Historian: Immanuel Hsu

immanuel hsuHistorian: Immanuel Chung-Yueh Hsu

Lived: 1923-2005

Nationality: Chinese-American

Books: Intellectual Trends in the Qing period (1959), China’s entrance into the Family of Nations (1960), The Rise of Modern China (1970).

Profession: Academic, historian

Perspective: Liberal-nationalist

Immanuel Hsu was born in China and raised in Shanghai. He entered the Chinese diplomatic corps and spent two years deployed in Tokyo.

After World War II, Hsu relocated to the United States for study, obtaining a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota and a doctorate at Harvard. He spent the 1950s at Harvard, completing research fellowships before taking up a professorship at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hsu remained there until his retirement in 1991, while guest lecturing at other American and European universities.

Hsu wrote numerous books and monographs on 19th and 20th century China, however his 1970 text The Rise of Modern China has become a staple for students of the revolution.

Historiographically, Hsu is a liberal-conservative who sympathises with nationalist ideas and movements. He is strongly critical of both the Manchu elite and foreign imperialists, painting them as transgressors who prolonged the Qing dynasty and corrupted the natural development of China.

Hsu paints Sun Yixian as the logical leader of Republican China and the Guomindang as the party of his ideas. He is less critical of Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang than left-wing historians, overstating their achievements during the ‘Nanjing decade’. Hsu also attributes the Nationalist defeat in the Civil War to financial bankruptcy and exhaustion, rather than mismanagement and corruption, while ignoring or glossing over communist successes.

Quotations

[On the Boxer Rebellion] “The dogs of war had been unleashed and would now, uncontrolled, run ravening and slavering around Northern China.”

“Throughout his life, Mao was motivated by a perpetual restlessness. He rebelled against his father, against landlord and capitalist, against Nationalist rule, against Soviet domination and revisionism, and finally against his own party establishment… Impatient for change, he wanted to transform the state, the society and human nature in one stroke.”

“For China, Mao was Lenin and Stalin combined. He was a great revolutionary, the most successful of the mid 20th century. His greatest achievement was the seizure of power through the creative adaptation of Marxist-Leninist theory… He evolved the strategy of organising the peasantry to encircle the cities.”

“A pillar of strength in both party and government, [Zhou Enlai] was the moderating influence through numerous political storms. Zhou had saved the country from the utter chaos during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution and had helped thwart the Gang of Four’s grasp for supreme power.”


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