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G. William Skinner (1925–2008) and new studies of Chinese regional history: Introduction

In September 1949, in the heat of an ongoing civil war in China, G. William Skinner, then a young, aspiring student of anthropology from Cornell University, visited West China Union University in Chengdu. With the help of the University, which was founded in 1910 by a group of Christian missionaries from North America, Skinner went to Gaodianzi, a small town near the city Chengdu, to conduct his fieldwork. However, this proved to be an imprudent decision, for in less than three months, Skinner had to end his foray in Gaodianzi and returned to Chengdu. And, worse still, as the Communists took over the country, he was put in house arrest and not permitted to leave for the United States until August 1950. But, as his later career shows, Skinner (who is known in Chinese as 施堅雅 or Shi Jianya) did not forget China, nor has China, as this issue demonstrates, forgotten him and his work. As China became inaccessible for any researchers from the West under Communist rule, Skinner went to Thailand to continue his fieldwork on overseas Chinese communities in the 1950s. After completing his PhD and securing a teaching job, he gradually returned to studying China, publishing several important works that helped raise his profile as a seminal figure in the field. During the 1960s, Skinner’s “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China” appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies in three installments, which greatly influenced a generation of China scholars in the United States and beyond. In the 1970s he edited, among others, The Chinese City between Two Worlds and The City in Late Imperial China, in which he put forth his well-known delineation of the “physiographic macroregions” in China. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Skinner considered demography, geography, economy, and history while mapping out those diverse macroregions, with which he hoped to achieve a better understanding of the social and historical changes in late imperial and modern China. If Skinner’s conception of the “physiographic macroregions” was his most noted contribution to the field of China studies, his study of rural China, which was loosely based on his unfortunately abbreviated fieldwork in Gaodianzi, seems to have a particular, as well as persistent, appeal to the scholars in China, especially those in Sichuan. In post-Mao years when academic life resumed its vitality in China, many Chinese scholars have become incredibly eager to absorb and appropriate ideas and methods of China scholars in the West, in hopes of improving their own research of Chinese society and history. Skinner’s idea about the existence of what he called “standard marketing community,” which was his focal point in the aforementioned articles in the Journal of Asian Studies, is among them. For instance, in 1993 when Wang Di wrote his first book, entitled Breaking Up a Closed World: The Social Transformation of the Upper Yangzi Region, 1644–1911 (跨出封閉的世界:長江上游區域社會研究 Kuachu fengbi de shijie: Changjiang shangyou quyu shehui yanjiu), he applied Skinner’s theory in analyzing the trading network and urban-rural relations in Sichuan. Wang was then a junior faculty member at the History Department of Sichuan University. After later earning his PhD at the Johns Hopkins University, he taught at Texas A&M University before taking a chaired professorship at the