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Michael Szonyi: All right, colleagues and friends, thank you so much for joining us today to celebrate A Path Twice Traveled: My Journey as a Historian of China. As I was thinking about introducing Paul, it occurred to me that a book talk needs a kind of special sort of, sorry, an autobiography needs a special kind of introduction because of course-

Paul Cohen: That's why I didn't call it an autobiography.

Michael Szonyi: Right, but also if you want to know about Paul's life and career, of course it's here, and if you have any questions after this, you can just ask Paul. So, it doesn't seem necessary for me to go on at much length, but I will observe the formalities and tell you a word or two about Paul. Paul retired from Wellesley College in 2000 as Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History, after a career at Wellesley of 35 years, proceeded by some peregrinations which he tells us about in the book. He has been associated with the Fairbank Center since the mid-1960s, and he is currently an associate of the Fairbank Center. That is the highest honor that we bestow on colleagues who are not faculty at Harvard.

Michael Szonyi: But of course, his association with Harvard goes back much earlier. He was a student at Harvard, receiving his MA in Regional Studies of East Asia, the program that I headed much later, and then his PhD under Fairbank himself, and under Ben Schwartz. He's the author of at least a half dozen books that I could come up with off the top of my head, and I was actually was really struck that... I will tell you the titles of several of these books in a moment, but I'm really struck that I actually remember, I literally do remember reading all of them. That is to say I remember reading China and-

Paul Cohen: You only remember six of them.

Michael Szonyi: I quickly go to the back and see. Six is pretty good! So, I remember reading China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism as an undergraduate. I remember reading Discovering History in China as a graduate student, and Discovering History in China is a book that I literally use certainly every semester still, more than 30 years after its publication, and I know Mark and other colleagues who teach Chinese history feel the same way. It's also a book that, so I teach my graduate students how to summarize books, and I say that you should be able to summarize any work of history in a sentence or two. Discovering History of China is not actually a book that they can summarize. What they really need to do is memorize it. It's that important to understanding our field and how it emerged.

Michael Szonyi: I remember reading History in Three Keys later on in my graduate career, and being inspired by that, and Speaking to History more recently still. History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crises, of Crisis, sorry, which was published in 2014, I think is a lovely expression of Paul's widening ambition. It wasn't enough just to discover history in China. You had to discover history around the Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 1 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. world. There are chapters on China, on France, the Soviet Union, England, Israel Palestine, and Serbia. And then his most recent publication, and actually in my defense, because I was a little bit involved in the publication of this book, I've read this book at least four times, so that should maybe make up for me forgetting one, that may have been one or two of the other titles maybe pushed out of my mind.

Michael Szonyi: It was a tremendous honor for the Fairbank Center to publish Paul's not autobiography, to publish A Path Twice Traveled. It was wonderful to read it, and learn more about the history of the Center to which all of us belong and participate, and Paul's role in it, and also Paul's contribution to the profession, to the community of scholars, and to our understanding of history more broadly. So, without further ado, please join me welcoming Paul Cohen.

Paul Cohen: Thank you, Michael, for not asking me the question that you wanted to ask me, which isn't dealt with in the book and which I couldn't answer. Maybe it'll just come out. You never can tell. The writing of a career memoir is not just something that you do because it's the right time in your life to do it, although I suppose in some cases that's true. It can also be a fascinating learning experience. The seed that... Can you all hear me?

Speaker 3: No.

Paul Cohen: Yes? Good. The seed that grew into a full-blown memoir in my case was a conversation I had with Rao Shurong, the editor of the Chinese literary journal Dushu in October 2015 at a reception here at Harvard. She invited me to submit a piece to their journal, and I wrote her a few months later from Hong Kong suggesting a possible idea for an article. In the course of a 60-year career as a historian of China, my thinking about Chinese history and about history in general had undergone a number of shifts and turns, and since I was quite well known among Chinese historians, a number of my books having brought up in multiple Chinese language editions, I thought it might be of some interest to describe in Dushu for its readers the evolution of one non-Chinese scholar's thinking about Chinese history.

Paul Cohen: Dr. Rao liked my suggestion and agreed to it. But alas, once I started working on the piece, I realized that it was a much larger undertaking than I had anticipated, and I would never be able to even come close to the length limit suggested by Dushu. My thinking was really at this point, was that rather than a short journal article, what I really needed to do was write something a good deal more substantial, probably resulting in a small book. As this change in plans was taking place, I realized that with the expanded project, I would be able in addition to tracing the development of my thinking about Chinese history, to delve into some of the more hidden aspects of my career. Still not secrets of the sort, of the autobiographical sort that you're looking for, Michael.

Paul Cohen: The backstories, for example, pertaining to the sometimes thorny process, which is putting it politely, of getting a work published. Aside from enriching my own story, the material on my encounters with Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 2 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. presses over the years may even be of help to younger scholars who are just beginning to publish, and often have little sense of what the process entails. This is a pretty fragile time in the career of a scholar, and one thing he or she needs to know is that publishing houses are run by human beings, and just as human beings sometimes err in their judgments, good presses don't always make good decisions.

Paul Cohen: Conveying such information, however, is not the principal aim of this memoir by a long shot. The main point of the memoir is not to give advice and comfort to the young. It's to share with readers, older ones as well as young, the sense of excitement and deep satisfaction that I have enjoyed from the process of coming to grips with history as a discipline, and more specifically, the history of a country that, although very different from my own, has turned out as my understanding of history in general has deepened, to be not quite as different as I once thought.

Paul Cohen: The main sources for the memoir, my own writings and talks, published and published, and the correspondence and notes, of course, that I've kept in my files over the years, along with an occasional phone conversation with a colleague which seemed important enough to write a note on for my files. After completing a first draft of the memoir, it occurred to me that it might also be of interest to read some of the memoirs written by other historians, for which purpose I found Jeremy Popkin's book, History, Historians, and Autobiography a marvelous guide.

Paul Cohen: Although in places I have touched on aspects of my personal life that clearly bore on my professional career, this is not in any sense an account of my private existence. It is first and foremost the largely public story of my intellectual evolution as a historian of China. Since a number of the books I've written have exerted considerable influence on the field of Chinese history, both in the Euro-American world and in East Asia, the memoir should be of interest to China historians and to people with a special interest in Chinese history. Parts of the memoir will, I hope, also be of interest to historians in general. I have in mind in particular those sections that deal with Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past, that Michael was just talking about; History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth; Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth- Century China; and my most recent publication, History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis.

Paul Cohen: On showing the first draft of the memoir to several friends, one or two of whom had nothing to do with Chinese history, each in a different way pointed out the failure to contextualize my account in terms of what was going on in the world or my personal life at the time of writing. As one of them put it, "It reads like you were sitting on a cloud somewhere, flipping from one book to the next, but there's no sense of who Paul Cohen was, or where he was, or what was going on in his life or the world during the course of his career." I got the message, and I made a serious effort in subsequent drafts to address the problem of, essentially the problem of context. The memoir is still primarily a public account rather than a private one, but now with a greater recognition of the key role that my private life and happenings around the world have played at various junctures.

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Hopefully this, along with photos documenting my life and career which have been included in the published book, which I chose not to PowerPoint for your benefit, will make it of greater interest to people who are not China historians, or for that matter historians of anything else. There were along the way, in the course of my career, a number of developments that I hadn't really expected. They were unanticipated. A memoir is a history. In that respect, writing a memoir of my career as a historian is very different from the building of that career in real time. For example, when I finished Discovering History in China, I anticipated, given my past experience with Harvard University Press, which had published my first two books, that it would be accepted as a matter of course. What I get to do in the memoir is show how very wrong I was.

