From country village to Confucius Institute

Asian Studies

When the University of Adelaide's new Professor of Chinese Studies, Mobo Gao, talks about rural China, it is with close personal knowledge.

Professor Gao was born and bred in a Chinese village of about 350 people, a small farming community called Gao village in Jiangxi Province in southern China. His book Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China (Hurst and Hawaii University Press), is widely used as an undergraduate and postgraduate textbook and he is currently working on a sequel.

Professor Gao has just started at the University of Adelaide as its first Director of the Confucius Institute, launched last year in partnership with Shandong University.

"I will be working with our partner Shandong University to teach Chinese language in Adelaide and to promote cultural understanding and exchange," Professor Gao said.

"Another significant part of our mission is to promote Australian culture to the Chinese and help the South Australian business community build opportunities within the Chinese market."

Professor Gao is a leading authority on the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the Maoist era. His latest book, The Battle of China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, is a reassessment of the Cultural Revolution and will be published this month.

The book is to be launched in London and is expected to create some controversy. It tackles the extremely negative depiction of China under Mao in recent publications and argues that most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefited from Mao's policies.

"Under Mao there was a comprehensive welfare system for urban residents and basic health and education provision in rural areas," Professor Gao said. "These policies were reversed under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping."

Professor Gao completed his undergraduate degree at Xiamen University in China and then won scholarships to continue postgraduate studies in the UK.

"I was sent by the Chinese Government to the UK," he said. "The scholarships were awarded on academic merit and I was considered the correct class background to receive one because I was from a poor peasant family."

He left China in 1977, did his Masters with Distinction at the University of Essex and then returned to China to teach English at Xiamen University for five years. He then went back to Essex and completed his PhD, funded by scholarships he won in the UK, and worked at various UK universities before taking a lectureship at Griffith University in Queensland.

In 1995 he moved to the University of Tasmania where he was Associate Professor of Chinese Studies in the School of Asian Studies and Asian Languages.

Professor Gao has two roles at the University of Adelaide - half-time as the new head of the Confucius Institute and half-time as Professor of Chinese Studies.

In the latter role he will be working on a sequel to his Gao Village book. The first edition was published in 1999 and is a series of thematic case studies of the village's development since 1949. The second book will have new case studies, bringing the book up to date.

Professor Gao is also author of Mandarin Chinese: An Introduction.

www.confucius.adelaide.edu.au

Story by Robyn Mills