Harvard University professor Michael Szonyi (center) wanders through a village in Yongtai county, Fujian Province. Photo: Courtesy of Michael Szonyi

In a post uploaded on the Moment of his WeChat account in January 2024, Michael Szonyi, a professor of Chinese history and former ­director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, was bending down in front of a stone tablet covered by Chinese characters to decipher the inscription without suffering from any distractions. This is just one shot of his daily research work in East China's Fujian Province, where he has spent most of his life.

When talking with the Global Times in an exclusive interview on Monday, the Canadian scholar articulated one of prominent effects of his years-long research into Chinese history and his multiple visits with his students to China. 

"No matter how difficult the relation between two countries is, there is still room and value in person-to-person engagement," the 57-year-old noted. 

"I am hopeful that over time US-China relations will be improved or stabilized. I think when that moment comes, the kinds of personal relationships that I build and that my students build and the Chinese students who come to America build will provide the basis for mutual understanding in the future."

'Honorary Villager'

In June 2024, Szonyi received a gift from the local government of Yongtai county of Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. He was dubbed as "Honorary Villager" to pay tribute to his contribution to preserving and conducting research around Yongtai's historical archives, which date back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and records almost each aspect of local people's life such as account books for running business and genealogy for maintaining bonds in clan.  

In the scholar's eyes, the Yongtai documents are a unique collection that allow outsiders better understand how a local ordinary family rose and fell, and how they dealt with variety of problems during daily life. 

"The first characteristic is that we can use the documents to trace a single family or even a single plot of land over a very long period, in some cases from the Ming Dynasty all the way to 1949 and even beyond. And this gives us all kinds of new insights into how traditional Chinese economy and traditional Chinese society operated," Szonyi said, unable to help gushing over the value of these relics in the interview.

Though he first arrived in Fujian in the 1990s, Szonyi's story with Yongtai documents started in 2016 when he was captivated by the original relics and a string of field investigations with researchers from the Xiamen University kicked off in 2017.

The total number of documents the team have collected since that time is near 100,000. There has even been a snowball effect: As people heard that the scholars were interested in these documents, more people came forward saying that they also had a box of documents in their attic.

Szonyi recalled that an elderly villager, who had two chests of old documents that had been stored in his house for hundreds of years, said that these things with possibilities of vanishing in dust finally had come to life because of Szonyi and his team's interest in them. The conversation helped Szonyi find another meaning to research on the documents.

Through a string of monographs focused on the local history of Fujian, the value of Szonyi's research has been gaining traction. He used the Yongtai documents for a graduate class at Harvard University, and led Harvard students to the county to carry out further research.

Harvard University professor Michael Szonyi (right) communicates with a villager in Yongtai county, East China's Fujian Province. Photo: Courtesy of Michael Szonyi

 
A different perspective of history

The Yongtai documents are mostly about the lives of ordinary people, and so-called nobodies in history, which cater to Szonyi's perspective in discovering Chinese history. 

"There has been so much of history told from the perspectives of political elites, the emperor and the literati, but when we look at the lives of ordinary people, we can get a very different perspective of history and how history unfolded," the scholar noted.

He chose to go deep into Chinese rural areas, talk with local residents in fluent Chinese and insist on taking field investigations as one of the major research methods, even if he had to face some unexpected situations like sleeping on the opera stage in a village temple with many horses years ago. 

Thanks to years long close and frequent contact with ordinary Chinese people, Szonyi captured something keeping still while something having changes in Chinese society.

Szonyi saw that Chinese rural people have a remarkable connection with their own history. "Probably my biggest impression that I get from studying rural society in late imperial China is of the tremendous creativity of Chinese people in using different kinds of cultural resources to deal with the challenges they face in their everyday experience," he recounted, a tradition which has been inherited across generations.

The professor saw the impact of economic development and opening-up and reform in China's cities as well as in rural areas. Under the changes spawned by economic soaring, he called on the conservation of diversity of traditional Chinese culture across different places in the country to keep their uniqueness.

Szonyi also saw China's endeavors to promoting exchanges with other civilizations around the world. He advocated to increase people-to-people interaction through ways such as onsite visits, instead of just watching short clips on social media platforms. 

The Chinese government published a series of policies to expand the number of ports that adapt the 144-hour visa-free transit policy to 37, embracing guests from around the globe and hailing a rising number of people-to-people exchanges.

The scholar has already planned out his next works to be published. "It will be about a study of the history of modern China from the perspective of rural society. I hope it will be a contribution to scholarship and to mutual understanding."