Franz H. Michael

Franz H. Michael (1907- 1992) was a German-born American scholar of China, whose teaching career was spent at University of Washington, Seattle, and at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Michael's research began with publications concerning the Manchus in China, the Qing dynasty and the Taiping Rebellion against it. He also studied Tibet and Inner Asia, and the tradition of authoritarian government in China, including the People's Republic of China. The themes of despotism, cultural synthesis or assimilation, and the modern fate of Confucian humanism shaped the choice of topics in Michaels' academic work and public advocacy, and his experience in 1930s Germany directly influenced his anti-totalitarian and anti-communist stance.

The festschrift The Modern Chinese State (2000) was dedicated "In Memory of Professor Franz Michael: Scholar, Advocate, and Gentleman". It grew out of a memorial conference at The George Washington University organized by a group of Michael's colleagues and former students.

Franz Michael was born in Freiburg-Breisgau, Germany, where his father was a university professor. He enrolled in the Law Faculty of Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin and in the Seminar for Oriental Languages there as well. He received a diploma in sinology in 1930, then transferred to the University of Freiburg and finished his degree there three years later.

In 1934 Michael joined the diplomatic corps but was not allowed to serve abroad because his father's side of the family was Jewish. Instead, at the age of twenty-six he resigned and obtained passage on a ship for China, where he obtained a post teaching German language at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he and his family joined the migration to inland China, but left in 1939 to go to the United States. Only as his six-month visa was about to expire did he find that he had been accepted as a Research Associate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

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