Paul Cohen: The book was rejected or cold-shouldered by not only Harvard, but by three other excellent presses as well, before finally being accepted by Columbia. Clearly we're dealing here with an example of the difference between the experienced past and the historically reconstructed past. Experience is outcome blind. We don't know how things are going to turn out, whereas in historical reconstruction, we know the outcome in advance, and the historian's effort is directed towards explaining how it came about, which his what I do in chapter four of my memoir, where I give a detailed blood and gore account of the ordeal I experienced in my efforts to get Discovering History in China published.

Paul Cohen: Still another example pertains to the narrative account of my career in general. A lot of what I now know about what happened in the course of my career is not stuff I knew at the outset. I didn't know while working on my first book, China and Christianity, that the next one would be an intellectual biography of Wang T'ao, a 19th century reformer and pioneer Chinese journalist. And the same holds true for subsequent books I wrote. In some instances, I had no idea at the outset what the main themes of the book would be. After finishing History in Three Keys in 1997, for example, it was my intention to write a book on national humiliation, guochi, in 20th century China, but in the course of exploring that topic, I kept running into the ancient story of Goujian, king of the state of Yue in the fifth century BCE.

Paul Cohen: And the more I read about the Goujian story, the more, the clearer it became that it spoke not just to the theme of national humiliation, but to many other facets of China's history in the 20th century, as well. So, if I stayed with plan A, I would have to omit vital parts of the Goujian story's engagement with recent Chinese history, something I was increasingly reluctant to do. I extricated myself from this quandary by shifting the focus of the book. Instead of national humiliation, it would be on the impact of the Goujian story in all of its facets, including by not confined to national humiliation. A simple idea, but also a radical one, as it meant a shift both in the book's main focus, and in the broader issues that would ultimately form its core, above all the relationship the between story and history.

Paul Cohen: As a form of history, a memoir embodies perspectives that were not present at the outset. Another example of this is the shift that can take place between the societal realities that pertain at the time your career is lived, and the discoveries you make about these realities long afterward from your vantage point as a memoir writer. What is interesting here is the new insight you get when you look back over your life and apply your present consciousness to the situations that existed many years before, when social conventions were very different. For example, after spending the summer of 1960 Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 4 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. at Yale taking intensive Chinese language courses, I arrived in Taipei in September of that year with my then wife, Andrea, and our young daughter, Joanna, to begin a 10-month program focused on spoken Chinese.

Paul Cohen: Readers in the 21st century may, at the mention of my wife, wonder and wonder, the outside readers I asked to read the manuscript raised this point quite explicitly, to wonder what were her career interests and how it was decided that she would go to Taipei with me. As I look back on my fellow male graduate students in Chinese studies at Harvard, not one, unless my memory fails me, which is possible, had a wife who had a career of her own. And this continued to be the case more or less after our arrival in Taipei, when we became friends with young American scholars, male scholars, from places other than Harvard. Whatever career aspirations the wives may have had, if they had any at all, were put on hold as they gamely followed their husbands into the field.

Paul Cohen: This asymmetrical pattern with respect to male and female career aspirations began to change quite dramatically in the course of the 1960s, a reflection of the Civil Rights Movement of that decade in America. But in the early 1960s, it was accepted as the norm that my wife would follow me not only to Taipei, but also as my teaching career got launched, to a succession of teaching posts in different parts of the United States. And Andrea was not alone in this regard. Natalie Zemon Davis, who later served as president of the American Historical Association, became passionately interested in history while an undergraduate at Smith College, but her professors, just about all of whom were unmarried women, they assumed that a married woman, which she was, couldn't have a professional career. And although her husband was supportive and believed in equality of careers, the two of them took it for granted that she would go where his jobs were.

Paul Cohen: This asymmetry, moreover, was by no means confined to the academic world. There were dozens of other respects in which the situations of men and women in US society were far from equal. There are many restaurants in New York City in the early 60s where a woman couldn't go into the restaurant without a man who was the guarantor of paying the bill when the meal was finished. As Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren put it, women had for decades been, and I quote her, "Shut out of lots of things."

Paul Cohen: Let me turn to some of the core themes in my writing career. One such theme that was there from the beginning in my case was the contrast between insideness and outsideness. An abiding concern throughout much of my career has been my determination to get inside China, to reconstruct Chinese history as far as possible, as the Chinese themselves experienced it, rather than in terms of what people in the West thought was important, natural, or normal. The idea here was to move beyond approaches to the Chinese past that suffered over much from Eurocentric or Western-centric preconceptions. Such preconceptions represented the outsideness in the situation. The insideness, which I strongly endorsed, was what I eventually came to call the China-centered approach, which started to take hold among American historians around 1970 or a few years prior to that.

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One of the most important expressions of this approach was its repudiation, explicitly or implicitly, of the conventional paradigms of the past, which began Chinese history in the West, and incorporated a western measure of significance, and its replacement of these with a Chinese storyline. A storyline that far grinding to a halt in 1800, or 1840, and being preempted or displaced by the West, continued to be of central paramount importance right through the 19th century and on into the 20th. Where the consensus of earlier American scholarship had been that the decisive break between the modern period of Chinese history and the traditional period was the Opium War, a growing consensus after around 1970 shifted to the view that the true watershed event of 19th century Chinese history was the Taiping Rebellion, which along with the Nian and Muslim rebellions that arose in its wake, wreaked unprecedented physical and human devastation on the population of the Qing Empire.

Paul Cohen: In time, I developed a somewhat more complicated understanding of the contrast between insideness and outsideness. Viewed from one perspective, the outsideness of the historian, whether a European or Japanese historian writing about the Chinese past, or a male historian writing about women, or a white historian probing black history, has the potential to misconstrue and distort, to introduce meanings alien to the material under examination. In such instances, this historian's outsideness clearly poses a problem, and that was the position I emphasized in my earlier writing. But a number of colleagues took exception to the strictness of this stand, arguing that there were certain instances in which outsiders, say American historians of China, might actually have an advantage over insiders, Chinese students of their own past.

Paul Cohen: In the course of writing History in Three Keys and thinking long and hard about the differences, especially between the direct experiencing of the past, quintessentially an insider perspective, and its later reconstruction by historians, inevitably outsiders, I came to accept this criticism, recognizing that while the historian's outsideness can indeed be a problem, it is a crucial aspect of what differentiates us from the original experiencers of the past, and enables us in our role as historians to render the past fathomable and meaningful in ways generally unavailable to those directly involved.

Paul Cohen: A quite different example of the contrast between insideness and outsideness is presented in the story of King Goujian in 20th century China. The Goujian story was as familiar to Chinese school children as the biblical stories of Adam and Eve or David and Goliath are to American youngsters, yet the story was almost completely unknown to inhabitants of the American cultural world. Even including serious students of the recent Chinese past. In Speaking to History, my book on the influence of the Goujian story in 20th century China, I referred to stories like that of Goujian as insider cultural knowledge. A form of knowledge that tends to be hidden from outsiders, mainly because the ways in which it is acquired, transmission within the family setting, early school lessons that are heavily story-centered, popular operatic arias heard on the radio and so on, are not generally available to people who have not had the experience of growing up in a Chinese cultural milieu.

