Can you pursue a PhD in chinese history without being able to read chinese?
It’s actually going to be a lot more important for you to read it than to speak it, and as an above poster has suggested, the language has changed some over the last 150 years and you may need to know both traditional and simplified characters. I don’t think anyone will expect you to be fluent in it to study the history, and you might be able to get away without it, but if you can’t read materials in the original language but only things that have been translated, you’re going to be very limited in your choice of research topics and won’t be able to do the cutting-edge stuff that hasn’t been studied. Most PhD programs require you to acquire reading knowledge in a foreign language anyway (and often several), no matter what your subject, so you might as well take some Chinese language classes. You can do that while getting the PhD; a couple years should be enough to get by with a dictionary (although Chinese bilingual dictionaries are hard to use! Ask your Chinese teacher to explain how)
You can pursue it without being able to read Chinese, yes. But you are going to be facing the hammers of hell when you have your orals. Further, your dissertation committee is going to get wise and may NEVER approve your research. The good news — Chinese has so many different characters and permutations that, of course, the CHinese people themselves simplify it. English is a far more complicated language, and 99% of what we say is in 1200 words (as Gregg of Gregg shortand found out and made a fortune off of). So don’t let memorizing a couple of hundred flash cards keep you from this PhD if you’re really interested in it!
