Adieu 'Mr China', your record lives on

Ezra Feivel Vogel, former director of Harvard University's John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies and a famous US scholar on Chinese and Japanese studies, died on Sunday at the age of 90.

Cui Tiankai, China's ambassador to the United States, tweeted his condolences, praising Vogel as an outstanding scholar on China and an old friend of the Chinese people who devoted his life to enhancing mutual understanding between the Chinese and US peoples and making important contributions to friendship between the two peoples and countries.

Vogel was one of the few Western scholars who had knowledge of Chinese and Japanese histories. He was not a linear historical narrator, instead he injected sociological perspective into his studies, endowing it with more realistic and comparative significance.

For example, Vogel's research on Japan enriched people's understanding of a mature modern Eastern society, providing a reference with which to observe China's modernization process.

For Chinese readers, Vogel's reputation derives largely from his book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, a political biography published in 2010 which focuses on Deng's career as a revolutionary, Party leader, and architect of China's reform. The book is regarded as the most comprehensive record yet of China's astonishing and bumpy road to economic reform.

The reason Vogel enjoys Chinese people's trust is his in-depth study of China since 1961. Few contemporary Western scholars have such a deep understanding of the difficulties and costs of China's modernization.

Some critics argue that Vogel overdid himself in praising China and Japan. But then, his book was intended for middle school students and ordinary people and he based his evaluation on history.

Vogel will be remembered because he was not afraid of injecting his emotions in his chronicling of China's modernization story.

He deliberately broke away from the Western perspective when narrating the Chinese story, which, in the eyes of those still suffering from a Cold War mentality, is "out of order". But this approach is exactly the proper starting point for a complete understanding of the relations between China and the West.

Even in his later years, Vogel continued to actively advocate better China-US ties, stressing that the US recognize China's modernization.

Even in his passing, the record "Mr China" has set will not be forgotten, not only because Vogel's book speaks well of China, but also because it reflects China's modernization. Vogel left a mark with his honesty as a scholar in a history that is in progress.