Paul Cohen: Insider cultural knowledge is by no means exclusive to China. It's found in all cultures, and is often relatively inaccessible to outsiders. The circumstances of its functioning and the degree of its hiddenness are, however, likely to differ from case to case. In China, the mere mention of the proverb , wo xin chang Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 6 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. dan, sleeping on brush wood and tasting gall, immediately calls to mind the main outlines of the Goujian story. Something comparable to this is often true in the West, as well, and in March of 2005, while driving back to Boston after visiting my son, Nathaniel, and his family, I was listening to On the Media, a national weekly radio program devoted to media criticism and analysis. The guest on the program was Charles Lewis, the founder and from 1989 until 2004, the director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Washington, D.C., that does investigative reporting and research on public policy issues.

Paul Cohen: The program host, Bob Garfield, was discussing with Lewis the effectiveness of his center's work in bringing about constructive change. "Let me ask you something, Don Quixote," he quipped, not very encouragingly. "What are your top three windmills that you've tilted at, that you thought deserved far more public attention, but somehow amounted to nothing?" Instantly comprehending the allusion to the Cervantes character, Don Quixote, an impractical dreamer whose repeated efforts to right the world's wrongs came to naught, and tilting at windmills, a metaphoric reference to the idealistic, impractical nature of Quixote's labors, Lewis proceeded to discuss a few of his least successful endeavors. A few minutes later, Garfield asked Lewis how often his efforts resulted in real change taking place. Lewis conceded that it probably wasn't more than 10% of the time. "All right," Garfield interjected. "Let me change mythic archetypes here. Never mind Don Quixote, let's talk about Sisyphus."

Paul Cohen: "Yeah," Lewis broke in. "That might be more accurate." Garfield finished his interrupted sentence, describing Sisyphus pushing the boulder perpetually up the hill, but Lewis, it is clear, had understood the metaphor from the start, and didn't need to have it decoded. In this radio exchange, names like Don Quixote and Sisyphus, and phrases like tilting at windmills, served as metaphors that even though not as wisely and widely prevalent in American society as wo xin chang dan in China, for many westerners required little further elucidation. If on the other hand, the conversation had taken place before a listening audience of Chinese, many of whom would not have been acquainted with Don Quixote or the Sisyphus stories, such decoding would have been essential.

Paul Cohen: Another theme that has cropped up periodically in my writing from the beginning to the present is the distinction between thinking and behavior that are culturally conditioned, and thinking and behavior that are reflective of universal human attributes. Very early in my study of Wang T'ao, I published an article in which I cautioned against overlooking those less visible aspects of modern Western civilization, and the traditional civilization of China, that without in any sense being identical, nevertheless converged or overlapped. Such points of convergence between cultures that in other respects were so far apart, I suggested, could be significant in a number of ways. One of which was that in them, we have a basic, a reflection of basic human responses to inherently human and hence to a degree supracultural predicaments.

Paul Cohen: Wang T'ao in very different language regularly made a distinction that was akin to the one I made. During his visit to Europe in the late 1860s, after a speech before the graduating class at Oxford in 1868, he was asked by some of the graduates to compare the Dao of Confucius and the Dao of Christianity. "In both cases," he responded, "Dao has its basis in humanity. In fact, it was precisely this quality, natural to Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 7 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. human beings everywhere, that gave to the human enterprise its underlying unity, da tong." In grappling with Wang T'ao's understanding of the common humanity underpinning the cultures of China and the West, I became sensitized to the general issue, and it became and increasingly important aspect of my historical perspective in general.

Paul Cohen: In my research on the Boxers, in spring and summer of 1900, when the struggle between the Boxers and their foreign and Chinese Christian adversaries reached peak intensity, I was struck by the degree to which at the time, this struggle as well as the circumstances surrounding it, was understood by both sides in profoundly religious terms. I also noted the general tendency of each party to the conflict to view itself as acting in behalf of a supernatural force that was authentic and good, god or the gods, and the other side as representing false gods that were at bottom, either powerless or the very embodiment of evil. What is remarkable is the degree to which contemporary Chinese, like the westerners, viewed everything that happened in the world, including whether it rained or not, as being in the control of heaven or the gods.

Paul Cohen: The main new development in my evolution as a historian, not just of China but in general, was a fresh appreciation of the importance of story and storytelling in history. Although my interest in story didn't become explicit until the closing years of the last century when I began to explore the part the Goujian saga took in 20th century China, I was unconsciously starting to appreciate the importance of story or narrative at some point in the mid-1980s in connection with the tripartite approach I had adopted by that time in my research on the Boxers. In the prologue to part one of History in Three Keys, I distinguished between experience, which is messy, complicated, and opaque, and history, which brings order and clarity into the chaos.

Paul Cohen: As I wrote at the time, the problem basically had to do with how we went about defining the relationship between history, in the sense of the history that historians write, and reality, in the sense of the history that people make and directly experience. This has been a quite controversial issue in the history field, as you are doubtless aware. Some individuals, like the late Hayden White, have taken the position that there's a fundamental discontinuity between history and reality. History, they believe, is basically narrative informed, while reality is not. Therefore, when historians write history, they impose on the past a design or structure that is alien to it.

Paul Cohen: Other individuals, among whom I have found David Carr to be one of the clearest and most persuasive, argue that, and I quote him, "Narrative structure pervades our very experience of time and social existence, independently of our contemplating the past as historians." Since narrative is for Carr an essential component of the past reality historians seek to elucidate, the relationship between history and reality, or as he puts it, narrative and everyday life, is one marked not by discontinuity but by continuity. My stance on this point lies somewhere between these polar alternatives, although it's closer by far to Carr's. I agree with Carr that narrative is a basic component of everyday existence, not only for individuals, but also for communities. And therefore, the narrativization of the historian does not in itself create a disjuncture between the experienced past and the historically-reconstructed past.

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Paul Cohen: However, there are other characteristics of the process of historical reconstruction as practiced that do create if not a complete disjuncture, at least a very different set of parameters from those demarcating immediate experience. At the bare minimum, all historical writing, even the best of it entails radical simplification and compression of the past. An event such as the Boxer episode that took several years to unfold and spread over much of North China is transformed into a book of a few hundred pages that can be held in the hands and read from start to finish in several days.

Paul Cohen: Although the objective of the historian is first and foremost to understand what happened in the past and then explain it to his or her readership, I would also caution that there is an oversimplification buried in the neat contrast between the experienced past and the historically-reconstructed past that needs to be addressed. The experienced past may well be messy and chaotic to the historian, but it is not to the immediate experiencer. It's not that there isn't mess and chaos in people's lives, but our lives to ourselves are not messy and chaotic, or at least not generally so. And it's precisely here that the narrative function at the level of individual personal experience is so important. As we live our lives, we instinctively place them in a narrative framework. In the language of psychology, Daniel Schacter writes, "Memory is a central part of the brain's attempt to make sense of experience and tell coherent stories about it. These tales are all we have of our pasts, and so they are potent determinants of how we view ourselves and what we do."

Paul Cohen: In other words, we tell stories to ourselves that make sense of our experiences. Biographical, not historical sense. So, it isn't entirely correct to say, paraphrasing Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator in Julian Barnes' novel, Flaubert's Parrot, that books explain, while in life things just happen. In life also, there is a powerful need for understanding and explanation, which all of us experience subjectively every moment of every day.

Paul Cohen: After a good deal of ruminating, it eventually occurred to me that by the very act of disaggregating what the Boxers were all about, and suggesting in some detail the different ways in which we might go about understanding them, I had gained greater access to the part that story played in their history. Predictably, this came to me initially in my exploration of the mythologization of the Boxer phenomenon. The final part of the book, but the part that I wrote first. The contents of the mythologization chapters in History in Three Keys, it gradually dawned on me, were awash with stories of all kinds. As I became more sensitized to the operation of story and storytelling, it became increasingly clear that the topics dealt with in the experience section of the book: drought, magic, female pollution, spirit possession, rumor, death, were also bursting at the seams with stories.

