Obituaries

In memory of Bill Brugger (1941–1999)

Andrew Watson

Bill Brugger’s death in Adelaide on 23 August came after a number of

years of poor health and a short, but intense, fight against cancer. His
many friends in Chinese studies and the generations of students he taught
were much distressed by this premature departure of a significant contrib-
utor to the study of contemporary China. Many of us will recall, with
deep pleasure, long discussions of the nature of political change in China
and of political theory, in which Bill’s engaging manner and concen-
tration on exploring the theoretical meaning of events stimulated us to
seek our own new perspectives. Such moments inevitably remain linked
in memory with the soft bubbling of his ever-present pipe. Bill will be
remembered as an engaged and productive scholar, as a fine teacher, as
a generous intellectual who engaged in debate without spite, and as a
good friend. Indeed, the warmth of feeling towards him was evident in
the last few weeks of his life, when many of his colleagues and former
students made journeys from distant parts of the world to say farewell.
Bill was philosophical in the face of his illness, and these visits were
another opportunity for him to reflect on China and political theory. He
will be keenly missed.
Bill’s engagement with Chinese Studies began in 1960, when he
enrolled in the Modern Chinese degree at SOAS. At that time, few
universities in Britain taught Chinese and few students chose the option.
The field was open for creative people, and Bill is one of those who left
his mark. During his undergraduate days at SOAS, Bill developed the
broad sinological foundation that has been a feature of British scholars
working on China. He also demonstrated the qualities that became
characteristic of his scholarly life and shaped the way he subsequently
organized his teaching and research. He was intensely methodical and
systematic. I recall how, in 1964, as finals approached, he organized
groups of classmates to work as teams, focusing on different periods of
Chinese history and sharing the fruits of their work. I suspect a number
of us owed what success we had in the final paper to this effort. This
approach also underlined the extent to which Bill was committed to
working with others, exchanging ideas and enjoying the sparks that could
come from discussion and debate. This characteristic was most apparent
in the 1970s and 1980s, when he organized and edited a series of books
on political change in China that were the product of regular workshops
and discussion groups.
Another feature of Bill’s early days at SOAS was his commitment to
social engagement. He ran for various offices in the student union and,
probably not a widely known achievement, starred in a spoof film loosely
based on a George Simenon novel. His experience later in China in-
 The China Quarterly, 2000
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tensified his sense of commitment to the social role of scholarship and,

during the 1960s and 1970s, when student activism flared in Britain and
Australia, Bill was firmly on the side of an open and participatory
structure for academic life. Bill was always conscious of the political
significance of events in China and of the political context for Chinese
studies.
On graduating from SOAS, Bill became one of the group of young
British scholars that was able to spend time in China before and during
the Cultural Revolution. China had, at that time, just changed to English
as the first foreign language and was seeking English language teachers.
This gave him the rare opportunity to engage with a society previously
studied at a distance and in the abstract. It was also a society undergoing
intense and consciously debated change. In retrospect, this was a key
formative period for him. It not only brought the language alive and
enabled him to come to grips with China’s social reality, but also
stimulated an abiding interest in political theory and the relationship
between theory and social practice. Bill’s commitment to a scholarly life
devoted to exploring China’s reality through the lens of political theory
became a fundamental driving force of the rest of his life.
On returning to Britain in 1966, Bill embarked on a programme of
study that resulted in his Ph.D. thesis in 1972 and led to the publication
of Democracy and Organisation in the Chinese Industrial Enterprise
1948–53 (1975). This book remains one of the most solid studies of the
period and of the socialist transition in Chinese industry. Its meticulous
analysis of a complex and detailed process was based on extensive
documentary research and had a clear theoretical focus that demonstrated
Bill’s lifelong commitment to linking the particular to the theoretical. The
book underlined Bill’s interest in socialist theory and in studying China
as a means to elucidate socialist perspectives on political thought. During
this time, Bill also became the Materials Officer at the Contemporary
China Institute at SOAS and worked to develop its basic collection of
primary materials. Bill thus made a significant contribution to the Insti-
tute that served for many years as one of the world’s major centres for
research on contemporary China.
In 1972, Bill moved to the Flinders University of South Australia as a
lecturer in politics. He rose to senior lecturer (1976), reader (1978) and
professor (1980). He served as head of department throughout the 1980s
and was a senior figure on many university committees. His rapid
promotion reflected his scholarly output, his organizational abilities and
the trust that he enjoyed among his colleagues. He remained a member of
the Politics Department at Flinders until his death.
The combination of strong empirical foundations in documentary
sources and a guiding focus on socialist theoretical issues became the
hallmark of the series of political studies of contemporary China which
Bill wrote and edited in the years after completing his thesis. A number
of these publications also involved work with his growing list of success-
ful postgraduate students (he supervised 14 theses in total), and it was
characteristic of the man to generate opportunities for his students to
296 The China Quarterly

