2024 CHUS Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award
The 2024 CHUS Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Professor Hanchao Lu, School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Professor Xi Wang, Department of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Hanchao Lu
Professor Hanchao Lu has exceeded the criteria of excellence in historical studies and generosity in service. Professor Lu’s service to CHUS has been extraordinary. As the CHUS President (1999-2001), Professor Lu led a group of CHUS members for a successful visit to Taiwan in 2000 and published an edited volume: Modernity and Cultural Identity in Taiwan (World Scientific, 2001) after the trip. At the turn of this century, the Chinese Historical Review suffered two three-year hiatuses until, in 2003, when Professor Lu took the initiative to revitalize the journal with two colleagues. He served on the editorial team and then as co-chief editor for an unprecedented total of fifteen years (2004-2019) and helped to establish Chinese Historical Review (CHR) as a highly respected academic journal. Professor Lu has continued to support CHR as an author and CHUS for many of its activities.
Professor Lu has published nine scholarly monographs, three of which won awards, and numerous articles in major academic journals. From his first monograph in English, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 1999/2004) to the most recent one, Shanghai Tai Chi: The Art of Being Ruled in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Lu has engaged in cutting-edge study of everyday life that sheds light on larger issues such as modernity and state-society dynamics. Fittingly, Professor Lu has gained international recognition as a leading scholar in the China field with prestigious fellowship awards in the U.S., Europe, and beyond. He is also the editor of a sixteen-volume series titled The Culture and Customs of Asia and the co-founder of the China Research Center, an interuniversity center, in Atlanta. In these and many other leadership capacities, Professor Lu has significantly enriched the China studies field and promoted the understanding of Chinese history and culture in both the scholarly and public domains.
Professor Xi Wang
Professor Xi Wang’s longstanding dedication to CHUS is exemplary. As a founding member and the second president of CHUS, Professor Wang contributed to the establishment of CHUS as a scholarly society. During his decade-long tenure as a lead editor of the Chinese Historical Review (2003-2014), Professor Wang’s tremendous effort helped transform CHR into a highly reputable academic journal. Professor Wang co-edited Discovering History in America and Teaching History in America, two memoirs of CHUS members published by Peking University Press that solidified CHUS’s reputation as an influential overseas academic organization among Chinese readers. In fall 2024, Professor Wang digitized the CHUS archives from its pre-internet age, about 50 PDF folders and a total of more than 7,000 pages. These files cover the founding of CHUS and its first decade and are highly valuable for the preservation of CHUS history and future research. Professor Wang completed this monumental project with his characteristically high standards and commitment.
Professor Wang has authored, translated, and edited more than a dozen books and published numerous articles in and beyond his fields of African American history, Civil War and Reconstruction, and American constitutionalism. His monographs, The Trial of Democracy: Northern Republicans and Blacks Suffrage, 1860–1910 (University of Georgia Press, 1997, 2012) and Principles and Compromises: The Spirit and Practice of the American Constitution (Peking University Press, 2000, 2005, 2014) are widely considered groundbreaking works in his fields. Professor Wang has helped shape the academic discipline of U.S. studies in China. He built institutional partnership between American and Chinese universities and academic organizations, which enabled American scholars to teach in China and Chinese students to participate in academic activities in the U.S. As a prestigious Changjiang Scholar, Professor Wang also taught U.S. history at Peking University for more than a decade and trained graduate students there in U.S. history. His contribution to U.S.-China educational and scholarly exchanges is unparalleled. In 2022, Professor Wang was honored by his colleagues at IUP as a Distinguished University Professor.