Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing 0824836081, 9780824836085

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Reinventing Modern China

Reinventing Modern China Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

Huaiyin Li

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2013 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Li, Huaiyin. Reinventing modern China : imagination and authenticity in Chinese historical writing / Huaiyin Li. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3608-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. China—History—20th century—Historiography.

I. Title.

DS734.7.L4565 2012 951.05072—dc23 2012010500 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Wanda China Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

Contents

Preface

vii

1

Introduction

2

Origins of the Modernization Narrative: Nationalist Historiography before 1949

33

Origins of the Revolutionary Narrative: Marxist Historiography before 1949

74

3 4

1

The Making of a New Orthodoxy: Marxist Historiography in the 1950s

110

Between the Past and the Present: The Radicalization of Historiography under Mao

132

Challenging the Revolutionary Orthodoxy: “New Enlightenment” Historiography in the 1980s

170

From Revolution to Modernization: The Paradigmatic Transition in Reform Era Historiography

204

8

Master Narratives in Crisis

236

9

Conclusion

261

Notes

279

Glossary

293

References

299

Index

333

5 6 7

Preface

A

s a study of Chinese historiography on modern China, this book is to some degree also a reflection of my journey in the field of modern Chinese history in China and the United States over the past thirty years. My training in history began in the early 1980s, when I was a history major and later a graduate student at the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The 1980s, as it turned out, was a turning point in the development of Chinese historiography in the twentieth century. It witnessed an unprecedented prosperity as well as a looming crisis of the discipline. Beginning with the refutation of the ultrapoliticization of historical writing in the radical years under Mao, historians who survived the Cultural Revolution committed themselves to serious academic research in each field of history, resulting in the proliferation of monographs and journal articles, and heated debates on major historical issues at frequently held symposiums. But much of the booming scholarship took place in the context of analytical tools, conceptual frameworks, and explanatory schemes inherited from the pre–Cultural Revolution period; in other words, historical research was conducted under the same paradigm that had been established in the field since the 1950s, despite some innovative reinterpretations that were intended to serve the present-day needs of the reform era. Without a breakthrough in interpretive schemes and relevance to the ongoing economic and political realities in the 1980s, the revived Marxist historiography soon lost its appeal to the general public and a new generation of undergraduate and graduate students in the field, hence the so-called crisis in history vii

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(shixue weiji), in sharp contrast with the popularity of history in the Mao era. As expected, much of the first semester in my graduate program was spent on reading the original works of Marx and Engels to ensure that the Marxist principles of historical materialism were properly comprehended. My exposure to a wide range of topics and source materials in the field in the three remaining graduate years, especially the months I spent on the archives of the famous industrialist Zhang Jian (1853–1926), the topic of my master’s thesis, proved to be much more enriching and stimulating; what particularly intrigued me was how his Confucian values influenced his business management and his planning of a comprehensive enterprise of modernization in Nantong. This issue, however, did not interest the senior historians in the Marxist tradition. Therefore, to my dismay, I was instructed to demonstrate, in typical Marxist fashion, how Zhang’s economic activities affected his political attitudes, or, more specifically, how Zhang’s personal connections and conflicts with government officials in conducting business accounted for his leading role in the Constitutional Movement in the last decade of the Qing. My thesis was thus written, but it never satisfied me. My rebellion started well before I graduated from the program. It was triggered by my encounter with a copy of Paul Cohen’s Discovering History in China (Columbia, 1984), which the author presented to one of my teachers at the institute shortly after its publication. That book kindled my interest in the modernization construct in postwar American historiography of modern China that Cohen criticized. I was soon attracted to more English-language titles on the theory and comparative history of modernization; the result was my article published in Shehui kexue pinglun (Social science review, 1986, no. 11), which I believe was one of the earliest attempts to introduce Western studies on China’s modernization to the audience in mainland China. After graduating in 1987, I spent the next six years collaborating with Professor Luo Rongqu of Beijing University on his project of comparative study of China’s modernization and working on my own project that tried to reinterpret some of the basic issues in modern Chinese history under the rubric of tradition and modernization, culminating in a coauthored book, Zhongguo xiandaihua de lishi toushi (China’s modernization in historical perspective), eventually published in 1994. After 1993, as a doctoral student at the University of California,

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Los Angeles, and later as a faculty member at the University of Missouri at Columbia, I concentrated primarily on the study of rural Chinese society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Having been exposed to different types of academic training and different historiographical traditions on the two sides of the Pacific, I emphasized in my own study of rural China a combination of macroanalysis of long-term historical trends and formal institutions, on the one hand, with microhistorical study of informal local practices that shaped villagers’ everyday behavior in community life and in interacting with the state, on the other, as embodied in my two recent books, Village Governance in North China, 1875–1936 (Stanford, 2005) and Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Microhistory, 1948–2008 (Stanford, 2009). During these years Chinese historiography also underwent tremendous changes, most noticeably the triumph of the modernization paradigm, largely based on modernization theory borrowed from the West, in place of the Marxist revolutionary paradigm that had dominated the field since the 1950s, and more recently the rise of a new generation of scholarship that departs from both the revolutionary and modernization paradigms and instead centers on social and cultural phenomena that were largely overlooked before and builds its interpretations mainly on the basis of imported postmodern critical and historiographical theories. Therefore, by the time I started my new job at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, I realized that I had arrived at a point where I was in a position to look back and rethink the methodologies and perspectives that had shaped the interpretation of modern Chinese history in twentieth-century China. This project scrutinizes the varying interpretations of modern Chinese history in chronological order, spanning the Republican period down to the present. Given the large number of Chinese historians involved in the field, the wide range of topics covered by their scholarship, and the multiplicity of methodologies they employed in historical writing, it is impossible to offer an exhaustive account of the richness and diversity of their historiography in the past century. Instead, in this study I highlight the different master narratives of modern Chinese history, the interpretative schemes that bolster the narratives, and the changing interpretations of the major historical events under the master narratives. To explicate the diverse and contradictory representations of modern China, I focus on the most prominent historians in China who contributed

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to the construction or deconstruction of a master narrative, and inquire into their academic training, intellectual inclination, and, most important, the specific political circumstances of their times that motivated their writing. But this book is more than a study of Chinese historiography. History writing, especially the recounting of the recent Chinese past, played a key role in the making of contending ideologies for political forces vying for power in twentieth-century China. People of different political persuasions, as I shall demonstrate in this book, projected their biases onto their interpretations of the past; they in turn used their different readings of the past to legitimate present-day agendas and guide future actions. A solid comprehension of modern Chinese historiography, therefore, is indispensable for understanding modern Chinese politics. My examination of the changing tendencies in Chinese historical writing further aims to shine some light on the intellectual history of modern China, particularly on the age-old rivalry between the Marxist and liberal traditions in the thinking of Chinese intellectuals. Unlike past scholarship that has highlighted the preponderance of Marxism and socialism among Chinese intellectuals before and after 1949, this study underscores the tenacity and vitality of the non-Marxist, liberal tradition in Chinese historiography and its eventual triumph in the last decade of the twentieth century. As shown throughout this book, the liberal tradition, as manifested in intellectuals’ embrace of Western modernity and Enlightenment values, dominated the writing of mainstream historians in the Republican era despite their compromise with nationalist commitments. After 1949, for all its claimed allegiance to the Marxist orthodoxy, this tradition, evident in senior scholars’ defense of intellectual independence and professional autonomy, continued to shape historical writing of the 1950s and early 1960s in the guise of historicism that fiercely resisted the ultrapoliticization of historiography; it revived in the early 1980s under the banner of “New Enlightenment” that aimed to refute the radical historiography of the Mao era; and, finally, in the late 1980s and the 1990s, it came back to dominate mainstream historical writing on modern China, evident in the prevalence of the modernization paradigm in the field. In addition to offering to readers in the English-speaking world a relatively systematic account of Chinese historiography on modern China and a unique approach to understanding the intellectual

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and political history of modern China, an equally important purpose of this study is to engage in a dialogue with my colleagues in China today. Historians in China, to be sure, have written a lot on the evolving methodologies, research interests, and interpretations in the field since the early twentieth century, and a large number of books and articles on these topics have been published. But little attention has been paid to how historians’ construction of narratives shaped their historical representation, how the narratives were constructed, and to what extent the narratives reflected historical realities or merely historians’ imagination. Almost all of the historians in each period surveyed in this book claimed their representations to be authentic, that is, revealing what actually happened in the past. When refuting a narrative they challenged, they targeted primarily the political motives and ideological assumptions behind the narrative; few questioned the way the narrative was built through purposeful selection of facts and even fictional imagination or emplotment of events. In my understanding, as this book will show, the different ways in which historians narrated the past were as important as their political inclinations and ideologies in shaping their representations. My concern with Chinese historiography today also has to do with the reconstruction of an alternative explanatory scheme for modern Chinese history. After the “crisis in history” in the 1980s, another wave of history literature flourished in the 1990s and 2000s, thanks to the rise of a market economy that made possible the publication of a plethora of history books aimed at the general public. At the same time, the emergent generation of historians, mostly trained in the post-Mao era, liberated themselves from the yoke of master narratives that had dictated history writing before and expanded their research interests to new areas and new subjects that had been marginalized or ignored in earlier generations of historiography. The recent accessibility of historical archives and the release of voluminous documents of government or political organizations also allowed scholars to reconstruct historical realities that had been distorted or concealed in the officially sanctioned histories. All these developments have contributed to the proliferation of historical literature on a vast array of topics in the past two decades. But most of the historians involved in this process have been content with discovering new areas that satisfy their taste or exposing new evidence. Few have thought about the implications of

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their findings for the construction of a new interpretive framework in place of the old ones that they have abandoned. Historical writing is meaningful, however, not only because it enriches our knowledge of the past, but more importantly because it contributes to the way we understand the past as well as the present. Support from institutions and individuals has greatly facilitated my completion of this project. I thank the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange for a research grant and the University of Texas at Austin for a number of grants, which enabled me to travel to China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong for the collection of source materials and to have the time to digest them. For their specific and helpful comments on individual chapters, conference papers, or journal articles that are incorporated into this book, I thank, in particular, Kathryn Bernhardt, Jeremy Brown, Brian Fay, Philip Huang, Matthew Johnson, Margret Kuo, Stephen MacKinnon, Michael Schoenhals, and Jiayan Zhang. My sincere thanks and gratitude go to Arif Dirlik for his perceptive comments on the manuscript and for the hours of conversation with me on various topics pertaining to this project during his visit to Austin in March 2011. I would like to thank Q. Edward Wang and an anonymous reviewer for the University of Hawai‘i Press for their detailed, constructive suggestions on many conceptual and interpretive issues, which helped me bring the manuscript into its current form. Several chapters of this manuscript were discussed in my graduate seminars on modern Chinese history at the University of Texas at Austin. For their feedback that contributed to my revision of these chapters, I would especially like to thank David Conrad, Peter Hamilton, John Harney, James Hudson, Jin Tang, Linlin Wang, and Xiaoping Wang. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for all errors and opinions in this book. Parts of Chapters 3 and 7 have been published in Modern China (vol. 36, no. 3, May 2010) and History and Theory (vol. 49, no. 3, October 2010), respectively. I thank the publishers for allowing me to include them in this book. Finally, I would like to express my deep appreciation to my wife, Guiyun, and our two children, Cathy and Daniel, who have grown from adorable kids to respectable young adults heading into high school and college, respectively, while this project was in the making, for their loving challenge and the warmth of family throughout the years.

