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names in Mandarin (Wade-Giles). This book is about South China. The whole "feel" of the place and its people is somehow different if it and they masquerade as something else: had Cantonese Romanization been used, the identification of the two villages named at pp. 126-127 need not have been explained, to cite one example. The late K.M.A. Barnett said the same when he reviewed my book, The Rural Communities of Hong Kong, in Vol. 24 of this Journal, when I was another victim of the system. Frankly, I should have known better, having even more to buck convention than Dr. Murray!
James Hayes
Jerry Dennerline, Qian Mu and the World of Seven Mansions, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
When Qian Mu (Ch'ien Mu) returned to the Chinese University some years ago on the occasion of the founding of the series of lectures that bears his name, students flocked to hear him even though few could have understood his Jiangsu dialect that passed for Mandarin. I have always looked upon that incident as being highly symbolic of the call of Chinese nationalism, of the attraction that the unity of Chinese culture held for Chinese students, and of their propensity to accept as wisdom what they could not understand.
Qian Mu symbolizes Chinese culture, untainted by Westernism or party politics. Qian Mu was my colleagues' teacher. He founded New Asia College that became a part of the Chinese University, in Hong Kong and not Taiwan, driven by nothing except his determination that scholarship should be pursued for its own sake. My colleagues at the Chinese University recall with nostalgia the comradeship they felt as students of New Asia in the 1950s. Despite Hong Kong's colonial status, and despite the 1949 Revolution, in New Asia they studied the Chinese classics as the fundamental philosophy that would remain forever Chinese. You cannot but marvel at the confidence that was inspired by this great man, and you can understand why students would turn to him for intellectual leadership.