Versatility, Interdisciplinarity, and Academic Collaboration: Paul Pickowicz’s Insights on Chinese Studies

Abstract

Paul G. Pickowicz, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Chinese Studies and Inaugural Holder of the Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History from 2007 to 2017 at the University of California, San Diego, is one of the country’s leading historians of modern China. For four decades, he has published on a wide range of topics on Chinese history. He is known for being a versatile researcher, an interdisciplinary scholar, and a visionary program builder. In his works Pickowicz has investigated social and political change in rural North China, the impact of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese peasants, the history of Chinese cinema, Cold War propaganda strategies, rural protest and Chinese soft-power initiatives, and Marxism and Chinese intellectuals. Pickowicz is also one of the prime movers behind the study of the People’s Republic as a subfield in modern Chinese history. His book Chinese Village, Socialist State (coauthored with Edward Friedman and Mark Selden) won the 1993 Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and was praised by the New York Review of Books for containing “more telling detail and acute analysis than any other study... of Chinese rural life.” Observer calls the book “by far the best book on the impact of the Chinese Communist Party on peasant life.” As scholars in multiple fields have attested, Pickowicz’s works, though historical at the core, are also intersectional, connecting history with sociology, political science, anthropology, film studies, and cultural studies. Pickowicz has also harnessed his passion for Chinese history, his multidisciplinary approach, and his skill in collaboration to the task of program building. Since the 1990s, he, together with Joseph W. Esherick, has built UCSD’s modern Chinese history program into one of the best in the world and trained a generation of scholars who are playing a leading role in the field. In 2016, Pickowicz was honored by the German government with a Humboldt Research Award for lifetime accomplishments in research and teaching. At the Stanford University workshop on “History, Images, and Politics in the PRC” held in January 2019, Professor Pickowicz graciously agreed to share with me his vision and insight into numerous subjects related to China, past and present, for the Forum of the Chinese Historical Review. The exchange between us covers a good range of topics from Pickowicz’s graduate school years and his first visit to China in 1971, his decades-long fieldwork in a Chinese village, and Chinese film studies to the issues of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and training The Chinese Historical Review, 27. 1, 50–66, May 2020