Jerome Ch en

Jerome Ch'en was a Chinese-Canadian historian who pioneered the study of the Republic of China (1911-49), especially the rise of the military and the Communists. He was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 1919, and educated at Tianjin Nankai University and National Southwestern Associated University. He won a scholarship to study at the London School of Economics under Friedrich Hayek in 1946. He worked for the Chinese Service of the BBC in the 1950s, and then became a Reader in history at the University of Leeds. He moved to Canada in 1971 and became a Professor of Chinese History at York University in Toronto. He was also the director of the University of Toronto York University Joint Centre of Asia Pacific Studies from 1983 to 1985. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1981 and a Distinguished Research Professor at York in 1984. He published several books and articles on Chinese history, including Yuan Shih-k'ai, Mao and the Chinese Revolution, China and the West, The Military-Gentry Coalition, State Economic Policies of the Ch'ing Government, and The Highlanders of China. He also translated and edited an anthology of Chinese poems, Poems of Solitude, with Michael Bullock. He died in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 2019 at the age of 99.