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Introduction

This book looks at how Chinese intellectuals have written about China’s “modern history” through their incessant construction of various, often conflicting, explanatory schemes and narratives since the early twentieth century.1 More specifically, this study has three objectives. First, it aims to reveal how scholars as well as political elites in China derived meanings from their different readings of the nation’s recent past by conceiving it as a coherent, phased process leading to an ultimate goal. Central to my analysis is the proposition that historical writing on “modern China” has evolved primarily as a response to present challenges and concerns that have faced individuals; to write about modern China was primarily to trace the historical roots of the country’s current problems in order to legitimize their solutions rather than a truth-seeking process or the reconstruction of the past as it actually happened. Therefore, to grasp their representations of modern China, one has to examine history writers in the historical context in which their perceptions of the present and their direct or indirect involvement with ongoing political and social events motivated as well as constrained their rendering of the past. History writing, in other words, was inseparable from their participation in the social and political discourses of their own times and from their embrace or elaboration of ideologies that served to justify their political claims. A basic purpose of this study, therefore, is to scrutinize the changing interpretive frameworks for modern Chinese history in different periods from the early twentieth century down to the present by linking them with historians’ different positions in a given sociopolitical setting as well as 1

2

Introduction

the ideologies they endorsed or articulated—ranging from the Chinese versions of liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism in the first half of the twentieth century to the orthodox, radical, or pragmatic Maoist creeds in the 1950s through the 1970s and the renewed liberal, nationalist, and Maoist traditions in the post-Mao era—which ultimately shaped the problematic, methodology, and philosophy of their historical writing. But the intricacy of history recounting lies not only in its entanglement with historians’ present-day concerns, which make their depiction of the past inextricable from their subjective biases, but also in the fact that China’s “modern history” itself has been an ongoing process full of uncertainties and yet to be finished. Not only were Chinese historians constrained by the peculiar spatiality found in their writings—that is, their relation to the social and political forces that made history—which directly conditioned their perspectives and perceptions, but they were also bound by temporality, or the point in time at which the historians were situated in the longer, unfolding process of modern Chinese history. Therefore, what they wrote about was not only teleological, mirroring their subjective comprehension of the meaning and order in the past, but also essentially temporary in nature, reflecting only the limited section of the timeline up to the point where they lived and wrote; beyond that point was an unknown future, and the constant flux and twists of history have repeatedly defied historians’ teleological projections of the purported course of history. These spatial and temporal limitations shaped representations of modern China that varied throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The second purpose of this project, therefore, is to offer a systematic account of the successive master narratives as well as the changing and often contradictory interpretations of major historical events in the recent Chinese past; my primary concern here is to determine to what extent historians’ dedication to faithfully reconstructing China’s past was compromised by their commitment to an imagined trajectory of history that served a political agenda. After laying bare the construction of major interpretive schemes and master narratives, and exploring debates on the most controversial issues in each of the major periods since the early twentieth century, an inescapable question that confronts us is what exactly is “modern history” in China? Is it possible, or necessary, to perceive— or conceive of—“modern Chinese history” as a purposeful, ordered

Introduction

3

process with an ineluctable end or to impose on China’s recent past a master narrative that gives the particular section of Chinese history a unitary meaning? Should historians in China—and beyond—deny or ignore the meanings and order, if any, in the country’s past and write about it without a purpose at all? Should they totally abandon the upper-case “History” of the nation bolstered by a teleological narrative and instead remain satisfied with microstudies of lower-case “histories” of isolated, individual incidents and everyday phenomena at the local level, which would inevitably render the recent centuries in China as a cluster of disordered, meaningless fragments? My third and ultimate concern in this study, therefore, is with the question of whether it is possible to represent China’s past in a way that yields meaning without distorting historical realities.

POLITICAL IDENTITY AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION A persistent question for Chinese historians in the twentieth century was how to reconcile their seemingly academic interest in objectively recasting the past with political inclinations that tended to twist their interpretations. Dedication to scholarly research, to be sure, does not necessarily enable one to depict the past neutrally and objectively; in fact, almost all history works that claim to be academic reflect more or less one’s ideological bias, aesthetic disposition, moral judgment, ethnic attitude, and methodological preference. In the historiography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western Europe, for example, “the use of the national past to legitimize (or delegitimize) particular governments and regimes remains as widespread as ever” among contemporary historians (Passmore 1999, 282). But here we can nevertheless distinguish between professional historians who eschew overt engagement in politics and those who prioritize an explicit political purpose in history writing. After all, thanks to the long process of professionalization that aimed to establish history as an “objective science,” historians in the West had to deliberately or at least rhetorically separate their political commitments from their scholarly work, no matter how unattainable their goal of objectivism was in actuality (Berger 1999, 4–5). In contrast, the politicization of historiography went much further in twentieth-century China. Engulfed by recurrent political and social turmoil that involved incessant struggles between different forces and factions, or actively participating in ideological

4

Introduction

confrontations between sharply divided groups of intellectuals, few Chinese historians found it possible to remain politically detached and apathetic in their academic work. Thus, more often than not, historians recast the past differently to express their varying understandings of current politics or to demonstrate the purported causal relations between the past they represented and the political views they upheld. History writing, in other words, was about manifestation of one’s political identity rather than revealing the truth of the past. A certain version of historical interpretation claimed hegemony over all others not because it was any closer than the rest to the realities in the past, but because it resonated with the ideology of the dominant force or served to legitimate the political claims of those in power. Despite their ideological schism and divergence over a wide array of issues regarding modern Chinese history, however, almost all historians in twentieth-century China have claimed the authenticity of their respective representations of the past without seeking to hide their political commitments. Few have been willing to admit or were aware of how their intellectual inclinations, their political and social biases, as well as their different modes of historical representation might lead to the possible distortion of history and hence varying degrees of discrepancy between their recounting of historical events and what actually happened in the past. Recent Chinese studies of historiography in modern China, too, have been generally contented with explaining what the different traditions and paradigms were in the writings of modern China in the past century, without much effort to explicate how competing ideologies and the ever-changing power relations between rival political forces interacted with the historians’ own intellectual and ideological predilections to shape their historical writing. Even fewer of the historians and researchers of Chinese historiography have shown a readiness to address the question of how the different modes of historical imagination that they have employed in producing the structure and content of narratives have affected their reinterpretation of the past.2 Outside China, historians have endorsed or questioned, over the past three decades since the “linguistic turn” in historiography, the propositions that history is a historian’s subjective construction of the past, that the historian “invented” history according to his or her ideological bias rather than “discovered” history as the past actually

Introduction

5

was, and that historical writing is essentially no different from literature to the extent that fiction and imagination have been central to the construction of historical narratives (White 1987; Appleby et al. 1994; Iggers 1997; Evans 1997). Despite the growing skepticism of the possibility and necessity of truthful reconstruction of history, however, an emphasis on objectivity remained a time-honored tradition characterizing modern historiography in the West. Beginning with Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), historians in Europe and North America who espoused historicism had stressed a “scientific” attitude in research. The writing of history was supposed to be based on rigorous and impartial scrutiny of source documents; ideally it should do away with any contemporary concerns, self-interest, bias, or prejudice specific to a certain social class or group. The task of a professional historian, in the words of Ranke, was to study the past “as it actually was” (cited in Braw 2007) or “in its own right, for its own sake, and on its own terms,” as G. R. Elton put it (2002, 59). In fact, few were able to remain colorless, passionless, and evenhanded in interpreting the past; history writing, like all other knowledgeseeking activities, “involves a lively, contentious struggle among diverse groups of truth-seekers” (Appleby et al. 1994, 254). “All history,” Richard J. Evans writes, “has a present-day purpose and inspiration, which may be moral or political or ideological” (1997, 168). But it was equally clear that modern historians in the West rarely treated their work as explicit ideological exhortation or political propaganda; most of them, past and present, committed themselves to the quest for objectivity, which they deemed fundamental to their recognition as professionals. Not surprisingly, despite the challenge from postmodernists and the subsequent “epistemological crisis” since the1970s, most historians, as Henry A. Turner Jr. rightly observes, still “strive to uphold the standards of Rankean methodological objectivity in their works” (Clark 2004, 1). Exhaustive and rigorous examination of documentary evidence was also an age-old tradition in Chinese philology. Beginning in the early Qing period in the seventeenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century, it accounted for the stunning success in the recovery of ancient classics and reconstruction of China’s early history. The few Chinese historians who received professional training in the historicist or empiricist tradition in Europe or the United States and developed their career in Chinese universities in the early twentieth century also declared their commitment to

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Introduction

empirical research and detachment from ideologies. But such indigenous or imported traditions rarely found their manifestation in the emergence of modern Chinese historiography, especially in the writing of modern Chinese history in the twentieth century. The historians who wrote about modern China, ranging from the first generation that enthused about the making of “New History” under the influence of social Darwinism in the 1920s to the latest generation that embraced modernization theory in the 1980s and 1990s, all linked their studies of China’s recent past with the stated purpose of national salvation and strengthening or the explicit political agendas of specific groups. The Marxist historiography that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, especially the Maoist radical rewriting of history in the 1960s and 1970s, brazenly prioritized utilitarian purposes over other commitments. Unbiased investigation dedicated to the discovery of the objective truth about the past, which appealed to many historians in the West as a “noble dream” (Novick 1998), simply did not exist among the vast majority of Chinese historians writing about China’s recent history. A probable reason for the politicization of modern historiography in China has to do with the preoccupation of Chinese intellectuals with the survival of the nation that overwhelmed their original enthusiasm for a Chinese Enlightenment in the early twentieth century. Whereas the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe led to the victory of science over religious superstition, the trust in scientific reason, and hence the development over centuries among historians of a shared faith in “scientific” history, or the possibility of discovering the truth about the past with reason and scientific methods (Appleby et al. 1994, 15–51, 246; Novick 1998, 1), few Chinese historians found it appealing or practicable to engage in purely empirical studies of the past in an ivory tower when confronted with crises of foreign encroachment and domestic turmoil. A subsequent and more important reason for the politicized historiography, therefore, is that those most active in writing about modern Chinese history were rarely professional historians; instead, they were first and foremost adherents to the ideologies of political forces they supported. As active participants in a revolutionary or reform movement, they used their interpretations of the past to give the movement a teleological meaning, to shape its guideline and direction, and to inspire future actions of its participants. History writing, in other words, turned out to be the most effective and powerful means

Introduction

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in the production and reification of a political ideology. The primary goal of their historiography was not to faithfully reconstruct the past, but to use the past to legitimate present-day action. Historians siding with different forces thus had different representations of China’s recent past. Which version of history prevailed and established its hegemony as the only legitimate representation of China’s foregone experiences hinged on the result of struggles between competing forces rather than whether it was closer to the realities of the past. Seen in this light, truth and knowledge indeed appeared as products of power rather than cognition, as cultural critics such as Foucault (1990) and his followers have argued.3 As a study of Chinese historians’ writings in a historical context in which their academic training and intellectual inclinations interwove with ideological and organizational commitments to shape their interpretation of the past, this study shows how historians used their work to rationalize the agenda of certain political forces and how such forces in turn used their respective interpretations of history to forge a discursive hegemony, to build group identity, and to enhance organizational solidarity in the competition for dominance—that is to say, their views of history were used to legitimize and redefine schemas of action and therefore became part of history itself. But this study is more than a study of historiography or ideas about history and politics in twentieth-century China. It also examines methods and strategies used by historians to produce historical narratives that often distort the historical realities they claim to represent. I shall demonstrate throughout this study that, despite historians’ assumption that what they wrote was consistent with what actually happened, they invariably have turned history into constructed memory through the making of narratives that retain only the parts of events that fit into their explanatory schemes and that exclude those that do not. The search for a more viable approach to the rewriting of modern Chinese history is possible only after deconstructing the narratives that have shaped Chinese historiography in the past century and led to the discrepancy between its representation and the reality of the past.

