{"id":89094,"date":"2014-02-17T08:35:34","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T13:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=89094"},"modified":"2014-02-25T08:10:08","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T13:10:08","slug":"china-scholar-peter-zarrow-joins-uconn-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2014\/02\/china-scholar-peter-zarrow-joins-uconn-faculty\/","title":{"rendered":"China Scholar Peter Zarrow Joins UConn Faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Peter<\/a>
Peter Zarrow, professor of history and modern China scholar. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The expanding Asian and Asian American Studies program at UConn welcomed prominent modern China scholar Peter Zarrow to campus this year. Zarrow\u2019s work examines the major cultural and political shift before and after the fall of the Chinese monarchy at the turn of the 20th century, after more than 2,000 years of imperial rule.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a critical period in history,\u201d Zarrow says. \u201cThe monarchy was crumbling. There was a growing acquaintance with Western ideas. It was a time when progressive ideas were making their way in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zarrow comes to UConn from Taiwan, where he lived for the last 12 years, working as a research fellow at Academia Sinica<\/a>, the leading academic institution in Taiwan.<\/p>\n

A major draw of UConn for Zarrow was the growing program in Asian and Asian American Studies<\/a>. He hopes to aid in the growth by helping to expand the collection of Asian works in UConn\u2019s libraries.<\/p>\n

The ousting of the emperor<\/strong><\/p>\n

He says his interest in Chinese history goes back to the 1970s, when there was great popular interest in left-wing Maoism and politics, as well as traditional thought. \u201cThese subjects were typical for my generation of students. I just had an unusually keen interest in it,\u201d Zarrow says.<\/p>\n

As an undergraduate, Zarrow attended several different universities, including UConn, before graduating from Brown University. He credits one of his UConn professors, Herman Mast, with inspiring him to delve further into Asian history through his Modern Asian History class.<\/p>\n

Zarrow has a particular interest in intellectual history. Much of his work focuses on the writings of great thinkers and philosophers, and looks at how those writings affected politics and political change.<\/p>\n

I would say to anyone who wants to do business in China: the more you know about Chinese history, the better off you will be. It\u2019s still a very historically conscious society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

During the decades leading up to the 1912 ousting of the emperor in China, intellectuals were writing more and more about Western ideas of truth and rationality, rather than more typical Chinese ideas of tradition, like those of the ancient philosopher Confucius.<\/p>\n

Many manuscripts from the time, Zarrow says, suggest that even the political elites were influenced by these progressive writings, which made the country ripe for what he calls a \u201ctop-down\u201d revolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you read the diaries of the political leaders during that time, they were influenced by these philosophers,\u201d he says. \u201cThey were making the culture less receptive to the monarchy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zarrow has also finished the manuscript for a book on school textbooks in China after the turn of the century. The book, titled \u201cStudies in Chinese Textbooks 1902-1937: Socializing Elites and Spreading Enlightenment,\u201d shows a curriculum shifting from a focus on the classics and philosophy to one that included science, foreign languages, and physical education. The books had a definite nationalist angle, something which Zarrow points out was typical for the time in other parts of the world too, such as the U.S.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are another reflection of the cultural gestalt of the period, and nobody had ever studied them before,\u201d says Zarrow.<\/p>\n

Understanding the present<\/strong><\/p>\n

This semester, Zarrow is teaching a course in Modern Chinese history and a special topics course on the memoir in China. When he teaches about the fall of the Chinese monarchy, he says he will likely draw parallels to the recent Arab Spring.<\/p>\n

Like China \u2013 which attempted to set up a democracy, experienced years of political unrest, and instead established communist rule \u2013 many Arab nations have had limited success with their uprisings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are examples of progressives who see dictators that need to be overthrown, but didn\u2019t necessarily have the coherency to do so in an effective way,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Zarrow suggests that understanding Asian history, culture, and politics is beneficial to any student, especially those interested in work that might take them to the area.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say to anyone who wants to do business in China: the more you know about Chinese history, the better off you will be,\u201d he notes. \u201cIt\u2019s still a very historically conscious society.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, recent political strife has pitted China against Japan in defense of several small, rocky, uninhabitable islands in the East China Sea. News reports<\/a> paint a picture of China\u2019s stubborn refusal to compromise on such a small issue. But Zarrow points out that to a country that has experienced decades of Japanese militants occupying its territory, a degree of defensiveness might be expected.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the things China does today don\u2019t make sense to people who don\u2019t know their history,\u201d he says. \u201cTheir defensiveness is a reaction to Japanese and Western imperialism that is partly manipulated but partly in their bones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next few years, Zarrow hopes to explore other aspects of Chinese culture surrounding the fall of the empire, including the concept of utopianism and the \u201cmuseumification\u201d of the royal Forbidden City into a national monument.<\/p>\n

But, he says, the one thing that will not change is his interest in telling stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a biographical component to what I do,\u201d he says. \u201cHistorians are interested in political and cultural ideas, but more than anything, we\u2019re interested in telling stories.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zarrow comes to UConn from Academia Sinica, the leading academic institution in Taiwan. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":89461,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[63],"class_list":["post-89094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-19 08:03:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89094"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89098,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89094\/revisions\/89098"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/89461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89094"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=89094"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=89094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}