Frank Dikötter
Biography
Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Born in the Netherlands in 1961, he was educated in Switzerland and graduated from the University of Geneva with a Double Major in History and Russian. After two years in the People's Republic of China, he moved to London where he obtained his PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1990. He stayed at SOAS as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and as Wellcome Research Fellow before being promoted to a personal chair as Professor of the Modern History of China in 2002. He has raised over a million pounds for pure research, and some of his books are described below.
His first book, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 1992; translated into Chinese in 1999), rapidly became a classic in the field, showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why the idea of race became so widespread outside of Europe and America in the late nineteenth and twentieth century in the specific case of China. Partly reprinted in leading textbooks, including the Oxford Reader's Racism, the Oxford Reader's Ethnicity, Blackwell's Companion to Ethnic and Racial Studies, Routledge's Nationalism: A Reader, the book argued that racism should be understood as a global phenomenon in the modern world shared by widely different social groups rather than as European pathology only (for reviews click on Gregor Benton, W. J. F. Jenner and Stephan Feuchtwang).
His second book highlighted how sexuality gradually became an object of investigation, surveillance and intervention for the sake of state power in the twentieth century, as prostitution, masturbation, homosexuality and other forms of sexual activity not linked to procreation were viewed with deep suspicion by modernising elites. Sex, Culture and Modernity in China (Hawaii University Press, 1995) also demonstrated how a dubious 'science of sexuality' justified gender inequality, as women were widely seen to be biologically inferior to men in terms of body and mind: their primary role was to produce healthy babies for a healthy nation (for reviews click on Borge Bakken, Craig Clunas and William Jankowiak).
Popular ideas about biology also led to an abiding interest in eugenics, the 'science of human improvement'. Often seen as a trend limited to Europe and the United States with a peak in Nazi Germany, interest in China in the sterilisation of human beings defined as unfit to reproduce culminated in a Eugenics Law passed in 1995: the background to that law is studied in Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China (Columbia University Press, 1998) (for reviews click on Morris Low, Diane B. Paul and Rania Huntington).
The use of state power to restrict individual liberties in the name of a better future is also explored in Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China (Columbia University Press): 180,000 words in length, this book was the first to use multi-archival research in the People’s Republic with sources gathered from a dozen national, provincial and municipal collections, and it examines the enormous changes in modern China through the lens of the prison. The book is a richly textured social and cultural analysis of the prison system that explores the profound effects and lasting repercussions of superimposing modern notions of rehabilitation on traditional categories of crime and punishment. It uses fine-grained documentary evidence to build up a 'history from below', showing not only how prisoners had a voice, but how order in the prison ultimately had little to do with grand plans on paper but rather with the many compromises and accommodations reached by prisoners and guards on the ground. As in the case of eugenics, the messy and complex reality of daily life subverted the ambitious plans proposed by the state, creating new problems where it intended to produce perfection.
Frank Dikötter has also assembled a team of historians to examine how and why the prison conquered most of the world in the twentieth century in a co-edited book entitled Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Cornell University Press, 2007), contributing to contemporary debates about the social effects of massive incarceration from an historical and global perspective (download a survey as Cultures of Confinement).
Even more controversial is his revisionist account of opium in China. Written with his research team, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago University Press, 2004) questions the conventional wisdom about the negative role of opium in modern China. The book systematically undermines received wisdom on the basis of abundant archives from China, Europe and the US, showing that opium had few harmful effects on either health or longevity, that most smokers used it in moderate quantities without any fatal 'loss of control', and that the substance was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with in-built constraints on excessive use. In a culture of restraint, opium was an ideal social lubricant helpful in maintaining decorum and composure. It was also a medical panacea before the availability of aspirin and penicillin: it allowed ordinary people to relieve the symptoms of dysentery, cholera, malaria and tuberculosis and to cope with pain, fatigue, hunger and cold. If opium was medicine as much as recreation, the book provides abundant evidence that the transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of prohibition produced a cure which was far worse than the disease. Heroin and morphine were snorted, smoked, chewed or injected in the wake of the anti-opium movement, often in conditions far more harmful than opium smoking. Although heroin pills were smoked at all social levels in relatively small and innocuous quantities, some hardly containing any alkaloids, the dirty needles shared by the poor caused lethal septicaemia and transmitted a range of contagious diseases. Prohibition spawned social exclusion and human misery, engendering the very problems it was designed to contain. The book also highlights the active role that China played in bringing about restrictive legislation that has led, after a century of 'war on drugs', to a global situation in which the two most harmful psychoactive substances - tobacco and alcohol - are often also the only legal ones available. The book added a whole new dimension to the anti-prohibition literature by critically examining the historical evidence about opium in China and was an instant hit among proponents of legalisation. Predictably, it has upset both scholars who cling on to the myth of a China poisoned by imported opium and advocates of prohibition.
