Dr. Shuhua Fan has recently published The Harvard-Yenching Institute and Cultural Engineering: Remaking the Humanities in China, 1924-1951 (Lexington Books, 2014).
As the first comprehensive study on the subject, the book adopts a concept of “cultural engineering,” which is defined as a conscious design to use cultural heritage to recreate culture in order to promote a society’s development, to look at key issues in a way which accounts for interactions and initiatives on both sides and shows the difficult path toward developing common interests without neglecting tensions and conflicts, thus going beyond the various one-sided historiographies which pit Chinese against Americans or nativist rejection of modernity against cultural imperialism.
Congratulations to Dr. Fan.