Ping-ti HoorBingdi He (Chinese: 何炳棣; pinyin: Hé Bǐngdì; Wade–Giles: Ho Ping-ti; 1917–2012), who also wrote under the name P.T. Ho, was a Chinese-American historian. He wrote widely on China's history, including works on demography, plant history, ancient archaeology, and contemporary events. He taught at University of Chicago for most of his career, and was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1975, the first scholar of East Asian descent to have that honor.
Ho entered Columbia University in New York City, and graduated with a PhD in history in 1952. His doctoral dissertation concerned British history in the 19th century.[1] Ho had already taught at the University of British ColumbiainVancouver, British Columbia of Canada. In 1963, Ho went to teach at the University of Chicago. In 1965, Ho was promoted to the James Westfall Thompson Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Ho retired from Chicago in 1987, but he soon became the Visiting Distinguished Professor of History and Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where he retired for the second time in 1990.[2]
He forcefully attacked the school now known as the New Qing History in his exchange with Evelyn Rawski in 1996.[4] He argued, following the Harvard school of John King Fairbank, that the Manchu rulers had become "sinicized" and did not have a distinctive non-Chinese approach. He said sinicization was not incompatible with the politics of a multiethnic empire, yet to reject sinicization is to deny a fundamental force in Chinese history.[5] Xin Fan examines the intensity of Ho's passionate attacks on the New Qing History in the 1990s. He argues that Ho was a cultural exile in two ways. He taught far from his homeland and never fully Identified with the United States. That sort of exile intensified his nationalistic pride for China. He had terrible memories of the Sino-Japanese War. The new historiography was based on Manchu-language sources—Not Chinese language sources—and seemed to him to be an echo of the Japanese wartime imperialistic project of Manchuristic studies.[6]
His cousin Ho Ping-sung was also a famous historian in China.
Ho (1954). "The Salt Merchants of Yang-Chou: A Study of Commercial Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century China". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 17 (1–2): 130–168. doi:10.2307/2718130. JSTOR2718130.
"Aspects of social mobility in China, 1368-1911." Comparative Studies in Society and History' 1.4 (1959): 330-359. online
Ho, Ping-ti (1967). "The Significance of the Ch'ing Period in Chinese History". The Journal of Asian Studies. 26 (2): 189–195. doi:10.2307/2051924. JSTOR2051924. S2CID162396785.
Ho, Ping-ti (1998). "In Defense of Sinicization: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski's "Reenvisioning the Qing"". The Journal of Asian Studies. 57 (1): 123–155. doi:10.1017/s0021911800022713. S2CID162071050.
^He, Bingdi (1952). Land and State in Great Britain, 1873–1910; a Study of Land Reform Movements and Land Policies. New York.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Fan, Xin. "The anger of Ping-Ti Ho: the Chinese nationalism of a double exile." Storia della storiografia 69.1 (2016): 147–160.
Keightley, David N. (1977), "Ping-Ti Ho and the Origins of Chinese Civilization", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 37 (2): 381–411, doi:10.2307/2718679, JSTOR2718679