly training — universities were closed from 1966 to the early 1970s — created a “lost generation” of scholars whose absence would be felt for decades.

The archaeological destruction was particularly devastating from a sinological perspective. Red Guards destroyed Buddhist temples, Confucian shrines, ancestral halls, and historical monuments across the country. The “Four Olds” campaign targeted precisely those artefacts and documents that constituted the material basis of sinological research. Yet the Cultural Revolution also produced, inadvertently, some of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century: the construction of air-raid shelters in Changsha led to the discovery of the Mawangdui tombs in 1972–1974, which yielded silk manuscripts of the Laozi, the Yijing, and other texts that revolutionised the study of early Chinese philosophy.

Western sinologists responded to the closure of China in several ways. Some turned to historical topics that could be pursued through library research alone — the study of pre-modern China experienced something of a renaissance during this period, as scholars who could not visit the mainland immersed themselves in classical texts. Others adopted the methods of “China watching,” analysing the fragmentary information that emerged from behind the bamboo curtain: official communiqués, provincial radio broadcasts, refugee interviews, photographs of public appearances scrutinised for clues to factional alignments. The techniques of Kremlinology were adapted to the Chinese context, with Hong Kong serving as the primary listening post.

The Cultural Revolution also divided Western sinologists politically. Some, particularly on the European left, saw in the Cultural Revolution a genuine revolutionary experiment worthy of sympathetic analysis, if not outright support. Others, particularly those with personal connections to Chinese colleagues who had been persecuted, viewed it as a catastrophe. The German sinologist Tilemann Grimm’s Mao intern (1974), which presented a critical analysis of Mao’s rule, provoked accusations from far-left student organisations that it was “a publication hostile to China.” Meanwhile, Joachim Schickel’s Große Mauer, Große Methode (1968) constructed an idealised image of China as the antithesis of capitalist Western society — while carefully excluding all empirical evidence of Chinese reality.

8. Taiwan and Hong Kong as Surrogate Research Sites

The closure of mainland China forced Western sinologists to seek alternative research sites, and two locations — Taiwan and Hong Kong — assumed disproportionate importance for the development of the field.

Taiwan, governed by the Republic of China after 1949, preserved much of the institutional and intellectual infrastructure of pre-1949 Chinese academia. The Academia Sinica maintained active research programmes. The National Palace Museum in Taipei housed the imperial art collections that the Nationalist government had evacuated from Beijing. The National Central Library possessed extensive holdings of rare books and manuscripts. For scholars of pre-modern China, Taiwan offered access to primary sources, knowledgeable Chinese colleagues, and a cultural environment that, however politically fraught, was recognisably continuous with the Chinese scholarly tradition.

Many of the most important Western studies of Chinese history, philosophy, and literature produced during the Cold War decades were based on research conducted in Taiwan. Scholars such as Frederick Mote, who spent extended periods there, found Taiwan’s research environment invaluable. The Chinese scholars who had fled the mainland after 1949 — including some of the most distinguished figures of the pre-war generation — provided an irreplaceable resource of expertise and personal knowledge.

Hong Kong played a different but equally important role. As a British colony on the edge of the People’s Republic, it served as the principal point of contact between Western China watchers and the mainland. The Universities Service Centre (later the Universities Service Centre for China Studies), established in 1963 with funding from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation, provided visiting scholars with access to Chinese-language newspapers, provincial radio broadcasts, and interviews with refugees and travellers. It became, in effect, the field station of American and European social-science research on contemporary China.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong also developed significant sinological programmes. D.C. Lau (Liu Dianjue), who had taught at SOAS before moving to the Chinese University, contributed authoritative translations of the Analects and the Mencius that complemented the Legge tradition while reflecting a native speaker’s sensitivity to nuance.

