Professor Hans van de Ven

Born and raised in the Netherlands, Hans van de Ven chose to study Chinese history on a whim, but from then on has never been tempted to do anything else. He is at his happiest sitting in a library or archive in China and discussing Chinese history with colleagues there, although talking with students in the comforts of his office at Cambridge or Peking University over a cup of tea (Chinese, of course) runs a close second.

War and violence have formed a central theme in his work, for two reasons. The first is an academic one. Chinese history over the last two centuries has been particularly violent, but scholarship has struggled to account for it. The Opium Wars of the nineteenth century came as a shock to dynastic China. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864, costing the tens of millions of lives, was probably the largest rebellion in history. In the twentieth century, the warlord wars of the 1920s, the War of Resistance against Japan during the Second World War, the 1945-1949 Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists, and then the Korean War devastated China, leaving it poor, traumatized, and riven with tension. As the celebrated eighth century poet, Du Fu, put it: ‘the country is destroyed, just mountains and rivers remain.’ Only now that the country is at peace and its economy prosperous is there the time and space not just to research the course of these wars, the reasons for them, and their enduring consequences.

The other reason is a personal one. Van de Ven grew up in a family effected by both the Second World War, during which his parents were teenagers, and the Indonesian war of liberation from Dutch colonialism, in which his father served in Dutch forces. The complex moral questions raised by these experiences shaped his understanding of modern war and its social and political legacies. 

Van de Ven has not only written about war and violence. Besides the pre-1949 history of the Chinese Communist Party, about which he wrote his first book analysing its founding history, he has also written about China’s globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His Breaking from the Past: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modern China about this topic is popular in China. Recently China’s World Chinese Studies Conference in China voted it as one of the ten most important foreign books on China in the last two decades.  Van de Ven’s discovery of the huge archives of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service enabled him to write this book focusing on China’s inclusion in the modern global trading systems as they emerged in the late nineteenth century. 

Van de Ven has spent his entire career as an academic at Cambridge University, teaching at all levels. He has trained a large number of PhD students who now teach at Universities in the UK, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the USA. Since 2022, he spends four months per year teaching at Peking University in China, which he regards as a great honour. He hoped in this way to contribute to maintain academic relationships between China and Western countries at a difficult geopolitical time. 

Another way in which van de Ven pursues this aim is as one of the directors of the Global Humanities Initiative at Cambridge University. This network of universities in China, India, the Middle East, and South America coordinates a staff mobility scheme that facilitates the exchange of scholars, runs a Cambridge University Press book series that highlights new scholarship from these areas, organizes summer schools bringing together PhD students from its member universities, and brings an eminent public intellectual from them to Cambridge for a month of intensive interaction with Cambridge’s scholarly community. Ensuring that Cambridge looks east as well as west, not just in its research but also its teaching, is the purpose of this initiative.