Tsiang Tingfu

Who was Tsiang Tingfu?

Tsiang Tingfu was a historian and diplomat of the Republic of China. Tsiang was born in Shaoyang in Hunan Province. Tsiang's education from his teenage years had been Western and largely Christian, and he converted to Christianity at the age of 11. Having been urged to study in the U.S. by his teacher from a missionary school, in 1911, he was sent to study in the United States, where he attended the Park Academy, Oberlin College and Columbia University. His dissertation, "Labor and Empire: A Study of the Reaction of British Labor, Mainly as Represented in Parliament, to British Imperialism Since 1880," led him into issues in the relation of foreign relations and domestic politics which would structure his scholarship after he returned to China. After obtaining a Ph.D., he returned to China in 1923, where he first took up a position at Nankai University and then at Tsinghua University.

At Tsinghua, he became the head of the History Department, where edited and published a number of works on Chinese history and published the English-language journal Chinese Social and Political Science Review. Using newly opened Qing dynasty archives and diplomatic publications, Tsiang argued that China should adopt Western approaches if it wanted to score diplomatic victories. Tsiang blamed China's unequal treatment by Western powers after the First Opium War on the Chinese unequal treatment of Western powers before the war. During his tenure at Tsinghua, he mentored a number of historians in the study of Qing history, including John K. Fairbank.