China Daily Exclusive
New Yorker's relentless pursuit to study China's development
By Kelly Chung Dawson (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-01-21 07:54
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NEW YORK - Over the past 60 years, it's been hard to keep up with Sidney Gluck.
He has had concurrent careers in academics, the arts and in textiles (he spent time developing parachute materials for the United States military). He has an encyclopedic capacity for facts and statistics that unspool at rapid speed. He's currently working on an autobiography and is the subject of an ongoing documentary.
But if you ask Gluck, he'll probably tell you that his most important role in recent years has been as an expert on China. "The world is changing, and China happens to be the hub," he said from his Lower Manhattan studio.
"History is the most important thing because it determines the way you look at things," the 94-year-old said. "China, with all its contradictions - that happens to be the area where I've been concentrating my knowledge, and I've been doing so for 50 years," he added.
Gluck, who this week attended a luncheon hosted for President Hu Jintao by the National Committee on US-China Relations in Washington, has served as co-president of the US-China Peoples Friendship Association.
He also co-founded and chaired the US-China Society of Friends. In his 50 colorful years of study, he has devoted himself to the subject of China's development.
Beck Lee, a press agent who has known Gluck for many years and is working on a documentary film about him, recalled a meeting at the Chinese consulate in which Gluck was treated "like a rock star".
"I watched him interacting with Chinese diplomats and dignitaries, this New York character, and I marveled. His accomplishments are staggering," Lee said.
Gluck's path toward US-China issues began in 1939, when he first became interested in Marxism. He said he met a "Russian lefty" at a New York theater who passed him a copy of Karl Marx's Dialectics, which is the practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of dialogue or logical arguments.
Excited by what he was reading, Gluck began leading an informal Sunday night class on the subject. Shortly afterward, he was recruited to teach a course at a school in Manhattan.
Over the next 60 years, Gluck taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, the Fashion Institute of Technology and at Parsons the New School for Design. In 2000 he addressed the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
He said he began following China's progress in earnest in the 1950s. In 1955, he organized the "Live and Let Life" movement in response to a confrontation between China and the US over the Taiwan question. The program was used by then president Richard Nixon in opening ties with China, he said.
"We took out a big ad in The New York Times," he recalled. "Chrysler got interested, and then when it was all over, Chrysler made a deal with China. That's the way the world goes," he said with a laugh.
In the 1990s, China's Minister of Culture invited him to take portraits of the Terracotta Warriors near Xi'an. His photos were exhibited in 2005 at Union College in New York.
"He is a dynamo, and he doesn't stop," said Al Aabati, Gluck's co-president of the US-China People's Friendship Association, who is 12 years younger than Gluck. "If you want to know about China, you call Sidney."
Gluck's enthusiasm for knowledge is seemingly limitless. His stories are peppered with phrases from another time, relayed in a Brooklyn accent.
"I've been around for all of it and I've been watching," he said of the many major developments that have occurred in world politics over the last few decades.
Gluck is currently gathering notes to write an autobiography. In the meantime, he maintains a weekly newsletter sent to thousands of China observers around the world.
"I cannot walk anymore," he said. "But don't worry about my brain. A doctor asked me, 'To what do you attribute your longevity?' And I said, 'I want to learn'."
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