Taiwan and Hong Kong also became the centres of a distinctive intellectual movement — New Confucianism — that had profound implications for the self-understanding of sinology. In January 1958, four philosophers who had exiled themselves from China after 1949 — Carsun Chang in the United States, Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan in Taiwan, and Tang Junyi in Hong Kong — published “A Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture.” The manifesto challenged Western sinologists to recognise the living philosophical tradition within Chinese civilisation, rather than treating China as a mere object of historical or social-scientific investigation. It was, in effect, a Chinese counterpart to the “sinology versus Chinese studies” debate taking place simultaneously in Western academia.

9. Major Scholarly Achievements of the Cold War Era

Before turning to the theoretical debates that preoccupied the field, the major scholarly achievements of the Cold War decades deserve attention — works that transcended the divisions between “sinology” and “Chinese studies” and that have earned a permanent place in the literature.

In Britain, David Hawkes (1923–2009) produced what is widely regarded as the finest English translation of a Chinese novel: his five-volume rendering of Hongloumeng as The Story of the Stone (Penguin Books, 1973–1986), with the final forty chapters translated by his son-in-law John Minford. This monumental achievement, which the Times Literary Supplement compared to Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji, demonstrated that the British tradition of the translator-scholar was still capable of producing works of the highest quality.

In France, Jacques Gernet’s Le monde chinois (1972) became the standard French-language introduction to Chinese civilisation, and his Chine et christianisme (1982) illuminated the cultural encounter between China and Europe with a depth and subtlety that transcended the conventional frameworks of both missionary history and the history of ideas.

In the United States, Frederick Mote’s Imperial China: 900–1800 (1999, though based on decades of earlier research) offered a masterful synthesis of Chinese history that rivalled Otto Franke’s Geschichte in its ambition and surpassed it in its command of Song and Ming sources. And the Cambridge History of China, co-edited by Twitchett and Fairbank from the 1960s onward, grew into the largest collaborative history of China in any language.

In Japan, Miyazaki Ichisada’s studies of the Chinese examination system and social history, and the collective research projects of the Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo at Kyoto, produced scholarship that was essential reading for any specialist in Chinese history, regardless of national origin.

10. The “Sinology versus Chinese Studies” Debate

The tension between “sinology” and “Chinese studies” that emerged during the Cold War era was not merely a terminological quibble; it reflected fundamental disagreements about the purpose of scholarship, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the nature of the academic enterprise itself.

The defenders of “sinology” — primarily scholars of pre-modern China trained in the European philological tradition — argued that the study of Chinese civilisation required a distinctive set of skills (classical Chinese, command of the commentarial tradition, knowledge of historical phonology) that could not be acquired through the methods of the social sciences. They insisted that China’s long history and complex textual tradition demanded a mode of engagement fundamentally different from the study of, say, contemporary American politics. Mote’s assertion that “sinology means Chinese philology” encapsulated this position.

The advocates of “Chinese studies” — primarily scholars of modern and contemporary China trained in the social sciences — countered that the exclusive focus on classical texts and philological method was narrow, elitist, and politically irresponsible. They argued that the urgent need to understand the People’s Republic — a nuclear power and the world’s most populous nation — demanded approaches drawn from political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Fairbank’s emphasis on “the study of China within a discipline” captured this alternative vision.

The debate played out differently in Europe than in the United States. In France, the philological tradition proved more resilient, sustained by the institutional continuity of the Collège de France and by the personal authority of scholars such as Demiéville and Gernet. Even as French sinology broadened to embrace the social sciences, it maintained a core commitment to textual scholarship that distinguished it from the American field.

In Germany, the debate was entangled with the political upheavals of 1968. The student movement’s demand for a sinology oriented toward contemporary China and equipped with social-science methods was, in part, a generational revolt against the perceived conservatism of the “mandarins” who had dominated the field. The transformation of Sinologie into Chinawissenschaften was accelerated by political pressure but also reflected a genuine intellectual reorientation that the German Science Council had advocated since the late 1950s.

In Britain, the debate was less intense, partly because British sinology had never achieved the institutional density to sustain a large-scale confrontation. The tradition of the individual translator-scholar — from Legge through Waley to Hawkes — coexisted with the social-scientific orientation of SOAS’s contemporary China programme. Twitchett and Fairbank’s collaboration on the Cambridge History of China, which combined meticulous source criticism with broad historical synthesis, represented one possible resolution of the tension.

