research

Since the very beginning of my research activities I have been fascinated with historiography in China . Both my dissertation on party historiography in the PRC and my postdoctoral thesis on a methodological dispute amongst Chinese historians deal with the development of Chinese historiography in the 20^th century. I am interested in aspects of the inner dynamics of historiography as an academic discipline as well as in its relationship with the process of nation building, and the formation of identity. With the increasing diversification of historiography in the PRC since the late 1970ies, I have also turned to the field of memory and recollection. In this field I have lately conducted several case studies on the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution addressing the issue of trauma and memory.
My work in the field of Chinese historiography is aimed at internationalizing the discussion of Chinese history and to facilitate the exchange of ideas related to issues of historiography inside and outside China . I am interested in methodological questions and in critically examining the mutual perception of history. In this sense I view my contributions to the understanding of Chinese historiography as an integral part of ongoing discussions on world- and global history. That is why I participate in numerous activities at the University of Vienna which are concerned with the discussion of theses issues. With Arif Dirlik I share the conception of historical universality as the sum of its particularities, wherefore a central concern of the science of history has to be the development of instruments that allow us to discover these particularities, to comprehend them, and to understand them as a part of the whole. A concrete expression of this conception is the online journal Historiography East and West, which I edit together with Axel Schneider ( University of Leiden ) as a multilingual and polycentric forum of discussion about the particularities of historiography.
In addition I conceive like Yves Chevrier of history as the center of the discourse about politics and moral in China . I this sense, I view my research on Chinese historiography also as a contribution to the discussion on the political and intellectual situation in the Chinese world. Especially my recent work related to the possibility of a public reappraisal of historic events of the Maoistic period, to the collapse of the “master narrative” established during the Yan’an Rectification Campaign covering Chinese history since the Opium Wars is a contribution to the analysis of the relationship between politics and historiography and the debate on communicative and a cultural memory as decribed by Jan Assmann. Currently, I work on the official and the unofficial historiography of the Cultural Revolution.
Whereas I perceive my work on Chinese historiography of the 20^th century as a form of basic research, I have developed a second focus on applied research. Since the middle of the 1990ies I have been investigating the situation in Chinese villages in the context of my research in political science. Everything started with an excursion on the problems of township and village enterprises in the vicinity of Shanghai , which lead my students from Heidelberg and myself to Shanghai and the surrounding area for four weeks. Since then I have been engaged with many aspects of rural development, and I have tried to develop a scientific approach explaining the relationship between state and rural society. Again with reference to Yves Chevrier, but also influenced by Jean Oi, Christine Wong and Vivienne Shue, I have set up a hypothesis on the distance of state and rural society, which my master and doctoral students and I have tested in several studies with regard to its explanational power. Theses studies include investigations of the transfer of rural enterprises into private ownership, the public health system in the countryside, migration from the countryside to the cities and its impact on the cities, but also of the memories of Chinese peasants of the Chinese Revolution and the PRC under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Currently we are working on the translation of our theoretical knowledge into policy measures by trying to implement public health policies in the Chinese countryside.
Being the only full professor of sinology in Austria , I lecture many subjects I am not conducting any research on. I have certainly always taken a personal interest in including areas of research my students are interested in into my personal agenda and to work on these fields jointly. Given the fact that of the 800 students I supervise at the University of Vienna , 250 are of Chinese origin but have grown up in Austria , it was obvious to develop the question of migration as a new area of research. So far, my contribution consisted in the supervision of several master- and doctoral theses on the topic of the integration of Chinese migrants into Austria under sociological, economic and cultural aspects. The more migrants from China live amongst us, the more sinology has to cope with the expectation of making a contribution to the integration of Chinese migrants into European societies.
In this sense, my students have made it clear to me over the past years that the increasingly important role that China plays in the world demands from sinology to give up its predominantly sino-centristic way of looking at things and to devote itself to looking at the view that China has on and the role it plays in the world. Accordingly, this frequently overlooked aspect is given more room in terms of teaching for some time past. At the same time, I supervise several master- and doctoral theses on the topic of Chinese foreign policy and I have recently expressed my view on questions of foreign policy in several publications.
Modern research on China the way I practice it considers itself to be an academic from of interdisciplinary engagement with China and its development in the 20^th century. It opens the discussion with the disciplines such as the social sciences to put their often universalistic but in this regard unexamined theories to the test of China . I addition to that, it is our responsibility to develop new theorems that are not only capable of explaining the complex development of China in the 20^th century but also to make a contribution to the further elaboration of the theoretic repertoire of the aforementioned disciplines. Should the prediction be correct that China will regain its influential position in the world, then science can not develop adequately without integrating the Chinese experience. From the perspective of my knowledge of China, every scientific theory, the validity of which is not proven for China, and every scientific theory, that does not stand up to the infinite intellectual challenge to incorporate China, is incomplete. When this idea will one day be regarded as a matter of course, the discipline of sinology will be obsolete, as knowledge about China will not be regarded as exotic, but will be widely spread, so that specialists that make the knowledge about China available in all its diverse aspects and to a public largely uniformed about China, will not be needed any more.