Liu Kwang-ching

In 1968 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.[3] In 1976, Liu was elected to membership in the Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and served as chairman of its advisory committee of its Institute of Modern History. He served as associate editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, was on the editorial board of the Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, and on the editorial committee of the University of California Press. In 1988 he delivered the Ch'ien Mu Lectures in History and Culture at New Asia College[4]

Liu was born in Beijing. His mother, Ik-hwa Chen was from a cultured family. Her father Chen Baozhen was a noted scholar of the Qing dynasty, and was an imperial tutor. His father was Juen-yeh Liu, whose ancestral home, Fuzhou.[5] Since his family was Chrisitan, [6] he attended a school run by Methodist missionaries. His father, concerned that his son should learn English, also arranged for an American to give him lessons and sent him to the Diocesan Boys School, an Anglican boarding school in Hong Kong.[1] After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Liu started college in National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, but left after his junior year to study at Harvard University on a scholarship. [1] He majored in English history, writing his honors thesis on the British philosopher T.H. Green [6] He graduated magna cum laude and earned Phi Beta Kappa. He entered Harvard graduate school in the History Department and studied with Sidney Fay, an eminent diplomatic historian, who advised him that the field of Chinese history might offer better opportunities.[5] Liu's first scholarly article, however, was a study of diplomatic history.[7]

Liu then studied modern Chinese history at Harvard under John K. Fairbank, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1956. He then worked for six years in the United Nations Secretariat as a translator before returning to Cambridge, where he was a Research Fellow and Instructor. He spent the academic year 1962 at Yale University as Visiting Associate Professor before moving to University of California, Davis, in 1963, where he remained until retirement some thirty years later.[1]

Modern China: A Bibliographic Guide to Chinese Works, 1898-1937 (Harvard University Press, 1950), edited with John Fairbank, was Liu's first major publication. Fairbank recalled in his memoirs that Liu and Teng Ssu-yu were among the able scholars from China who laid the foundations of China area studies with their bibliographical work. Liu had a “genius for bibliography”, Fairbank wrote, especially for “imagining what historians could do with available materials”. Over the course of three years of preparation, Fairbank and Liu canvassed 1,067 works, organizing entries into topical sections, annotating each item, and compiling indexes for author, title, and topic. In advising graduate students, Fairbank continued, having the book at hand “was like having an extra section of brain, one could carry around, and a lot more reliable.” [6] The review by Sinologist Hellmut Wilhelm reported that the book is much more than a listing of titles, but analyzes each one at length for its detailed contents and value. He concludes that "the book is not recommended as a useful reference work only, to be kept on every student's self, but it should be read from cover to cover for the information it provides as well as for its inspiration."[8]

Liu collaborated with Yu Ying-shih and Robert Irick on a listing and organization of research materials, American-Chinese Relations, 1784-1941: A Survey of Chinese Language Materials at Harvard. and in 1964 his own Americans and Chinese: A Historical Essay and a Bibliography, was published by Harvard University Press. Reviewers praised these volumes [9]

Harvard University Press published his monograph, Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China, 1862-1874, in 1962, and he returned to the area of late nineteenth century political reform in several later studies.

In 1981 he organized a conference on orthodoxy and heterodoxy, which resulted in the edited volume, Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1990). In his Introduction to the eleven essays, Liu explains 礼教 lijiao，or "doctrine of propriety-and-ritual", as being "orthodox" or "traditional." (ix) The historian Willard Peterson's expansive review in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies pointed out that the "use of the noun 'orthodoxy' suggests there is an entity, something which existed in Ming-Ch'ing society and which historians can describe." Peterson agrees that there "certainly were correct practices and beliefs." But he objects that there was not one, single "orthodoxy," but rather a "process," one that should be a verb, in which emperors, magistrates, lineage elders, teachers, and fathers tried to "correct" others by imposing their authority.[10]

A later volume, edited with Richard Hon-Chun Shek, was Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004).

In 1960, Liu married Edith Warren, who had degrees in history from Harvard and Columbia. They had two children, Jonathan Warren Liu and Faith Chapin Liu, and three grandchildren.[11]

The historian Philip A. Kuhn in delivering the 2004 Liu Kwang-ching Lecture recalled that Liu "taught by example: integrity in using sources, straightforwardness in writing, and dedication to encourging students."[12] A colleague in the Davis history department recalled that "He was intensely serious about scholarly research. He regarded parties as a potential seminar with refreshments," however his wife recalled that he loved opera, in particular Gilbert and Sullivan. [13]

• Cheng, J. C. (1964). "Review of Americans and Chinese: A Historical Essay and a Bibliography, by K.-C. Liu". Pacific Historical Review. 33 (2): 226–229. doi:10.2307/3636609. JSTOR 3636609.
• Fairbank, John King (1982). Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0060390050.
• Gasster, Michael, "(Review) Shen Pao-Chen and China's Modernization in the Nineteenth Century, And: Li Hung-Chang and China's Early Modernization," China Review International 2.1 (1995): 209-212.
• Giskin, Howard (2006). "(Review) Heterodoxy, Heteropraxy, and History". China Review International. 13 (1): 13–42. doi:10.1353/cri.2007.0023. JSTOR 23732807.
• Hua, Vanessa (5 October 2006), "'K.C.' Liu - history professor emeritus", SF Gate
• Rockwell, Suzanne (5 October 2006), Kwang-Ching Liu, 19th Century China Expert, Dies, U.C. Davis
• "Kwang-ching Liu, 84; expert on 19th Century Chinese History", Los Angeles Times, 7 October 2006
• Mann, Susan; Price, Don C.; Smith, Wilson (2006), KC Liu, History Department UC Davis
• Peterson, Willard (1993), "(Review) Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, by K.-C. Liu.", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 53 (1): 249–268, doi:10.2307/2719477, JSTOR 2719477
• 魏秀梅 (Wei Xiumei), 郝延平 (Hao Yanping) eds. 近世中國之傳統與蛻變 (Jinshi Zhongguo zhi chuantong yu tuibian; Tradition and Metamorphosis in Modern Chinese History): Liu Guangjing yuanshi qishiwu sui zhushou lunwen ji (Essays in Honor of Professor Kwang-Ching Liu's Seventy-Fifth Birthday) (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindai shi yanjiu suo, 1998). 2 vols. ISBN 9576715881).