Profiles

What a Difference a Day Makes: Gardner Bovingdon
Making the Connection : Rick Harbaugh

What a Difference a Day Makes

Professor Gardner Bovingdon On June 4, 1989, a day after returning to the U. S. from China, Gardner Bovingdon turned to the front page the newspaper to see the news of Tiananmen Square splashed across the front page. "It was devastating . and it left no doubt in my mind that I was going to spend the rest of my life studying China," Professor Bovingdon recalls. He had visited Tiananmen Square on June 2 nd on his way home from a year as an English teacher at Dalian University of Technology through the Princeton in Asia Program. He remembers sensing a strange mixture of dogged determination and resignation in the students who remained in the square.

His journey through Tiananmen Square to the discovery of his passion for China was, like so many others, indirect and in some ways unexpected. "I went to Princeton as a pre-med student," Bovingdon laughs. "I was a math geek in high school. I was big into the Rubik's Cube and spent a lot of time on the computers in the basement of my high school.. I hadn't traveled or thought much about the world. But then in college, I suffered an attack of 'the questions.'" Those "questions" led him to an interest in Buddhism and soon he found himself more interested in classes on topics such as religion and politics in the third world than in his pre-med courses. His junior year of college, he decided to take time off and went by himself to Nepal to study Zen Buddhism. "It was an extremely interesting but frustrating experience because I knew that I wasn't learning the language," he says.

Even after returning to Princeton to complete his undergraduate studies, however, he did not focus on language. Instead he became interested in the relationship between religion and politics, and in Marxism. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on Marx's theory of history, focusing on how Marx used historical explanations to defend his political program. Inspired by a class on Chinese politics that he had taken before going to Nepal, Bovingdon decided that he wanted to go to China after graduation. He set out for China with the Princeton in Asia Program in the hopes of seeing "Marxism in action."

At Dalian University of Technology, Professor Bovingdon taught English to students in the MBA program. His students were extremely bright and came to the program with real-life experience, so he found himself learning as much from them as they did from him. "Teaching at D.U.T. confirmed my interest in teaching. I loved being in the classroom." Beginning the study of Chinese also unleashed his passion for learning languages, an enthusiasm he has not lost since.

By mid-April 1989, he noticed changes on campus. "There were big posters everywhere commemorating the death of Hu Yaobang. This was the beginning of the 1989 student movement, and over the next two months, my students and others would march in the streets, stage group discussions on campus, and send representatives to Beijing to take part in the larger movement. It was an extremely exciting time," Bovingdon recalls.

Another notable experience during his time in Dalian was his silent exchanges with a young man who was dressed like many other students but had blue eyes and brown hair. "I would see this student all over campus. He always had a soccer ball, and we would nod shyly to each other, as if we understood one another. It wasn't until years later, when I began to study Xinjiang formally, that I realized that he had been one of the few Uyghur students on campus at the time."

Professor Bovingdon applied to graduate school in the U.S. and began his Ph.D. work at Cornell in the fall of 1990. He went to Cornell to study Chinese politics and hoping to take a class or two from Benedict Anderson, who eventually became a member of his dissertation committee. Interested in studying nationalism "from the periphery," Bovingdon decided to study Xinjiang, where he eventually spent about 20 months doing research. Despite the challenges of doing research there, he was able to collect the data he needed and write a dissertation on nationalism and identity politics, which he defended in September 2001.

Professor Bovingdon came to Indiana University in the fall of 2003 to take what he calls his dream job. "When I.U. advertised a position in Xinjiang studies, it was as if some unseen act of nature had occurred. What an unbelievable stroke of luck!" Maybe he is lucky, or maybe he just happened to be at the right place at the right time. Whatever the case, the stars have aligned to bring him to Indiana University as a strong addition to the Department of Central Eurasian Studies where he has taught courses on the politics and history of the Xinjiang, the writings of foreign travelers visiting the region, and the politics of identity in China and Inner Asia. He looks forward to years of working with students who share his passion for Xinjiang, identity politics, and historiography. Written by Susan W. Furukawa

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Making the Connection

To the casual observer, there is little common ground between economics and the Chinese language, but don't tell that to business professor Rick Harbaugh. The author of Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary and the webmaster for Zhongwen.com, a webpage that is a godsend to any student of Chinese, Professor Harbaugh has always been able to find a connection between his two passions, Chinese and economics.

After graduating with a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Harbaugh went to China to teach English for a year at Jilin University in the old capital of Manchukuo. While working, he studied Chinese on the side, and at the end of his year as a teacher, he took a letter of recommendation from his Chinese tutor and went to Dalian where he began knocking on doors in an attempt to find a university where he could study Chinese. He finally convinced the Northeastern Economics and Finance University to take him on as a student, and he studied there for three months. "I was their first international student studying Chinese, and now they have an entire program of Chinese study."

Professor Harbaugh returned to the U.S. to continue his study of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. There he met a classmate from Taiwan who introduced him to a professor who arranged for him to visit the National University of Taiwan. "I had only intended to go for a semester, but when I registered for classes, I simply signed up for the courses that the guy in front of me took since I could barely read the course bulletin. That's how I ended up spending three years in the Master's course for economics! Considering how haphazard I was about it, I was very lucky. Most of what I learned about economics, I learned there."

In 1992, after doing research on mixed property rights, Professor Harbaugh received his M.A. from National Taiwan University. While he was in Taiwan, he supported himself by filing economic reports for Wharton Economic Forecasting Associates on the economic situations in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. He also kept busy working on what would become Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. "The dictionary came about somewhat indirectly. To procrastinate from my Master's thesis, I started to create a little video game based on the connections between characters. I began to suspect that the connections were far stronger than I had been taught, so I wrote a program to track the etymologies in trees that linked together the characters. When I ran the program I was very shocked to see that all the parts of the 4,000 characters that I entered arose from just 200 etymological trees. I decided that to make these trees useful it would be best to make them part of a dictionary. Of course, I had no idea how long it would take."

After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, Professor Harbaugh spent time teaching at Yale and the Claremont Colleges before coming to Indiana University as a visiting professor last year. He was hired by the Business School at I.U. Bloomington in March.

Zhongwen.com was born in 1996 while he was still at Pittsburgh. Harbaugh explains, "The printed dictionary still wasn't finished because of typesetting problems, so I locked myself away for a weekend and ended up with the first version of this website. It gets about 10,000 visitors a day at an average of 15 to 20 minutes a visitor. That means that people are spending one million hours a year utilizing my site."

Professor Harbaugh's current research focuses on "signaling games." He looks at how people show off and engage in costly behavior in order to express their high status in society. "These signaling games are a surprisingly central part of economic theory now. Economics used to assume that efficient behavior would always prevail, but now we have nice models of how people or corporations will behave wastefully to try to prove themselves or try to hide their shortcomings." Professor Harbaugh sees a link between economics and Chinese, too. "People often ask me 'Why are Chinese characters so difficult?' I think that this is partly an example of signaling. The difficulty of learning Chinese allowed affluent, educated people to distinguish themselves from their less fortunate compatriots, much as fancy clothes show off wealth. Of course, giving people a chance to show off can be a good idea too. Making everyone wear Mao suits in China might have saved some money but didn't work in the long-run. And I'm not convinced that character simplification did much to increase literacy.''

In his teaching as well, Professor Harbaugh maintains his two abiding interests. This year, he has taught the classes, Chinese Economy in Transition and The Digital Economy. Next year he looks forward to working together with Scott Kennedy to create a set of classes on Chinese economics. Written by Susan W. Furukawa

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