Paul Cohen: Finally, the fresh understandings of the historically reconstructed past that I gained in the course of writing History in Three Keys strengthened in my thinking the ways historians too engage in storytelling. Story had now become an important part of the conceptual apparatus with which I approached history writing in general.

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Paul Cohen: My next book, the book on the influence of the Goujian story in 20th century China, was related to History in Three Keys in a number of ways. Most conspicuously, its focus on a well known humiliation revenge motif centered on the story of King Goujian demonstrated the potential of this story as a patriotic narrative, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, when China lay under Japanese threat. But more importantly, the ways in which the story was adapted and readapted to successive crises called to mind the changing myths or stories about the Boxers that were created at different points in the 20th century.

Paul Cohen: Much as myths represented different ways of extracting from the Boxer past, the messages mythologizers wanted to instill in people's minds in the present, fresh versions of the Goujian story were designed, consciously or unconsciously, to speak to the shifting concerns of Chinese throughout the 20th century. The Goujian book also served as a point of departure for the multiple story history interactions dealt with in my most recent book, History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis. Although one of the chapters in that book focuses on the Goujian story, others deal with Serbia, France, Britain, Israel, and the Soviet Union. This was my first book that was not primarily a China book. Indeed, a major part of my motivation for writing it was to place China in a wider world setting, and thereby make it less idiosyncratic and exotic.

Paul Cohen: I made the distinction earlier between aspects of my understanding as a historian that were there from the start of my career and aspects that only emerged later in my thinking. Ironically, History and Popular Memory in a very real sense embodied both of these aspects. A major theme of the book is a supracultural phenomenon that I describe in my memoir as "a different sort of world history. Not the conventional kind based on conjunctures, comparisons, and influences, but one that is manifested in recurring patterns, clearly bearing a family resemblance to one another, yet independently arrived at and very possibly rooted in certain human propensities, above all the universality of storytelling in the human experience that transcend the specificities of culture and place." What's interesting is that this supracultural, universally human dimension, which was part of my intellectual armory from an early point in my writing career, now became firmly joined to storytelling, an aspect of my historical thinking that only began to come to the fore in the 1980s when I started to think about the ingredients in what was to become History in Three Keys.

Paul Cohen: Once I became convinced of the importance of stories and storytelling, it became in one form or another a core component of my thinking as a historian. I had encountered it initially in the shifting myths created about the Boxers over time. It later proved central to my understanding of the protean character of the Goujian story, which took on different guises in response to different circumstances, and it lay at the heart of the popular memory described in my latest book. In that book, I make a clear distinction between popular memory and historical and critical history, but although for historians this distinction is of paramount importance, I also note that it is routinely blurred in the minds of non- historians and often historians themselves, and historians' truth is frequently not able to compete with the power of a compelling story from the past that while professing to be an account of what actually happened, in fact has been seriously distorted by myth or political manipulation.

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Paul Cohen: From the historian's point of view, critical history is generally to be preferred to popular memory. I mean, that's what we do, right? But the relationship between the two is far more ambiguous and complicated than is commonly acknowledged. One reason for this is that popular memory often embodies a real historical component, and it's not always easy for non-historians and in many instances historians themselves to distinguish clearly between what is fact and what is fiction. Another reason is that historians, in our efforts to reconstruct the real past, are generally if not inevitably faced with an insufficiency of evidence. The more complex the past under scrutiny, the greater the insufficiency, which forces us to fill in the blank spots by inferring what we think took place.

Paul Cohen: The trouble is it's hard to keep these inferences from reflecting the values and assumptions that happen to be dominant in the society in which we currently live and work, which means that even as we endeavor to challenge the old myths that encumber people's understanding of the past, we end up however involuntarily introducing new myths into our accounts. This takes me, in a sense, back to the core ambiguities with which the final chapter of my memoir begins. The chapter is titled Then and Now: The Two Histories. In the opening paragraph, I write the following: "At various points in this memoir, I've alluded to the double meaning of the word history. History refers to what happened then, what took place in the past, but it also is also used to refer to how historians view the past now, how we understand and write about it. In this particular case, I happen to be the principal figure in both phases, the then and the now, hence the title, A Path Twice Traveled: My Journey as a Historian of China."

Paul Cohen: But memoirs are only one form of history, and a highly singular one at that. There are many other forms, and these other forms often raise issues that memoir writers tend to ignore, because they're not of immediate concern. For example, the past that memoir writers seek to know what happened then encompasses a recent and well-defined period of time, generally the subject's adult life, and tends to be focused mainly on a single individual. Therefore, memoirs, at least if they are writers, only have to tell their readers what books and articles they've written, the main themes in their work, the accolades and awards they've won, the criticism encountered and so on. Of course, this is a deliberately oversimplified depiction of what one is actually likely to find in a memoir, given that the writer faces countless choices and is free to decide what to include and what not to include.

Paul Cohen: But in the final analysis, it remains a relatively simple operation, especially compared to what a historian of say the French Revolution has to contend with, where things got a lot more complicated. The past that a historian of the French Revolution seeks to know is about a huge number of diverse people, not a single person. It's spatial embrace, moreover, is vast, and it can never come close to being grasped in full, partly because many of the things that took place were never recorded, and partly because much that was recorded has been forgotten. In addition, our French Revolution historian, in shaping the picture he or she wants to convey, will also consciously or unconsciously include certain items of information in his or her account, and exclude other items. All historians, after all, French Revolution historians as well as memoir writers, have personal agendas.

Paul Cohen:

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Which brings me to the related matter of how historians, including memoir writers, view the past now. How we understand and write about it. There will always be gaps that need closing, blank spots that need to be filled, but as historians endeavor to do this closing and filling, we have no choice but to do so in the language of our own day. To tell a story that comes as close as possible to reconstructing what actually took place then, but in a way that speaks meaningfully to people living now. In other words, historians, memoirists as well as French Revolution scholars, must be polyglot. Conversant in the language of the present, but also to the extent humanly possible, in the language of the past. And it's the need to move back and forth between these two utterly different realms, each posing its own special problems of understanding, that is perhaps the greatest difficulty we face in our work. It's not a difficulty that can ever be entirely overcome, and certainly the difficulty is greater in direct proportion to the distance between then and now.

Paul Cohen: But as any seasoned historian will affirm, grappling with the challenge, even embracing it, is one of our greatest sources of fulfillment as historians, taking us to the heart of the mysteries we seek to clarify and make less opaque. Thank you.

Michael Szonyi: Want to sit? Why don't you sit? Thanks so much, Paul, for that... Well, thank you for the talk, and thank you also for the wonderful book. To quote or to paraphrase Julian Barnes again, books don't just happen. Books are crafted. And one of the things I really enjoyed most about the book and about your talk, as well, is to get a sense of you as a craftsman. There's an expression, it probably translates culturally better than Sisyphus or Don Quixote, this is a book about how the sausage gets made. And if you're interested as historians, and as scholars, and as authors, of many of the people in the room, and students in the room, if you're interested in how the sausage gets made, this is a book which is full of insight into that.

