Section:GDN 1J PaGe:9 Edition Date:190821 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 20/8/2019 18:02 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Wednesday 21 Au g u st 2019 The Guardian •
9
T
he early life of the
historian Jerome
Ch’en , who has
died aged 99, ran
in parallel with the
upheavals in modern
China that he went
on to document.
Once dynastic rule collapsed after
1911, the warlord period (1916- 28)
was followed by the Japanese
invasion (1931- 45) and the civil war.
By the end of the civil war,
in 1949, the Communist party
was triumphant and Jerome was
studying in London. He stayed
abroad, and spent the rest of his life
working out, as a historian, how it
was that the decades he had lived
in China had led to the Communist
conquest. He pioneered the study
of the Republic of China (1911-49),
especially of the rise of the military
and later of the Communists.
This was often painful work.
The events that engulfed China
brought great suff ering to his family
and friends, and cut him off from
his native country. Though they
started life in a traditional society,
his brilliant generation of Chinese
intellectuals came of age in warfare
and revolution, and were later
persecuted or exiled.
Jerome ’s books included Yuan
Shih-k’ai (1961), about the dynastic
moderniser and fi rst president of
the republic; Mao and the Chinese
Revolution (1965); China and the
West, and The Military-GentryJerome Ch’en
Historian of modern
China forced to live in
exile from the 1940s
In 1946 he won a scholarship to
study under Friedrich Hayek , the
liberal critic of JM Keynes, at the
London School of Economics. When
Hayek decamped to Arkansas in
1949, Jerome moved to the School
of Oriental and African Studies.
By the time he fi nished his thesis
in 1952, the Communist party was
in control in China. The last letter
he received from his older brother
warned him not to come home.
The new order was hostile to
someone trained in western liberal
economics.
Jerome worked for the Chinese
service of the BBC, and played
for the BBC’s bridge team. This
was not a long-term career; being
Chinese he was not considered
suitable for promotion. He went
to Leeds University, as reader in
history. The years there were not
unhappy. He had many friends but
he was an outsider; it was made
clear to him, in a kindly way, that
as a Chinese person he could not
expect to get a chair in Chinese
history. In 1971 he was recruited
as a professor by York University
in Toronto, where he stayed until
retiring in 1987.
For almost three decades Jerome
had no contact with China or his
family. When he did go back in
1978 he learned that his fellow
intellectuals had been persecuted,
banished and imprisoned, or
had taken their own lives, in the
Cultural Revolution. As China
entered the Reform era in the late
1970s, he regained some of the
hope for a better China that he had
embraced in his youth.
In October 1981, at the con-
ference for the 70th anniversary
of the Chinese Revolution (the
fi rst time the revolution had been
celebrated for four decades),
Jerome gave a fl uent, impassioned
speech on “seeking truth from
facts” and academic independence.
He was cheered for many minutes
by Chinese colleagues.
His hope faded as it became clear
that the Communist party would
remain in charge of China; there
was no hope for the rule of law. He
did not return to the country except
for short visits , which was a source
of deep sadness for him.
Jerome had a large circle of
friends and colleagues, in Canada,
the UK, the US, China, Taiwan,
Hong Kong and Japan; I fi rst knew
him as a student and colleague.
In retirement he read the offi cial
biographies of Deng Xiaoping,
Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, still
trying to understand how the
Communists came to power and
held on to it. He saw the war with
Japan as the turning point in the
history of modern China as well
as of his own life: “The war was
Japan’s great mistake, Mao’s most
brilliant gamble and Chiang [Kai-
shek] ’s worst mishandling.”
Jerome outlived his siblings.
Diana LaryJerome Ch’en, historian, born
2 October 1919; died 17 June 2019The war
was Japan’s
great
mistake
and Mao’s
most
brilliant
gamble [email protected]
@guardianobitsBy 1949 the
Communist
party was
triumphant.
Ch’en was
studying in
London and
stayed abroad.
He spent his time
as a historian
working out how
it was that the
decades he had
lived in China
had led to the
Communist
conquest
V TONY HAUSERof the painter Philip Sutton , and six
years later she became his fourth
wife. She also became his regular
producer and took care of the
aspects of the business that did not
excite him. Meanwhile, still working
with the great old men, Dick had
embarked on a personal project that
he unabashedly intended to be “the
best animation feature ever”.
