Peter Hick is a historian of late imperial and modern China. His dissertation project, “Migration and Conflict in Late-Qing Siyi, 1850-1920,” addresses the social history of Guangdong Province’s “Four Counties” region, the point of origin of most Chinese migrants to North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of sources including legal documents, overseas Chinese periodicals, and contracts, this project traces how mass male outmigration reconfigured regional dynamics of political and economic power, rewove the region’s social fabric, and played a key role in enmeshing China with a burgeoning Pacific world. 

Peter’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the Stanford Center at Peking University, among others. In addition to Chinese history, he has a longstanding interest in the history of war and revolution, as well as the history of millenarian religious and political movements. The latter was the focus of a self-designed Sources and Methods course, “A Global History of the Apocalypse: Millenarian Movements in the Modern World,” which he taught at Stanford in 2020

 JM: Is there a millenarian movement that you find most fascinating? Which and what about it fascinates you? 

PH: The millenarian movement that most fascinates me is the Boxer rebellion of 1899-1901. This anti-foreign, anti-Christian uprising of the North China peasantry touches on so many fascinating topics and questions, and is enormously significant in how we understand the interplay of religion and ideology, folk culture, imperialism, and the late-Qing social crisis. As the uprising came to involve every major power with a presence in China at the time, the suppression of the Boxers drew in many of the same people who had fought other millenarian movements in colonial and imperial wars of the age, including the wars to destroy the Mahdist state in the Sudan and the Sioux Ghost Dance movement on the American plains. Partly as a function of the involvement of so many foreign powers, the Boxers are also very well documented in a range of non-Chinese languages – this is very useful in helping undergraduates dive into sources from the time for their own research, particularly when they don’t speak Chinese themselves.

JM: Of the questions you posed, is there one that you yourself find especially challenging? Which and how come?

PH: I find myself particularly challenged by the question of the persistence of millenarian beliefs and thought-patterns into our own age. Where does this come from? Is it a product of the particular conditions of modern life? Are some of these conditions ones that we share with the millenarians that my students and I looked at in my course? Or is millenarian or apocalyptic thinking somehow hardwired into our collective psyche? Given the destruction left in the path of past millenarian movements – and most of this destruction looks, in hindsight, incredibly futile – should we ourselves be on our guard against this kind of thinking when faced with the crises of our own day? And if that’s the case, how then do we galvanize ourselves to respond to these crises? I think that given the state of our world today – threatened as we are by climate change, the specter of nuclear destruction, and other calamities in the making – these are vital and urgent questions to contemplate if we are to address these issues wisely and in a historically informed way; however, these are also the questions to which the answers are the least clear.

JM: How, if at all, are you having to adjust in your research/teaching during the time of COVID?

PH: Well, the obvious one is the migration of almost all research, teaching, meetings, and discussions online. To be honest, at many points I found this transition to be rather alienating and depressing – although in normal times I think I’m a fairly introverted person, to have the fabric of one’s daily life completely torn up, and to have most of the usual sources of inspiration, relaxation, and recreation suddenly denied, has been pretty tough. The general ambience of immanent dread has also been rather burdensome at times. However, the displacement and disorientation brought about by this crisis has forced me to reexamine a lot of my values and priorities, and is really changing my relationship to my own work. I think that I and others in academia, particularly the humanities, ought to be asking ourselves – with so much suffering unfolding around us, why are we still doing what we are doing? Are we simply hiding in our universities, treating them as a safe harbor from the calamity all around us? Or, in the context of COVID, is there a way we can approach our work that imbues it with different kinds of meaning (whether that’s informing the public, generating new knowledge, or generally pushing back against the shambles around us)?

On a related note, this past year I’ve found myself more excited about and committed to teaching than ever before. Part of this may have been because, while we were all sheltering in place in the spring, teaching was a rare chance for a bit of human contact and discussion, mediated as it was though Zoom. I was really impressed and moved by how engaged my students were, and really felt that we were all making a difference in and enriching each other’s intellectual lives. It is of course possible that my students were only so animated because spending time with their classmates online was an alternative to spending time with Mom and Dad – I’m sure that in some cases being uprooted from their college lives and placed back home with their parents cannot have been easy. Still, I actually felt that I was contributing something positive to other people’s lives, and our meetings really did feel like an antidote to the stress and depression and fear of the pandemic.