Interview of James Lee by Alan Macfarlane, 17th August 2002

0:00:05 Introduction; family background; Shanghai; great-great grandfather converted to American Episcopalian church; after Taiping rebellion went to Suozou and founded an Episcopalian mission; school they founded expanded and became Suozou University; great grandfather expanded mission to Liaoning, to Shenyang; his son was not a believer and became a Shanghai businessman; he had five children, third son was my father, T.D. Lee, 1957 Nobel Laureate in physics; he migrated to U.S. in 1946

0:06:52 Mother's family from Wuxi, born in Shanghai; went to a Catholic missionary school; got a missionary fellowship to go to U.S. and there met my father; as a child of an academic family, assumed I would become an academic so only question was in what field; went to boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and at 14 narrowed it to economics, urban planning or history; at 16 decided to do history and at 17 decided to study Chinese history

0:09:37 In Lausanne as father had been at CERN and enjyed boarding school there; 19-20, when junior at Yale, had opportunity to become one of first new foreign students in China; encouraged to experience real life; undergraduate in archaeology and Chinese history at Yale; graduate education at Chicago where father got his degree

0:13:16 When I started my studies knew no chinese; advised by Professor Ping-ti Ho to learn chinese; did my masters and PhD at Chicago under him; he had a great influence on choice of topic and method; originally worked on European history but switched to Chinese history to get a job; had worked on Chinese population history then on the Chinese examination system; arranged a research position for me with William McNeil; in Chicago 1975-78, then went off to do fieldwork; high-point of Chicago anthropology with Marshall Sahlins, Sol Tax, Barny Cohn, Ron Inden - all very influential

0:22:14 Subject of PhD was on frontier history of China; became  South-West China 1250 to 1850; Professor Ho insisted that he could read early sources so studied bronze inscriptions at Peking University; then in Hong Kong read complete corpus of 7th-9th century written texts; went to Yunnan to use archives

0:26:44 Chicago in 1979 in state of internicine warfare; moved to Michigan as a junior fellow; Professor Ho had written on population history so took classes in demography and looked for data to begin to work on; began work in the Forbidden City archives; found aggregated data but under influence of Laslett's 'Households and Families in Past Time' wanted to find data on household structure and individuals; found just such data in Liaoning; came here 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1989 after which the Mormons purchased all the records and could use the microfilm in the U.S.; felt the need to check the data so stopped the project when 75% done; from late 1980's to early mid-1990's started a new project on the Imperial lineage

0:33:21 Cameron Campbell joined me in 1987 working on Liaoning project; Wang Feng joined us on the project on the Imperial lineage; Cambridge Group for Population and Social Structure; Roger Schofield

0:37:27 1994-5 back to working on Liaoning; working on 'Fate and Fortune' - synopsis; 'One Quarter of Humanity' - synopsis; Arthur Wolf; 'Life Under Pressure' - synopsis

0:54:16 Malthus and China; recent theory and 19th century impirical work; Pomerantz's Great Divergence thesis; own and collaborators advantage is the quantity of impirical facts that  will allow revision

1:04:02 Thoughts on change in China today

1:08:42  Advice on studying China