The Years of Great Debate

Extract

The year which I spent as acting editor of The China Quarterly was a time of turmoil and transition for China studies which now seems very far away. How contemporary China should be perceived was a matter for intense and sometimes bitter argument. This was part of the wider controversy over the whole nature of Asian studies and its relationship to government policy which had arisen out of the American intervention in Vietnam. The difficulty of understanding the Cultural Revolution and the lack of scholarly access to China only sharpened the debate. Yet Western China scholarship was on the verge of a new leap forward which would soon make China more penetrable than at any time since 1949. For the year of 1971–72 led from ping-pong diplomacy to Richard Nixon's on-the-spot discovery that the Great Wall of China really was great. Before long even those scholars who had maintained that China was better studied from a safe distance found that their institutions were able to secure tempting access to the mainland.