11. Japan’s Kangaku Tradition in the Cold War Context

Japanese sinology occupied a unique position in the Cold War period. Japan possessed the oldest continuous tradition of Chinese studies outside China itself — the kangaku (漢学) tradition that had flourished since the Tokugawa period (see Chapter 19, section 1). This tradition, transformed in the Meiji era into modern academic shinagaku (支那学) and later Chūgoku-gaku (中国学), had produced scholars of the first rank, including Naitō Konan and Miyazaki Ichisada of the Kyoto school (see Chapter 19, section 1.3–1.4).

The post-war period brought a painful reckoning with Japan’s wartime role. Some Japanese sinologists, notably Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–1977), argued that Japan’s study of China had been complicit in imperialism and needed to be radically reconstructed. Takeuchi, who had formed the Chinese Literature Research Society (Chūgoku Bungaku Kenkyūkai) in 1934, advocated for the study of contemporary Chinese literature as opposed to “old-style” Japanese sinology. His intellectual engagement with Lu Xun and modern Chinese thought represented a decisive break with the classical tradition.

Despite the post-war crisis of identity, Japanese classical sinology continued to produce work of the highest quality throughout the Cold War period. Yoshikawa Kōjirō’s studies of Du Fu’s poetry and Song-dynasty literature set new standards for the close reading of Chinese poetic texts. The collective research projects organised by the Kyoto Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo — exhaustive concordances, annotated editions, and collaborative studies of major Chinese texts — provided tools that scholars worldwide came to rely upon. In this respect, Japanese sinology functioned as both a national tradition and a global resource, its contributions freely adopted by scholars who could not read Japanese but who depended on the meticulous indices, bibliographies, and critical editions that Japanese scholars produced.

Japan’s position as an American ally, combined with its proximity to China and its deep cultural connections, created distinctive conditions for Japanese sinology during the Cold War. Unlike their American and European counterparts, Japanese scholars could read Chinese sources without translation and shared a common scriptural heritage with Chinese civilisation. The Kyoto school’s emphasis on Chinese history as an autonomous civilisation, rather than as a case study for Western social-science theories, offered an alternative to both the Fairbank model and the Soviet approach.

The normalisation of Sino-Japanese relations in 1972 preceded the American opening by several years and gave Japanese scholars earlier access to the People’s Republic. Japanese sinological journals — Tōhō Gakuhō, Tōyōshi Kenkyū, Shigaku Zasshi — maintained standards of philological rigour that rivalled the European tradition. For a full treatment of Japanese sinology, see Chapter 19.

12. The Opening of China (1978): A Watershed Moment

The death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four the following month set the stage for a transformation that would reshape sinology no less profoundly than the Cold War had done. Deng Xiaoping’s programme of “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang), launched at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978, reopened China to the outside world and, with it, to Western scholarship.

The impact on sinology was immediate and dramatic. Archives that had been closed for decades became accessible. Archaeological sites could be visited. Chinese scholars, many of them survivors of the Cultural Revolution, resumed publishing and began attending international conferences. Western scholars could conduct fieldwork in the People’s Republic for the first time since the 1940s. The quantity of available source material — both historical and contemporary — expanded exponentially.

The opening of China transformed every branch of sinology. For scholars of pre-modern China, the flood of new archaeological discoveries — oracle bone inscriptions, bamboo-slip manuscripts, tomb artefacts — created entirely new fields of study. The discovery of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts (1973) and the Guodian bamboo slips (1993) forced fundamental revisions in the understanding of early Chinese philosophy and literature. For scholars of modern and contemporary China, direct access to the country and its people made possible a qualitative leap in empirical research.

The opening also created new institutional frameworks for scholarly exchange. The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, established in 1966 under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, became the principal channel for American academic visits to China after 1972. Similar organisations were established in Europe. The flow of Chinese students to Western universities — a trickle in the early 1980s, a flood by the 1990s — created a new generation of scholars who moved easily between Chinese and Western academic cultures.

