Evelyn S. Rawski

Evelyn Sakakida Rawski (born February 2, 1939) is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History of the University of Pittsburgh and a scholar in Chinese and Inner Asian history. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of Japanese-American ancestry. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1995-1996.

Rawski has written extensively on history of the Qing dynasty, and is considered a seminal figure of the school called the New Qing History.

She graduated from President Theodore Roosevelt High School in Honolulu, then took her bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1961, graduating with high honors in Economics and Phi Beta Kappa. Inspired by sinologist Knight Biggerstaff at Cornell, Rawski decided to pursue historical studies in graduate school, and earned a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern languages at Harvard University in 1968 under Yang Lien-sheng. She is fluent in English, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Manchu languages.

Rawski's research has centered on the social and cultural history of the Qing dynasty, often in ways that revise earlier views of political history. Education and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China (1979) targeted the standard view that the nonphonetic nature of the Chinese writing system led to low literacy rates and held back economic growth. Paul A. Cohen judged that Rawski "turns this entire set of assumptions on its head...." Arguing that traditional village schools were accessible, texts cheap, and teachers low salaried, and defining functional literacy as the ability to read everyday texts rather a mastery of the classics, she concluded that male literacy rates in late imperial China were in fact among the highest in the pre-modern world, probably amounting to almost one literate person per family. Cohen commented that her analysis was "not unassailable" but that her "overall thesis" "puts the problem of literacy and popular education... in a wholly new light, and future research in this area will have to take up where she has left off."

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