Beyond the Great Wall with China Historian John Delury

A historian of modern China and expert on East Asia, Professor John Delury focuses on US-China relations and the Korean peninsula. In 2023, he was selected as the inaugural Tsao Family Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where he explored China’s vision of empire. He taught at Yonsei University in South Korea for 13 years and is now a visiting professor at JCU. His latest book, Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China, was published by Cornell University Press. He recently published the article “Can South Korea’s Democracy Survive?” in Foreign Affairs.

Where did your passion for China and East Asia come from?
When I was a teenager, I started reading books by ancient Chinese philosophers. I was also very interested in Thomas Merton, who was a Catholic American Trappist monk and scholar of comparative religion. He led me to my interest in Eastern philosophy, and I was immediately drawn to the ideas of Chinese philosophy.

After my freshman year in college, I had the opportunity to spend the summer in Beijing. There were not a lot of Americans, and it was still in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests and massacre. It was a strange time, but I had an amazing experience. It was also frustrating at times because I could not speak any Chinese, so I could not communicate. Everywhere I went, people were staring at me, and I couldn’t disappear. In graduate school, I learned the language after going to Tsinghua University, one of Beijing’s top universities. I took a language pledge and did not speak English for a whole year.

Before coming to Italy, you were Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul. What was it like teaching in a Korean university?
Teaching at Yonsei was, in some ways, similar to JCU. The department I was in allowed me to teach in English, and all my students were fluent in the language. Yonsei has a liberal arts college and a graduate school for International Studies, and I taught in both over the course of 13 years. Most of my students were Korean, but there were also amazing students from all around the world, Vietnam, Southeast and Central Asia, Europe, and the United States. There was a lot of great energy, and it was very fun to teach.

The Koreans have lived next door to the Chinese for thousands of years, and the characters and roots of Korean words are like Chinese. There is a long history between the two countries, and the baseline is much higher in Korea when it comes to having a sense of what China is like, compared to the United States and Europe. It is difficult to be an academic in mainland China because of their politics. In Korea, however, I was surrounded by people with high baseline knowledge, and it was a great environment.

How would you describe your teaching methodology? What do you hope students will take away from your classes?
My first goal is to keep my students engaged, so I try to keep the readings interesting and have a lively classroom experience. I also strive to generate good class discussions. To me, that is the most interesting part, and it’s fun to get the students talking. This is my first time teaching in Italy, so I’m trying to cater my classes to my students. For example, in my US-China class, I see everyone’s different perspective and how it can be based on geography. If you look at the topics from an Italian or European perspective, suddenly you see the US and China a little more objectively than an American does.

It seems that Western universities study China with an exclusive relationship to the US. Do you think this approach limits our understanding of China?
I think it’s important for Europe to get away from seeing China through the prism of US-China relations. For example, China could have some role to play in the war between Russia and Ukraine. If we ever move toward armistice, a peace treaty, or some way to put the conflict to rest, China will have an important post-war economic role to play. However, if Europe looks at China through US-China dynamics, they might miss a big opportunity because the focus would be on what’s happening with the US-China trade war. I think US-China relations are extremely important, but you must create some space to see China on its own.

It is important to see how Europeans understand the Koreas and China. It is a very interesting discussion, because Korea is the size and the level of development of a Western European country, but it’s all on its own — there’s no EU around it. There’s also a lot of learning that could be done as a European, you can’t just be focused on US-China relations. You have to think about what Korea-China relations are like and what can be learned from it. I think there’s a lot of room for growth, and hopefully some of my students will keep these interests going and build from it.

You use historical thinking to shed light on current issues in China, the Koreas, the US policy in East Asia, and more. Can you give us examples of how you do this?
The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, brought back a particular phrase in Chinese – tianxia, which translates to “all under heaven,” referring to an empire. When it appears in the Chinese language, it can get lost in translation because it doesn’t always make sense in the same context. However, as my work explains, this is the traditional way of saying “empire” in Chinese. The Chinese leadership is using historical words that come from the past, and you must do the historical work to understand the true meaning of it.

In terms of Korea, I’m working on something that helps to understand why Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, declared martial law and how that is so shocking and traumatic to most Koreans. It hadn’t been done in 44 years, but before that time, it was done quite regularly. For my students back in Korea, they would have only heard stories from their parents and grandparents who lived through that horrible time. So, it is important to know South Korean history.

Tell us about your year at the American Academy in Rome. You were the inaugural Tsao Family Prize Fellow. How did they come to create this?
The American Academy hosts core programs which are prize fellowships, and last year, they opened a new spot for China studies. I think this reflects China’s global importance, and for the United States, China is very important. The Academy’s Board of Trustees with support from the Tsao Family Foundation had a vision of bringing in a sinologist to explore the connections between China and Italy and China and the Mediterranean. It was a great experience for me, and I think the other fellows appreciated hearing about the Chinese perspective.

During my time at the Academy, I worked on a book about the traditional Chinese conception of empire, tianxia, which I mentioned previously. This book, which is currently under review, places the late imperial Chinese discourse of tianxia in dialogue with early modern European political thought. By reconstructing the life and thought of seventeenth-century Confucian thinker Gu Yanwu, the book rethinks the Chinese word for empire in a comparative light — exploring linkages and differences with the legacy of Rome in contemporaneous Europe.

What is your impression of JCU so far?
JCU is great. I was invited to give a lecture here last year on North Korea, and that turned into a New York Times op-ed. Before teaching here, I would also come to use the library or books on China and Asia not held at the American Academy. I knew what a lovely campus JCU had, but to be in the classroom is different, and it is a lot of fun. The students are excellent and there is always good energy.