Main Trends in American Studies of Chinese History: Neolithic to Imperial Times

Abstract

ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT developments in modern American sinology is the appearance of the specialist.' I look back on my own graduate training in the sixties as perhaps the last time when professors and students alike could make some claim to being Renaissance men in the field of Chinese studies. The western scholarship was not inconsiderable, but it was possible at that time, with Hucker's bibliography2 in one hand and class reading lists and the Association for Asian Studies bibliography in the other, to pretend to know the major scholarship and the major issues in most areas of American and even European sinology. This was partly true, of course, because, in many areas, there was little or no scholarship, and one simply relied upon the inestimable pages of East Asia: The Great Tradition to carry one through the murk, for example, of the Nan-pei ch'ao or the Yuan dynasty.3 For better or worse, we were capable of becoming sinological generalists. As teachers of survey courses we still make that claim, but since American sinologists, to their great credit, have come to write more and more about more and more, individual scholars, with the best will in the world, inevitably read a smaller percentage of the work produced. The appearance of a series of mini-journals such as Early China, Bulletin of SungYuan Studies, and Ming Studies testifies to