Merle Dorothy Rosenblatt Goldman (March 12, 1931 – November 16, 2023) was an American historian and sinologist of modern China.
She was professor of history at Boston University, especially known for a series of studies on the role of intellectuals under the rule of Mao Zedong and on the possibilities for democracy and political rights in present-day China.
She then went on for a Ph.D. at Harvard University, which she received in 1964 in History and Far Eastern Languages, studying with Benjamin I. Schwartz and John King Fairbank.
[5] Among her honors, grants and memberships are Radcliffe Graduate Medal for Distinguished Achievement, June 1981; Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1987–1988;[6] American Council of Learned Societies; the Social Science Research Council; Wang Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Chinese Studies, 1984–85.
[5] Goldman, as historian Perry Link observes, began by studying the adversarial relations between writers and the Party leadership, both of whom assumed that "literature, morality, and politics are closely intertwined -- indeed little more than different aspects of essentially the same thing."
The earlier works, Kane says, were interested in the "negative," that is, dissenters as "Western-style creative spirits rebelling against party control."
The "establishment intellectual," like the scholar-bureaucrat of traditional China, remonstrated with rulers whose basic good intentions and legitimacy they accepted.
When Mao died in 1976, they looked forward to reforms that would be of benefit to them and to China (Mirsky adds that "Chinese intellectuals tend to be patriotic").
She reported that Bai compared his situation with the ancient poet Qu Yuan, who remonstrated with his ruler to no avail, then drowned himself rather than rebel.