Howard L. Boorman

Last updated

Howard Lyon Boorman (b. 11 September 1920 Chicago d. 17 February 2008) was a United States Foreign Service Officer who after retirement became best known for organizing and editing the Biographical Dictionary of Republican China a standard reference work commonly referred to simply as "Boorman."

Contents

Career

Howard Boorman was born Chicago, Illinois to William Ryland and Verna Lyon Boorman, who moved to Grinnell, Iowa, in 1935, where he graduated from Grinnell High School. After studying briefly at Grinnell College, Boorman finished his undergraduate education at University of Wisconsin in 1941. He first entered the Department of State, then joined the Navy. He studied Japanese at the Navy Language School in Boulder, Colorado, and became Lieutenant Japanese Language Officer. He served at the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area, which was located in Hawai'i, served a translator for General LeMay’s 21st Bomber Command. and was attached to the Marine Division that accepted the surrender of Japanese military, assisting with Japanese POWs. [1]

After the war, he entered the graduate program at Yale, leaving in 1947 to become a Foreign Service Officer. He was posted to Beijing, but after the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, Boorman was posted to Hong Kong where the Consulate developed resources to monitor and translate the mainland press. [2] He returned to work at Columbia University, where he won the Rockefeller Public Service Award in 1954–55. He began work on the four volume Biographical Dictionary of Republican China in 1955. [3] In 1967, Boorman joined the History Department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. He retired from teaching in 1984. [1]

In 1971, he and his son Scott, collaborated on a book that drew a parallel between Chinese military and diplomatic strategy and the Chinese game of go. [4]

Boorman married twice. He married Margaret Stelle in 1948, in Beijing, where their son, Scott, was born in 1949. In 1970, he married Mary Houghton, whose father, Henry Spencer Houghton, helped to found the Peking Union Medical College. [5] She died in 2000. Boorman died February 17th 2008. [1]

Biographical Dictionary of Republican China

The four-volume biographical dictionary contains biographical articles on 600 prominent figures of the Republican period (1911–1949). Although it was published before much new material became available, it remains a valuable starting point. [6]

Selected publications

Selected articles

Books and edited volumes

Biographical Dictionary of Republican China

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Special Collections and Archives.
  2. Henriot (2021).
  3. Boorman (1962).
  4. Reinhold, Robert (6 March 1971), "Maoist Strategy Likened to Complex Game of Go", New York Times: 11
  5. "Henry Houghton, Educator, is Dead" (PDF), New York Times, 24 March 1975
  6. Wilkinson, Endymion (2018). Chinese History: A New Manual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. ISBN   978-0-9988883-0-9., p. 989.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maoism</span> Variant of Marxism–Leninism

Maoism, officially Mao Zedong Thought, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed while trying to realize a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. A difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that a united front of progressive forces in class society would lead the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than communist revolutionaries alone. This theory, in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary, represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. Later theoreticians expanded on the idea that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions, arguing that he had in fact updated it fundamentally and that Maoism could be applied universally throughout the world. This ideology is often referred to as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to distinguish it from the original ideas of Mao.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fei Xiaotong</span> Chinese anthropologist and political figure (1910–2005)

Fei Xiaotong or Fei Hsiao-tung was a Chinese anthropologist and sociologist. He was a pioneering researcher and professor of sociology and anthropology; he was also noted for his studies in the study of China's ethnic groups as well as a social activist. Starting in the late 1930s, he and his colleagues established Chinese sociology and his works were instrumental in laying a foundation for the development of sociological and anthropological studies in China, as well as in introducing social and cultural phenomena of China to the international community. His last post before his death in 2005 was as Professor of Sociology at Peking University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wu Han (historian)</span> Chinese historian and politician

Wu Han was a Chinese historian and politician. Wu was one of the most important historians in the development of modern historical scholarship in China during the 1930s and 1940s.

Nagalingam Shanmugathasan was a trade unionist and Maoist revolutionary leader in Sri Lanka. He was the General Secretary of the Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist)

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jiang Menglin</span> Chinese academic

Jiang Menglin, also known as Chiang Monlin, was a Chinese educator, writer, and politician. Between 1919 and 1927, he also served as the President of Peking University. He later became the president of National Chekiang University. In the early 1950s, he was head of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction in Taiwan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wang Kemin</span> Republic of China politician (1879–1945)

Wang Kemin was a leading official in the Chinese republican movement and early Beiyang government, later noted for his role as in the collaborationist Provisional Government of the Republic of China and Wang Jingwei regime during World War II.

