Editing Ray Huang (section)

==Academic career==
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Huang went to the United States to study [[Chinese history]]. At the [[University of Michigan]], he received his [[bachelor's degree]] in 1954, his [[master's degree]] in 1957, and his [[doctorate]] in 1964. He was appointed visiting [[associate professor]] at [[Columbia University]] in 1967, and a [[professor]] at the [[State University of New York]], New Paltz Branch, from 1968 to 1980. He was a research fellow at the [[Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies|Fairbank Center for East Asian Research]] at Harvard in 1970.

He worked with the leading American [[Sinologist]] [[John K. Fairbank]]. Nevertheless, Huang and Fairbank disagreed in research methodology. Fairbank liked concentrated analysis in short time frames and limited areas, but Huang liked synthesis covering broad time periods (though Huang's classic work ''[[1587, a Year of No Significance]]'' had a very tight focus).

In 1972, Huang went to [[Cambridge University]] and assisted [[Joseph Needham]], who was more sympathetic to Huang's research approach, in Needham's monumental work on the history of Chinese science and technology. Huang's chosen field of study became financial administration in [[Ming China]], and he published one of his major works, ''Taxation and Finance in Sixteenth Century Ming China'', in 1974 (translated into Chinese only in 2001).

Huang returned to Cambridge in the mid-1970s and contributed two chapters to the Ming Dynasty Volumes of ''[[The Cambridge History of China]]''. Around the late 1970s, he retired from teaching and focused on writing instead and even occasionally contributed to a column in ''[[Yazhou Zhoukan]]''. Nonetheless, he often travelled to [[Taiwan]] even after his retirement to give lectures and participate in various academic exchanges.

His other works include ''The War in Northern Burma'' (1946), ''1587, a Year of No Significance'' (1981) (also published in Chinese as ''The Fifteenth Year of Wan Li''/[[:zh:萬曆十五年|《萬曆十五年》]], 1985), ''Broadening the Chinese Field of Vision'' (in Chinese, 1988), ''Chinese Macrohistory'' (1988) (in Chinese 1993), ''Conversations about Chinese History on the Banks of the Hudson River'' (in Chinese 1989), ''Discussions of Here and There and Old and New'' (in Chinese 1991), ''Capitalism and the Twenty First Century'' (in Chinese 1991), ''From a Macrohistory Perspective in Reading Jiang Jieshi's Diary'' (in Chinese 1993), ''Contemporary Chinese Outlets'' (in Chinese 1994), ''The Affair of Wan Chong'' (in Chinese 1998), ''Yellow River Blue Mountain: Record of Huang Renzi's Recollections'' (in Chinese 2001), and ''Bianjing Unfinished Dreams''.