The original inspiration was
the tales of the legendary Mulla
Nasrudin, and the fi rst title of the
project was Nasrudin. Dick made
and discarded a series of painstaking
trials, but in 1973 settled on a new
story and title, The Thief and the
Cobbler. In 1990 Warner Brothers
agreed to fi nance and distribute the
fi lm, but when it went over time
and over budget Dick and Mo left
and their material was handed over
to other companies to make two
disastrous versions, abandoning
Dick’s voice tracks and introducing
irrelevant musical numbers.
Dick and Mo salvaged a work
print that served as the basis of their
own recreation, subtitled A Moment
in Time, which was supported by
the American Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences and
premiered in 2013. The fi lm’s 31 years
in production set a new world record.
The Thief catastrophe drove
Dick and Mo to close their company
and retreat to Salt Spring Island,
British Columbia, Canada, where
they remained for fi ve years. It
was there they had the idea for
Dick’s masterclasses , in which
he consciously performed like a
nightclub comedian, with lots of
jokes and funny walks – an essential
practical demonstration of the
way to study live movement. After
around 30 such performances
around the world, he distilled the
masterclass material into what
has become the animator’s bible,
translated into many languages and
formats including DVD and iPad app.
In 1997 the couple moved back
to Britain, and from 2008 Dick had
space at Aardman Studios in Bristol,
where he installed one of his 1938
Disney animation desks. There he
worked to the very end on the fi lm of
which he wryly joked: “ The working
title is Will I Live to Finish It? ” He did
not, but the 12 minutes he produced
of Lysistrata – a subject that had
interested him since he was a boy –
stand as his most innovative work.
Had he not been an animator, Dick
might have been a musician , and
played the cornet and fl ugelhorn
regularly with his own group, Dix
Six. He described himself musically
as “New York-Dixielander ...
whatever you call it.”
His marriages to Stephanie
Ashforth, Lois Steuart and Margaret
French ended in divorce. He is
survived by Mo and their children,
Natasha and Leif; by Alex and
Claire , from his marriage to Lois;
and by Timothy and Holly , from his
marriage to Margaret.
David Robinson
Richard Edmund Williams, animator,
born 19 March 1933; died 16 August 2019
Coalition: China Under the Warlords
(both 1979); State Economic Policies
of the Ch’ing Government (1980);
and The Highlanders of China (1992).
He rewrote The Military-Gentry
Coalition in Chinese. Perhaps his
favourite book was his fi rst, Poems
of Solitude (1961), an anthology
translat ed from Chinese poems,
edited with Michael Bullock.
Born Chen Zhirang in Chengdu,
Sichuan, in western China, Jerome
came from a literature-loving family.
His father, Chen Keda, passed the
imperial examinations just before
the system was abolished in 1905;
the offi cial career that would have
followed vanished. His mother, Ma
Huizhi, was married to his father in
her mid-teens, after his fi rst wife had
died, leaving two sons. She had eight
children; four did not survive.
Chen Keda scraped together an
income to support the family until
1929, when he went bankrupt.
Ma Huizhi died, the family lost its
home, and Jerome was sent to a
missionary school, where he learned
English. The Japanese invasion
had forced the fl ight of China’s
great northern universities to the
remote southwest. In 1939 Jerome
went to the distinguished but
poor Southwest United University,
combining the faculty and students
of several institutions.
In late 1945, after the defeat of the
Japanese, he took a six-day journey
by lorry to Beijing, where he taught
economics at Yen-ching University.Birthdays
Prof Deborah
Ashby , medical
statistics expert,
60; Prof Derek
Aviss , cellist,
71; Dame Janet
Baker , mezzo-
soprano, 86;
Usain Bolt ,
sprinter, 33 ;
Celia Brayfi eld ,
novelist, 74 ;
Sergey Brin ,
entrepreneur
and co-founder
of Google, 46;
Dina Carroll ,
pop singer, 51 ;
Kim Cattrall ,
actor, 63 ; Jackie
DeShannon ,
singer and
songwriter, 78 ;
Julie Etchingham ,
broadcaster, 50;
Kristin Forbes ,
economist, 49 ;
Anne Hobbs ,
tennis player, 60;
Liam Howlett ,
musician and
producer, 48;
Glenn Hughes ,
bassist and
singer, 67; Gerald
Jones , Labour
MP, 49; Simon
Katich , cricketer
and coach, 44;
Kelis , singer and
songwriter, 40;
Kenny Rogers ,
singer, songwriter
and actor, 81;
Craig Tracey ,
Conservative
MP, 45; Laura
Trevelyan ,
broadcaster,
51 ; Peter Weir ,
fi lm director,
75; Paul Zerdin ,
ventriloquist, 47.RELEASED BY "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws