How many times he has traveled to China, Iwo Amelung cannot say. “I haven’t counted, bbut altogether I’ve lived there for many years, including from 2003 to 2007, when I worked at Peking University and coordinated an exchange program.” Following his four-year stay in China, Amelung was appointed to a professorship at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2007 and has since represented the field of Sinology in both research and teaching at the Institute for East Asian Philology.
His own contact with the “Middle Kingdom” began in a very pragmatic and unspectacular way: “I’m a historian, and I needed a second major to pursue a degree in history,” Amelung recalls. That was back in the 1980s. He learnt about Sinology – which was just starting to become a popular subject at the time – and decided to pursue it, without ever having had any prior contact with the Chinese language. “But the country, with its completely foreign language, writing system, and culture, already exerted a certain fascination on me back then,” he says. “What has fascinated me ever since are the far-reaching changes observable in China. They’ve led to a completely different perception of China today compared to 20 or 30 years ago.” Whereas the People’s Republic was long considered a poor country, many Chinese people have since become relatively wealthy, and the standard of living among parts of the urban population is very much comparable to that in the West.
The Pragmatism of a Historian
Notwithstanding his enthusiasm for contemporary China, Sinologist and historian Iwo Amelung’s research focuses on 19th- and early 20th-century Chinese history. “That I, as a scholar, chose to focus on this period was initially due to entirely pragmatic reasons,” he explains. “In the 1980s and early 1990s – during my studies and the start of my academic career – Chinese archives were being opened to historical research for the first time, and I had the opportunity to spend almost nine months at the First Historical Archives of the People’s Republic of China – granting me nearly exclusive access to extensive and highly interesting sources from China’s late imperial period – an era that had previously received virtually no scholarly attention”, Amelung reports. For anyone writing a doctoral dissertation in Sinology, these were ideal – one might even say paradise-like – conditions, especially for a historian. In his dissertation, based on his findings in the First Historical Archives, Amelung thus set a decisive course for his academic path. A central focus of his work as a Sinologist and historian is the history of science, and he is currently investigating how different sciences developed in China from 1949 to the present. He also had plans in 2021 to conduct research at the Second Historical Archives on the development of Chinese meteorology in the 20th century. However, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic thwarted this plan, with practically no researchers allowed to enter China in the years that followed.
Cultural Heritage in Times of War
Instead, Amelung’s attention has shifted from historical archives to archaeological sites and museums. “I want to investigate how the Chinese state protects its cultural assets in times of war and crisis,” he says. “This topic has not received nearly the attention it deserves.” At the same time, he is also researching how the People’s Republic of China processes and presents archaeological finds with the goal of constructing nationalist narratives in contemporary China. Topics like the ideological interpretation of archaeological findings not only dominate his research. “I want to share with students the things that interest me – in my lectures and tutorials, but especially in my seminars,” he says. Amelung places particular emphasis on dialogue with students: “I want people to learn to think for themselves and to express what they think,” whether it be in German, in the traditional Bachelor’s or Master’s programs in Sinology, or in English, in the Master’s program in Modern East Asian Studies. The sinologist also recalls excursions from around 10 to 15 years ago that he undertook together with students of Sinology and Architecture. At that time, there were plans to establish a professorship for Chinese archaeology at Goethe University — but the project never materialized, something Amelung still regrets. In his view, this subject is far from a mere academic “nice-to-have.” He explains: “Archaeology has become extremely important in China, where it has developed into one of the best-funded research disciplines.”
Stefanie Hense
