Merle Goldman

Merle Dorothy Rosenblatt Goldman (March 12, 1931 – November 16, 2023) was an American historian and sinologist of modern China. She was professor of history at Boston University, especially known for a series of studies on the role of intellectuals under the rule of Mao Zedong and on the possibilities for democracy and political rights in present-day China.

Background Merle Dorothy Rosenblatt was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1931. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1953, then took a master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1957. She then went on for a Ph.D. at Harvard University, which she received in 1964 in History and Far Eastern Languages, studying with Benjamin I. Schwartz and John King Fairbank. Fairbank, she later recalled, supported her in her own interests, which were quite different from his.

Personal life In 1953, she married economist Marshall Goldman; they had four children and were married until his death in 2017.

Career Goldman was an instructor at Wellesley College during 1963–1964, then taught in the History Department of Boston University from 1972 until her retirement in 2001. During those years she was Research Associate of the East Asian Research Center, which became the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, at Harvard University, becoming a member of the Executive Committee in 1967 and serving to the present.

Among her honors, grants and memberships are Radcliffe Graduate Medal for Distinguished Achievement, June 1981; Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1987–1988; American Council of Learned Societies; the Social Science Research Council; Wang Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Chinese Studies, 1984–85. She was a member of the United States delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights (1993–94); Editorial Board, China Quarterly. but some also pointed out that it made "little acknowledgment" of the "often strong differences among writers" and that "the complete focus was on the negative impact of party's attempts to control literature." "All that mattered," said one critic, "was that writers were seeking freedom and it was being denied."

The meaning of "dissent" and the role of intellectuals and the state changed in Goldman's next books as she and her colleagues explored the continuities between 20th century intellectuals and the imperial past. Anthony Kane concluded that the title of her 1986 China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent pointed to this change. The earlier works, Kane says, were interested in the "negative," that is, dissenters as "Western-style creative spirits rebelling against party control." The new work expanded the concept of dissent to include the "active advisory role [intellectuals] have traditionally played and are increasingly playing again," a role which grows from a "literati tradition of qingyi (pure opinion) that dates back to traditional China." This exploration was further developed in a conference volume Goldman co-edited with Carol Hamrin, and Timothy Cheek, China's Intellectuals and the State (1986) which worked with the concept of China's "establishment intellectuals." The "establishment intellectual," like the scholar-bureaucrat of traditional China, remonstrated with rulers whose basic good intentions and legitimacy they accepted.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a time when Goldman could finally travel in China, she worked to encourage the forces for human rights and democracy there and joined the board of Human Rights Watch. When the time came for a new edition, Goldman herself added a chapter on developments in China since the first edition, and she is listed as co-author.

Selected publications Goldman's publications include more than fifty scholarly articles in addition to articles for the general public in the New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe. Monographs Literary Dissent in Communist China, Harvard University Press, 1967; Atheneum paperback, 1970 "Notable Book," The New York Times

From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China, Harvard University Press, 2007.

Edited volumes Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, Harvard University Press, 1977; paperback, 1985 China's Intellectuals and the State: In Search of a New Relationship in the People's Republic of China, edited with an introduction, "Uncertain Change," Council on East Asian Publications, Harvard University, 1987 Co-editor, Science and Technology in Post-Mao China, Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1989 Ideas Across Cultures, Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin Schwartz, coedited and introduction written with Paul Cohen, Harvard University Press, 1990 Fairbank Remembered, co-edited with Paul Cohen, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, 1992 The Paradox of China's Reforms, co-edited with Roderick MacFarquhar, Harvard University Press, 1999 Historical Perspectives on Contemporary East Asia, co-edited, Harvard University Press, 2000 Intellectual History of Modern China, co-edited with Leo Ou-fan Lee, Cambridge University Press, 2002 Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, co-edited, Harvard University Press, 2002 Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market, co-edited, (London; New York: Routledge, 2005 ) Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China, co-edited with Elizabeth Perry, Harvard University Press, 2007