publish their work. It is not surprising, therefore, that they have always
shown him great loyalty. His corpus of work included five individual
books, four jointly written books, three edited volumes and numerous
chapters and journal articles. His students have become lecturers and
professors in a number of universities in Australia and in Hong Kong.
As time passed, Bill became increasingly engaged with the broad range
of political theory. His intellectual interests took him well beyond China.
Indeed, in recent years, as the reassessment of political change and of the
Cultural Revolution in China proceeded, Bill not only contributed to that
discussion but also developed a growing interest in the impact of post-
modern thought. He published on an extensive variety of issues including
classic British and European liberalism, socialist theory, technocracy and
Australian politics. His last book, Republican Theory in Political
Thought, engaged with the issue of the moment in Australia. He was also
a frequent contributor to radio and newspaper commentary. His capacity
to sustain this breadth to his scholarship was a testimony to the strength
of his intellect.
For those who knew him, his sense of intellectual engagement, the
breadth of his work and his capacity to retain a focus on the theoretical
heart of scholarship will remain at the core of our memories. As will his
warmth, generosity and kindness.

Jacques Guillermaz (1911–1998)

Claude Aubert

On 2 February 1998, Jacques Guillermaz died at 87 after a long and

dignified fight against illness. He was not only the founder of French
studies on Contemporary China, but one of the last first hand witnesses
of more than fifty years of recent Chinese history.
“The most beautiful journey is not worth a modest come back.” This
quotation, from a poem by Gao Qi, found in his autobiography Une Vie
pour la Chine, Mémoires, 1937–1989 (1989), may summarize the feel-
ings of a man who personally paid a heavy price for having travelled so
deeply into the turmoil of China’s recent past: he gave that country the
best part of his youth. Indeed, the last twenty years of his life, after he had
retired to a small village in the Savoie near Grenoble, may have been the
happiest of his life. The love and care of his third wife, as well as the
peace of the countryside, gave him the serenity to look back at the hopes
and the disillusionment he experienced in the face of so many lost
opportunities, to wish the best for a country he admired more for its
civilization and its people than for its politics.
But what a journey! Born the same year the Manchu dynasty collapsed,
Guillermaz arrived in Beijing in May 1937, two months before the city
 Obituaries 297

