Tong Enzheng
Encyclopedia
Tong Enzheng was a prominent Chinese archaeologist, historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

, designer
Designer
A designer is a person who designs. More formally, a designer is an agent that "specifies the structural properties of a design object". In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, such as consumer products, processes, laws, games and graphics, is referred to as a...

, and science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 author.

Career

Tong authored the textbook Cultural Anthropology and specialized in early southwest China. He also was involved in redesigning the Sichuan University
Sichuan University
Sichuan University is one of the oldest national universities in China. It is ranked No. 8 among the Chinese universities according to the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities....

 Museum. He also became noted for his criticism of the influence of Lewis H. Morgan
Lewis H. Morgan
Lewis Henry Morgan was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist, a railroad lawyer and capitalist. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois...

 on Chinese Anthropology. Tong also led the "Southern Silk Road Project.", pursuing the study of links between ancient Southeast Asia and China.
Not many of Tong's publications in Chinese have been translated. For a bibliography, see the Wesleyan link posted below. In English, one of his most widely cited articles is a review of Chinese archaeology under socialism.

In science fiction he wrote the satirical New Journey to the West, and the short story "Death Ray on a Coral Island"." This won an award for "China's best short story" in 1978 and was later adapted to film. Both his science fiction writings as well as his archaeological and historical scholarly writings were reprinted in a multi-volume set issued in 1998 from Chongqing Publishing House (Tong Enzheng wenji, 3 volumes, 1998, ISBN: 9787536638716).

He died in the US after fleeing China following the Government crackdown on the protests at Tiananmen Square. At the time, he was a visiting scholar at Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...

, which has instituted a lecture series in his name, an Enzheng Tong Archaeology Library located at its Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, as well as a webpage with Tong's CV and further information.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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