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD IN HISTORICAL NARRATIVES Political identity was not the only factor influencing historians’ perspective on the past. It was not sufficient to detach oneself from such

8

Introduction

commitment and to engage in “professional” writing of history to make one’s representation closer to historical realities. The way a historian constructs the narrative of an event or puts together separate facts to produce a meaningful whole (that is, to tell a story) also affects the degree to which his or her writing mirrors the reality of the past. In other words, the historian’s literary style in writing about history and imagination or subjective structuring of the theme and plots of a historical event or a long-term historical trend are as important as ideological, moral, or aesthetic preference in shaping his or her representation. It has been widely accepted among historians and critical theorists that the writing of history can rarely proceed without the construction of narratives, including the narrative of a specific event that has its own beginning, middle, and end, and the “master narrative” (alternatively termed “grand narrative” in this book) that links the smaller historical accounts together and stretches over a long period of time with an overarching theme.4 Historians, however, have disagreed over the relationship between the narrative and the past it relates. For some, narrative is imposed by the writer of history or those in power on a non-narrative world, for the past itself was formless. As an imaginary construction, narrative cannot be neutral; it necessarily reflects the historian’s subjective perspective, his or her aesthetic or moral values, and social or political prejudice. By arranging the individual, fragmented incidents or facts into a tidy and coherent narrative, the historian has to conceal the contradictions and discords of society that do not fit into the unifying story or the meaningful whole projected by the narrator (Clark 2004, 103–104). Narratives, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, are effects of poetic ordering rather than “features of some real action” (1984, 39), and their function is to transform the past into something new rather than to discover its truth. For Hayden White, the history thus produced serves only as a “refuge” for those who want “to find the simple in the complex and the familiar in the strange” (1985, 50). For other historians, however, narrative does not depart too far from the past it covers. “Storytelling,” David Carr writes, “obeys rules that are imbedded in action itself, and narrative is at the root of human reality long before it gets explicitly told about. It is because of this closeness of structure between human action and narrative that we can genuinely be said to explain an action by telling a story about it” (2008, 29). Refuting the claim by many postmodernists that

Introduction

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narratives do not exist in the past itself but are all put there by the historian, Evans argues that in some cases “the narrative is there in the sources, lived and thought by the people we are writing about”; “people in the past,” he goes on, “were consciously living a story they believed in and sought to shape,” although he quickly admits that “many historical narratives have been devoted to providing historical justification or inspiration for political and social movements in the present” (1997, 126–128). The authors of Telling the Truth About History, too, state that “we see no reason to conclude that because there is a gap between reality and its narration (its representation), the narration in some fundamental sense is inherently invalid”; “narrative,” they contend, “is essential both to individual and social identity. It is consequently a defining element in historywriting” (Appleby et al. 1994, 235). The above two views, contradictory as they are, can both be applied, with necessary modifications, to historiography in twentieth-century China, which centered on the construction of narratives.5 For Chinese historians, to write about China’s past meant primarily to conceive a narrative framework in which the facts could be purposefully arranged by addition or deletion to produce a coherent story that yielded the expected meanings. Each story was thus represented as a distinct narrative to reflect the writer’s own interpretation consistent with his or her explicitly or implicitly stated ideology. Above the separate narratives of events, there was always a master narrative that wove together the individual stories to produce a consistent theme or to give the stories a collective meaning, which could be directly incorporated into an ideology or add strength to an existing ideology. Unlike their predecessors in imperial times, who were largely free of conflicting ideologies, leaving their audience with no contradictory narratives, the historians in the twentieth century were burdened with rivaling ideologies, nationalist, liberalist, Marxist, Maoist, New Left, or neoliberal. Their interpretations of history thus yielded a myriad of varying (and often contradictory) narratives and competing grand narratives, which frequently functioned to distort and obscure rather than illuminate the realities in the past. This does not mean, however, that the narratives thus produced were necessarily fictitious and extraneous to the past itself. In fact, as will be shown shortly, for politically motivated historians before 1949, what they wrote about modern China mirrored more

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Introduction

or less the history they experienced and imagined. The grand narratives that guided their writing, as mutually contradictory as they appeared, reflected the simultaneously coexisting and conflicting historical processes that shaped the political landscape in China. However, this should not lead to the relativist position that each such contending narrative was equally valid and no one should be privileged over another, as some postmodernists seem to suggest (Clark 2004, 210). My discussions on Chinese historiography in the second half of the twentieth century will show that a narrative or grand narrative could divorce itself from the event or period of history it claimed to represent when the historians’ writing was no longer relevant to their experience and social existence, when they failed to show respect for the sources that recorded the events, when history writing was no longer about the discovery of historical patterns but about legitimating the present agenda, and when only one hegemonic narrative was allowed and accepted as the orthodox representation of the past. Several factors worked together to shape the narratives of modern Chinese history. The first and most important is a historian’s motivation, as discussed earlier, which in turn had to do with the time in which he or she lived, the challenges that confronted the nation, and the historian’s own political inclination toward national priorities. By and large, two grand narratives competed and alternated to shape the representation of modern Chinese history: revolution and modernization. Both originated in the late 1920s and 1930s as results of Chinese intellectuals’ inquiry into the reasons behind China’s backwardness and crisis of survival, and of their search for solutions to China’s plight. While the liberal and nationalist historians sympathizing or siding with the Nationalist government (1927–1949) created the modernization narrative to highlight the incremental reforms imposed by the state and to support the political aims of the existing regime, the leftist and Marxist historians who supported the communist revolution invented the revolutionary narrative to accentuate the bottom-up rebellions and revolutions in Chinese history and thereby to justify the current revolutionary movement. After 1949, the revolutionary narrative predominated in historical writing in the People’s Republic of China to legitimate the socialist state and to serve the ever-changing needs of party leaders; in contrast, the modernization narrative, which had lost ground in the Mao era, resurfaced and came to dominate the representation of

Introduction

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modern China after the death of Mao because it resonated perfectly with the party-state’s new policies of reform and opening up in the 1980s and thereafter. “Using the past to serve the present” (gu wei jin yong) turned out to be a tenacious tradition in Chinese historical writing (Unger 1993, 1–8). Equally important in understanding the making of narratives is the ideology and concomitant methodology (theories, concepts, and approaches) historians employed to frame and bolster a narrative. Almost all ideologies that informed historical writing in China had a foreign origin; once introduced to China, however, they quickly yielded to the needs of different political forces in formulating and rationalizing their respective schemes for changing realities and recasting the past. Thus, on the one hand, intellectuals who had embraced the Enlightenment values and premised a Eurocentric modernity in their agenda for China’s “modernization” soon retreated from their liberal ground and turned to statism as a viable, though undesirable, approach to state building in the late 1920s through the 1940s. On the other hand, those who had espoused “authentic” Marxist doctrines from Russia, first in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the early 1950s, also switched willingly or unwillingly to the pragmatic ideology advocated by Mao in the 1930s and 1940s, and later the radical ideology of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, to reformulate their account of modern China. In the post-Mao era, at first historians had to couch the revived modernization narrative in quasi-Marxist terms; later they overtly espoused the liberal ideology of modernization theory imported from the West to reinterpret modern China. As China entered the postreform era in the 2000s, when its economy was largely privatized and incorporated into the global capitalist system, Chinese historians were divided into those who continued to adhere to the modernization narrative and the liberal ideology behind it and those who questioned the validity of grand narratives and attempted to rid their scholarship of ideological commitments by shifting their attention from the purported grand process of history to the everyday history of ordinary people. Finally, to understand how the narratives of specific historical events were constructed, we have to look at the different “modes of emplotment,” using Hayden White’s term (1973, 5–11), or methods by which a certain group of facts were put together through purposeful selection (i.e., to include certain facts while obliterating others) in order to produce a meaningful entity that had its own accounts of

12

Introduction

the origins, process, and consequences of events.6 A historical event thus constructed might have different versions, each of which had its own beginning, middle, and end as well as its own moral.7 The different purposes or present-day agendas that drove historians to retell the past directly accounted for different modes of emplotment by which they constructed the narratives. As this study will show, to speak for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its struggle with the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), many of the historians who joined the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s tended to depict China’s recent history as a series of struggles between revolutionary and reactionary forces that culminated in the eventual triumph the Chinese Communist Party over the Guomindang. They thus eulogized rebellions and revolutions in modern China, depicted peasant rebels and communists as morally impeccable heroes, and at the same time demonized their enemies. For convenience of discussion, I term the mode of narration that characterized the writings of the CCP historians before 1949 as romanticism. The same mode of representation continued into the post-1949 period and took its extreme form during the Cultural Revolution, when radical historians linked struggles between good and evil in history to current power struggles and used the distorted historiography to serve their political purposes. Pessimism as an alternative mode of representation permeated the writings of non-Marxist, mainstream historians in Republican China. Preoccupied with China’s recurrent efforts to modernize since the nineteenth century, they tended to depict modern Chinese history as a series of frustrations and to attribute such failures to cultural and political barriers inherent in China’s historical traditions and insurmountable for both reformers in the late Qing period and the Nationalists thereafter. The grim realities of political disunity and foreign invasion in the 1930s and early 1940s also accounted for historians’ pragmatic approaches to state making and economic reconstruction; they tended to be realistic in thinking about China’s path to modernity and critical of Western economic and political models, which earlier generations of Chinese intellectuals had wholeheartedly embraced. In sharp contrast, historians of the post-Mao era, inspired by the modernization program of the new leadership and optimistic about China’s future prosperity, showed an inclination to reinterpret modern Chinese history by accentuating the linkage between

Introduction

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historical trends in the late Qing and Republican periods and the ongoing reform programs that aimed to transform China into a market economy and open it up to the world (i.e., the Western capitalist world). Thus they emphasized in their narratives the positive developments leading to the growth of industrial capitalism, civil society, and political pluralism, which they hoped to see reemerge in the new era. Western influences, which had been equated with the evils of imperialism, were seen as indispensable sources for the emergence of China’s own modernity. Cultural traditions that had been seen as impediments to China’s progress were recast as heritages conducive to capitalist development. Free of the distresses and insecurities that beset their predecessors in the Republican period, the historians of the post-Mao era tended to be more cosmopolitan in redefining China’s new cultural, economic, and political orientations. Optimism, therefore, was the style that characterized their representations of modern China. The optimistic mode of history writing continued to shape the historiography on modern China as the country entered the postreform era at the turn of the twenty-first century. Consistent with the widespread confidence in China’s prospects for modernization, most historians were content with the master narrative of modernization that has dominated their writing since the 1990s, while the remainder adhered to the outmoded narrative of revolution.8 However, under the growing influence of postmodern theories and historiography from the West and displaying their commitment to the internationalization of their scholarship, an increasing number of historians have become dissatisfied with traditional historiography constrained by grand narratives and critical of claims by historians of earlier generations on the authenticity of their historical representation. Skepticism is the mode featured in the new history writing that repudiates the grand narratives of Chinese historiography in the twentieth century and questions the necessity and possibility of reconstructing the realities of the past. The different modes of narration, as outlined above, affected history writing differently. By dramatizing history into a series of struggles between good and evil, the romantic historiography often obscured the aspects of the past that had little or no relevance to the purported theme. After dichotomizing historical figures into the simple categories of demons and heroes, the revolutionary historians also found it difficult to acknowledge the opposing traits found

14

Introduction

in thoughts and activities of the highly moralized figures. Pessimistic and optimistic narratives, for their part, reduced the moral color in their representations of history, but the historians’ preoccupation with the failures or prospects of China’s modernization also led them to concentrate on either negative or positive factors behind the frustrations or successes in the past. They thus tended to illuminate part of history at the cost of obliterating the rest of it. Finally, the emerging generation of skepticist historians in the late 1990s and 2000s, discontented with grand narratives and even disinterested in discovering the truth about the past, ran the risk of stripping the most meaningful part from historical writing and reducing their representations of the past to nihilism, despite their purported commitment to reconstructing aspects of history that have been obscured or marginalized by conventional historiography. All of the factors examined above, the narrative form of historical representation as well as the motivations, ideologies, and modes of emplotment specific to individual historians, combine to explain the varying levels of disjunction between historians’ representations and the reality of the past. This study does not seek to determine whether or not a specific narrative about modern China reflected the reality it claimed to represent. Instead, I probe the historical context in which the various narratives emerged and prevailed as well as historians’ purposes and methodologies in producing the narratives. Therefore, my examination of the Chinese historiography of modern China will follow a chronological order, focusing on the construction and contestation of various narratives during the following periods: the Republican era (from the 1910s to the 1940s), the Maoist era (from the 1950s to the 1970s), the reform era (from the 1980s to the 1990s), and the postreform era (since the 2000s). As an introduction to the ensuing chapters, I delineate below the making of the major historical narratives in each of these periods.