was invaded by Japanese troops. In the days following the Marco Polo
Bridge incident, he was on the spot, counting the dead. In Nanjing, on a
hot Sunday morning in July 1949, he was on the streets to watch the
arrival of the Communist troops. In October 1966, when he left Beijing
for the last time, the Red Guards were rampaging the streets and
brutalizing its inhabitants.
Jacques Guillermaz was a military man. After graduating from Saint-
Cyr, the best military academy in France, he first served in Madagascar
before being ordered to Beijing as aide to the military attaché there.
Being a soldier, he obeyed and learned Chinese. As military attaché of the
French Embassy, he followed the Nationalist government first to
Chongqing, where he stayed from 1941 to 1943, then on to Nanjing, from
1946 to 1949. After the fall of Nanjing, he stayed on in the city until
1951. He was then posted to Thailand from where he participated in the
Geneva Conference on Indochina, and in the activities of SEATO. In
1964, after having begun a new career as a China scholar in Paris, he was
called back to Beijing, again as military attaché with the provisory grade
of général de brigade, to the newly installed French Embassy. Just before
taking this position, he had the unpleasant task, together with an another
diplomat, of visiting and announcing to Chiang Kai-shek the French
decision to recognize Beijing.
Each of his long stays in China ended in abrupt departures, which were
ruptures of a kind. In 1944, after so many years in China and with his first
marriage at an end, he was dispatched to Algiers and to France where he
fought in the last battles of the war. His forced departure from China in
1951, and his return to Europe in the late 1950s, resulted in a separation
from his second wife – the poetess Hu Pinqing, whom he had married in
Nanjing – who preferred go to Taiwan. Again, in late 1957, he served as
colonel in Algeria.
Guillermaz failed to achieve the military career he had hoped for. This
failure, along with China’s own failures, however, were a sort of blessing.
His experience in China led Guillermaz to question the limited knowl-
edge of local politics then available in the West and to enter Chinese
studies where he acquired an international reputation. In this process, he
introduced to the closed community of French classical sinology a new
approach to the country and its people.
In 1957, he went back to school to obtain a degree in Chinese studies.
The following year, he retired from the army and began to teach at the
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sixième Section, which later became
the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, EHESS). There he
established and headed the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur
la Chine Contemporaine, better known afterwards as the Centre Chine.
Then, over a period of some twenty years, as Directeur d’Etudes at the
EHESS and Director of the Centre Chine (excluding an interlude in
Beijing during 1964–1966), he shaped the French school of contemporary
China studies.
The Centre Chine was of modest proportions, even after it was
transferred to the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, at the heart of the
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EHESS. It was, however, open to all, and many who would have been
discouraged by the world of traditional sinology attended Guillermaz’s
lessons and the informal seminars he organized on current events in
China, and used the facilities of the specialized library that he built up
from nothing. Eventually, these students, trained under his direction, went
on to engage in either research or professional activities related to China.
This circle became an active network whose influence went beyond the
formal structures of the EHESS.
Jacques Guillermaz’s in-depth books on the recent history of China
filled a critical void in the literature in France at the time. As early as
1959, when only the first studies of Fairbank, Schwartz and other
American scholars were available but difficult to access in France, he
wrote La Chine Populaire, in the very popular series of Que sais-je?.
This was followed in 1969 and 1972 by his well-known Histoire du Parti
Communiste Chinois (1921–1949) and Histoire du Parti Communiste
Chinois au Pouvoir (1949–1972), published by Editions Payot. These
books were to be re-edited and translated into numerous languages and
still remain basic tools for students, with their detailed accounts of events,
biographical data on all the main historical actors and realistic assess-
ments.
In his books, as well as in his teaching, Jacques Guillermaz showed
shrewd judgment formed in the field, when history had the savour of war
and death. Who, other than a military man, could have best explained a
period mainly shaped by force, ruse and chance? In those uncertain times,
individuals had more than disproportionate roles and Jacques Guillermaz
had the rare advantage of having known most of them personally. At the
same time, he was attentive to information from all walks of life,
diplomats of course, but also journalists, missionaries, merchants and
technicians as well as historians, political scientists, economists, lawyers
and geographers among others. This multi-disciplinary approach was to
become the landmark of the Centre Chine.
A good observer of human nature, he knew enough of the ordinary
Chinese not to be carried away by ideology when Maoist propaganda was
making so many converts in the West. Conservative in politics, with first
hand experience of communism, he had no illusions about the real issues
in the political struggles he witnessed. He had great admiration and
compassion for the Chinese people – hard working, so resilient in the
worst of times, so patient and naive (lao shi) in front of their rulers.
By duty an analyst of China’s misfortunes, Jacques Guillermaz was at
heart an admirer and a connoisseur of China’s grand past, familiar with
its great historical characters, and particularly fond of its poetry. He will
be remembered by all as a gentleman, attentive to everyone and particu-
larly considerate towards staff of the Centre Chine. He was respectfully
addressed as Mon Général by colleagues as well as students. This title –
which he secretly resented – was a mark of genuine respect for a man so
different from the ordinary scholar. The legacy he left to all of us in
France working on contemporary China is not small. One may hope that
what was to be the achievement of his whole life, the Centre Chine, his
 Obituaries 299

fine library and his research community, will survive him and eventually
give birth to the great Institut de la Chine Contemporaine that he wanted
so much.

