Philip A. Kuhn (September 9, 1933 – February 11, 2016) was an American historian of China[1] and the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.
"[3] Stanford University historian Harold L. Kahn added that “Every twenty years, like clockwork, Philip Kuhn produces a book that we are required to read.
What he says sticks to the ribs and gives much pleasure,”[4] and Yale University historian Peter Perdue wrote that Kuhn "shaped the field of Qing history more profoundly than any other scholar of his generation.
While at Chicago, Kuhn published in 1970 Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 as part of the Harvard East Asian monograph series, which led to his being granted tenure and a full professorship.
His second monograph, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (1990) was centered on an incident of alleged shamanic witchcraft – “soul stealing” – that took place in the spring of 1768.
[11] Reports reached the Qianlong Emperor that wandering sorcerers were stealing the souls of children, laborers, fishmongers, landlords, and the wives of grain transporters by cutting their queues or lapels, igniting panic in the countryside.
Kuhn shows how the Qing bureaucracy worked in order to shed light on the theoretical question first posed by Max Weber on the nature of political power in China.
[4] Stanford University historian Harold L. Kahn's review in Journal of Asian Studies said that Kuhn's "mastery of (and profound affection for) archival documents-confessions, trial records, court letters, secret (and not-so-secret) memorials, above all the vermillion rescripts of the emperor- and his anthropological rummaging in law codes and ritual permit us to follow him into local ecologies of uncertainty in an age of affluence, into an understanding of the fragile, busy, often embattled inner life of the popular soul, into the insecurities of Manchu ethnic sensibility and imperial loathing of the south and its soft blandishments.” Kuhn “constructs a social history of contagion at one level, an operational history of power at another, and then watches with benign irony as the subjects of both intersect at ever-ascending levels of victimization.”[4] The book's central theme is the relation between the power of the monarch and the restraining power of the bureaucracy.
Pamela Kyle Crossley calls it “certainly one of the most thoughtful, and may well be one of the last, ruminations on the implications of Weberian concepts for studies of the Chinese state.” Kuhn sees the emperorship “locked in uneasy partnership with the bureaucracy,” resisting Weber's characterization of Chinese monarchy as a “genuinely autocratic institution,” and argues that the monarchy was able to reposition itself against the bureaucracy until it permanently lost this advantage in the 19th century.
[14] Jonathan Spence's review in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies also praises Kuhn for drawing attention to the often neglected role of shamanism and sorcery in late imperial China.
Gong Yongmei notes that a "distinctive feature of Philip Kuhn’s scholarship is the importance of interpreting history from a theoretical paradigm..., a characteristic typical of American Chinese studies.