The opening of China also challenged the Cold War paradigms that had shaped the field. The division between “sinology” and “Chinese studies” began to seem less absolute as scholars of all orientations gained access to the same sources. The ideological frameworks that had constrained Soviet sinology lost their hold as the USSR collapsed. The rise of Chinese scholarship on China — the emergence of guoxue (国学, traditional Chinese studies) as a self-conscious movement within China — created new interlocutors who challenged Western scholars’ assumptions and offered alternative perspectives.

By 1990, the field of sinology had been transformed beyond recognition. The small, European-centred, philologically oriented discipline that had reached its highest achievement in the interwar period had given way to a global enterprise encompassing thousands of scholars, dozens of disciplines, and an institutional infrastructure of universities, research centres, journals, and professional associations that stretched from Berkeley to Beijing, from Paris to Tokyo. Whether this transformation represented progress or loss — or, more likely, both — was a question that sinologists would continue to debate as the field entered the twenty-first century.

13. Assessment: The Cold War Legacy

The Cold War era left sinology a fundamentally different discipline from what it had been before 1945. Several features of this transformation deserve emphasis.

Scale. The number of scholars working on China increased by at least an order of magnitude. The United States alone produced more specialists in Chinese studies during the Cold War decades than the entire world had possessed in 1945.

Disciplinary diversification. The social sciences — political science, economics, sociology, anthropology — established themselves as legitimate and, in the American context, dominant approaches to the study of China. Classical philology, once the defining method of sinology, became one approach among many.

Institutional consolidation. Government funding, foundation support, and university expansion created a permanent institutional infrastructure for Chinese studies that was far stronger than the pre-war system of individual professorships.

Political entanglement. More than at any previous period, the study of China was shaped by the political relationship between the scholar’s home country and China. McCarthyism, the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution, and the opening of China all left deep marks on the direction, funding, and intellectual orientation of the field.

The persistence of philology. Despite the triumph of the social sciences in the American and, to a lesser extent, European academy, the philological tradition survived. The continuing vitality of the T’oung Pao, the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and Monumenta Serica; the production of major scholarly translations; and the persistence of departments and programmes devoted to classical Chinese studies testified to the enduring value of the tradition that Chavannes had founded and that Pelliot, Maspero, Karlgren, and their successors had brought to its highest expression.

The rise of Chinese scholarship. Perhaps the most significant long-term consequence of the Cold War era was the emergence of Chinese scholars as major participants in international sinological discourse. In the pre-war period, the flow of knowledge had been predominantly one-directional: Western scholars studied China, and Chinese scholars studied the West. By the end of the Cold War, Chinese scholars were increasingly producing research that engaged directly with the methods and findings of Western sinology — and, in many fields, setting the terms of the debate. The publication of Chinese archaeological reports, the opening of Chinese archives, and the training of Chinese scholars in Western universities all contributed to a fundamental redistribution of scholarly authority. By 1990, it was no longer tenable to speak of “sinology” as an exclusively Western enterprise.

The digital horizon. By the late 1980s, the first signs of the digital revolution were visible on the horizon. The computerisation of Chinese text — a formidable technical challenge, given the thousands of characters in the Chinese writing system — was beginning to transform scholarly access to Chinese sources. The creation of digital databases, full-text search tools, and online catalogues would, in the decades to come, alter the practice of sinology as profoundly as the invention of printing had done five centuries earlier. But this transformation belongs to the next chapter in the history of the field.

The Cold War era was thus both a rupture and a continuation. It destroyed the institutional and intellectual world in which classical sinology had flourished, but it also carried forward — in new forms, through new institutions, and across new national boundaries — the fundamental enterprise of understanding Chinese civilisation through the disciplined study of its written records and material remains. How the field would navigate the challenges of the post-Cold War era — globalisation, the rise of China as a world power, the digital revolution, and the renewed tension between China and the West — is a story that lies beyond the scope of this chapter.

References

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