Memorial to Benjamin I. Schwartz

(1916–1999)
Paul A. Cohen, Merle Goldman and Roderick
MacFarquhar

During a span of almost four decades, from the early 1950s until the late
1990s, Benjamin Schwartz, through his teaching in the Harvard Govern-
ment and History departments and in his books and articles, was a
towering figure in the field of Chinese studies. He set standards – above
all at the intersection of intellectual history and politics – that were a
guide and source of inspiration to students and scholars worldwide. His
influence extended well beyond the China field; it also cut across
conventional disciplinary boundaries, touching political science, religion,
philosophy, culture and literature, as well as history.
Ben’s learning was vast, ranging far beyond even the cultures of the
ten languages he spoke or read. In the classroom he refused to be
confined to the topic at hand, and to co-teach with him was to participate
in a lively but always collegial dialogue. He conveyed his learning not as
a fixed set of truths or simple accretion of information, but with a
distinctive approach to the posing of problems. Central to this approach
was a healthy scepticism toward received wisdom, predictive models of
explanation (such as political and economic systems), the cliches of
everyday academic discourse, and any and all forms of reductionism.
Again and again, Ben insisted on defining what was taken for granted and
unveiling the complexity that lay hidden behind simple labels. In his
essay “On arenas of social choice,” for example, he asserted that our
difficulty in grappling with contemporary social thought came not so
much from the neologisms as from “the older established vocabulary
which we simply take for granted. Words such as ‘social,’ ‘society,’
‘system’ and ‘choice’ seem transparent, and yet buried in them are all the
problems and dilemmas of the contemporary human sciences.”
A man of paradoxes and odd juxtapositions, Ben is not easily catego-
rized as a scholar-thinker. He wrote seminal books and articles on the
history of Chinese Communism. Chinese Communism and the Rise of
Mao (1951) is still a pioneering work not only in the field of comparative
communism, but also in political and intellectual history. It analysed the
ideological and intellectual debates of the early decades of the 20th
century within their extraordinarily complicated political, personal and
300 The China Quarterly

international contexts. With copious documentation, he was the first

scholar to provide evidence showing that the Chinese Communists were
not simply puppets of Stalin and the Soviet Union but had their own
agendas. A leader such as Mao Zedong was willing to disobey Moscow
when its orders clashed with what he perceived as China’s realities. His
second book, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West
(1964), focused on a major late Qing thinker whose translations of
Western social and political thought were enormously influential among
contemporaries. Ben’s analysis of Yan Fu shed light on the struggles of
a whole generation of Chinese intellectuals who sought to come to grips
with the tensions evoked by China’s political and intellectual encounter
with the West. His third path breaking work, The World of Thought in
Ancient China (1985), presented a wide-ranging discussion of ancient
Chinese thought and views of political power, illuminated by frequent
comparisons with the foundational ideas of other civilizations, in particu-
lar the early West.
Temperamentally, Ben was unwilling to be confined by his pro-
fessional involvement as a “China specialist.” He often engaged in the
broader intellectual issues of the day, as evidenced by his public response
to Allan Bloom’s best-selling assault on American higher education and
his searching critique of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of Jews and Judaism
in her “religion of politics.” Although a frequent and vigorous defender
of the “area-studies” approach with its implicit emphasis on the defining
importance of culture, both popular and elite, he consistently displayed
faith in the existence of a world of common humanity transcending
cultural boundaries. Most striking, the wielding of power, the search for
its sources, the concern for its moral ramifications and other issues
pertaining to its proper use were for him subjects of intense and abiding
intellectual fascination. Yet, it would be hard to find someone less
interested than Benjamin Schwartz in the trappings of personal power.
Schwartz’s former students presented him in 1990 with a festschrift
entitled Ideas across Cultures. Among his many other honours, he served
as President of the Association for Asian Studies in 1979–80 and Director
of the Fairbank Center at Harvard in 1983–84. His book on ancient
Chinese thought was awarded the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of Phi
Beta Kappa in 1986 and also won the American Historical Association’s
1986 James Henry Breasted Prize. In 1998, he received the American
Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction.
Though becoming increasingly frail in his last year, Ben never lost the
sparkle in his eyes or any of his intellectual capacities. Up to his final
days, his presence raised the level of any discussion from the petty and
mundane to profoundly intellectual and moral. Though thoroughly en-
gaged in his own religion of Judaism, he had a deep appreciation and
intellectual understanding of all ways of thought – Buddhism as well
as Confucianism, Chinese popular religion as well as philosophical
Daoism, and Islam as well as Christianity. He had an uncanny ability to
get to the heart of a question or academic argument, no matter how
confused and obscure it might be. Just a few weeks before his death, in
 Obituaries 301

a discussion at the Fairbank Center about whether or not the Chinese

revolution had been necessary, Ben characteristically illuminated the
issue by questioning the very premise of the question. He asserted that
“the question should not be whether the revolution was necessary, but
whether a revolution was necessary.” In that one statement, he invited us
to consider a deeper reality and so transformed the debate.
Ben’s death has left not only a profound intellectual void but also a
personal one. As Richard Baum has written elsewhere, he was “a true
gentle-man (with equal emphasis on each syllable).” He treated everyone
– young and old, student or statesman, the Fairbank Center kitchen staff
with whom he spoke Portugese or eminent visiting scholars – with equal
respect as individuals with whom one could engage in intellectual
discourse and from whom one could learn. He was a man of rare personal
as well as intellectual character, whose likes we are not apt to encounter
again.

