Organizer and Chair: John E. Wills, Jr., University of Southern California, Los
Angeles
Discussants: Joshua A. Fogel, University of California, Santa Barbara; Stevan
Harrell, University of Washington, Seattle; James L. Hevia, North Carolina
State University; William Kirby, Harvard University; Frederic Wakeman ,
University of California, Berkeley; John E. Wills, Jr. , University of Southern
California, Los Angeles
The history of foreign relations, especially of relations with Europe and North America, once was the center of energy in Western-language studies of Chinese history. Although good work has continued to be done, the centers of innovation and intellectual energy have been in other fields since the 1960s. The participants in this round table, and many others who we hope will join in our discussion, believe that a revival of interest and intellectual energy in this field is under way, and propose to contribute to that revival by presenting their own views as to how the field may be changing and what kinds of new approaches may be most fruitful. We already are interested in the implications of a de-centered, non-reified concept of "China" that recognizes the very deep involvement of many peoples and many regions "within China" in renegotiations of "ethnic" identities and cultural, political, and economic ties across China's apparent frontiers. We are interested in the webs of transnational connection centered in places like Shanghai and in the implications for the study of earlier periods of the contemporary debate about "Greater China." We would like to ask ourselves what it might be like to go back to "classic" themes of the study of Chinese foreign relations-wars, spheres of influence, the treaty system-with the perspectives offered by these new approaches. We will be especially interested in suggestions of bodies of theory that may help raise the present rather tepid theoretical temperature of the field.