He Bingdi (1917~2012.06.07), Jinhua, Zhejiang. He graduated from Tsinghua University in 1938, was admitted to the sixth batch of Tsinghua students studying in the United States in 1944, went to Columbia University in the United States at the end of 1945 to study Western history, and received a doctorate in British history from Columbia University in 1952. After that, Mr. He Bingdi gradually turned to the study of national history, and achieved remarkable results. In 1966, Mr. Ho Wasingdi was elected as an academician of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. In 1979, Mr. Ho was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts, Arts and Sciences.
Representative works: "Population Decline in the Early Ming Dynasty and Its Related Problems", "Theory of Social History of the Ming and Qing Dynasties", "Cradle of the East", "Sixty Years of Reading History", etc.
He Bingdi has a strong sense of nationality. He believes that the completion of a truly meaningful historical work not only requires a rational and meticulous handling of a large number of diverse historical materials, but also has the driving force of emotion behind it. Of all his writings, the one that is most emotionally invested is Cradle of the East: A Neolithic and Early Historical Chinese Technology and The Indigenous Origins of Ideas, 5000-1000 BC. The book was heavily debated before its publication, and it took several twists and turns to come out. Fairbank, a professor of history at Harvard, once said: "If there are five or six Ho Bingdi in China, no one in the West will dare to talk nonsense about Chinese history." ”
Fairbank, a harvard history professor, once said, "If there were five or six Ho Bingdi in China, no one in the West would dare to talk nonsense about Chinese history."
For the "weird" point, He Bingdi also has a deep understanding, thinking that this is a big flaw in his life. He Bingdi was born in Tianjin, and when he was in the third grade of Tianjin Private First Primary School, his teacher Liu Yimin wrote a comment to him: "If you can love everyone and be kind, then the jade is flawless." Every time he thought about this for decades, he sighed: "This teacher can point out so sharply and correctly predict the biggest flaw in my life- often can't live in harmony with Chinese and foreign scholars." There is some truth to the famous saying of the ancients ' three years old to see the old'. ”
Once, He Bingdi and Hu Shi were talking in his apartment in New York, during which someone handed Hu Shi a business card and asked to see him. Hu Shi saw the business card and expressed his dissatisfaction with the character and motives of the people who came, but after a little thought, he still made the decision to receive the meeting. When Hu and the visitors met, they even laughed. He Bingdi felt that this was Hu Shi's strength: leaving room for suspicion of people; trying not to show people an angry face. "It's exactly what I can't do."
He Bingdi had several conversations with Hu Shi. He thinks the most important one was a conversation at Hu Shi's New York apartment on August 18, 1960. This summer, He Bingdi participated in the International Congress of Oriental Scholars held in Moscow. Before the congress began, the delegation that the Chinese Communists had planned to send suddenly stopped coming. The sinologists who attended the meeting began to realize that Sino-Soviet relations had seriously deteriorated.
In this conversation, the views on Mao Zedong were involved, especially Mao's poetry. In 1958, He Bingdi translated two of Mao's "Qinyuan Chun" into English and published it, praising Mao's poems. Hu Shi disagreed with He Bingdi's assessment of Mao. Hu said to He: "It is very uncomfortable to see, because you still praise him for his poetic talent." In fact, he was not worthy of my class in Chinese literary history at Peking University! He Bingdi disagreed with Hu Shi's opinion, and the two argued slightly.
Other academic views, He Bingdi and Hu Shi's opinions are also different. For example, Hu Shi said: Chen Yinke is also a good memory. He Bingdi believes that Chen Yinke's "deep roots in sinology, the ability to read in ancient Languages of Asia and Europe, the incisive examination of the medieval historical facts system, and the freshness and breadth of the mutual elaboration of poetry and social history are rare in the world." In He Bingdi's eyes, Hu Shi was too conceited, believing that he was the first person in the cultural academia and refusing to admit that there were people higher than him.
Hu Shi admired He Bingdi. Hu Shi said that he had only stayed overseas with two guests, one was Chen Shengshen and the other was He Bingdi. In 1952, He Bingdi was invited to eat at Hu Shi's house. The two men had a common interest in talking. On the same day, Hu Shi compared and recalled Tsinghua university and Peking University, and there was a sentence that impressed He: "Tsinghua College of Literature has always been more 'cautious' and relatively 'small', while Peking University is very different. As long as I become the president of Peking University one day, I am sure that I will make the Faculty of Letters the world's first-class. Unbeknownst to either, both were undergoing a massive restructuring of Chinese mainland institutions — a direct change in the fate of Chinese universities for the next 60 years.
"If I have ever entered 'heaven' in this life, then 'heaven' can only be Tsinghua Garden from 1934 to 1937. Heaven must not only have a beautiful natural environment and abundant material resources, but must also provide a spiritual environment that enables the sojourner to continuously enhance his self-discipline and confidence in the future. This is a memory of He Bingdi.
He Bingdi did not agree with Hu Shi's statement that Peking University is "big" and Tsinghua is "small". He believes that he has been marching towards the "big place": "In the critical years when I exercised my thinking, the history department of Tsinghua University has thrown off the shackles of over-tedious examination in traditional Chinese studies, and provided me with a fresh cultural garden to think about the 'big' place, at least the initial dream to the 'big place'. ”
Not everyone thinks it was the "Garden of Eden" period. Lin Congmin, a close friend of He Bingdi, pointed out that behind tsinghua's beautiful life in those years there were "unstable factors" - demonstrations, demonstrations, strikes, and petitions organized by the ccp's underground organizations.
Among the politically active classmates at that time, Yao Yilin impressed He Bingdi the most. Because Yao's academic performance is very good. "He not only excelled in the first monthly examination for the General History of the West, but also won the first place in the English Recitation Competition held by the whole school in the autumn of 1934." These experiences about Yao Yilin have not been recalled before, and at the end of 1994, He Bingdi entrusted the General Office of the State Council to forward to Yao Yilin's family for the first time in a letter of condolence.
Ho is not keen on political activities, but he has his own observations. "Although in hindsight, we could not see the fate of the country at that time, tsinghua professors and most of the students in the 1930s believed that the Nanjing Nationalist Government was the only organized anti-Japanese force, and the student union and the Peking Students' Federation repeatedly exposed their intentions and actions precisely to weaken and subvert this force."
During his time at Tsinghua University and the Southwest United University, He Bingdi felt that the teacher he benefited the most was Lei Haizong: "What I benefited most from Lei Shi was the 'big' of his ideas and the 'depth' of the negative aspects of traditional Chinese culture. At that time, I did not have enough knowledge of national history, but I could already understand that there were blood and tears behind the 'depth' of Lei Shi, because only truly patriotic historians did not hesitate to list the various weaknesses in traditional culture in order to try to solve why it would cause a situation of 'accumulation of weakness' for more than a thousand years. ”
After 1949, Lei Haizong stayed on the mainland. In 1957, at the "MingFang", he spoke publicly that the social sciences of the communist and socialist world had stagnated since Engels's death in 1895. His speech was published by the People's Daily with the addition of "according to the language". During the "Anti-Rightist" period, he was one of the key targets of criticism.
In the winter of 1959, He Bingdi's masterpiece "Chinese Oral Studies, 1368-1953" was published by Harvard University. The following year, he sent the book, along with some important articles published earlier, to Lei Haizong, who was far away at Nankai University, to "talk about the preliminary overseas work report of the disciples in the old days."
Two years later, He Bingdi received a reply from Lei Haizong. Lei Zonghai expressed his excitement and greatly appreciated this disciple: "You are still in your prime, and I am convinced that the achievements you will make in your future academics will definitely surpass the extraordinary achievements you already have." ”
A few months later, at Christmas, Lei Haizong died in Tianjin. In 1965, when the University of Chicago decided why Bing di gave a lecture, He suggested that it be named after Jameswestfallthompson, who was Lei Haizong's most important teacher when he was studying at Chikuma University. He Bingdi's move is also a memorial to his most respected teacher - when he went to the United States to study, the school he chose also listened to Lei Haizong's advice.
In 1939, He Bingdi served as an assistant professor at the Southwest United University, teaching general history of the West. At this time, the school has received orders from the Ministry of Education to prepare for the fifth Tsinghua Gengqian study in the United States examination. He Bingdi took the exam but failed. He then took the sixth exam and passed with the first place. In the list of the same batch of publicly funded students in the United States, there is also Yang Zhenning.
Many years after that, Yang Zhenning chatted with He Bingdi and said, I remember that we were admitted to the Gengqian publicly-funded international students in the same year, and you were 3 points more than me at that time. Ho said, you remember wrong, I am not 3 points more than you, but 7 points more.
It is extremely difficult for students to study in the United States, and the inductees are all elites among the elite. In the previous Gengjian examinations of Tsinghua University, the highest score was obtained by Qian Zhongshu in the third session. He Bingdi greatly admired Qian Zhongshu: "It is no accident that the highest glory in the new Dengke Records of the 20th century was qian Zhongshu, who was both Chinese and Western in learning and literary talent. ”
He Bingdi, who was given the opportunity to go to the United States, chose Columbia University in New York at the suggestion of Lei Haizong. His personal reasoning was that if he didn't live in New York, the Metropolitan Opera's most outstanding tenor would have listened to it several times in his life! When entering Columbia's graduate dormitory, Ho saw a silver shield with inscriptions on it stating that in 1910, Columbia university and Yale speech competition, Columbia finally won, and the leader of the Columbia debate team was Gu Weijun. He Bingdi was very excited about this, believing that this made "some pride and self-esteem for the new Chinese students."