Yu Pingbo, original name Yu Mingheng (俞銘衡) and courtesy name Pingbo (平伯), was a Chinese essayist, poet, historian, redologist, and literary critic.

On Protracted War is a work comprising a series of speeches by Mao Zedong given from May 26, 1938, to June 3, 1938, at the Yenan Association for the Study of the War of Resistance Against Japan. In it, he calls for a protracted people's war, as a means for small revolutionary groups to fight the power of the state.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jiang Kanghu</span> Chinese politician

Jiang Kanghu, who preferred to be known in English as Kiang Kang-hu,, was a politician and activist in the Republic of China. His former name was "Shaoquan" (紹銓) and he also wrote under the name "Hsü An-ch'eng" (許安誠).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zhang Shizhao</span>

Zhang Shizhao, courtesy name Xingyan, pen name Huangzhonghuang, Qingtong or Qiutong, was a Chinese journalist, educator, politician of the early 20th century known for his advocacy first of revolutionary cultural values in the period leading up to the 1911 Revolution and then of traditional Confucian culture in following years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Baoqi</span>

Sun Baoqi was a government official, foreign minister, and premier of the Republic of China. His courtesy name was Mu-han (慕韓)

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun–Joffe Manifesto</span> 1923 agreement between China and the Soviet Union

Sun–Joffe Manifesto or the Joint Manifesto of Sun and Joffe (孫文越飛宣言) was an agreement signed between Sun Yat-sen and Adolph Joffe on January 26, 1923, for the cooperation of Republic of China's Kuomintang and Soviet Union. The manifesto asserted that the Soviet system was not suitable for China and announced in general terms the willingness of Soviet to co-operate with the KMT in its struggle to unify China.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun</span> Chinese political maxim

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun is a phrase which was coined by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The phrase was originally used by Mao during an emergency meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on 7 August 1927, at the beginning of the Chinese Civil War.

Ying Lianzhi, also known as Ying Hua, was a Manchu Bannerman, a prominent Catholic layman who agitated for church reform, founder of the prominent newspaper Ta Kung Pao, and instrumental in founding The Catholic University of Peking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stuart R. Schram</span>

Stuart Reynolds Schram was an American physicist, political scientist and sinologist who specialised in the study of modern Chinese politics. He was particularly well known for his works on the life and thought of Mao Zedong.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tsai Tingkan</span> Republican China politician

Tsai Ting Kan was a Chinese naval officer. Tsai was educated in the United States as a student on the Chinese Educational Mission and became an admiral in the Qing dynasty navy and Republican era statesman and politician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mao Renfeng</span> Chinese spymaster

Mao Renfeng was a Republic of China general and spymaster who headed the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics from 1946 until his death, succeeding his childhood friend Dai Li, who died in a plane crash in 1946. Between 1946 and 1949, his spy agency played a prominent role in the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, he fled to Taiwan with the rest of the Nationalist government, where he died 7 years later.

<i>Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung</i> Five volume collection of the written works of Mao Zedong

The Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, is a five volume collection of the written works of Mao Zedong ranging from the years 1926–1957. The collection was first published by the People's Publishing House in 1951, and was later translated into English by the state-owned Foreign Languages Press. A fifth volume, which included the works of Chairman Mao from 1949 to 1957, was released during the leadership of Hua Guofeng, but subsequently withdrawn from circulation for its perceived ideological errors. There has never been an official "Complete Works of Mao Zedong" collecting all his known publications. A number of unauthorized volumes of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung have been released, such as Volumes 6–9 which were published in India by the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Biographical Dictionary of Republican China is a biographical dictionary in four-volumes, often abbreviated as BDRC or referred to as "Boorman". It was published from 1967 to 1971 by Columbia University Press, edited by Howard L. Boorman, Director of the Research Project on Men and Politics in Modern China at Columbia University, with Richard C. Howard and O. Edmund Clubb. It includes 600 biographical articles written by some seventy-five contributors on men and women prominent in China's Republican period (1911-1949). Their careers are followed beyond 1949, some until 1966. More than half of the subjects are in politics, military, diplomacy or administration; a little more than a quarter intellectuals, such as scholars, journalists, propagandists; 10.8% in the arts; 7% in professions such as doctors, jurists, and clergy; and only 6.2% in business.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ye Dehui</span> Chinese writer and editor

Ye Dehui was a Chinese writer and editor active during the Qing dynasty and the Republican Era. Vacillating between academia, business, and civil service in his early life, Ye eventually established himself as a leading bibliophile and literatus. He was executed by the local government for his alleged counter-revolutionism.

References