Academic memoirs are a bit like autobiographies of aging porn stars: fascinating to those who follow the business closely, incomprehensible to those who don’t, and a perfect place to name all the people who screwed you on your way to the top.
Richard Baum’s China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom certainly doesn’t pull any punches regarding the many ivory tower dust-ups involving Baum during his long and distinguished career. While the casual reader might find titillating the blow-by-blow of Baum’s feuds with fellow China scholars Phillip Huang and the Michael Oksenberg (among others), they will also thoroughly enjoy a book that is equal parts intellectual journey, a concise and cogent review of recent Chinese history, and a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the development of China studies in the United States.
First of all, today’s PhD students ought to be in awe of the quality of work done by Professor Baum and his cohort in the 1960s and 1970s. Barred from traveling to the mainland, they did their language study in Taipei and their ‘first-hand’ research at places like the University Center in Hong Kong. It is telling that even today when access is much easier and materials widely distributed, China watchers are still often left staring at the rusty red walls of Zhongnanhai, scratching their heads, and asking each other things like: “Well, is he dead or isn’t he?”
That said, research on China has come a long way since Baum was in grad school and this book offers a fascinating rumination on the development of China watching since that time. Just as Paul Cohen did with his 1984 book Discovering History in China, Baum gives us not only a ‘state of the field,’ but also the fascinating back story into how events, politics, academic fads, and intellectual trends shaped the development of American thinking on China over the past five decades.
It’s easy also to be impressed by Baum’s candor. Even though he is one of the leading figures in his field (indeed some young scholars grumble that he guards the gates to his influential list serve China Pol like a feudal lord) in his book at least, Baum comes across as a bit of an outsider, lobbing bombs at the establishment.
Certainly, he never was one to be afraid of taking chances, including stealing classified intelligence documents as a graduate student on Taiwan and posing as CCP sympathizer at a Hong Kong picnic to try and finagle a ‘Friend of China’ visa. In his later career, his brash nature and natural outspokenness would land him on the wrong side of both the Chinese Communist Party and the White House (on separate occasions) and on occasion also complicate his personal and professional relationships.
In the end, Baum does a good job of blending his themes together. His frank and cutting descriptions of both China and China watchers are matched by a refreshing personal honesty of his own shortcomings and missteps. Baum’s analysis of recent Chinese history is excellent and highly readable and it must be said that when journeying through 45 years of China watching, Professor Baum makes an occasionally irascible but also often funny and always insightful travel companion.