Qin Hui (historian)

Qin Hui is a Chinese historian and public intellectual. He holds the position of Professor of History, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing.

Biography

His primary field is economic history, but since 1992 he has emerged as a prominent public intellectual, taking a stand on a range of issues, often in conflict with the official doctrines of the Chinese government.

In terms of political ideology, Qin Hui defends a left-liberal position. He favors privatization under strict conditions of democratic openness. However he opposes market fundamentalism in its Chinese forms, and seeks to introduce institutions of social democracy, including some aspects of the welfare state. He strongly defends liberty as a political value, and often allies with other Chinese intellectuals labeled "liberal." . He has engaged in polemics with the Chinese New Left, particularly its more populist and nationalist forms. He has for example signed petitions protesting chauvinistic responses to the 9.11 attacks in New York.

His major contribution as a public intellectual has been to initiate wide debates on social justice. Having himself been sent down to work as a peasant in a poor mountainous region of Southwest China in the Cultural Revolution, he has identified China's peasantry as suffering from grave lack of social justice up to the present day. At the same time, his historical research has shown strong tendencies of the peasantry to enhance their citizen status whenever possible .

A skilled writer able to provide incisive arguments and encapsulations of complex issues, Qin Hui has introduced a host of influential themes to the Chinese-speaking world, and in the so-called "Sinosphere" , collections of his works can be found on literally scores of websites. An important case in point is his doctrine of "issues versus isms" .

Qin has drawn on the work of Chayanov, Eric Wolf and other writers on agrarian society to attack cultural essentialism in studies of the Chinese peasantry, which often takes the form of portraying the peasantry as permanently imbued with Confucianism and the collectivist ethics of the feudal patriarchal lineage. Qin has been concerned to show that history rather culture provides a solid explanatory framework for the empirical phenomena.

Qin's formal research has largely been concerned with China's agrarian history in the broad. Contrary to the received Maoist view which emphasized peasant wars as expressions of class struggle, Qin concludes that the most significant fault-line in the countryside was not between peasant and landlord, but between peasant and official. This has obvious consequences for interpreting contemporary rural China.

Qin Hui is married with one daughter. His wife, Jin Yan (金燕） is an eminent scholar of Eastern European and Russian affairs in her own right, often collaborating with Qin under the nom-de-plume Su Wen .