Milestones in the History of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies

Abstract

We are all beneficiaries of the far-sighted scholars and foundation executives who launched the center. They realized during the ColdWar, whenChina and theWest had almost no contact with each other, 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 studies 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, several academics began to put their wishes into action. In 1958–59, Franz Schurmann had been a lonely scholar trying to study contemporary China in Hong Kong with the help of the Union Research Institute, and after he returned to the United States he urged the establishment of a center that would allow more scholars to come. In 1959, John Fairbank, who was then president of the 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 (SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which were organized by disciplines, were in a better position than the Association of Asian Studies. So under the Joint Committee