| When the study of China was highly politicized and demoralized in the United States during the McCarthy era, it was the Ford Foundation that played a key role in salvaging this field from disintegration. In the following three decades, the Foundation made a great contribution to building Chinese studies into a national, even an international, enterprise. Moreover, it made efforts to improve the American public's and elite groups' understanding of China, helping to bring change to U.S. policy toward China and Sino-American relations.;There has been little scholarly work, especially fully-documented study, of the Ford Foundation's China program. Nevertheless, the Foundation's role in the China field has produced a lasting controversy. While Concerned Asian Scholars criticized its collaboration with the national security state during the Cold War era, other scholars blamed the Foundation's submission to the academic interests which led to the so-called "academic enclosure." This dissertation is the first extensive archival study of the Foundation's China program. What I have found in my study is that the Foundation had its own agenda in the China field which, though deeply influenced by the Cold War and academia, went far beyond the national security state and the ivory tower to serve the interests of the United States and the world capitalist system in a way which can largely be identified in Antonio Gramsci's term--hegemony. This hegemony is not a cultural control built upon financial manipulation of particular viewpoints by the Ford Foundation in its grant-making process, as some critics have charged because of their own misunderstanding of the Gramsian thesis. Instead, it is the leadership of consensus-building in the perspective of the world capitalist system, characterized by the long-term interests, general direction, and integrated approach to the power of knowledge, that reflects the internal dynamic nature of the Ford Foundation. |