Michael Szonyi: One of the messages that I think comes across very clearly is that you're a very thoughtful sausage maker, that you really do... I mean, we all, when we write our books, we talk about the methodological issues we confront, but there's something more profound going on in your work, and it came out very clearly in your summary of a number of themes that have shaped your work over the years. The question of inside versus outside, the question of cultural coding, the question of thinking and behavior that is culturally conditioned versus thinking and behavior that is universal, the issues of story and narrative. So, I want to start the questioning with a question about craft. First of all, to what extent are these themes in your mind as you put together these individual books? Or to what extent did they only become evident to you after the book is completed? And to the extent that these are themes, you write that you write about your progressive sensitization to these issues, to the extent that these are issues that you are sensitive to as you are writing, what's your process of incorporating them? That is to say how do you make them part of your craft? Of your crafting?

Paul Cohen: I think that the themes exist, come into existence earlier than I am aware of their coming into existence, so that they get unconsciously incorporated into whatever craft I have, and I only become conscious of what I have done at a subsequent point, for one of any number of reasons. It's a good question. The distinction between how much of what happens in human behavior is culturally conditioned, of how Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 12 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. much of it is humanly conditioned, because all human beings share things alight cross cultures, is a question that Ben Schwartz used to raise frequently in his teaching, and I'm sure that influenced me to think in those terms.

Paul Cohen: The insideness versus outsideness was more developed from a reaction that I had to, after going along full throttle with China's response to the West, and being influenced by the Dung Fairbank volume to a very great extent. That's how I learned about Wang T'ao initially, how I was introduced to him. I began to think about is this a little bit too simple? Is it really that simple? Isn't it more complicated than that? And so, I started thinking in a reactive mode against China's response to the West as being of course China responded to the West. As I was mentioning a couple of days ago to another friend, I was asked about six months ago to read the manuscript of a book by Jenny Huangfu Day, who is a young historian at Skidmore College, and it's about the early, late Ching, early 20th century Ching diplomatic missions to the West.

Paul Cohen: And the old view of this is that this is sort of incorporated into the China's response to the West I think. What she does beautifully is show that there wasn't one West, and there wasn't one China. There were young people going on these missions who had just finished their study of language at the Tongwen Guan, and there were other people who had been bureaucrats for 30 years, and had a totally different approach. When they wrote letters back, they wrote different kinds of letters depending upon whether they were writing to bosom friends back home, or a beloved brother or sister, or to colleagues in the Zongli Yamen. In other words, who you're writing to influences what you say. And they also had different personalities. One of the guys who was on one of these missions was just fascinated by the games that westerners played, and he was fascinated in China by the games that Chinese played. Others couldn't care less about that.

Paul Cohen: And so, what she brings out very clearly is that there wasn't a Chinese response to a West. There were Chinese responses to the West, just as there were western responses to China. She also was influenced by Ben Schwartz, who recognized these kinds of pitfalls that one could get into, even though I don't think Ben ever directly confronted Fairbank on the China's response to the West paradigm.

Michael Szonyi: All right. This is not one of those sessions where we're going to run out of questions, because I have about eight, but I am going to throw it out to the audience. It's not a formal, a usual formal, academic talk, so we have this practice at the Fairbank Center and many venues at Harvard that we ask you to introduce yourself and your academic danwei or whatever. I think we can depart from that today, but if you like, when you ask your question, I know we have lots of all friends. If you like, preface your question by telling us how you know Paul. But you don't have to.

Paul Cohen: You're still trying to get at my private life.

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Well, that last question you asked appeals to me, because-

Paul Cohen: I can't hear that.

Roger Desforges: I'm Roger Desforges, professor emeritus, State University of New York, Buffalo. My first book was actually reviewed by Paul Cohen. So, that was my first contact with Paul.

Paul Cohen: Hold on a second.

Roger Desforges: And sitting next to me is Paul Schrecker, John Schrecker.

Michael Szonyi: He's just having trouble.

Roger Desforges: Then next to me is John-

Michael Szonyi: Is that working?

Roger Desforges: Is that working? Is John Schrecker, who recommended the publication of my doctoral dissertation, so I feel like I'm among family here. I found your book on the Boxers, The Three Keys, I think that's your best book that I've read. It may not be the best book in your view, but I'd be interested in how you appraise your own work over time, and where you feel you really hit what you wanted to hit, and other places where maybe you didn't. The book on Goujian was very interesting to me, because I'm working on a very similar problem.

Paul Cohen: Had you heard of Goujian previously?

Roger Desforges: I think I probably had heard of him, but I-

Paul Cohen: I never heard of him.

Roger Desforges: ... probably would not have known what to say. Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 14 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here.

Paul Cohen: And I spoke to a number of fellow modern China specialists, whether they knew who this guy Goujian was, never heard of him.

Roger Desforges: Right, well-

Paul Cohen: And obviously, students of ancient China knew about Goujian, but a lot of students of modern China didn't know much about ancient China.

Roger Desforges: Well, my question about the Goujian book is that I was really excited when I saw that you were tackling that issue, and I think you tackled the early part of that story really well, and perhaps the latter part of the story, that is the 20th century handling of the Goujian story. But in between, there were a couple of thousand years of history, and I didn't find that, and it seems to me that if we're going to try to move out of the outsider position into the insider position, we need to take account of the whole of a history, and not just two parts which seem to be quite different, and just compare those two parts.

Paul Cohen: I didn't catch all of your question, but there is another point that I would make about the insideness- outsideness phenomenon, and that is that Goujian was not insider cultural knowledge only for the Chinese. He was equally insider cultural knowledge for the Vietnamese and the Japanese and the Koreans, because they had been, their intellectuals had been nourished and trained in the Chinese academic traditions and Chinese classics and so on. And they were familiar with the Chinese language, Chinese writing system. That's what they dealt with.

Paul Cohen: So, language obviously had something to do with how much of insider cultural knowledge was able to move to another culture, which was not in the same language family.

Roger Desforges: Well, I'm sure there are lots of other questions, so we can carry this on afterward. Yeah.

Michael Szonyi: I found the Goujian book actually really discouraging, because it just reminded me of how much of this coded, how much of what I read was culturally coded in ways I could just get the tiniest little... The tiny little fragment of I remember when I was learning chengyu, learning wo xin chang dan, but never imagining all of the depths and layers of coding that-

Paul Cohen: Incredible.

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But anyways.

Paul Cohen: But it works in reverse, too.

Michael Szonyi: Yeah. What do you mean by in reverse?

Paul Cohen: Well, what Chinese think that they're grasping what some aspect of American life is all about, and they only really grasp one dimension of it. The other stuff is-

Michael Szonyi: Right. Sure. But you could also say reverse in a different sense, which is that the layerings, that even a Chinese person knows some of the layerings, but not all of the layerings.

Paul Cohen: Right, right.

Michael Szonyi: Professor Elliot.

Mark Elliot: Thanks so much, Paul. And so, Mark Elliot, EALC in history here. I think I met you for the first time in 1984, when in Fred Wakeman's seminar at Berkeley, we opened Discovering History in China for the first time. I didn't meet you in person, though.

Paul Cohen: It was a little small group, and yeah, I remember.

Mark Elliot: I didn't meet you in person, I don't think, really until I came here in 2000 for the first time. I wanted to ask you a question that's been on my mind a lot the last six months to a year, which is whether we as historians of China have not failed in some very important way, and I refer to the abysmal state of discourse around China in the United States today, and not just in the United States, but I'll confine it to the United States, where most of the sort of nuance for which you are justifiably well known, and which you've just spoken about. Most of the nuance in conversations around China today, certainly in Washington, D.C., and among policymakers is lost completely. And we are entering it seems an era in which you are either for China, and any sort of notion of multiple Chinas is completely washed away.

Mark Elliot: You are either for China, or you're against China, and I don't know-

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... very good formula for understanding.

Mark Elliot: Which is, certainly not. And this is having all sorts of ramifications in the ways in which academic exchange is happening today between American universities, including Harvard, and Chinese universities. I'm sure you must have seen the story in the Times two days ago, where many of China's most noted experts on the United States, who would catch cultural coding, are being denied visas.

Paul Cohen: Yeah.

Mark Elliot: By the U.S. State Department. So, I just wondered what your reading of the situation is, and where you see, if you see, some sort of bright spot here where historians, perhaps, maybe you have a reading of where we went wrong in failing to ensure that a sophisticated conversation, sophisticated and informed discourse and understanding of China took root? Or what we might do differently going forward?

Paul Cohen: Well, Chinese scholars, Chinese intellectuals, like American intellectuals, they come out of a particularly society, the society they live in, society they deal with morning, noon, and night. And it's the rare one who is able to get out of this sort of narrow gauge framework and see things in nuanced, subtler and subtler ways. I've been reading recently, this is Wang Gungwu's work in progress. It's not yet published. It's basically on how... The theme of it, this is a guy who writes a book a year, not like you and me. He is interested in how China becomes part of the world, but he's also influenced, he's also interested in how in becoming part of the world, Chinese are reaching back into the Chinese past and selecting aspects of that past that they feel strengthen their position in the world today.

Paul Cohen: It's fascinating. He does a very good job of this, and it's not simple, when he deals with the Xi Jinping. He refers to the authoritarianism and so on, but he doesn't see him as a replica of Mao. In many ways, he sort of has elements of Mao, but elements of Deng Xiaoping, as well. And elements that really go back to neither of them, and that he's sort of built into a... I don't know that I would call it a third set of possibilities, but maybe it is. It's a very, very complicated business. I do have a few Chinese colleagues that I've, one of whom had translated some work of mine, and who I've seen on a number of occasions, and he's extremely subtle, extremely aware of nuanced differences in viewpoints. But most of them are not, and I suspect that that's true in the West, as well.

Paul Cohen: I mean, it wasn't uncommon a few years ago to think, "Well, if the Chinese will just become, develop an economy that's a little bit more like ours, and become a more prosperous society," which over the past 30 years they absolutely have become, that they'll become more liberal politically. That connection is a connection which is... It comes right out of our history, and we're trying, in a sense unconsciously, to apply it universally, when there are so many variables that are not taken into consideration. And so, you end up with an oversimplification, and it hasn't happened, and there have been a lot of voices today

Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 17 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. that are saying it's not likely to happen, that the Chinese are not likely to ever become a liberal democrat. Are we a liberal democratic country? We're changing, too.

Michael Szonyi: I'm going to take chair's privilege and just follow up on Mark's question, if that's okay, so there's actually a book about that oversimplification, James Mann's The China Fantasy, right? Which is precisely about how oversimplifications have shaped US policy. So, I want to just push you a little bit on Mark's question. What's our job, what's our responsibility, what's our role as historians to poke at that fantasy? To undermine that fantasy? To challenge that fantasy?

Paul Cohen: Could you ask me a harder question?

Michael Szonyi: All right. You want to take a stab? Nope?

Paul Cohen: I don't have an answer. I really don't. I think that there's no question about the fact that there is a role for historians. We can influence Chinese, we can influence Americans by understanding Chinese in a certain way. There's no simple answer.

Michael Szonyi: Esther.

Esther Hu: Thank you. Esther Hu on the faculty at BU. Paul, I think we first crossed paths at the Joe Esherick talk last March, when you said something that, you had a Mao quotation, and it's in my first book, so I was very excited that I went up to you afterwards and I said, "Wow! Blah, blah, blah, blah." And then you said, "Well, that's a well-known quotation." And so, that's when we first crossed paths, and I first crossed paths with both you and Elizabeth at one of the visiting scholar presentations at the very end of the year. I think it was also last spring. I think it was in May.

Esther Hu: Anyway, I read your book, and I admire it, and-

Paul Cohen: The memoir?

Esther Hu: This. Yes.

Paul Cohen: Oh, you've already read it. Oh. Wow.

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Esther Hu: Yes. You told me about it when you were serving as discussant for a-

Paul Cohen: Right, right, right, right.

Esther Hu: For something in the Yenching Institute. Anyway, so I loved especially the strategies that you mentioned on pages 141, 149, regarding how to make one's work more accessible to an audience. So, you mentioned one, everydayness of history. Comparisons to baseball. Two, cross-cultural comparisons, rain and the supernatural for two cultures. Three, emphasizing how unexotic, even, what is it, universally human was the understanding of the Boxers. So, I find that immensely helpful in connection to Michael's question to you regarding your craft. So, for me as a writer, this is just immensely helpful.

Esther Hu: But for me, the clincher was, because I don't have a PhD in history, my PhD's in English, and so in trying to understand Chinese history, I got to page 234, where you mention the periodizations of, for China going from the traditional period to the modern period, it's not the Opium War from 1839 to 1842. It's actually the Taiping Rebellion, from 1850 to something, something. And for me, that was, I was like, "Wow, I didn't know that." And I am sure everybody else in the room knows that, so it's like this is new information for me, and I just really appreciate learning about so much.

Paul Cohen: Yeah. One of the things that, this came out, or at least there was an allusion to this in my reference to the common humanity, in a sense, that the Boxers and their adversaries had, in that they were both religious, they both believed that the other side was imprisoned by false religious beliefs that were the embodiment of evil and so on. And yet when we think of the Boxers as the other, we think of the Boxers as being the very antithesis of anything civilized. If we're thinking of them, let's say around 1900, when we get to the 1930s, the westerners are seeing the Chinese stirrings of real Chinese nationalism as being echoes of Boxerism. So, they're seeing something that the Chinese regard in a positive sense in a negative sense, because the nationalism is targeting westerners in the 1930s in many instances.

Paul Cohen: But it seems to me that a lot depends on, you can take any subject, and you can build a framework around it, and it can be a narrow, tight framework, or a somewhat looser framework, or a very loose framework, and the answers that you get to a single set of questions are going to differ from one framework to the next, so that it's awfully important to take into account in the most rigorous way possible the context for the questions that you're raising. And I have not always done that myself, but I see the value of doing it, and I think that that would be a way of approaching, say Xi Jinping in China today. Is he a bad guy because he doesn't do the right things in the human rights area? Like the problems with the Xu Zhangrun at Tsinghua right now? Or is he a good guy, because he's doing something that in his hard-nosed way, he thinks it's absolutely essential for China to become, to fulfill its dream? Or the dream that he has for China?

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And I think you'll find that there are Chinese on both sides of this issue. Some of whom support Xu Zhangrun, Xi Jinping, and others of whom disagree with him. That's fine, but I think we have to recognize that complexity, and that's something that in our ceaseless effort to make the past clear and comprehendible, that we frequently tend to not give adequate attention to. Complexity is hard to deal with. Complexity doesn't offer you simple, straightforward positions about complex situations. That's the whole thing. And so, I think it's habitually, we don't think in complex terms. Habitually, we're looking for a way of simplifying things. And that's something I think good historians have to be wary of, whether in the process of being wary of that level of complexity, they're going to be better equipped to make a dent in Chinese thinking about America, I don't know.

Michael Szonyi: Rudolph, yeah.

