A pioneer of
social history in Chinese history, Kuhn helped re-evaluate the "impact-response" school of Western scholarship on China associated with his mentor, John Fairbank. Gong Yongmei, a researcher at the Center for China Studies Abroad at
East China Normal University, observed that in his early work, Kuhn followed in the steps of his mentors, Fairbank and
Benjamin I. Schwartz, but where they saw the modern history of China as a story of decline and stagnation, he stressed the new social and political forms that were created internally, not imported from the west, and that progressed toward
modernization. That is, he did not favor either the traditional Chinese framework of the
dynastic cycle or the
Cold War American framework of Western impact and China's response. Kuhn's dissertation research started with local
militarization that put power in the hands of local
gentry at the expense of the central government. This doctoral research resulted in book-length chapters on the
Taiping Rebellion in the
Cambridge History of China, and his initial book,
Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China; Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864, published by
Harvard University Press in 1970. In his influential analysis of American historians of China,
Paul A. Cohen says that
Rebellion and Its Enemies is a "landmark study" which begins to modify the line of interpretation which sees China's modernization as brought from outside China and outside Chinese tradition and that Kuhn "instead addresses the nature of change taking place before the coming of the West." His question is not response to
Western imperialism but "what was happening in eighteenth century China?" When the Beijing archives of the
Qing dynasty became open to American scholars, Kuhn was among the first to spend extended time exploring them. His second
monograph,
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (1990) was centered on an
incident of alleged
shamanic witchcraft – “soul stealing” – that took place in the spring of 1768.
Stanford University historian Harold L. Kahn's review in
Journal of Asian Studies said that Kuhn's "mastery of (and profound affection for) archival documents-confessions, trial records, court letters, secret (and not-so-secret) memorials, above all the vermillion
rescripts of the emperor- and his
anthropological rummaging in law codes and ritual permit us to follow him into local ecologies of uncertainty in an age of affluence, into an understanding of the fragile, busy, often embattled inner life of the popular soul, into the insecurities of
Manchu ethnic sensibility and imperial loathing of the south and its soft blandishments.” Kuhn “constructs a social history of contagion at one level, an operational history of power at another, and then watches with benign irony as the subjects of both intersect at ever-ascending levels of victimization.” Kahn comments that the book shows autocratic power and bureaucratic complacency “fed on each other” and so “reinforced the sinews of the
ancien regime,” a position that ran counter to Weber’s notion of mutual incompatibility in a
zero-sum battle for power. Jonathan Spence's review in
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies also praises Kuhn for drawing attention to the often neglected role of shamanism and sorcery in late imperial China. He lauded Kuhn's treatment of hair and magic, especially in the thinking of the Manchu emperors, making the stealing of the
queue an especially sensitive issue. The Chinese translation of
Soulstealers sold more than 100,000 copies. Some readers saw contemporary relevance. One of the book's translators, a history professor at East China Normal University, wrote in a postscript to the 2011 edition that the
mass hysteria described in the book has often recurred in China, and that this hysteria "reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s in the unprecedented Great Revolution." One online discussion drew 10,000 comments. One wrote "On the rare occasions when a rebellion was successful, that success merely produced another imperial court," and quoted Kuhn's book as an explanation: "Because the empowerment of ordinary people remains, even now, an unmet promise." Kuhn's last book,
Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (2008) is a comprehensive study of the
Chinese diaspora, that is, the historic movement of Chinese out of China. Gong Yongmei notes that a "distinctive feature of Philip Kuhn’s scholarship is the importance of interpreting history from a theoretical paradigm..., a characteristic typical of American Chinese studies. In general, advanced theory and interpretative models are two remarkable advantages of American Chinese studies, and these are reflected in the analytical tools Kuhn draws on and the disciplines he borrows from in his research on Chinese immigrants: historical ecology, anthropology, sociology and religious studies.
Man-houng Lin, first female president of
Academia Historica and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History,
Academia Sinica;
Hans van de Ven, head of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies,
University of Cambridge. ==Selected works==