Giving voice to the voiceless people in local society: an interview with Wang Di, June 6, 2018

Abstract

Wang Di was born in 1956 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The city, where Wang spent much of his youth, is located in the fertile plain of southwest China and is well known for its rich history and unique local culture. During the Cultural Revolution, Wang was sent to a rural village as a part of the government program to reeducate high school graduates, and then he became a factory worker. That experience may help explain his strong emotional attachment to the land and people in this region. In 1978, he was admitted to Sichuan University to study history. Seven years later, he graduated with a master’s degree in history and joined the faculty of the university. He was promoted to associate professor in 1987 for his extraordinary performance in teaching and scholarly achievements. Wang’s early research examines the social history of the upper Yangtze River region with the Sichuan basin as its focus. Drawing on Skinner’s macroregion theory, Wang treated the entire upper Yangtze River region as an organic unit with its own distinctive economic, social, and cultural identity. He was also influenced by the French Annales School, especially Fernand Braudel, who is known for his three levels of time: the environment, society, and events. Wang traced the historical transition of the upper Yangtze River region from a relatively isolated traditional society to a modern community. Supported by rich empirical sources, he painted a vivid picture of the region’s natural environment, demographic diversity, agricultural patterns, handicraft industry, commercial activities, political structure, social organization, and educational conditions. In short, his work provides readers with encyclopedic information about this region during the early modern period. Although he started work on his study in 1980, it was not until 1993 that his monograph was published under the title Striding Out of a Closed World: The Social Transformation of the Upper Yangtze Region, 1644–1911 (Kuachu fengbi de shijie: Changjiang shangyou quyu shehui yanjiu, 1644–1911). By the time Wang’s first book was published in China, he had already started his new academic journey in the United States. In 1991, he was awarded a young scholar grant by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (CSCPRC) that allowed him to spend a year at the University of Michigan. During his stay in the US, he was fascinated by the cutting-edge scholarly work of European and American academics and decided to extend his stay so that he could learn more.