Jay Taylor, a U.S. Foreign Service specialist and Harvard University researcher on China for many decades, has won the 2010 Lionel Gelber Prize for his book The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
The prize was announced today by Noah Rubin, Chair of the Lionel Gelber Prize Board and grandnephew of Lionel Gelber.
According to Jury Chair George Russell, “The Generalissimo is a remarkable achievement, a fresh and impeccably documented approach to a vital issue that puts the histories of the Chinese Revolution and of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists in a new and more favourable light. For decades since the Chinese Communist revolution, the triumphalist historical view of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party dominated. Chiang was viewed as a greedy villain and a puppet of Western capitalist influences. It is a tribute to Taylor’s objectivity that his own views changed as he researched the topic.
The jurors agreed that this was an important, intriguingly written contribution that would stand the test of time and would be an important corrective to another era’s intellectual fashion, as China itself is forced to consider the continuing remarkable success of the Republic of China. That success owes a great deal to the austere and contradictory personality of Chiang Kai-shek, which Taylor brilliantly illuminates.”
Jonathan D. Spence, the first winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize in 1990, writes in The New York Review of Books that he felt compassion for Chiang. According to Spence, what is revealed through Taylor’s use of Chiang’s diaries, which span 56 years, humanizes the man.
(More information HERE.)
The prize was announced today by Noah Rubin, Chair of the Lionel Gelber Prize Board and grandnephew of Lionel Gelber.
According to Jury Chair George Russell, “The Generalissimo is a remarkable achievement, a fresh and impeccably documented approach to a vital issue that puts the histories of the Chinese Revolution and of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists in a new and more favourable light. For decades since the Chinese Communist revolution, the triumphalist historical view of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party dominated. Chiang was viewed as a greedy villain and a puppet of Western capitalist influences. It is a tribute to Taylor’s objectivity that his own views changed as he researched the topic.
The jurors agreed that this was an important, intriguingly written contribution that would stand the test of time and would be an important corrective to another era’s intellectual fashion, as China itself is forced to consider the continuing remarkable success of the Republic of China. That success owes a great deal to the austere and contradictory personality of Chiang Kai-shek, which Taylor brilliantly illuminates.”
Jonathan D. Spence, the first winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize in 1990, writes in The New York Review of Books that he felt compassion for Chiang. According to Spence, what is revealed through Taylor’s use of Chiang’s diaries, which span 56 years, humanizes the man.
(More information HERE.)
