Movie stars, pop idols, teenage heartthrobs and party-hopping socialites,
move over. Here comes the professor.
Since the launch of his latest book in Shanghai earlier last month, Yi
Zhongtian, the 59-year-old, unassuming associate professor of history at Xiamen
University, has been hogging the centre stage in town. The first print run of
550,000 copies of the book, a collection of his series of lectures on the
romance of the "Three Kingdoms" in a CCTV programme, has reportedly been sold
out.
Never being shy, the professor seems to relish the public limelight on his
life, his book and his lectures. And while the book has brought Professor Yi
fame and, possibly, fortune, it has also stirred a storm of controversy
surrounding his propriety in the arcane world of mainland academia.
Having watched many of Professor Yi's highly opinionated and eminently
entertaining lectures on television, I have become one of his many fans. Critics
have accused him of crowd pleasing, which they condemned as unbecoming of a
serious scholar. As a student of history, I disagree with the basic premise of
such criticisms.
In our school, teachers often urged students to think creatively about
historical events. We were asked to analyze the motives and thought processes of
the principal figures in arriving at their decisions that shaped the course of
history. We were also encouraged to ask the question, "What if it happened the
other way?"
These are exactly the same elements that have made Professor Yi's discourse
so captivating to the general public, because he has succeeded in bringing out
the drama in one of the most turbulent periods in China's long history.
On television, he is obviously not supposed to provide all the footnotes of
his research, and therefore he should not be criticized for failing to comply
with the strictest requirements for delivering a scholastic paper.
After all, Professor Yi is not unique among historians in doing what his
critics charge to be "popularizing" history. The late Barbara Tuchman (1912-89),
a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote several highly popular historical books,
including A Distant Mirror (1978) and The March of Folly (1984), that we
laypersons can enjoy and understand.
In Practicing History, a collection of her essays, Ms Tuchman describes the
historian as a storyteller who too often discovers a thesis only after the
material is thoroughly studied and understood. "Historians must learn when to
stop research and start writing it," she wrote. "It is an act of creation."
Although historians have questioned some of Ms Tuchman's dissertations, her
enlightening approach to the study of history has widely been held in high
regard. She received a number of honorary degrees and was a lecturer at Harvard
University, the University of California and US Naval War College.
Professor Yi seems to believe that in history, character is fate, which is
one of Ms Tuchman's central themes in The March of Folly. And he knows when to
exposit his thesis. If delving into the personalities of major historical
figures seems too "creative" to some of his colleagues in academia, Professor Yi
has remained unfazed.
In a candid interview on CCTV, Professor Yi said he was not particularly
troubled by the criticisms levelled at him, usually by unsigned critics, in
newspapers and the many chat rooms on the Internet. "Very few of those
criticisms actually merit my response," he said.
In that interview, Professor Yi won the admiration of his many fans not so
much with his eloquence, for which he is well-known, but by coming across as
being honest to himself. On the question of money, with an obvious reference to
the royalty income from his latest book, Professor Yi rhetorically asked: "Why
should Chinese intellectuals be condemned to a life of poverty? When will
society begin to accord intellectuals their due respect and reward?"
He went on to relate a real-life experience that has helped strengthen his
practical view about money, a topic few intellectuals in China are willing to
discuss, at least in public. He recalled that upon visiting the widow of a
colleague who had just passed away, he was horrified to find that she was living
in abject poverty. "There was no furniture to speak of in her home," he said.
"She borrowed a few wooden stools from her neighbour for us to sit."
Professor Yi said he is going to reach the mandatory retirement age at Xiamen
next year, and he was holding out little hope that any other university will
hire him to teach. Universities, he said, abhor controversy.
It is widely estimated that Professor Yi stands to gain at least a few
million yuan on royalties from his book. It's money well earned. I am waiting
for the second print run to buy my copy.
Email: jamesleung@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 09/05/2006 page4)
