Oxford China Academics
Dr. Karl Gerth is University Lecturer, Fellow and Tutor in Modern Chinese History at Merton College. Prior to Oxford, Dr Gerth taught at the University of South Carolina. He grew up in Chicago, graduated from Grinnell College and received his PhD from Harvard University. His new book is As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers are Transforming Everything, which he will discuss at his talk hosted by Asia Society Hong Kong on Tuesday 15 March. He has conducted research in China and Japan on consumerism for over twenty-five years. He is the Chinese co-team leader of the Ceres21 Project currently investigating innovative adaptations in the automotive and power industries to climate and environmental change on three continents. He also rows with the 2nd VIII at Merton College, winning blades in Torpids 2011.
Does this quote resonate with you?
“During their college years the oarsmen put in terribly long hours, often showing up at the boathouse at 6:00 am for pre-class practices. Both physically and psychologically, they were separated from their classmates. Events that seemed earth-shattering to them […] went almost unnoticed by the rest of the students. In many ways they were like combat veterans coming back from a small, bitter and distant war, able to talk only to other veterans.” (David Halberstam, The Amateurs)
It resonates with me. I often feel I live in two worlds. Not only because I row for my college’s boat club but also because I divide my time and attention between two very different places, Oxford and China. Whether or not you rowed at Oxford, I suspect everyone who has spent time here probably has felt the same way. You had a very different life elsewhere from the life you had at Oxford; your life here was difficult to explain to non-Oxonians, non-“combat veterans.” Even my job titles “tutor & fellow” make little sense to non-Oxford academics.
What makes Oxford so distinctive, or a “distant war” to non-Oxonians, is the combination of predictability and tradition, on the one hand, and chaos on the other.
In Oxford, at least the chaos is predictable thanks to the daily cycles within yearly cycles. Meals create structure. I eat lunch daily at 12:45 in my college, Merton, which, founded in 1264, is tied with Balliol and University as one of the three oldest colleges at Oxford (a fact members of the college have been conditioned to raise at the first mention of Merton). Likewise, High Tables begin exactly at 7:15 with the same rituals: the pounding of a gavel, the reading of a prayer in Latin, and the conversation about the dreary English weather.
In contrast with orderly meals at Oxford, little is more chaotic than the tutorial system, a form of teaching unlike anywhere else. Tutorial times may change every week based on the plans of the students and tutor. Students and tutors jointly decide on readings and paper topics. Or, my favorite example, students studying for “joint-honours” (say, a dual degree in History and Politics) need to divide a paper between two terms, coming to my office for three tutorials in the autumn and another four only six months later.
Term-time is predictably demanding, leaving many tutors to do most of their research and writing out of term. I finished my latest book the same way, As China Goes, So Goes the World. One of the unusual perks of an Oxford fellowship is meals. For over five years, I had been writing notes and collecting materials for the book. But I needed to work 14-hours a day over an entire summer to finish the manuscript, schedule only possible thanks to guaranteed meals and human contact.
Of course, when I return to Oxford from a research and speaking trips to China, I often feel like I am similarly returning from a very different “distant war.” At Oxford, many colleagues regard an interest in China—even contemporary Chinese economic and social issues—as exotic. Yet an interest in sixteenth-century English poetry or string theory is ordinary.
Fortunately, rather than The Analects, Tang poetry, or Qing ceramics, my research on Chinese consumerism and the global impacts of China adopting Western lifestyles involve countless topics. So, over college meals, it was easy to discuss climate issues with a scientist, what I call “extreme markets” (the buying and selling of body organs, endangered species, children, etc.) with a lawyer, and marketing with a business professor. What I rarely discuss with colleagues, though, is my life in China, which might be too distant a war for them to appreciate. How to convey the building boom in Shanghai, the dust of Xi’an, or the wondrous hybridity of Hong Kong? Moreover, as an historian who has been traveling to China for twenty-five years, how could I convey the tremendous and almost indescribable amount of change that has taken place over the past couple of decades?
I began by trying to make this change comprehensible to me. The primary reason why I wrote As China Goes, So Goes the World was to broaden my understanding of China beyond my firsthand experience.
As I write at the start of the book, when I first traveled to China in 1986 to spend a year studying at Nanjing and Beijing Universities, I was surprised to find myself immediately transformed from a poor American college student with barely enough money to buy a pizza and six-pack of beer to a “rich foreigner” with much more to spend than my Chinese classmates. The problem with this elevation of my fortunes, I soon discovered, was that outside the fancy new hotels catering to foreign tourists, there were few places to shop and not much to buy. Of course, this was a China very different from the one most visitors find today. Now luxury cars, fashionably dressed Chinese, and omnipresent advertising fill cities that resemble endless strip malls with street after street of stores big and small.
What happened and what are the implications? These are the questions I try to answer in the book and which I’ll discuss when I speak to Oxford alumni at the Hong Kong Club on Tuesday, 16 March.
