Women's studies an interdisciplinary area of inquiry is a recent phenomenon in India. Some scholars view women's studies as a harmless fad; others see it as a threat to the intellectual integrity of disciplines, or at least to the male domination of faculties. Women's studies certainly questions the androcentric assumptions of many scholarly fields and seeks a greater piece of the academic pie for women scholars, but that is not the whole story. In the past decade or so, gender has joined class, race, and ethnicity as an element in theories about the major forces that shape society. Women's studies is not only concerned with changing intellectual inquiry but also with changing society itself. Scholars and activists sometimes inhabit different bodies, but by and large people who are concerned with inquiry into women's condition are also engaged in trying to change that condition.

Sinology and the history of science have changed practically beyond recognition in the past half-century. Both have become academic specialisms, with their own departments, journals, and professional societies. Both have moved off in new directions, drawing on the tools and insights of several disciplines. Although some sinologists still honor no ambition beyond explicating primary texts, on many of the field's frontiers philology is no more than a tool. Similarly, many technical historians now explore issues for which anthropology or systems analysis is as indispensable as traditional historiography.

A full decade has passed since Frederic Wakeman, Jr., published his influential “Rebellion and Revolution: The Study of Popular Movements in Chinese History” (1977). He opened his article with the observation, “During the past twenty-five years, hundreds of studies of Chinese peasant rebellions have appeared in print.” He added that most of these studies had been published in the People's Republic, but in his bibliography he listed dozens of entries by Western scholars on the topic. Significantly, while noting that Western studies of peasant resistance in China “drew upon Chinese scholarship to write histories of their own,” Wakeman emphasized that Western historians were divided on the issue of whether the “Maoist depiction of Chinese history as perennial class struggle” was accurate. He summed up the controversy in these words:

Was an immiserated peasantry ruthlessly exploited by a venal landlord class through the sweep of pre-modern Chinese history? Or would it be more accurate to say that, while the population suffered in times of epidemic or famine, there were long periods of plenty when relatively affluent farmers benefited from rising agricultural prices, and negotiated rental contracts to their own liking with accommodating landlords? (Wakeman 1977:202)