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| Danny's lecture on the Kitan language, ANU 2017 Click screenshot to go to video |
He died recently. There was a memorial service, which I couldn't attend as I'm stuck here in Hong Kong/
Here's part of the wikipedia entry on Danny:
Daniel Kane (Kāng Dān: 康丹) was born in 1948 in Melbourne. Bereaved of his father when young, circumstances constrained him to cut his education short and enter the work force at 15. He left school and joined a bank, working as a teller. There he discovered that he had a talent for languages. Melbourne was a magnet for immigrants from over the world and he found that when they came into the bank, with little effort he could communicate with them. He undertook further education in his spare time and matriculated to Melbourne University with high honours in several languages.
He took a First Class Honours degree there in 1971, majoring in Chinese and was granted a Ph.D. scholarship to the ANU. His Ph.D. was conferred in 1975 with a thesis on the Jurchen language a Tungusic language related to Manchu spoken during the Jin dynasty in North China. He received an M.A. in Asian Studies from the Australian National University in 1976.
Parallel to his academic career, Kane has also had a career in diplomacy. He joined the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs in 1976 and was posted to Beijing during the early part of the reform period and particularly the period of the Democracy Wall. He was also Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing during the 1990s.
Academically he was lecturer in Chinese at the University of Melbourne in 1981 and visiting scholar at the Department of Chinese at Peking University in 1988 and 1993. Since 1997 he has been Professor of Chinese at Macquarie University in Sydney.
He was widowed in 2010 when his wife, the Shanghai scholar of Qing history[1] and Chinese modernization, Yè Xiǎoqīng (葉曉青), died of cancer, after risking her initial recovery from an early diagnosis of cancer to bear their son Ian (易安 (Yìān).[2]
Danny suffered for several years from Parkinson's disease.
I remember meeting Danny in 1976. I quickly discovered that he was a preternaturally gifted linguist. Discovered not from him -- he was a modest man -- but from all others who knew him. One said he was a "genius at languages". I agree.
I found out that he knew, to more than conversational level, not just all the major European languages, French, German, Italian and Spanish -- mere snacks before a main meal -- but more obscure languages like Mongolian, Chinese from the Tang dynasty, Turkish and Russian He told he he'd learnt Turkish on a holiday there. In a month. And not just a few words, but the language.
I found later that he knew not only Mongolian, but ancient Mongolian. And he became a scholar of the forgotten language of Khitan, a dead an now "undecipherable" language, which he managed, in part, to decipher.
His Chinese calligraphy was beautiful. I remember he used to doodle Chinese characters in meetings. Lovely, distinguished characters. Indistinguishable from those of an educated and literate Chinese, better maybe. He was today's Edmund Backhouse, who lived in Beijing in the waning days of the Qing dynasty, and whose Chinese was so good he forged a "diary" of a Qing Dynasty official, all in classical Chinese, a forgery that was not uncovered until the 1970s. It makes a fascinating story, told in "The Hermit of Peking', by Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Danny was a one-off. In the Embassy in 1976 - 80, when I was there, in the political section, Danny went against the consensus when he thought the consensus was wrong. The Embassy in those days, and probably up until today, was not exactly pro-China, but tended to buy into the line of the Chinese government. It's called "going native" and it's a tendency of every Embassy of every country. I'm sure the Embassy folks of those days wouldn't agree -- they were professional diplomats, after all, and there to reflect their professional evaluation of Chinese politics. But Chinese politics was not easy to read in the aftermath of Mao's death in September 1976. And it was all too easy to mis-read it. And to buy into what was being said in the local media. Danny was able to see through that because he was so gifted linguistically that he made connections outside the norm and read more widely in the local media.
I remember that Danny went against the consensus about Hua Guofeng. Hua who? Hua was chairman of China from 1976 to the end of 1978 -- the same title as Mao Tse-tung! -- when he was ousted to make way for Deng Xiaoping. But, according to the Chinese government at the time -- in turmoil to be sure -- Hua was the man who Mao had trusted. "With you in charge, I'm at ease" said a quasi recumbent Mao in posters around Tian'anmen, Mao reclining in a divan, Hua reaching forward, taking the metaphorical torch from the old tyrant. Our Embassy bought that line. Danny did not. He got stick for that -- was mocked as "Genghis Kane" by some -- today you'd call him a "Nazi" because he doesn't agree with you. But Danny was right, about Hua, at least. And I think that was so for a lot about China. He was sceptical about all the CCP said. In that way he's similar to the other great Australian scholar of Chinese from that time -- Geremie Barmé, who I've written about here. (and earlier here).
I'm told that a previous Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Lin Ping, also remembers Danny "Genghis Kane". That'd be -- I'm thinking -- because Lin thought Danny knew too much about China, though of course he didn't give that away. But if there's one thing that makes the Chinese leadership furious it's barbarians know too much.
