Preeminent historian of China dies at 82

Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 is the most notable book by Philip Kuhn. [File photo]

Philip Kuhn, a preeminent British-born American historian on Chinese history, died on Feb 11. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by Sinologist and Chinese history professor Hilde De Weerdt and Cambridge history professor Hans van de Ven.

"RIP Philip Kuhn, author of excellent books on Chinese history: Rebellion & Its Enemies; Soulstealers; Origins of the Modern Chinese State," writes Weerdt on her Twitter account at 5:40 pm Beijing time on Monday.

Kuhn was born in 1933 in London. He went to the US, attending Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C.. After getting his A.B. at Harvard University, he went to Georgetown University for graduate school in 1957. Kuhn returned to Harvard for his doctorate in History and East Asian Languages under the guidance of John King Fairbank, a prominent historian of China.

Diverging from the "shock-response" pattern put forward by Fairbank, which argues that Western society's impact on China changes Chinese society fundamentally, Kuhn suggests one probe the history of China to explain its transformation. This was a new and unconventional view in the study of Chinese history.

Many of Kuhn's readers mourned his death on social networking sites Sina Weibo, spurring the interest of netizens to take a look at Chinese society from a historical perspective.

Among Kuhn's published books, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 is most notable. Some university professors claim that the book is required reading material for their students.

Originally published in 1990 by Harvard University Press, Soulstealers won the recognition of the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 1992 for its "subtle, powerful, and still relevant inquiry into the dynamics of autocratic rule". It probed into the mass hysteria which broke out over sorcerers among the common people during the most prosperous period of China's last imperial dynasty.

Liu Chang, co-translator of Soulstealers said that the book is "attractive as a detective novel".

"The book is also about contemporary China," Liu said Kuhn used to tell him.

In the book, Kuhn wrote that in a society where population is growing excessively, per capita resources are going the wrong way and social morale is decaying, people will doubt that they can improve their social condition through work or study. And when they lose faith in the judicial system, they may turn to sorcery for an illusion of power.

The four books published by Kuhn are Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China; Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864; Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, and Origins of the Modern Chinese State and Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times.

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