Speaker: Fei-Hsien Wang, Associate Professor, Department of History, Indiana University Bloomington

In 1973, the Institute of Modern History (IMH) at Academia Sinica launched an ambitious collaborative project to examine late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China through the lens of modernization theory. Over the next sixteen years, seventeen historians participated in “Modernization in China: A Regional Study” (中國現代化的區域研究), each focusing on a particular province or region. Although one of the largest and best-funded collaborative projects in the field and later celebrated as a defining legacy of the IMH, more than half of its studies were never published. Some participants subsequently described the undertaking as a “completely pointless” endeavor.

Why did historians working at the margins of an American-centered field of China studies initially embrace modernization theory, yet ultimately leave much of their research unpublished? This talk situates the project within the broader landscape of Cold War knowledge production in East Asia. It argues that the project’s ambitions and frustrations emerged from the interplay of Taiwan’s political and institutional environment under martial law, changing geopolitical relations, and shifting intellectual trends in American and Taiwanese academia from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

Rather than viewing the project as either an extension of American intellectual hegemony or a failed adoption of modernization theory, I examine how IMH historians appropriated a transnational framework to pursue their own intellectual and institutional agendas while navigating epistemological and political constraints. Their experience invites us to reconsider how scholarly knowledge travels across unequal academic hierarchies—and what constitutes the “success” or “failure” of a research project.