Fortunately, Oxford has recently begun a major effort to develop Chinese studies. When I was hired in 2007, Oxford added some fifteen other academics who specialize in China, making Oxford one of most exciting places to study China in the world. I now have the best of both worlds, fellow veterans of both wars in Oxford. I look forward to meeting other similar double-duty veterans in the coming years either in Oxford or in China.
--- Written in March 2011 ---
Does this quote resonate with you?
“During their college years the oarsmen put in terribly long hours, often showing up at the boathouse at 6:00 am for pre-class practices. Both physically and psychologically, they were separated from their classmates. Events that seemed earth-shattering to them […] went almost unnoticed by the rest of the students. In many ways they were like combat veterans coming back from a small, bitter and distant war, able to talk only to other veterans.” (David Halberstam, The Amateurs)
It resonates with me. I often feel I live in two worlds. Not only because I row for my college’s boat club but also because I divide my time and attention between two very different places, Oxford and China. Whether or not you rowed at Oxford, I suspect everyone who has spent time here probably has felt the same way. You had a very different life elsewhere from the life you had at Oxford; your life here was difficult to explain to non-Oxonians, non-“combat veterans.” Even my job titles “tutor & fellow” make little sense to non-Oxford academics.
What makes Oxford so distinctive, or a “distant war” to non-Oxonians, is the combination of predictability and tradition, on the one hand, and chaos on the other.
In Oxford, at least the chaos is predictable thanks to the daily cycles within yearly cycles. Meals create structure. I eat lunch daily at 12:45 in my college, Merton, which, founded in 1264, is tied with Balliol and University as one of the three oldest colleges at Oxford (a fact members of the college have been conditioned to raise at the first mention of Merton). Likewise, High Tables begin exactly at 7:15 with the same rituals: the pounding of a gavel, the reading of a prayer in Latin, and the conversation about the dreary English weather.
In contrast with orderly meals at Oxford, little is more chaotic than the tutorial system, a form of teaching unlike anywhere else. Tutorial times may change every week based on the plans of the students and tutor. Students and tutors jointly decide on readings and paper topics. Or, my favorite example, students studying for “joint-honours” (say, a dual degree in History and Politics) need to divide a paper between two terms, coming to my office for three tutorials in the autumn and another four only six months later.
Term-time is predictably demanding, leaving many tutors to do most of their research and writing out of term. I finished my latest book the same way, As China Goes, So Goes the World. One of the unusual perks of an Oxford fellowship is meals. For over five years, I had been writing notes and collecting materials for the book. But I needed to work 14-hours a day over an entire summer to finish the manuscript, schedule only possible thanks to guaranteed meals and human contact.
Of course, when I return to Oxford from a research and speaking trips to China, I often feel like I am similarly returning from a very different “distant war.” At Oxford, many colleagues regard an interest in China—even contemporary Chinese economic and social issues—as exotic. Yet an interest in sixteenth-century English poetry or string theory is ordinary.
Fortunately, rather than The Analects, Tang poetry, or Qing ceramics, my research on Chinese consumerism and the global impacts of China adopting Western lifestyles involve countless topics. So, over college meals, it was easy to discuss climate issues with a scientist, what I call “extreme markets” (the buying and selling of body organs, endangered species, children, etc.) with a lawyer, and marketing with a business professor. What I rarely discuss with colleagues, though, is my life in China, which might be too distant a war for them to appreciate. How to convey the building boom in Shanghai, the dust of Xi’an, or the wondrous hybridity of Hong Kong? Moreover, as an historian who has been traveling to China for twenty-five years, how could I convey the tremendous and almost indescribable amount of change that has taken place over the past couple of decades?
I began by trying to make this change comprehensible to me. The primary reason why I wrote As China Goes, So Goes the World was to broaden my understanding of China beyond my firsthand experience.
As I write at the start of the book, when I first traveled to China in 1986 to spend a year studying at Nanjing and Beijing Universities, I was surprised to find myself immediately transformed from a poor American college student with barely enough money to buy a pizza and six-pack of beer to a “rich foreigner” with much more to spend than my Chinese classmates. The problem with this elevation of my fortunes, I soon discovered, was that outside the fancy new hotels catering to foreign tourists, there were few places to shop and not much to buy. Of course, this was a China very different from the one most visitors find today. Now luxury cars, fashionably dressed Chinese, and omnipresent advertising fill cities that resemble endless strip malls with street after street of stores big and small.
What happened and what are the implications? These are the questions I try to answer in the book and which I’ll discuss when I speak to Oxford alumni at the Hong Kong Club on Tuesday, 16 March.
Fortunately, Oxford has recently begun a major effort to develop Chinese studies. When I was hired in 2007, Oxford added some fifteen other academics who specialize in China, making Oxford one of most exciting places to study China in the world. I now have the best of both worlds, fellow veterans of both wars in Oxford. I look forward to meeting other similar double-duty veterans in the coming years either in Oxford or in China.
--- Written in March 2011 ---