Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction

Wang Fan-sen has written a biography of Fu Ssu-nien ( F u Sinian), the founder of the Institute of History and Philology (IHP) of the Academia Sinica, where Wang is a research fellow. Fu Ssu-nien was an active participant in the New Culture Movement, editing and writing for the influential student journal Neir, Tide, and a leader of the pivotal 4 May 1919 student demonstrations in Beijing. Fu spcnt seven years in England and Germany, where he studied a variety of subjects but failed to obtain an advanced degree. Nevertheless, Wang maintains that this intellectual exposure enabled Fu to become “an architect of the Chinese modern academic world’(65). This he accomplished principally through his establishment of the IHP in 1928, though he also taught at Peking University and established the influential intellectual journal Tu-li p ‘ing-lun (1932-1937). “Dismayed” that Paris and Berlin were the centers of modern scholarship on China, Fu’s goal was the professionalization of Chinese academic culture to make Chinese scholarship competitive with the West’s. Fu’s IHP sponsored \ignificant scholarly projects in fields sticli as linguistics, archaeology, ethnography. and history. Fu emphasized the importance of fieldwork, of systematically collecting and examining new data, and of maintaining objectivity. Under his auspices, Chinese archaeology came into its own, beginning with the excavations at Anyang that revolutionized scholarly views of the Shang period. He was also responsible for purchasing the Ming-Ch’ing Inner Cabinet archives and beginning their organization, selection, compilation, and publication. Fu hoped for an autonomous “academic society” divorced from politics, but Wang shows that that was an impossibility as invasion and civil war wracked China. Fu turned to political involvement to protect his academic enterprises. He was a supporter of Chiang Kai-shek but courageously criticized the corruption of Chiang’s brother-in-law, H. H. K’ung. Fu Sxu-nien is not for the general reader. Wang presumes familiarity with modem Chinese historq and with historiographical arguments over ancient Chinese history. Many important points of information are found only in foornotes, such as that Fu was “Chiang Kai-shek’s personal favorite” (183n.84), with no further explanation. We are left with no idea of how Fu managed, in slightly less than two years as head of Taiwan National University, to become “the most memorable figure in the university’s history” (186n. 102). His personal life is completely absent (there is only one reference to his marriages and nothing on his married life), as is his personality (dcscribed only as “overbearing,” again in a footnote). A bit more of the spadework that Fu himself recommended for historians would have resulted in a more rounded portrait, but Fu’s contributions to public and intellectual life do emerge from the study.