Rudolph: I know Paul. I think if I recall accurately, since 81, and in a rather provocative manner. I was a young scholar, I had written a book on something where by any standard I knew nothing about. Namely religion of the Taiping Tianguo, and all that, never written a word about the 19th century. Well, and then I thought, "Well, I better show it to some specialists who might have a critical view on that." So, I sent it to Fred Wakeman and to Paul, both of whom I did not know, and then as a matter of fact I came here for a talk, I dropped it on his desk and said, "Well, I would be very happy if I could have the manuscript back tomorrow morning." You know?

Rudolph: Which was just 200 pages or something, no big deal. Well, I must say to this day, to both of them, I'm extremely grateful that they had a sort of sober look at it and says, "Well, this guy's a nobody, but he has a point, so let's get that published." And that was a kind of generosity and a willingness to engage with outsiders. They could have just said... with that, and thrown it in the wastepaper basket, and they didn't. And I must say I was extremely grateful for that.

Rudolph: But here comes my question. Now, there have been some criticism of the early manuscript, as you said, that somehow you as a person were not really in that manuscript, and I think on a different point, I perhaps would like to take that up again. In your presentation today, I haven't had time to read the book now, so in your presentation today, somehow the particular time in which you lived, the political shifts through which you lived, seem to be completely outside of any importance. So, you have an internal history of how your own things proceeded. Well, but soberly speaking, you lived through the 60s, when you were... a large transformation of basically entire historical thinking. The approach came about. You lived through the end of the Cold War, and now it of course, itself, is sort of... How should I say? Self- gratifying story of historians. Namely, we are these people who are just interested in truth, and we are exploring these things and so on and so forth.

Rudolph: Now, if you look through 20th century history, that story is not very convincing, because the moment the temperature goes up, you go to a war situation or something like that. You have a very sizable amount of historian who are willing to bend their craft to whatever propaganda purpose is just in time. Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 20 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here.

This is independent of where they are, whether they in Germany, United States, France, England, or wherever it is. And so, you have, as a matter of fact, historians being part, very much, of a kind of a ideological warfare, propaganda warfare, and debate there, and then you, of course, have lived in a place and in a time where you were not on a short leash of a master narrative and its changes. So, nobody tells you, institutionally speaking, "This you cannot write. This is the wrong topic. And this you have to frame in the following manner."

Rudolph: In China, that is, as a matter of fact, quite definitely the case. You have an established master narrative, and the pressure on scholars to adjust to it and fit to it is very high. But you have informal pressures which are also very high, namely fashions of the moment, fashions of the time, and I would even think that the China-centered approach you pushed for one moment, has a historical particular context. Namely, an effort to get out of an imperialist narrative of imposing things on others, trying to get the local voices to speak and to be articulate, to take them seriously, and of course that instantly comes with the problem, namely who is that local voice? Namely, the person is that, the official master narrative of the Communist Party, is that the local voice? How do you find it? Who articulates it? How do you get to it?

Rudolph: And I think if you tell us a little bit about your interaction with the time circumstances, your action of your historical research with the particular time circumstances, how that might have influenced, I think that would be very nice.

Paul Cohen: Let me think about that.

Michael Szonyi: Can you give us one example where the larger political context shaped something that you wrote? With the benefit of hindsight?

Paul Cohen: In the introduction to Discovering History in China, I bring in the Vietnam War. Sorry. In the introduction to Discovering History in China, I bring in the Vietnam War. Not so much the antiwar movement, but the degree to which Americans assumed that we saw our modernity as being a good. But the manner in which our modernity was expressed from the Vietnamese point of view was in terms of killing and wounding and hurting, and I was aware of this when I was writing the book, and I think it probably influenced my attraction to the China-centered approach. A Vietnam-centered approach would have resulted in a very different set of responses to what was going on in America, militarily and so on, than in fact was the case. There were great differences among Americans at the time, as you no doubt are aware.

Paul Cohen: It's a good question.

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That's actually a really good example, because of course, so much of Discovering History in China is exactly about situating intellectual shifts in their time. Joanna?

Joanna Handlin: Hi, I'm Joanna Handlin Smith. I first met Paul... Can you hear me?

Paul Cohen: Not easily.

Joanna Handlin: Oh, really.

Paul Cohen: It's my problem, not yours.

Joanna Handlin: Okay. Roughly 45 years ago, when he and John Schrecker, who just left, were co-editing a volume and I recall to this day, I can remember that his youngest daughter, Emily, was about five, and he still has... He had then Barcelona chairs in his Lincoln house, the same ones he now has in his Belmont house. So, how much veracity is there? Okay.

Joanna Handlin: So, my question, just surveying, you've been in this for 60 years, a bit longer than I, but I've been there roughly 45, 50. And the contrast of your account, which is granted, you work on 19th and 20th century, and I work on the late Ming, but I'm just wondering whether the enormous changes in the scholarly field that have taken place over these past decades, which includes the opening up of China, and the jettisoning of fengjian as a paradigm for looking at everything in the past, which includes the interactions with Chinese scholars who come here and learn a bit about western historiography as we, or some of us, go to China and learn more about current trends.

Joanna Handlin: The availability of materials, the opening up of archives that allows one to study subaltern, I just wonder whether you sense that these changes in the scholarly context has changed your approach, and maybe to make it a little easy, I wonder if the book on Goujian, on cultural coding, could have been written? Would you have even bothered to have written such a book 60 years ago as your first book? So, that's my question.

Paul Cohen: I'm not sure I got the meat of that question.

Joanna Handlin: Well, you've done very well, as Rudy has said, in tracing the evolution of your moving from one problem to another. Meanwhile, all sorts of changes are taking place in the scholarly world in which you participate, have participated. Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 22 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here.

Paul Cohen: You mean you don't think that the points that I made in my presentation are valid for all time?

Joanna Handlin: I just want you to make it more explicit. I mean, you did mention from outsider to insider, you did, but you know, where does storytelling, or the value placed on story, is that a reaction to your own evolution? Is it something that you've, from somehow participating in this larger circle-

Paul Cohen: Yeah. One of the great experiences in my life was going abroad in the summer of 1954 to study French in Paris. And it wasn't studying French in Paris that was the core experience that was really important. It was being outside of North America for the first time in my life. Going to restaurants, ordering steak and french fries, drinking a whole bottle of vin ordinaire by myself. Just living in a way which was culturally... Going to a restaurant and being assured that the food was going to be decent. In 1954, you couldn't have that confidence in America. You know, a lot of restaurants were really crap, and you had to watch your step, and I felt that, "This is a different culture."

Paul Cohen: And that's just one example, but there were so many other aspects of it. That was a hugely important experience for me in becoming sensitized to cultural difference. There was nothing in my life prior to that that reached that level of importance for me. But then I built on that. I think that going into something like Chinese history was clearly related to my openness to delving into another cultural experience, one that was different from my own.

Joanna Handlin: I'm not sure I made my point clear, but maybe we should continue it another time.

Michael Szonyi: We'll take I think one last question. Oh, sure. Two questions, from Jin first and then Jewels.

Jin: My name is Jin. I met Paul because I sent him a paper on Fairbank, on Donald Fairbank, which I was surprised. I sent you a paper that I wrote a couple of years ago on my own reading of Fairbank, and I was surprised at how quickly you replied, and I was surprised at your detailed response, feedback. So, that's why I have a lot of respect.

Jin: I was struck by your talking about the difference between experienced history and constructed history. My background is journalism, and there's this well-known cliché that never let facts get into a good story, and I... Get in the way of a good story.

Paul Cohen: Never let facts get in the way of a good story?

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Jin: Yeah.

Paul Cohen: Okay.

Jin: And I-

Paul Cohen: And you think that historians do that too?

