Frederic Wakeman
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Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. (Chinese: 魏斐德) (December 12, 1937–September 14, 2006) was a prominent American scholar of Chinese history.
Wakeman was born in Kansas City, Kansas. His father was the novelist Frederic Wakeman, Sr. who often moved the family to live abroad in places like Bermuda, France, and Cuba. He graduated from Harvard University in 1959, where he majored in European history and literature. After Harvard, he went on to earn master's degrees from the University of Cambridge and at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris. While studying at the Institut d'études politiques, he switched to Chinese studies. He also studied as a graduate student in Taiwan. In 1962 he published a novel, Seventeen Royal Palms Drive, under the name "Evans Wakeman." Wakeman, studying under Professor Joseph Levenson, received a Ph.D. in Far Eastern history at University of California, Berkeley in 1965. That year he began teaching at Berkeley, where he remained his entire career and retired as the Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Asian Studies. Wakeman served as the director of Institute of East Asian Studies at Berkeley from 1990 to 2001. Upon his retirement from Berkeley in May 2006, he received the Berkeley Citation, the highest honor given at U.C.Berkeley.
His scholarship and teaching focused on late imperial China, from the Ming and Qing dynasties, but in his later career studied 20th century political and urban history, especially the role of the police and secret service during the Republican era.
Starting in the early 1970s, Wakeman also chaired academic committees formed to expand cultural and scholastic relations with China. Often he and his colleagues were the first Western scholars to make official contact with their Chinese counterparts since the 1949 revolution. In 1978, as educational adviser of the U. S. Inter-Agency Negotiating Team on Chinese-American International Exchanges, Wakeman helped open research opportunities in China for American scholars in the social sciences and humanities. In 1987, he helped draft an appeal signed by 160 American scholars calling on the Chinese government to stop oppressing intellectuals. Wakeman was also the president of American Historical Association in 1992 and served as the President of the Social Science Research Council from 1986 to 1989.
He was the author of seven books on Chinese history, six published by the University of California Press. His first monograph, published in 1966 and based on his doctoral disseration, was Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861. Strangers at the Gate focused on social disorder in the Pearl River Delta in the aftermath of the First Opium War and extensively utilized documents seized by the British from the Guangdong-Guangxi Governor-General's office. The most extensive and voluminous of Wakeman's works is The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in the 17th Century. published in 1985. In 2003, he published Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service, about the notorious chief of intelligence for Nationalist leader Chang Kai-shek.
The prominent historian and author Jonathan Spence called Wakeman "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years." Spence and Wakeman were widely regarded as the two best historians of Chinese history based in the West at the time of Wakeman's death; while Spence published books geared towards a mass audience, Wakeman wrote more deeply scholarly works for the academic community. He was also a popular teacher. Among his former students is Orville Schell.
Wakeman retired from teaching in May 2006. He died in Lake Oswego, Oregon of liver cancer at the age of 68.