Much has been written about social movements in the history of modern China, but next to nothing is known about the revolution which transformed the very texture of everyday life. Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life (Columbia University Press, 2007) is the first book to map the many changes in the material landscape of modern China from the middle of the nineteenth century to the advent of communism in 1949. It shows that far from being homespun, the quotidian was already inextricably linked to global trends by the last decades of the nineteenth century, from the yarn of clothes, the iron of tools or the oil in lamps among ordinary farmers to electric fans and imported phonographs in wealthy households. 'Foreign' has long signified 'superior', if only because exotic goods generally come from distant lands and are thus highly valued. But contrary to other parts of the world, for instance Africa and Latin America, the material goods and technological innovations associated with foreign modernity were not merely imported for elite consumption, they were copied locally and rapidly made available to much larger sections of the population. The appropriation of objects initially associated with the foreign increased cultural diversity, contrary to the popular but misguided notion that globalisation leads to cultural uniformity. In clothing, for instance, women of all social backgrounds selected scarves, skirts, blouses, gowns, corsets and tights from a growing range of sartorial possibilities, using them in combinations which were often strikingly original: the use of the one-piece gown with a scarf and coat is but one example. The very staple of food, often seen as the aspect of life least permeable to foreign influence, changed in taste and aspect, as rice, sugar and wheat were increasingly produced industrially, white being the desired colour. Debunking the myth of a 'hostility toward alien things' which is claimed to have slowed down China's inclusion in a global economy, this richly textured book provides a fascinating analysis of how a very pragmatic attitude towards material goods prevailed, as most consumers bought the new and discarded the old without misgivings. They not only welcomed new commodities, but small enterprises rapidly started copying them for an export market in the early decades of the twentieth century: cheap goods made in China can be found everywhere today, from Marrakech to New York, just as porcelain made in China pervaded the world several centuries ago. Much has been written about copyright infringements, cheap exports and rapid commercialisation in the People's Republic of China, but these developments are part of a much longer historical tradition examined in this book. If an intrinsic element of a rapidly changing world is the capacity to overcome resistance to novelty, could China be more in tune with modernity than Europe? The book is lavishly illustrated by a hundred photos of everyday life, many from private and archival collections and never published before, including thirty by Jack Birns, who was a photographer for Life Magazine based in China in 1947-8.
Taken as a whole Frank Dikötter's books constitute a series of micro-studies which trace the contingent ways in which ideas, objects and institutions acquire global dimensions and are locally transformed in the specific case of modern China. In analysing topics such as gender, sexuality, 'race', eugenics, drugs, crime and punishment from a China-centered perspective based on extensive research on original primary sources, he has undermined many of the assumptions made in the humanities about the 'imposed' nature of the modern world, showing how elites and ordinary people alike were often keen to participate in key aspects of modernity and use them to suit their own perceived needs. These many acts of appropriation drive cultural diversification, even if the framework of reference is increasingly global. As a global community in the twenty-first century, we share a common world, although the ways in which this world is inflected, interpreted and shaped varies enormously from place to place: it is the emergence of this global community which is the focus of Frank Dikötter's work, including both the increased circulation of goods, ideas and people and the darker side of globalisation such as racism and sexism. His work also contributes to a number of longstanding debates about the making and breaking of individual freedoms, providing fresh historical perspectives from a non-European context on the incompatibility of racism with liberalism, the entrenched forms of discrimination against women and disabled people, the effects of state punishment in the form of the prison and the consequences of drug prohibition.
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