China in My Life: A Historian's Own History by C. Martin Wilbur

Author:C. Martin Wilbur [Wilbur, C. Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9781563247637
Google: eRNxAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 3508942
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-01-15T07:03:39+00:00

This is where my journal ended. We arrived San Francisco on August 14 and joined my parents the next day. We started driving east on August 21. On Thursday, September 1, we arrived back home. We had been away for thirteen months exactly.

15

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Teaching and Scholarship

Upon our return from Japan, I was swept into a very busy life. I had my regular courses to teach and, as one recently returned from an interesting year of study in Asia, I found myself in some demand as a speaker. In September 1955 I went to Los Angeles and to Seattle to give talks; and I was asked to give a talk at a regular meeting of our church. In October and November, I spoke to the Americans for Democratic Action, the Japan Society, and an assembly at Wheaton College (arranged by Paul Cressey). In December I gave a talk at Harvard on China’s drive to influence Asia. Strange to say, I declined an invitation from Columbia’s history department to give a talk at the departmental dinner. That was a silly mistake, for I might have become better known within the department.

I was a member of the Executive Committees of Columbia’s department of Chinese and Japanese, the East Asian Institute, and the history department, all of which required meetings. I had work on dissertations to do, and I reviewed books for scholarly journals. In those days, I rode to Columbia by train, getting off at 125th Street in Harlem, taking a bus to Amsterdam Avenue, and then walking about six blocks to my office. This took at least an hour and a half each way. That was taxing. For Kay, who met me with the car at the Pleasantville station, it was a strain because the trains often were quite late, and she had dinner cooking.

In the scholarly arena, I picked up on the book that Julie How and I had worked on, which had been accepted for publication by Columbia University Press. We had to do some revision and to write a conclusion. As soon as that was done, Julie left for Hong Kong, and I had to see the book through the press. It came out in October 1956 as Documents on Communism, Nationalism, and Soviet Advisers in China, 1918—1927: Papers from the Peking Raid.

The book was a detailed study of the early history of the Chinese Communist Party, the Nationalists in the 1920s, and the influence of Russian advisers, who worked with both parties in what the Communists called a “united front.” The main documentation was a body of papers seized in a raid on the Soviet Embassy compound in Peking on April 6, 1927, many from files of the Chinese Communist leaders in Peking, who were in refuge in the embassy, and others from the files of the Soviet military attaché’s office. These were absolutely unique in revealing the inner workings of the Russian mission and the Chinese Communist Party. We used a great variety of other sources to illuminate and explain the documents, of which we reproduced fifty in translation.

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