User:Bertport/A. Tom Grunfeld

A. Tom Grunfeld is a professor of history at Empire State College of the State University of New York, specializing in the modern history of east Asia, particularly of China and Tibet.

He holds a B.A. from the State University of New York at Old Westbury (1972), an M.A. in Chinese history from the School of Oriental and African Studies ( 1973) and a Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the State University of New York (1985) [1]. He has received numerous awards funding travel and research from institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities ( 1984), the Research Foundation of City University of New York (1985) and the State University of New York and the Ford Foundation (1993). He is often asked to comment on current Chinese and Tibetan affairs for the BBC and CNN International.

Criticism
According to some, he mainly relies on questionable sources provided by the Chinese government. He is regarded as an apologist of the Chinese regime. He was a member of the US–China Peoples Friendship Association, and a staff member and contributor to its journal New China. According to Jamyang Norbu, he speaks neither Chinese nor Tibetan.

Professor John Powers of the Australian National University says Grunfeld, whose writings he compares to those of Israel Epstein, enthusiastically endorses the Chinese version of events using the same vocabulary that Chinese writers use to describe conditions in Tibet before 1950. Grunfeld's The Making of Modern Tibet has many harsh judgments about old Tibet, but he gives no indication that he visited the country before or after the Chinese annexation, and he has not interviewed Tibetan refugees. Powers also points out that Grunfeld neither speaks nor reads Tibetan, and cites no experience of field work among his subjects. Despite these weaknesses, Grunfeld claims to have ascertained the reality of old Tibet. To do this, he dismissed reports of Tibetans who lived in Tibet, and those of Western travelers who presented a positive image, and focused on negative reports of a few westerners. For Grunfeld, any positive report is invalidated by a negative one, and a Western visitor to Tibet is always more credible than a Tibetan who has lived there.

Publications

 * The Making of Modern Tibet, first edition: 1987, second: 1996
 * On Her Own: Journalistic Adventures from the San Francisco Earthquake to the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1927, 1993
 * The Vietnam War: A History in Documents (with Marilyn Young and John Fitzgerald), 2001

working from

 * http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Tom_Grunfeld
 * http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Ffr.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FA._Tom_Grunfeld&sl=fr&tl=en
 * http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Grunfeld