CONTRASTING NARRATIVES BEFORE 1949 By and large, two master narratives shaped the representations of Chinese history in the late Qing and Republican period. One depicted that period as a process of evolution or modernization, or China’s departure from an isolated, stagnant society past and its embrace of “modern” ideas, technologies, and institutions borrowed from the West. The other emphasized the theme of revolution or a

Introduction

15

series of struggles of Chinese people against imperialism and feudalism that culminated in the communist revolution. The two narratives shared some assumptions that were fundamental to their interpretations of modern China: they both believed in the good of “modernity” (especially the utility of modern science and technology) for humanity and in the necessity for China to become an industrialized society; and they both conceived the transition to modernity as a national phenomenon, assuming the nation-state as the necessary vehicle by which the goals of modernization or revolution would be achieved, and therefore focused on events at the national level or with nationwide consequences. To some degree, these shared cognitions reflected what Paul Cohen calls the “consensual Chinese agenda” (2003, 132–133). But striking contrasts existed between the two narratives, as seen in the different sets of ideological presumptions underlying the two narratives, the perspectives each of them employed in interpreting the past, their respective origins and development during the twentieth century, and the extent to which their representations deviated or reflected the realities in modern China. Central to the modernization narrative were the following propositions: (1) China was “backward” before its modernization, and the backwardness was attributable primarily to reasons internal to the country itself, especially its cultural traditions and ethnocentric selfperception. (2) Key to China’s modernization, therefore, were influences from the West through the introduction of scientific knowledge and modern institutions. (3) What made this influence possible were the efforts of enlightened ruling elites, who initiated modernizing reforms in defense, economy, education, and finally political systems; modernization, therefore, was essentially an elitist and gradualist movement. (4) A unified and centralized state was one of the indispensable preconditions for successful industrialization and economic development; individual freedom and political divide had to be compromised under a strong state before China was modernized. (5) The ultimate goal of China’s modernization, however, was to create a liberal democracy that offered full protection of individual rights and an economy that combined the efficiency of capitalism in production with the fairness of socialism in distribution. Based on the preceding premises, the modernization narrative highlighted the positive effects of Western influences on Chinese society, the reform programs of ruling elites, and social-political

16

Introduction

movements that contributed to the spread of modern ideas, the development of capitalism, and the making of a modern state. The Self-Strengthening Movement (1860s–1890s), the Hundred Days’ Reform (1898), the New Policies in the 1900s, and finally the “golden decade” (1927–1937) of reconstruction under the Guomindang government thus stood out as the most significant events in this light. In contrast, peasant rebellions and revolutions appeared as deviations and anomalies from the right course of history, impeding China’s modernization and secondary in importance. As shown in Chapter 2, the modernization narrative found its clearest articulation first in the work of Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang, 1895–1965), a prominent historian in the 1930s and later a professional diplomat for the Guomindang government. Jiang’s embrace of the idea of modernization reflected a new trend in the thinking of Chinese intellectuals in the 1930s, namely, a transition from their preoccupation with the introduction and popularization of pure ideologies imported from the West (such as social Darwinism, liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism, to name a few) to an increasing concern with the more urgent, practical task of “national salvation” in the late 1920s and early 1930s. What drove Jiang to write about modern China, I shall argue, was primarily his concern with the crises that confronted China in the early 1930s and their solutions. His recognition of the importance of creating a centralized, strong state explained his support for the Guomindang government and disapproval of other forces that threatened political unity; his understanding of China’s disadvantaged position in dealing with foreign powers and of the history of China’s foreign relations also led to his support for the Guomindang’s conciliatory policy in handling Japanese aggression. His writing on modern China, therefore, was more of a rationalization of his opinions about China’s domestic politics and foreign relations than an academic attempt to reconstruct the past. In contrast, the revolutionary narrative was built on the following premises: (1) China, which was no exception to the universal pattern of social evolution (through the five stages of primitive, slavish, feudal, capitalist, and socialist/communist societies, as formulated by Stalin), had already entered the “late phase” of feudalism and witnessed the “sprouting” of capitalism in the late imperial period; thus, even without the influence of the West, China would eventually evolve into the stage of capitalism in its own way. (2) The

Introduction

17

encroachment of Western imperialism interrupted the “natural” process of China’s evolution and impeded, in collaboration with the feudal (and then the bureaucratic bourgeois) ruling class who had been subjugated by imperialist powers, the growth of Chinese indigenous capitalism. (3) Therefore, a revolution against imperialism and feudalism was the precondition for the successful development of capitalism and industrialization in China. (4) But the Chinese bourgeoisie, economically weak and hence politically inclined to compromise, was incapable of completing the task; therefore, it was up to the Chinese proletariat, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, to conduct the revolution by mobilizing peasants as the main force of the revolution. (5) Because of the CCP’s leadership of the revolution and because of the worldwide transition to socialism after the Russian Revolution of 1917, China should move toward the establishment of socialism as well after the revolution. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the revolutionary narrative foregrounded precisely what the modernization narrative trivialized, namely, peasant rebellions and revolutions ranging from the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), the Boxer Uprising of 1900, and the Revolution of 1911 to the communist revolution that succeeded in 1949. For revolutionary historians, it is the successive struggles against imperialism and feudalism that cleared the way for China’s strengthening and prosperity. Gradualist reforms, in this light, appeared as temporary, nonfundamental approaches that could only result in limited progress at best and that impeded revolutionary movements at worst (and hence were reactionary in nature). The revolutionary narrative found its most authoritative formulation in the works of Fan Wenlan, a trusted historian of Mao Zedong. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, it emerged in the early 1940s primarily as a representation of China’s recent history endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party for two reasons. The first was the power struggle within the Party, in which Mao challenged the “orthodox” interpretation of history based on orthodox Stalinist Marxism and built his own ideological supremacy within the Party. The second was the heightened friction between the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang that threatened their fragile alliance in dealing with Japanese aggression, which explained Mao’s need to use history as a weapon to counterattack the political assault from the Guomindang and to legitimate the CCP’s political stance. Therefore, Fan’s work was significant in the history of the CCP’s histo-

18

Introduction

riography not so much because it established a foundation for the further development of Marxist studies of Chinese modern history as because it started a new tradition that emphasized the pragmatic purpose of historiography, the use of history for political reasons at the cost of objectivity in representing the past. The contradictory motivations behind their historical writing drove Jiang Tingfu and Fan Wenlan to tell two different stories about modern China. Not only did the grand narratives in their respective works contrast sharply, but their different perspectives and modes of emplotment also enabled them to depict the same historical events with different and even contradictory accounts of their origins, developments, and implications. The writing of history, as seen in the works of Jiang and Fan, resembles the writing of fiction to the extent that they both involve the use of imagination and emplotment in the construction of narratives and that their historical narratives were “more invented than found,” having “more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” (White 1985, 82; italics in original). Behind the different representations of historical events and figures in modern China was the two historians’ motives to rationalize their respective political agendas for changing realities rather than to reconstruct historical realities. Therefore, no matter how contradictory to each other and how far from reflecting the past these narratives were, their different renderings of the past and the present nevertheless contained a degree of authenticity to the extent that they reflected the history that the historians experienced and participated in making. The conflicts and contradictions between the modernization and revolution narratives mirrored conflicts and contradictions in historical realities. Indeed, one cannot imagine a history of modern China without the two contradicting narratives that were essential to the ideologies of the rivaling political forces that played a decisive role in the making of modern China.

FROM DISCIPLINIZATION TO RADICALIZATION: THE MAOIST ERA The victory of the communist revolution in 1949 marked the end of the rivalry between the revolutionary and modernization narratives. For the next three decades, revolutionary historiography stood as the only legitimate account of modern Chinese history. But

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post-1949 historiography was far from unchanging and monolithic during the Maoist era (from the 1950s to the late 1970s). It underwent significant reconstructions, echoing both the recurrent ideological and political antagonism within the Chinese Communist Party and tensions between historians of different generations and social backgrounds. Overall, we can identify two contradictory trends: disciplinization that functioned to curb the romanticized mode of narration in historiography and radicalization that pushed it to its extreme form. By disciplinization, I mean the efforts to turn the revolutionary narrative developed by CCP historians into a standard representation of China’s past through the creation of a formal interpretive framework, the imposition of a standard approach of historical analysis and description, and the formulation of a set of concepts and premises about the major issues in the field. Before its disciplinization, the revolutionary narrative had been accepted by only a small group of historians and supporters of the Chinese Communist Party, and it was in a state of constant change and uncertainty. Fan Wenlan and his comrades within the Party were able to update and revise the narrative to enhance its vitality and viability in competition with the modernization narrative before it took its final shape through disciplinization. Without a rigid interpretive schema and standard terminology imposed on historians, their writing still showed a degree of openness that allowed them to inject into their interpretation personal views and bias that did not necessarily conform to the Party’s ideology. After disciplinization, however, historians had to write about history strictly within the imposed interpretive framework. Historical facts thus were tamed or “politically domesticated” to adapt to the officially sanctioned schemes that brought order, consistency, and coherence to historical accounts, a situation not too different from the consequences of the disciplinization of historiography in nineteenth-century Europe (White 1987, 72). Rather than a tool enabling people to discover the reality of the past, disciplinization obstructed their view of it. As a hallmark of the disciplinization of modern Chinese history, a standard interpretive schema was established through a debate on the periodization of the history from the Opium War in 1840 to the May Fourth Movement in 1919. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, central to the debate were historians’ different understandings of the criterion to use to divide the history at issue into a number of periods.

20

Introduction

Should modern Chinese history be periodized in terms of changes in the “principal contradiction” that determined the nature of Chinese society? Or should periodization be based on changes in “relations of production” in Chinese economy and society, which seemed to be more consistent with the principles of Marxist historical materialism? Or should the periods be determined according to “surges” in class struggle, which was supposed to be the decisive force in propelling social progress? Most historians in the debate dismissed the criterion of “principal contradiction” despite its central importance to Mao’s theoretical thinking (as formulated in his famous essay “On Contradiction”) because emphasizing the principal contradiction underscored the role of imperialism, which contradicted the antiimperialist revolutionary narrative. To stress the importance of relations of production, for its part, was criticized as a form of “economic determinism” and therefore non-Marxist. Therefore, what prevailed in the debate was the opinion that favored class struggle as the criterion of periodization. Historians endorsed this opinion not only because class struggle had been used by their counterparts in the Soviet Union as the criterion to divide the history of prerevolutionary Russia, but more importantly because this criterion jibed perfectly with the revolutionary narrative about modern China. As a result of the debate, a new interpretive framework was widely accepted as the only standard one for all textbooks on modern Chinese history. However, once disciplinized, the revolutionary narrative also became a set of rigid concepts and standardized (and often oversimplified) formulations; it no longer had the vitality to redefine and update itself, the flexibility to adapt to ever-changing circumstances, and the subjectivity that enabled historians to express their individual preferences. Historiography, in other words, was turned from a reflection of lived experience and the expression of one’s individuality to a lifeless, stereotyped representation of the past. Disciplinization was detrimental to the revolutionary narrative also because it necessarily involved a process of professionalization of historiography, or the transformation of historical writing from a highly subjective exercise serving a political agenda into an academic endeavor to be governed by its own norms and rules. Trained in either traditional Chinese philology that emphasized the meticulous examination of evidence or in the Western historicist tradition, many of the senior historians who had established academic reputations before 1949 continued their methods and practice in historical

Introduction

21

research after the communist revolution. For them, the disciplinization of historiography meant not just the application of highly stereotyped Marxist doctrines to the field, but also a reemphasis on rigorous academic training in the profession, which meant erudition in the subject, a solid mastering of source materials, research built on exhaustive investigation of evidence, and judgment that reflected the objective realities in history as closely as possible. In resistance to the excessive politicization of historiography, they emphasized “historicism” (lishizhuyi), or objectivity in historical research. They also maintained their dominance in their field and in institutional administration by implementing strict academic regulations and by creating an administrative hierarchy, introducing a striking inequality between senior and junior faculty members: the former enjoyed full privileges in research, teaching, and institutional administration, and the latter had none. Thus, there were multiple tensions and contradictions inherent in the disciplinized Marxist historiography. Despite its intention to buttress the revolutionary narrative with an orthodox ideological foundation and despite its goal of making the revolutionary narrative the only legitimate account of the past, the dogmatic application of the highly simplistic doctrines turned revolutionary historiography into mere annotations of the Party’s ideology and hence deprived historians of their originality in addressing present issues and satisfying the ever-changing needs of contending political forces. At the same time, however, despite its effort to make historiography a loyal tool of the party-state for ideological indoctrination, disciplinization inevitably resulted in an emphasis on professional training in the field and objectivity in research, which functioned to resist and correct the ideological twisting of history. When the highly formalized account of history proved to be too inelastic to accommodate the new needs of political leaders and when historians’ professional interest overcame their ideological commitment, disciplinized history reached a point of crisis and became vulnerable to subversion during the radicalization of historiography in the years to come. The radicalization of historiography, as discussed in Chapter 5, required two steps: the “historiographical revolution” (shixue geming) during the height of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and its resurgence in the mid-1960s that directly led to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The initial goals of the revolution were to curb the tendency in historiography that prioritized “purely aca-

22

Introduction

demic” research without relevance to the present and to promote a new kind of historiography that aimed to serve the immediate needs of the party-state. The net result of the revolution thus was the denigration of the scholarship—and hence the weakening of the academic authority—of senior historians, who had rebuilt their academic prestige through the process of disciplinization and whose standing rested primarily on their professional training and academic achievement, much of which had occurred before 1949. But the historiographical revolution, I shall argue, was more than a challenge to senior scholars’ academic standing, a form of cultural capital; it also undermined their status as a privileged social group, a form of social capital. Many of the junior faculty members and students welcomed the revolution during the Great Leap Forward precisely because it promised to narrow the gap with the senior historians and because they found new opportunities to participate in history writing, especially in the compilation of local histories and textbooks. Later, when the radicals among the junior historians renewed the historiographical revolution in the mid-1960s, they not only challenged the scholarship of senior authorities in the field and the legitimacy of the academic and administrative hierarchies in universities, but further called into question the ideological inclination embodied in the writings of senior scholars. The historiographical revolution, in other words, was no longer about differences in academic interests and different methodologies in conducting research; the radicals defined it as a struggle between proletarian and bourgeois views in historiography, which allegedly mirrored the struggle between the two classes in the political realm. The goal of the new revolution thus was totally different from before: instead of reversing the academic inclination in historiography, it was to attack the historians who presumably represented the bourgeois line in historical research and to eliminate them from the field. The revived historiographical revolution thus displays a complicity between the young radicals and party-state leaders: the former used their attack on senior scholars to advance their own status in the field while showing their ideological correctness and loyalty to Mao’s radicalism; Mao in turn used the political attacks on historians as a springboard leading to a full-scale attack on his political adversaries, who purportedly represented the bourgeois line in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in economic and political areas. In fact, throughout the Cultural

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Revolution, historiography served as the most powerful weapon for Mao and his supporters to use in the struggle with their political adversaries. Because of the central role of the reappraisal of historical events and historical figures in the construction of radical ideologies, history also became the most prominent discipline in the humanities and social sciences during those radical years. The writing of history once again showed its value in real political life as it had in the 1930s and 1940s. However, while its utility for politics increased, the radical historiography departed even further from the realities it represented. Without the constraints that the earlier efforts of disciplinization had imposed on historical writing, the radicals reinterpreted the past as freely as they wanted to advance their political interests. What characterized the radical historiography was a simplistic dichotomy between good and evil, or the revolutionary and the counterrevolutionary, as manifested in the unreserved approval of rebellions and revolutions in modern China and the idealization of rebel leaders and revolutionaries, which contrasted sharply with its caricatured denigration of those who opposed the rebels and revolutionaries. As a tool of political struggle that had little relevance to historical objectivity, the radical historiography was short-lived; it completely lost its value once the political struggle itself was over. It was remembered in the post-Mao age not as part of the historiography that contributed to knowledge about the past, but as a record of confrontations between two generations of historians and between two factions within the Chinese Communist Party in competition for political and ideological dominance.

FROM NEW ENLIGHTENMENT TO MODERNIZATION: THE REFORM ERA Compared to the Marxist historiography (including the pragmatic, the orthodox, and the radical variants), the non-Marxist, liberal tradition in historical writing turned out to be more enduring and vibrant in surviving and finally prospering in the drastic political upheavals and transformations in twentieth-century China. Based on conviction in the progress of history, the power of reason, and other Enlightenment values, liberal thinking found its systematic articulation in the writing of history first in the works of Liang Qichao (1873–1929) in the 1910s and 1920s; it continued to shape

24

Introduction

mainstream historians’ interpretation in the Nationalist era as seen in the works of Jiang Tingfu and his colleagues, who often reconciled their liberal values with nationalist commitments. After the communist revolution, liberalism as an intellectual heritage and political faith receded but never totally vanished. Integrated into Marxist discourse, the liberal tradition primarily took the form of historicism that tenaciously resisted the Marxist orthodoxy and Maoist radicalism in historiography in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the post-Mao era, as Chapter 6 shows, the liberal intellectuals who had been marginalized and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution reasserted their positions through the “New Enlightenment” movement. Couched in the language of Marxist humanism, this movement sought to reaffirm the values of science, democracy, and individual rights while repudiating autocracy, the cult of personality, and the violation of human dignity that had prevailed in the preceding radical years. The liberal historians played a conspicuous role in the movement and focused their writings on refuting radical historiography while avoiding a direct challenge to the revolutionary narrative. The modernization paradigm of the late 1980s and 1990s, as demonstrated in Chapter 7, continued the liberal tradition in Chinese historiography. Unlike their predecessors before the Cultural Revolution or in the New Enlightenment, whose liberal inclinations (especially their insistence on independent thinking, respect for historical objectivity, and resistance to the ultrapoliticization of history) paradoxically coexisted with their ideological commitment to Marxism and the revolutionary narrative, the younger generation of liberal historians who contributed to the emergence of the modernization paradigm received their academic training mainly in the 1980s. With greater exposure to Western ideas and less or no obligation to Marxism, they finally jettisoned the revolutionary narrative and embraced the imported modernization theory in place of Marxism as the interpretive framework with which they rebuilt the grand narrative of modern Chinese history. The modernization historiography of the late twentieth century shared its basic assumptions about modern China with the modernization narrative that Jiang Tingfu had formulated about half a century earlier. They both saw Western influence as the critical factor in China’s modern development, they both formed their basic assumptions about modernization on the basis of Euro-Amer-

Introduction

25

ican experiences, and they both perceived China’s modernization as essentially a process of Westernization. What was highlighted in the newly revived modernization historiography thus were the contrasts between Chinese tradition and Western modernity, as evidenced in the social differentiation between enlightened reformers and conservatives, and in the spatial differences between foreign concessions and Chinese residential areas in treaty port cities, between the industrializing cities and poverty-stricken countryside, or between the increasingly commercialized coast and stagnant interiors. Modernization thus was perceived as the dissemination of modernity (embodied in new ideas, technologies, and institutions) from the West to China, from the enlightened elites to the rest of society, from the concessions to the rest of Chinese cities, from urban to rural areas, and from coastal to inland regions. As a grand narrative, modernization further assumed a linear progression from a traditional, agrarian society to a modern, industrial society through a number of stages, again modeled after the historical experiences of the “modernized” (i.e., Western) nations, and was believed to be applicable to all modernizing non-Western countries. Despite such resemblances, the modernization historiography of the reform era, I shall argue, was fundamentally different from its predecessor before 1949. Contrary to the tragic mode of narration that permeated the writings of the modernization historians in the 1930s and 1940s, optimism was the dominant narrating style in their historical representation in the late 1980s and 1990s. Unlike their predecessors obsessed with China’s repeated failures and pessimistic about China’s prospect of modernization, the historians (as well as other Chinese intellectuals) of the post-Mao era showed an unprecedented confidence in China’s future, and their optimism was well buttressed by China’s rapid economic growth and its steady integration with the world. Not surprisingly, they were interested primarily in positive signs of China’s progress in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rather than the reasons behind China’s frustrations since the Opium War. Furthermore, unlike their counterparts before 1949 who, after witnessing so many failures in China’s recent history and its present situation, tended to be critical of China’s own cultural traditions and skeptical of Western capitalism, the historians and liberal scholars of the 1980s and 1990s showed both greater interest in the positive aspects of China’s cultural heritage and a greater willingness to accept Euro-American models of modernity.

26

Introduction

Equally stark is the contrast between the modernization historiography of the reform era and the revolutionary historiography in the preceding years. Committed to representing modern Chinese history as a process of China’s transition from tradition to modernity, rather than a battle between good and evil, the modernization historians would weave both the enlightened ruling elites and the subversive social forces into their narratives, irrespective of the purported political confrontations between the two groups of people. Furthermore, unlike the revolutionary narrative that highlighted only rebellions and revolutions, turning modern Chinese history into a history of peasants, rebels, and revolutionaries, the modernization narrative greatly broadened the scope of historical investigation to include a wide range of topics pertaining to urban history, business history, social history, cultural history, and so forth, bringing forth the flourishing of studies of modern history under the rubric of “China’s modernization” in the late 1980s and 1990s. But the modernization narrative was no different from the revolutionary narrative to the extent that it is a product of historical imagination shaped more or less by an imported ideology. It “invented” the history of modern China by foregrounding the parts of history that fit the theme of modernization and obscuring those that appeared to be irrelevant to modernity. Peasant rebellions and revolutions, which had been central to the revolutionary narrative, became marginal topics from the perspective of modernization. By looking primarily at areas that showed the signs of growing modernity; by judging growth by criteria unsuited to Chinese settings; and by trivializing economic, social, and political processes where no signs of modernity were found, the modernization narrative ran the risk of distorting history as much as did the revolutionary narrative that it challenged and replaced. Moreover, as the revolutionary historians were committed to legitimating the communist revolution and Maoist policies following the revolution, the fundamental concern of modernization historians was to prove the historical and logical “necessities” of the capitalist transformation of the Chinese economy in the reform era and its integration with the capitalist world under the grand narrative of a linear process of modernization. Both the revolutionary and modernization accounts of modern China, therefore, were products of historical imagination driven by an ideological commitment, rather than results of serious reconstructions of historical realities. By the late 1990s and the early 2000s, as China had completed

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much of its capitalist transformation and increasingly integrated itself with the Western capitalist world—not only economically, but also culturally and to some degree ideologically as well—the modernization narrative had also established its hegemony in the writing of modern Chinese history. The revolutionary narrative, by contrast, had basically vanished in scholarly works and lingered, with little appeal to readers, only in the official rhetoric of the communist revolution. As seen in many other fields of humanities and social sciences, Chinese historiography ended the twentieth century with the eventual triumph of the liberal tradition over its age-old rivals, the orthodox and radical Marxist traditions.

REWRITING HISTORY IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Historiography in Europe and North America has experienced remarkable changes since the 1970s and earlier, such as transition from the investigation of macrolevel processes to microhistory that focus on local events and the everyday life of ordinary people; from a traditional concentration on political history to a new emphasis on social and cultural history; from an alleged commitment to the discovery of objective truth to a thriving interest in textual and discursive analysis and other symbolic dimensions of history; from an explanatory approach of socioeconomic determinism to the method of “thick description” or a more comprehensive analysis of motives, values, and other aspects of the social context of human behavior; and from a linear history based on master narratives of progress, nation-state, and modernization to multilinear narratives that advocate cultural pluralism (Appleby et al. 1994; Iggers 1997; Breisach 2003). Recent trends in Western historiography directly or indirectly influenced history writing in China in the 1990s and 2000s. We will find that similar shifts in academic interests are also discernable among Chinese historians. What made these changes possible, I shall argue, is the impact of globalization, which has fundamentally transformed China’s economic and cultural landscape. Along with the unprecedented involvement of the Chinese economy in the global capitalist system, the1990s and 2000s saw a surge in academic exchanges between Chinese scholars and their counterparts in the West, and a large number of books that had an impact on theoretical conceptions or analytical approaches in the humani-

28

Introduction

ties and social sciences in the West were translated into Chinese. What inspired the new generation of Chinese historians around the turn of the twenty-first century, therefore, were precisely the imported theories and approaches from the West, and their commitment to the internationalization of their scholarship, a redefinition of research subjects, problematics, analytical approaches, and even style of writing to ensure the compatibility of their work with “international” (i.e., Western) scholarship. Growing dissatisfaction among the new generation of Chinese historians with the grand narratives of revolution and modernization was another driving force behind the new tendencies in Chinese historiography. To such historians, the contrasting grand narratives that had shaped Chinese historiography in the twentieth century accounted for the obvious fallacies of existing historical studies: by foregrounding relations of production and class struggles, the revolutionary narrative failed to present a rich and multifaceted picture of the realities of Chinese politics, economy, society, and culture in the modern era; similarly, by accentuating the impact of the West and the aspects of Chinese society that experienced subsequent changes, the modernization narrative failed to take into account the aspects of history that had not been affected by Western influences or had not seen the expected modernizing effects. To overcome the problems inherent to the grand historical narratives, the most innovative historians of the late 1990s and 2000s proposed a transfer of scholarly attention from the major events that had nationwide impact to the everyday social, economic, or cultural life in local communities; from significant figures (political leaders or prominent elites) who supposedly made history to the insignificant, ordinary people who were made by history; from trends or institutions at the national level to customs, practices, economic relations, and social networks at the local, regional, or transregional levels; and from the officially published data or officially preserved archives that represented the bias of the state to written and oral sources scattered in local communities or preserved in the memories of the populace. They placed all these new orientations under the rubric of “new social history” (xin shehui shi). The “new social history,” therefore, was characterized not only by its embrace of Western historiographical theories, but also by its abandonment of the grand narratives that had defined the writing of modern Chinese history. Unlike the revolutionary or modernization

Introduction

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historiographies that served an explicit or implicit political purpose through the construction or acceptance of a grand narrative, the new generation of scholarship allegedly freed itself of any ideological commitment and therefore found the use of a grand narrative obsolete and redundant. Unlike traditional historiographies that invariably claimed ideological correctness as well as the truthfulness of their accounts, which was essential for making history a powerful tool for building the legitimacy of and hence the popular support for political programs that the historian spoke for, the new generation of historians showed no interest in asserting the authenticity of their recounting of the past. For some of them, to reconstruct the past exactly as it had been was neither possible nor necessary, for their writing about history was not to make people believe what they had written was true, but rather a way to articulate their own academic or aesthetic interests, which supposedly did away with any pragmatic purposes. History, in other words, did not have to be an ordered, meaningful whole, in which every piece of fact had to be fit into the grand narrative; instead, it was to be perceived as what it was in actuality, a chaotic world comprising fragmented pieces of facts. To the extent that an increasing number of historians have lost their interest in guiding their narration of China’s recent history with a master narrative and have shown little interest or confidence in rewriting history according to the actual realities in the past, we might characterize the mode of history writing among such historians as a kind of skepticism, to distinguish it from romanticism, pessimism, and optimism, the three major modes of narration that prevailed in the earlier generations of historiography in twentieth-century China. The rise of “new social history” thus had contradictory implications for understanding the future directions of Chinese historiography after its desertion of grand narratives. On the one hand, by shifting their attention from ideological interpretation of macrohistorical trends in the entire nation to microlevel investigation of local events and everyday phenomena, proponents of “new social history” were able to move their reconstruction of history closer to the realities in the past than earlier generations of historians. On the other hand, the new orientations in Chinese historiography may turn out to be obstructive to its further development. Satisfied with empirical research of local or regional history, the new generation of historians has shown apathy, if not hostility, to reconstructing a macrohistorical framework (if not a new grand narrative) in which local

30

Introduction

and regional histories might find meanings that could not be fully appreciated in local or regional settings. Moreover, contented with the often simplistic use of borrowed concepts and theories without much caution and creative adaptation, they have also lost the motivation to build a more viable and sophisticated set of interpretive constructs to replace those they have deserted. The result, therefore, has been a gradual loss of autonomy by Chinese historians and the establishment of the hegemony of imported theories and approaches in the emergent “new social history” in China. But China’s ongoing integration into the world capitalist system also offers Chinese historians an unprecedented opportunity to advance their scholarship by redefining the spatiality and temporality of “modern Chinese history” in the larger context of globalization. Globalization, as a transnational phenomenon in world history, can be traced to the sixteenth century or earlier, when a capitalist world system emerged in northwestern Europe and expanded to other parts of the western hemisphere. However, as a discourse that has increasingly attracted the attention of intellectuals and the media, globalization has only a short history prevailing since the 1990s. What made possible the rise of this discourse are not only a revolution in information technologies that brought the different parts of the world closer to one another than before and created a growing global awareness, as well as new geopolitical and environmental challenges in the post–Cold War era that necessitated greater collaboration across national boundaries, but, more important, the rise of a number of large-size economies in the non-Western world (especially China and India), their unprecedented integration with the global capitalist system, and its profound impact on the existing world economic order. Since its origins in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the capitalist world system has been dominated by Western powers, which in turn gave rise to their hegemony in world politics. Until the 1980s, the “global” process of capitalist expansion had been basically a Western phenomenon, in which the “core” countries of Western Europe and North America plus Japan dictated the world economic order, while the “peripheral” countries in the nonWestern world were subject to the political hegemony and economic dominance of the former. The rise of the “new economies” since the 1990s, especially the escalation of China to the second largest economy in the early 2010s, not only signified the shifting of the world economic center from the Atlantic world to the Asia-Pacific region

Introduction

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that made the capitalist system truly global for the first time, but also redefined the terms of trade, capital flow, and redistribution of wealth across borders. For the first time, Western hegemony in world economy and geopolitics as well as the Eurocentric conception of “modernity” that reflected the historical hegemony of Western powers faced a fundamental challenge; people in the non-Western world are exposed to new alternatives in their pursuit of economic and political developments. For China, globalization not only means its full integration into the global system leading inevitably to the restructuring of the preexisting world economic order, but also a redefinition of China’s relationship with the rest of the world and a reconfiguration of China’s geopolitical relations. For Chinese historians, therefore, recounting China’s recent past in the context of globalization means first of all the extension of “time” in modern Chinese history. In most of the twentieth century, the “modern history” in China had been considered a history of revolutions; the triumph of the communist revolution in 1949 thus signified the ending of China’s “modern history”; the post-1949 period, as a living reality to historians in the People’s Republic, was completely separated from the revolutionary past and not considered part of history. In the 1990s, a significant number of historians equated modern Chinese history with the history of China’s modernization; the time of modern China thus was extended to the post-1949 period to cover the longer process of China’s modern transformation that has yet to be finished by the 2010s. Nevertheless, for modernization historians, the ending of “modern history” in China is also easily defined: as soon as China finishes the process of industrialization, urbanization, and democratization, no matter how ill-defined or how Eurocentric these concepts may be, its modern history would come to a conclusion. In sharp contrast, from the perspective of globalization, the “modern history” of China extends well beyond the point when China is “modernized”; finishing the immediate goals of modernization only allows the country to define “modernity” in its own terms; what challenges China after “modernization” is not only redefining its own version of modernity to accommodate new challenges within the country and promoting it as an alternative paradigm for development beyond its boundaries, but also redefining its role in the existing global capitalist system and reshaping the economic and political order within that system in order to effectively cope with the challenges that confront all of humanity.

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Interpreting modern China from the perspective of globalization thus also entails the broadening of “space” in modern Chinese history. Despite the importance of external influences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revolutions and modernization movements in China took place largely within its physical boundaries; the space of China’s “modern history,” in other words, was largely limited to the artificial “nation-state,” which itself was in the making in the past two centuries. But the nation-state will lose its validity as an explanatory tool as well as a historical space when we no longer define modern Chinese history as merely China’s revolution and/or modernization but instead look at it as a grand process of regeneration and revitalization of Chinese civilization in the larger context of its interaction with other civilizations and the reconfiguration of its relationship with other powers in the increasingly interconnected world. In a nutshell, a new interpretation of modern Chinese history in the age of globalization means not only the lengthening of its span to the centuries before the coming of Western influences that engendered Chinese revolutions and modernization movements and to the era beyond the process of China’s “modernization,” but also the widening of its space from within China’s national boundaries to the larger geopolitical setting in which the grand renewal of Chinese civilization has been taking place. All these changes in the content of modern Chinese history, needless to say, necessitate a corresponding change in the approach by which we comprehend the enlarged process and scope of modern China. Speculation regarding what such an approach might be will be offered at the end of this study after the existing approaches and their fallacies in interpreting modern China have been thoroughly examined.

---------------------------------- CHAP TER 2

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Origins of the Modernization Narrative Nationalist Historiography before 1949

Calling for a “revolution in history” (shijie geming) in China at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), then an exile in Japan after the failure of the 1898 reform, legitimated the “new historiography” he espoused by juxtaposing it to the old historiography prevailing in China: the latter, he lamented, dealt with “only the imperial court rather than the state,” “only individuals rather than society,” “only past stories rather than current affairs,” and “only facts rather than conceptions” (Liang Qichao 1936c, 1629). The mission of the new historiography, therefore, was to reveal “the universal principles and regularities” (gongli gongli) of the evolution of humankind as a “social group,” for history itself was nothing less than “the phenomenon of the evolution of human groups.” A fundamental difference between the old and new methods of history writing, Liang emphasized, was that the former treated China’s past as nothing more than a repeated cycle of “order and disorder,” whereas the latter inquired into the universalities of social evolution (ibid., 1632–1633). The ultimate purpose of the new historiography, Liang maintained, was to use it as a tool to “promote nationalism” and thereby ensure the survival of the Chinese people in the fierce competition of nations in the world. “Without a revolution in history, there would be no hope for the salvation of our nation” (ibid., 1631). Liang’s advocacy of a revolution in historical writing foreshadowed a fundamental transformation in twentieth-century Chinese historiography. Aside from the obvious change in the form of history writing—that is, a transition from predominantly the compilation of fragmented facts into chronicles without an explicitly articulated 33

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grand narrative to the recasting of the past into a coherent process with a clear account of its origins, phases, and consequences—the most important departure from the old historiography is found in the content of the so-called new historiography, that is, the construction of grand narratives that aimed to legitimate various present-day agendas in connection with nation building and/or state making.1 While Liang Qichao’s preoccupation at the beginning of the twentieth century was with the building of national identity, that is, the awakening of national consciousness among the people under the Qing through the rewriting of the Chinese past in light of the “universal principles” of the evolution of humankind, his successors in the 1930s would shift their attention to reinterpreting Chinese history for the urgent task of state making, which would mean either strengthening and overhauling the existing state by recasting it in the imagined context of China’s century-long “modernization” or overthrowing the regime by an invented process of “revolution” by the Chinese people against their enemies. In both cases, history writing would mean the construction of narratives under a borrowed or invented conceptual scheme for the purpose of rationalizing current political needs and goals. This chapter focuses on the production of the “modernization” narrative that characterized mainstream Chinese historiography in the 1930s, a critical moment in the political and intellectual history of twentieth-century China. On the one hand, state making made decisive headway after Guomindang forces subjugated warlord forces in different parts of China through the campaigns of Northern Expedition (1926–1928) and moved close to the goal of political unity when it declared the establishment of the Nationalist government in Nanjing in 1927. On the other hand, the new regime soon encountered severe challenges that would nullify the achievements that the Nationalists had made and put China into an unprecedented crisis. First, the worldwide depression that began in 1929 quickly affected the domestic economy; the dumping of foreign goods and the sharp decrease in exports caused the widespread bankruptcy of factories and hence a loss of confidence in China’s industrialization. Second, the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and Japan’s subsequent occupation of the three northeastern provinces constituted the severest challenge to China’s sovereignty since the nineteenth century. Third, the outbreak of the war between Chiang Kai-shek’s army and three provincial forces in 1930, the rapidly expanding “red areas” of the Chinese Communist Party, and finally the rebellion of a Nationalist force in Fujian and

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its creation of a separate government in 1933 shattered the dream of China’s political unity and stability that had been shared by many. The concurrence of these events caused a change in the political attitudes of mainstream intellectuals from their earlier passion for liberal capitalism in the 1910s and their nationalist fever in the 1920s to their growing concern with the urgent issue of China’s survival and the most effective approaches to speed up China’s political consolidation and economic reconstruction. The 1930s, therefore, saw a new tendency in which intellectuals’ zeal for imported ideologies yielded to rational and practical approaches to China’s problems that often defied their ideological commitment or turned ideologies into a tool to achieve political goals. Overall, they became politically conservative rather than radical: they gave up their earlier enthusiasm for liberal democracy and instead placed their belief in a strong state or an “enlightened dictatorship” for China’s unity and stability, and hence the possibility of China’s reconstruction and modernization. Economically, they abandoned their earlier faith in the Western model of private capitalism and instead espoused a planned economy, controlled capitalism, or a mixture of socialism and capitalism as the basic method of China’s modernization. To secure peace and time necessary for China’s modernization, the most eminent of the liberals further held that China had to adopt a conciliatory policy in its foreign relations and avoid a war with its enemy (namely, Japan) before China had built a modern military and modern industry. As will be shown throughout the book, this pragmatic turn in the 1930s had a profound impact on the intellectual and political history of China in the rest of the twentieth century. It is in this discursive context that the historiography of modern China in the 1930s can be properly understood. We will find that the basic assumptions shared by the intellectuals on China’s modernization directly shaped their interpretation of the major issues in modern Chinese history, and they further used their new interpretation of history to speak for the political agendas that were believed to represent the correct directions of China’s modernization.

DISCOURSE ON MODERNIZATION In the preface to a special issue on “the problems of China’s modernization” published by Shenbao yuekan in July 1933, the editor explained the purpose of the debate:

36

Origins of the Modernization Narrative Rather than a new issue, the problem of “China’s modernization” has been an old topic in the past eighty or ninety years. Since China’s defeat in the Opium War during the Daoguang reign of the Qing dynasty, the whole country has felt the acute stimulation of the invasion of Western forces, which led people to believe in the beginning of a major change in China unseen in its history of more than three thousand years. As a remedy to the situation, strenuous efforts were made to consolidate defense and develop transportation, hence the beginning of Western-style matters [yangwu], such as establishing arsenals, building steamships, constructing railroads, using telegrams, promoting sciences. . . . All these activities were the efforts of our predecessors to “modernize” China under the slogan of “Chinese learning as essence, Western learning as application,” a principle they proposed to deal with the issue [of modernization]. Unfortunately, despite the long history of that issue, China’s production and defense remain very young and backward in terms of “modernization.” The national economy has deteriorated to such a level nowadays that most people live under the miserable condition of half-starvation. The strength of national defense has weakened to such a degree that the four northeastern provinces were lost and no solution worked. It is not a good sign that we seem to have forgotten that old topic and paid little attention to it. We must keep in mind that without rapid progress toward modernization in production, our entire nation will never be able to escape the misfortune of extinction and eternal doom. The purpose for our having an open debate on the issue, to which no valid solutions have been made in recent decades, is to use the opinions of the discussants as a medicine to stimulate the many people who have long ignored China’s economic crisis and to remedy their numbness. (Shenbao yuekan 1933b, 1)

“Modernization,” as the editor understood it, was a process that had begun with the Self-Strengthening Movement in the 1860s but had never succeeded in China; how to “modernize” China remained the biggest challenge that confronted the entire nation. Not surprisingly, in its earlier notice to solicit contributions to the special issue, the magazine urged potential contributors to focus their discussion on two issues: “First, what are the difficulties in and barriers to China’s modernization? What are the preconditions for speeding up China’s modernization? Second, which method should China’s mod-

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ernization choose, individualist or socialist? Is it a modernization to be spurred by foreign investment or a spontaneous modernization by national capital? What are the steps for practicing such a method?” (Shenbao yuekan 1933c). The editor, therefore, wanted contributors to discuss China’s modernization not merely in its own terms but also in a worldwide context in order to identify the Chinese pattern of modernization. Modernization, as the editor explained it, was a worldwide process. “In the past two centuries,” he wrote in the solicitation, “many countries have undergone an industrial revolution, experienced the process of ‘modernization,’ and witnessed the emergence of modern capitalist social formation. This formation, however, has currently shown many of its deficiencies during the unprecedented economic depression in the whole world and has verged on collapse. Should China follow its old path or look for a new path in its future ‘modernization’?” (Shenbao yuekan 1933c). This debate is worth mentioning here because it signified the wide acceptance among intellectuals of “modernization” (xiandaihua) as a viable term, in place of the ill-defined and misleading “Westernization” and other conceptions, to describe the changes in the preceding two centuries in the West and to understand the challenges that confronted China since the mid-nineteenth century. It also evinced Chinese intellectuals’ awareness of the need to shift from their traditional concern with cultural issues inherent in the topic of China’s “Westernization” to the more important socioeconomic issues in the rather comprehensive process of modernization and to the Chinese model of modernization. More important, the debate shows the foremost characteristic of the modernization discourse in the 1930s, namely, the renunciation of liberalism and embrace of nationalism as the fundamental approach to the solution of China’s problems. In their response to the question of which method China should adopt for its economic reconstruction, most participants in the debate denied liberal capitalism as a feasible socioeconomic system in China and instead proposed various forms of “controlled economy” (tongzhi jingji) as its substitute. Among the sixteen articles and ten short essays published in the special issue of the magazine, there was only one that explicitly supported the idea of “private capitalism”; most of the others proposed a “socialist” method of modernization (nine articles), a “noncapitalist” economy (three), a “socialist planned economy” (two), a “planned economy” (one), a “controlled capitalism” (one), a combi-

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nation of socialism and capitalism (one), or socialism as the ultimate goal of China’s modernization (one). These authors favored a socialist economy exemplified by the Soviet Union or a controlled economy as seen in Germany because they believed that such noncapitalist economic systems had proved to be exceptionally successful in accelerating economic reconstruction and in building an industrial economy and a formidable military force in a short period, which was precisely what China desperately needed in the early 1930s. The free capitalist economy, in contrast, appeared to be ineffective and outdated, for it had caused anarchy in production, unemployment, inflation, disparity in wealth distribution, and the intensification of class struggle. As will be discussed in this chapter, the renunciation of liberal capitalism in favor of a controlled economy was consistent with the repudiation of liberal democracy in favor of a dictatorial state, a tendency prevailing among mainstream intellectuals in China in the 1930s. For the majority of them, the most urgent task for China was to find effective economic and political methods to modernize the country, even if modernization had to be achieved at the cost of the political and economic freedom of individuals. The modernization discourse, therefore, departed significantly from the “Westernization” discourse in the May Fourth period that had centered on intellectual enlightenment or the promotion of imported liberalist values. As a result of intellectuals’ reflection on the failures of China’s Westernization in the preceding years and response to the domestic and external crises that confronted China in the 1930s, the modernization discourse indicated the transition from liberalism to nationalism in their intellectual orientation and their growing awareness of the need for an alternative perspective that situated their understanding of China’s problems and the solution to them in the context of a history of repeated failures and troubled realities. Intellectual Origins of the Modernization Discourse

The terms “Westernization” (Xihua) and “Europeanization” (Ouhua) were first used by proponents of the New Culture Movement in the 1910s to repudiate the formulation of “Chinese learning as essence, Western learning as application,” which had dominated the thinking of the Self-Strengthening Movement leaders in the late nineteenth century, and to challenge the traditionalists who had spoken for the superiority of traditional Chinese culture over Western culture in

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the early twentieth century. It can be traced to the idea of evolution that was first introduced to China by Yan Fu (1853–1921) and later applied to historiography by Liang Qichao. Twenty years after his advocacy of a “revolution in history” in China, Liang reviewed Chinese history since the Opium War and divided that process into three phases. The first, from the Opium War to the Sino-Japanese war in 1894, was when the Chinese felt a “shortage in material instruments” and thus began their efforts to learn Western technologies and sciences. The second phase, from 1895 to around 1917, was when the Chinese realized their “deficiency in the institutions” and embarked on political reforms and revolutions, which, however, ended in failure. During the third phase, beginning with the end of World War I, the Chinese recognized their “deficiency in culture” and started the enlightenment movement to fundamentally change the social culture and mentality of the people. The history of China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in other words, was a process of evolution, moving upward from the material level through the institutional level and finally to the spiritual level (Liang Qichao 1936b). What China needed, in the words of the New Culture advocates in the late 1910s and 1920s, was “wholesale Westernization” (see Luo Rongqu 1993, 358–359). However, the idea of “Westernization” or “wholesale Westernization” incurred questioning and opposition from some intellectuals shortly after it was proposed. Witnessing the massive destruction caused by World War I in Europe, Liang Qichao, who had wholeheartedly espoused European civilization, declared the “bankruptcy of material civilization” in the West and proposed to replace the simple slogan of “Westernization” with a new attitude that aimed “to enrich our civilization with Western civilization and to complement Western civilization with our civilization, hence the making of a new civilization through combination” (Liang Qichao 1936a, 3495). Liang Shuming (1893–1988), too, disagreed with the assumption of Western culture as the only model of modern progress; instead, he proposed the concept of “world culture” as the universal pattern to be shared by all human societies; he adopted Chinese, Western, and Indian cultures as the three forms of world culture that represented the three successive orientations of its evolution (i.e., from the forward-looking through the inward-looking and to the backwardlooking orientations). Chinese culture, he claimed, would eventually replace the presently dominant Western culture to become the