He Bingdi has a strong sense of nationality. He believes that the completion of a truly meaningful historical work not only requires a rational and meticulous handling of a large number of diverse historical materials, but also has the driving force of emotion behind it. Of all his writings, the one that is most emotionally invested is Cradle of the East: A Discussion of the Neolithic age and the indigenous origins of technologies and ideas in early History, 5000-1000 BC. The book was heavily debated before its publication, and it took several twists and turns to come out. Fairbank, a professor of history at Harvard, once said: "If there are five or six Ho Bingdi in China, no one in the West will dare to talk nonsense about Chinese history." ”
During the publication of Cradle of the East, in mid-July 1971, the White House issued a communiqué on Nixon's decision to visit Beijing in early 1972. "It's like a thunderbolt on a sunny day that is about to end a long period of rain." ——This was How He Bingdi felt at that time. He and his wife quickly applied for a visa, arrived in Guangzhou on October 12, 1971, and then went to Beijing to meet their former teacher Feng Youlan at Peking University.
After returning to the United States, he was invited to speak everywhere. The "great achievement" of his remarks at that time was "Looking at the Characteristics and Achievements of New China from the Scale of History" published in early 1974. This article was published in the Hong Kong "70s" magazine, "Reference News" also reprinted, the impact is very large, many people have advised Ho Bingdi to reprint in the collection of essays, but he later changed his mind: "I am willing to forget it, because although it has historical facts and feelings, but only see the surface of the new domestic weather, failed to explore the real motivation of the new climate." Also willing to forget is a series of articles written in the 1970s and early 1980s on China's resources and economic prospects. ”
In 1986, He Bingdi returned to China again, and he had a good conversation with the nephews and nieces of the four houses of the He family in Shanghai. When playing in Hangzhou, I met Jiang Feng, the president of Zhejiang Normal University (the school site is in Jinhua), and Jiang Li invited him to return to Jinhua to give a speech, and the only condition he put forward was: I made an appointment with the mayor of Jinhua City on my behalf in advance, and on the eve of arriving in Jin, I would talk to him about the original real estate problems of the four houses and the livelihood strategy of saving the four houses. The mayor of Jinhua entertained him, and when talking to his subordinates about the He family, he was introduced in only one sentence: On April 17, 1979, Comrade Deng Xiaoping received him—and his old classmate Yao Yilin was also received at that time.
He Bingdi has a deep-rooted family concept, and the family is also the object of his research. In an academic controversy, He Bingdi used his family lineage to prove the limited function of the family. Jinhua He's door and 4 rooms, He Bingdi's cousin He Bingsong and nephew He Dekui are both early official students in the United States, the former was the president of Jinan University, the latter was the vice mayor of Shanghai. But "with He Bingsong's high reputation in the freelance profession, he can only afford the livelihood of his nephews and nephews." Dekui has the highest income, and can invoke the clan members of the four rooms outside the long house as primary school teachers of the Ministry of Works Bureau, and actively benefit the small cousin of the third house far away in Pingjin." He concluded that in the late imperial period, the most successful people in the clan could not guarantee that each generation of the Honbo Honji would be able to continue to succeed through the imperial examination, so how could there be the same surname within the Boundless Mana Ze and the Concubine Hall, Zai Tang, and Wufu?
In He Bingdi's mind, in addition to his father, the one who had the deepest influence on his life was his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Zhang. When he was a child, his grandmother taught him more than once: "Although you can eat vegetable meat, you must always leave a piece of braised meat until the bottom of the bowl to eat the last bite, so that you will not suffer when you are old." I ask you: What master of traditional Chinese studies can better penetrate the mind of a child of five or six into the most basic deep sense of concern and anxiety in Chinese culture? ”
He Bingdi's Sixty Years of Reading History and Reading the World was all the rage after it was published by the Guangxi Normal University Press in 2005. His memory became a passageway back to an era, and his stories and methodologies became models for many aspiring academic descendants.
He Bingdi's final years also focused on the study of the history of Chinese thought. His feelings for scholarship continued to the end, and before his death, he was still on his sickbed to read research papers on Lao Tzu. He always did what his grandmother said: there was always a piece of braised meat at the bottom of the bowl.
![Remember Mr. Ho Bing Di[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)