Jim Peck

Since written history is what we think happened, the historian is inevitably part of the historical process he is studying, and so he must scrutinize himself as well as the flux of events that he seeks to understand. James Peck' article, “The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of America's China Watchers” (Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars II.1, October, 1969, 59-69) strikes a welcome note of criticism. During the last twenty years of non-contact with the Chinese mainland, there has been a minor American cult of the “China expert”, whose instant wisdom could provide the answer on everything west of Guam and absolve his compatriots from the need of thought; this has been an index of the American public's ducking the issues raised by our national response to the Chinese revolution. Now Vietnam has turned us psychologically inward, into a new preoccupation. East Asian area specialists in the period 1931-1945 were mainly asked about the menace of “aggressive Japanese militarism” linked with European totalitarianism; the Cold War decades saw the American public alarmed by China's new enmity as part of “monolithic international communism.” Now we are in a new climate of opinion where the greatest evil seems to come from over-extension, from “American imperialism,” or at least from within the U.S.A. and thus from within ourselves. Self-criticism is the new mood, and it seems now just as necessary and just as incomplete as those earlier concerns did in their day.

It is revealing that a Vietnam Caucus held in March 1968 should end its meeting by beginning an evaluation of the professional “conscience” of Asian scholars. That it took this war to raise the latent problems in the profession is itself a depressing commentary on the state of the field. But the desire on the part of some individuals to create a nationwide inter-university student-faculty Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars to pose and then seek to resolve these problems fulfills one of the organizers' hopes.

Affordable access to aircraft data and the integration of health management hardware and software into aircraft avionics systems are major hurdles to implementing condition based maintenance (CBM) for legacy and new aircraft. Avionics architectures are not design to support the acquisition and processing of data needed for advanced diagnostic, usage based lifing or prognostics capabilities that enable CBM. This paper examines the requirements to implement CBM including higher bandwidth sensor and control data from subsystems and approaches to capture, store, process and/or communication this data. Solution approaches include distributed processing, partitioning of support vs flight critical functions, health ready subsystems, and an open system approach. The impact of this approach on enterprise stakeholders and their potential role in the resulting business model is also discussed.

The exchange of correspondence reprinted below appeared in the October 1968 edition of what was then called the CCAS Newsletter (vol. 1, no. 2). The issues raised more than forty years ago are still relevant today. As Mark Selden framed the questions in the same issue of the Newsletter, “the issue [is] the complex one of the relationship between knowledge and power and between the scholar and the politician: knowledge to serve what ends?” Principals in the exchange are Jim Peck (editor of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1970 and 1971), Ezra F. Vogel (professor of East Asian studies at Harvard at the time of this exchange; from 1993 to 1995, he was U.S. National Intelligence Officer for East Asia), John K. Fairbank (the first full-time specialist to teach Chinese history at Harvard; he retired in 1977); David Riesman (Harvard social scientist, author of The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character 1963); and Jon Livingston (first editor [with Leigh Kagan] of what would become the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars).