Ezra F Vogel's award acceptance speech

Following is the acceptance speech of Ezra F Vogel, former director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center and Asia Center, for Award for Outstanding Contributions to China Studies.

It is a great honor to be recognized in China for my half century of effort to understand China and to convey my best understanding of China to a Western audience. It is a special honor to be recognized by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences which has played such a central role in promoting social science in China. We at Harvard feel we have a greater intellectual distance in looking at developments in our national government than scholars in Washington D.C. who tend to respond to the current mood in the nation’s capital. I feel that the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences also gains intellectual distance by being located away from your national capital.

In the 1960s when I began studying China from the outside, I fervently hoped that someday I might be able to do research inside China, and in the 1970s the dream came true. I remember visiting the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences several times in the 1980s as scholarly exchanges between Chinese and American social scientists were just beginning. I was very impressed with the leadership of your president Zhang Zhongli who in the 1950 gave up a promising career in the University of Washington, one of America’s leading Asia centers, to return to China to help make your Shanghai Academy a leading intellectual center for social science in China.

As social science becomes international, we Americans not only study our own society but we also benefit from scholars from other countries who study our country and bring different perspectives. Chinese scholars study their own society but we hope they may also benefit from the scholarship of those who come from abroad to study China. Having spent the ten years after retirement dedicated to understanding Deng Xiaoping and China’s era of reform and opening, I am deeply moved to be recognized in China as one who has seriously endeavored to interpret China to the West and to enter into the internal discussion within China as scholars here make an effort to understand the Deng era and how it transformed China.

Source: http://www.chinastudies.org.cn/c/622.htm