Guy Alitto
Introduction
Guy Alitto is an American academic in the East Asian Languages and Civilization department at the University of Chicago. He is quite well known in China for revitalizing the scholarship on Chinese Confucian scholar Liang Shuming. He is also often quoted in popular Chinese media sources. He is best known in America for his scholarship and for his role as translator for the first official Chinese delegations to the United States after Richard Nixon's first visits to China.
Career
Guy Alitto served as interpreter for the first official delegations visiting the United States in 1972, after Nixon's visit to China.
Alitto received his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1975 for Chinese history. His advisor was John Fairbank, and important figure in the academic development of Chinese history in the United States. Alitto did not immediately find a US faculty position, a problem he attributed in 1975 to reverse discrimination caused by the affirmative action efforts of the time. Instead, he took a part-time role in a rural college in Taiwan.
Alitto was one of the first foreign academicians allowed into rural China during the opening of Zouping county in Shandong province between 1987 and 1991. He continued visiting the area throughout the 80s and 90s, and it is reported in China Daily that the academic became a regular figure in the area.
Influence
Alitto is best known in China, where he was instrumental in revitalizing scholarship into Liang Shuming, one of the last major Confucian scholars. Alitto wrote his book The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity in 1979. Before this book, Shuming had been "consigned to the dustbin of history." Alitto was widely popularized in the China Central TV episode The Last Confucian and Me.
Alitto is often cited in Chinese national media sources. Examples include Alitto's support of Chinese jurisdiction in the Senkaku Islands dispute, his statement that the Falungong "represents more of a rupture than a continuity with Chinese religious traditions,"or his interest in rural areas of China.