Jin: I think there's advantage. There's advantage of doing that, because there's a trade off between simplicity and effectiveness, and when Mark asked the question how to make Washington understand a more nuanced, complex picture of China, I thought of Trump's language. When he speaks in eighth- grader English, and that's how he can speak to the mass. I also thought of the effectiveness of Chairman Mao. Why is Chairman Mao, was so effective? Because his language, his concept, were so easy, were so accessible to the average people, so I think in a way, for historians to be effective, they have to deal with the trade off between simplicity and effectiveness.

Jin: And then I have another... Oh, another one-

Paul Cohen: But you don't think that historians can deal with complexity and still have appreciative readers?

Jin: They can deal with complexity in their complicated way, in their complicated language.

Paul Cohen: Right.

Jin: But the cost of that is the effectiveness, such as to people in Washington.

Paul Cohen: Right.

Jin: There's a cost to it, so when you try to grasp, when you try to understand history in a complicated way, a complex way, then you accept the cost, as well, at the same time. And then I have another point, which is to have a constructive history, another difference between constructive history and Paul Cohen - My Journey as a Historian of China (Completed 02/07/20) Page 24 of 28 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2020 - view latest version here. experienced history is you put logic to explain how so and why so. Why things happened in the way it did. And in doing that, you have a thesis. If you try to present history in its own complexity, then it would not be as coherent as... It's difficult to have a thesis. When you cite example that this young woman who talked about Chinese responses to western impact, I think the only possible coherence in her paper that you read is that she anchored her paper against Fairbank's impact and response model, which gave her an anchor in writing her paper-

Paul Cohen: Something to argue against, in a sense.

Jin: Right, something to argue against. That gives her coherence. When you try to capture what is the zeitgeist of the time, you have to capture the main point, the main thrust of the time. And if you try to talk about Chinese responses of the time, then what is the main thrust of the story? Of the history? What is the thesis? And the only possible thesis that I can think of for that, for her paper, is Fairbank's anchor. Paradigm, simple paradigm that gave her an anchor, that gave her coherence to her story. So-

Michael Szonyi: I don't know that there's a question there. Do you want to riff on that a little bit?

Jin: Two points.

Jin: With a coherent story. Coherent constructed history.

Paul Cohen: I think that you've got a point, and I think that I would say that in responding as I did, as strongly against China's response to the West, that I undoubtedly oversimplified the target in order to make my response more impressive. In fairness to myself, I also have a chapter in my memoir on important aspects of China's history in recent centuries, which do not work, for which the China-centered approach does not really work. Migration history, the history of non-Chinese ethnic groups. It's really, it's too complicated to be simplified under the China-centered approach, so I think it's always important to realize what you're doing. If you're going to be using a target in an oversimplified way in order to strengthen your position, okay. But at least understand what you've done and how you've been able to construct your response. And I think very often that isn't the case.

Paul Cohen: And I would include myself initially, although eventually I think I did come to a recognition that just as I came to a recognition that outsideness was not necessarily a disadvantage, that it could also be an advantage in certain circumstances, and I think a China-centered approach is a good approach, but it's not necessarily the approach that you want to apply in all situations. It's-

Michael Szonyi:

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We are a little over time, and I'm very glad to give the last question to I'm pretty sure, if I'm not mistaken, one of the youngest people in the room, who is if I'm not mistaken, a senior at the college. Mark, second row here. So, we've had comments from a historian at the peak of his career. We'll have the last question from someone just starting her career.

Jules: Thank you. My name is Jules, and I'm a senior at the college. I'm a student of history and math, and I just finished my thesis on the Opium War, so it was really a pleasure to hear the talk.

Paul Cohen: Could you try speaking a little bit louder?

Jules: I first learned about Professor Cohen in my history tutorial as a sophomore, when we were asked to choose a particular field of our own choice to write a historiography paper, and Discovering History was the book that I wrote about. And my question was you talked a little bit about your personal relationship with Chinese history, and especially the past half a century of writing and learning about Chinese history, and I'm wondering what is your sort of personal experience or feelings towards the changes and transformations of China in the past half a century? Not necessarily as a historian, but also as an American citizen, as for example a parent, or a consumer going into when your iPhone doesn't work as well as it should, and when you're picking out your next phone. Thank you.

Paul Cohen: I didn't hear enough of it.

Michael Szonyi: Can you just wrap the question up quickly? Louder, yeah.

Jules: I was just wondering your personal feelings towards the changes and transformations in China in the past half a century, not necessarily as a historian, but also as an American citizen, or a parent, or a private consumer.

Michael Szonyi: Did you get it?

Paul Cohen: Not really, but-

Michael Szonyi: So, your thoughts on summing up the transformation in China in the course of your career, so not history, but how China has changed.

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Right, right, right. When I was in graduate school in the late 1950s, if you had told me that China 50 or 60 years later was no longer going to be a country where 20% of the population lived in the cities, and 80% lived in the countryside, and where 20% were well-to-do, and 80% were impoverished, and presented me with the China that we have today, where 350,000 students from China annually study institutions of higher education in the United States, and many of these are students, are not poor Chinese. They come from middle-class Chinese families. I have a daughter who was teaching for some years in Rhode Island, English as a second language, and she would often have a class that was 25 people in the class, 24 of whom would be Chinese. Which was not ideal, because there were enough of them so that they would speak Chinese with each other too often, instead of practicing their English.

Paul Cohen: But it was a clear instance of something, of a phenomenon that was inconceivable if you go back to the 1950s when I was in graduate school. Inconceivable that China could send that many people to the United States to study at their own cost, not with huge scholarship aid, because a lot of the American universities were taking in, and this is true today, international students in order to help them deal with their financial situations. They don't do that by giving large, fat fellowships to foreigners. So, if you want to have a sense of change that has taken place in China during the course of my career, the answer is they're huge.

Paul Cohen: Of course, there've been more than one change. I mean, in the 1950s, the Great Leap Forward hadn't yet taken place till the end of that period, and then you had the Deng Xiaoping era, which was reversed a lot of the things that were commonplace during the Mao years, and then after Deng Xiaoping, for a few... Deng Xiaoping was able to sort of... The way in which the succession operated at that point in time was that Deng Xiaoping could in effect appoint his successors, and he did, and then when Xi Jinping became the chief honcho, he got the rules changed, so that he could appoint himself, in effect indefinitely, as the top dog in China.

Paul Cohen: So, these are important changes that have taken place, politically changes, and also economic changes in China. Not to mention the degree to which, the level of education in China today, of the average citizen, it's incredible. It's a very highly-educated society, which was not the case when I began to study China. And the internet, of course, which is a big item in the furniture of Chinese life today, didn't exist in the 1950s, or the 60s, or the 70s, for that matter, and it's another window on what's going on in the world, which the Chinese are very, very sensitive to. They know.

Paul Cohen: I mean, I could go on and on and talking about the changes in China that have taken place during the course of my, what, 60, 65-year period as a student of Chinese history. What?

Michael Szonyi: It would be hard to make the argument that it's the most significant change, but one extraordinary change is I think in the 1950s when you came to Harvard, it would be hard to imagine the work of a scholar named, I'm assuming Cohen is your Chinese name.

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Paul Cohen: Cohen.

Michael Szonyi: Cohen, is that your Chinese name?

Paul Cohen: Yeah.

Michael Szonyi: Be hard to imagine the work of a scholar called Cohen being a best seller in China. But you've had several best sellers in China. I think the Chinese version of this will be a best seller. It's been such a great treat to work with you over the years, but also especially to work with you on this project, and to have you here today. Thank you so much, and thank you all.

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