Gerry Segal (1953–1999)

David S. G. Goodman

Gerry Segal died on 2 November 1999 at the age of 46 after a six-month

struggle with cancer. He was an articulate, provocative and courageous
commentator on a wide range of international politics, best known for his
work on Pacific Asia and particularly China. For almost two decades, he
repeatedly focused on matters of the utmost topicality by challenging
current orthodoxies, and in the 1990s became a leading public intellectual
in the English-speaking world. In the process, he not only set agendas for
academics and policy-makers, but provided both intellectual and organi-
zational frameworks for them to interact with.
After graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with Ellis
Joffe, and the London School of Economics, with Michael Yahuda, Gerry
Segal started his academic career as a lecturer in international politics. He
held university lectureships first in Aberystwyth, then in Leicester and
later in Bristol. At the end of the 1980s, he headed a project on
comparative foreign policy reform in communist party states at the Royal
Institute of International Affairs for three years. In 1991, he moved to the
International Institute for Strategic Studies, first as senior fellow respon-
sible for Asian security, and later for two years as Director of Studies.
Gerry Segal’s written legacy is impressive both for its quantity and its
constant intellectual stimulus. He wrote or co-authored 13 books, edited
or co-edited another 18, and published more than 120 articles and essays
in academic publications. Even more impressive was the challenge of his
relentless intellect. His Ph.D. thesis on the ‘Great power triangle’ –
between Washington, Moscow and Beijing – established a style which
302 The China Quarterly

both emphasized a healthy scepticism about current fashions in academic

analysis and encouraged thinking beyond the square. This basic approach
characterized his subsequent work, especially on China, and inevitably
led to controversy. In the middle of the 1980s, he was among the first
to explore the potential consequences for international politics from
China’s adoption of economic reform, against the advice of many West-
erners who preferred to think they were dealing with an unchanging
China. His 1994 Adelphi Paper, China Changes Shape, examined the
impact of international markets and interactions on the exercise of
China’s regionalism, and became a subject of complaint by sections of
the Party-state in the People’s Republic of China who interpreted the
argument as advocating political disintegration. Most recently his For-
eign Affairs article on “Does China matter ?” similarly ruffled more than
a few feathers in the People’s Republic and led to an editorial denunci-
ation in the China Daily.
Coupled with his substantial research output was Gerry Segal’s impres-
sively high level of activism in other areas. Topical research and scholar-
ship led him quickly and easily into the role of a public intellectual on
international politics, particularly commenting on the development of
Pacific Asia. He wrote regularly in the international press and was a
frequent commentator in the electronic media. These activities fitted well
with his strategy of bridging the gap between academic expertise and the
work of policy-makers in government and its associated agencies. In
1987, that particular emphasis led him to establish the quarterly journal,
The Pacific Review, which has developed as a major international forum
for the discussion of ideas on Pacific Asia. In a similar vein, he took a
leading role in the development of the European Council for Security
Co-operation in the Asia-Pacific in 1994, and the Council for Asia–
Europe Co-operation in 1996.
Gerry Segal was an inveterate collaborator and organizer of research
projects. Among other collaborators, he wrote frequently with Barry
Buzan; and together he and I produced seven books. As his work at both
the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute
for Strategic Studies indicates, he was an enthusiastic and very effective
research manager. He led and participated in a number of research
projects at the Royal Institute of International Affairs before moving there
as a research fellow to work on a comparative study of the foreign policy
of communist party-states, just as those states themselves were undergo-
ing a major transformation. Those circumstances made the project that
much more exciting and relevant, though necessarily also the more
difficult. With that project, as with others both before and after at the
International Institute for Strategic Studies, scholars from around the
world were only too willing to be involved and pushed to think beyond
the comfortable. Recognizing his experience in research management,
when the Economic and Social Research Council decided to establish a
Pacific Asia Programme in 1994 to encourage and support related re-
search projects in the United Kingdom, Gerry Segal was invited to be its
Director.
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Although Gerry Segal was always reluctant to describe himself as a

‘China expert,’ China Studies, as well as the study of the Asia Pacific
more generally in the United Kingdom, has lost a significant influence.
Moreover, on the wider stage the presence of someone prepared to prick
our consciences by attempting to articulate the difficult – sometimes the
unthinkable – will also be sorely missed. Those who worked closely with
Gerry Segal will miss his generosity of spirit, his loyalty and his
engagement with life. From fairly early on, I rapidly discovered that the
two of us approached problems from widely different world views, but it
never impeded our relationship. Working with him was always a plea-
sure, as well as intellectually rewarding.