Joseph W. Esherick
historian
Joseph W. Esherick (Chinese name: simplified Chinese: 周锡瑞; traditional Chinese: 周錫瑞; pinyin: Zhōu Xīruì, born 1942) is an American sinologist. He is a professor emeritus of modern Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego. He is the holder of the Hwei-chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies. Esherick is a graduate of Harvard College (1964, summa cum laude). He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley (1971), under the supervision of Joseph R. Levenson and Frederic Wakeman.
Works and views
In addition to publishing research monographs, Esherick published a series of essays on historiography and reviews of the large questions in modern Chinese history. As a member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, for instance, Esherick in 1972 published a critique of the field and of his undergraduate professor, John K. Fairbank, "Harvard on Imperialism." Later such essays dealt with the Revolution of 1911, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Revolution of 1949.
Critiquing the application of state-society models of China analysis, Esherick's work on rural Shaanxi in the late 1940s observes that representatives of the Party-state at the county level and below were themselves "members of society" and "deeply enmeshed in a variety of local networks from which they could never be completely separated."
Publications
Books
Modern China: The Story of a Revolution, co-authored with Orville Schell (Knopf and Vintage, 1972).
Lost Chance in China: The World War II Despatches of John S. Service (Random House, 1974; Vintage paperback, 1975).
Reform and Revolution in China: the 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (University of California Press, 1976; paperback: 1986; Chinese translation: Zhong-hua Publishing House, 1982; second edition: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16241610. VIAF identifies the subject as 109717261. The Library of Congress control number is n50008986. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1964, 1971 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph W. Esherick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.