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universal world culture in the future (Liang Shuming 1921 [2006]). Liang’s promise of a renaissance of Chinese culture in the world, needless to say, had a strong appeal to intellectuals and the general public, who had long been frustrated by the prolonged national crisis. So popular was his book that it was reprinted five times in the first year after its publication in 1921. Liang’s purpose was to justify the viability of Chinese culture in the face of rampant Western influences in China. But his work nevertheless offered a fresh perspective for Chinese intellectuals to rethink the relationship between Chinese and Western cultures. Instead of a simple juxtaposition between China and the West and the blatant proposition of “Westernization,” he suggested treating the differences between the two cultures as those between two civilizations at different stages of evolution. Chang Yansheng (1898–1947) picked up Liang’s ideas and explained the differences more explicitly in terms of phases of evolution: “My opinion on the issue of world culture,” he stated, “has long been that there is not such a difference between the East and the West in the world at all. What we mean by the so-called differences between the East and the West are actually the differences between the ancient and the modern”; “the development of Western civilization in modern times is not based on any particularities unique to the ethnicity [of Western peoples]; rather it represented an inevitable phase of the universal involution of humankind” (Chang Yansheng 1935 [1990], 177). By 1935, a consensus was reached among the participants in the debate on “China-based culture” to accept “modern culture” as a worldwide culture that no longer recognized distinctions between the East and the West. As Tao Menghe, a professor at Peking University, put it, all cultures created by modern nations belonged to the whole world and should be open to every nation for adoption; furthermore, each nation should “boldly absorb the culture developed by other nations.” “The future of humankind,” he wrote, “should not solely count on Western cultures.” The Chinese nation should play an important role in the making of the “new culture” to be shared by all nations in the world (Tao Menghe 1935, 13–16). The switch from the China/West dyad to the ancient/modern binary accounted for Chinese intellectuals’ gradual abandonment of the term “Westernization” and adoption of the new term “modernization” in their writings in the 1930s. In his essay “Cultural Conflict in Today’s China,” written in 1929 for Christian Yearbook, Hu Shi

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used the term “wholehearted modernization” to replace “wholesale Westernization,” which he had used before. By his definition, “Western civilization” had become “world civilization” or the equivalent of “modern civilization” (Hu Shi 1929a, 167–168). The New Culture Movement was significant, Hu explained, precisely because it promoted “the full acceptance of the new civilization of the world” (Hu Shi 1929b, 580). Because of increasing criticism of the term “wholesale Westernization,” Hu Shi officially gave it up and replaced it with what might be translated “full-scale worldization” (chongfen shijiehua) in 1935 (Hu Shi 1935a, 454). Jiang Tingfu, a history professor at Tsinghua University and cofounder of the political magazine Duli pinglun (Independent review), used the term “modernization” more often than any other scholars in his writings in the 1930s. He underscored the central role of modern science in the process of modernization. As he put it, “the modernization that we advocate is the wide application of scientific knowledge, scientific skills, and the scientific method of thinking” (Jiang Tingfu 1938, 4). But modernization was not limited to the proliferation and application of the sciences. “Modern world culture,” Jiang elaborated, “has two important particularities: one is natural science, and the other is the machinery industry. Both of them have engendered political, economic, and social changes, such as mass participation in government, the emergence of transcontinental colonial empires, the struggle between the capitalist class and the working class, large companies that dominate the world market, and so on” (Jiang Tingfu 1937, 205). Modernization, or what Jiang called “total modernization” (zhengge xiandaihua) (Jiang Tingfu 1932a, 16), was therefore a multifaceted process that rested on the application of modern science in production but also involved the transformation of the entire society. Similar definitions of modernization are found in the writings of other intellectuals. Some of the contributors to the aforementioned special issue of Shenbao yuekan, for example, defined modernization as the “construction of an entire society” (Yi Ying 1933, 229–230) or a process of “industrialization” and the “subsequent modernization of education, scholarship, and other social institutions” (Zhang Sumin 1933, 233–234). Other contributors distinguished narrowly defined “modernization” from a more broadly defined one: the former underscored economic transformation, especially industrialization and the overall improvement of productivity, whereas the

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latter referred to changes in the social, political, and cultural areas. Summarizing the debate, the editor of Shenbao yuekan described “modernization” in the postscript of the special issue as a process centered on the “transformation of national economy, industrialization, and increase in productivity” but encompassed a “wide range” of changes in “political, literary, academic, and social systems and many other aspects” (Shenbao yuekan 1933a). Compared to the earlier debate on Westernization that had focused almost entirely on cultural and political issues, especially the relationship between Chinese and Western cultures/civilizations, the emerging consensus on multifaceted modernization showed increasing attention to socioeconomic issues that had become particularly pressing in the early 1930s in the wake of a worldwide depression and imperialist invasion. Most important, the switch from Westernization to modernization reflected intellectuals’ increasing awareness of the fallacy of viewing Western culture or Western liberal capitalism as the only model for non-Western countries to become “rich and strong.” Reviewing the changes in the discourse on modernization in China, Feng Youlan astutely remarked in 1944: People used to say that we needed Westernization; nowadays we often say that we need modernization. This is not merely a change of term; it reflects a recent change of perception. It shows that people have increasingly realized that Western culture is superior, as we understood it to be before, not because it is Western, but because it is modern. And we have suffered losses widely in the past one hundred years not because our culture is Chinese, but because our culture is medieval. This awareness is indeed great. (Feng Youlan 1944, 204)

Forerunner to Modernization Theory?

The wide use of the term “modernization” and the conception of modernization as an all-around process of societal transformation led some researchers to conclude that the “concept and viewpoint of modernization” occurred first in China and “about twenty years” earlier than in the West (Luo Rongqu 1993, 365). Indeed, a strong resemblance existed between the idea of modernization in China in the 1930s and 1940s, and the modernization theory that prevailed in the United States and the rest of the West in the 1950s and 1960s.

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This is not surprising; many of the Chinese intellectuals who upheld the idea of modernization in the 1930s and 1940s received their higher education in the United States. Therefore, they shared with modernization theorists in the West some of the basic assumptions about the progress of history and social evolution as well as the concepts and methodologies of the social sciences that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century. As will be shown in this chapter and again in Chapter 7, where Western modernization theory will be examined, both concepts of modernization accepted the universality and inevitability of the process of modernization in all societies; both assumed a dichotomy between a traditional agricultural society and a modern society based on mechanical power; both underlined the central role of scientific knowledge and its application in production in driving economic and social progresses; both treated individual nations or nation-states as the unit of analysis and tended to focus on domestic factors in explaining the success or failure of modernization; and both highlighted the central role of enlightened elites in carrying out modernizing programs and discredited the efficacy of revolution and violence in that process. But substantial differences existed between the Chinese intellectuals and postwar American social scientists in their conceptions of modernization. Modernization theory prevailed in the United States in the 1950s primarily to meet the needs of the U.S. government to influence state making and economic planning in third world countries in its confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Cold War (Latham 2000). It offered third world countries the prospect of becoming like contemporary American society if they followed the “phases” of modernization. The features of a “modernized” society that the theorists defined, such as mass participation in policy making, a high level of industrialization and urbanization, the culture of mass consumption, and the welfare state, reflected idealized conditions that the United States and other Western societies were attempting to achieve. It is no wonder that since its early days modernization theory has been criticized for its Eurocentric perspective. In sharp contrast, Chinese intellectuals derived the idea of modernization from their need for a more valid conceptual framework to understand the nature of the challenge that had confronted China since the nineteenth century and from their recognition of the failure of earlier approaches to make China “rich and strong,” including “Chinese learning as essence and Western learning as application”

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in the late Qing period and “wholesale Westernization” in the early Republican years. Therefore, unlike the American modernization theorists who conceived the variables of a modernized society in terms of the developments in the postwar United States, Chinese intellectuals defined the goals of China’s modernization by looking for what they believed would be most effective for China to overcome its problems in the 1930s. Instead of embracing democracy as the aim of China’s political development, most favored a centralized (and even dictatorial) state to terminate political disunity and provide the society with peace and stability. Economically, instead of embracing a capitalist system based on private ownership and free market principles, most of them espoused a noncapitalist controlled economy or a socialist system to avoid the ills of capitalism and speed up China’s reconstruction. Thus, contrary to modernization theory that idealized American society as epitomizing modernity while treating communism as an anomaly to modernism and rejecting fascism as a form of modernism (Gilman 2003, 15), Chinese intellectuals generally admired the efficiency of the centralized political and economic systems they found in Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and accepted them as the models for China to follow for its own “modernization.” To recapitulate, despite its ostensible resemblance to modernization theory in the postwar United States, modernization discourse emerged among Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s primarily as their response to China’s repeated failures since the nineteenth century and to the unprecedented crises that distressed the nation in the 1930s. It reflected a transition in their intellectual inclination from indiscriminate acceptance of Western civilization to realistic attitudes to China’s problems. It was in the discursive context of China’s modernization that mainstream intellectuals perceived the nature of the major challenges facing China, formed their attitudes toward different political forces, and interpreted the historical experiences of modern China.

THE MODERNIZATION OF CHINA The modernization discourse in the 1930s had a direct impact on liberal intellectuals’ understanding of modern Chinese history. Two historians, Jiang Tingfu and Chen Gonglu, stood out as the most influential scholars in reinterpreting China’s recent history from the

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perspective of modernization. Both were concerned with China’s failure to modernize in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and looked for the reasons within, rather than outside the country, and both expressed a similar opinion about China’s domestic problems and foreign relations on the basis of their understandings of its modern history. Educated in the United States from 1911 to 1923 and with a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, Jiang began his career as a professor and chair of the history department at Nankai University in Tianjin in 1923. After 1929, he taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he focused his research on China’s diplomatic relations in the late Qing period until 1935, when he joined the Nationalist government. Jiang’s most influential work was his Zhongguo jindaishi (Modern history of China), which was finished and first published in 1938. It was the first book that assumed “modernization” to be the major challenge to late Qing and Republican China, and in it Jiang interpreted the major issues in modern Chinese history from the modernization perspective. The concepts and interpretations that Jiang used and formulated in this book shaped mainstream historical writing on modern China in the following decades. He was later praised as “the man who laid the foundation for the study of modern Chinese history” and whose “new methods and new concepts” created “a new style of research” that brought the field of modern Chinese history to a “new level” (Liu Fengxiang 1965, 27). The Elitist Approach to Modernization

At the very beginning of his Zhongguo jindaishi, Jiang wrote: A fundamental question has challenged the Chinese nation for almost a century. That is, can the Chinese modernize and catch up with the Westerners? Can we utilize science and machinery? And can we give up our family- and community-centered notions and organize a modern nation-state? If we can, our nation will have a bright future; and we will not, if we cannot. Of all nations in the world, those who embrace Western civilization will necessarily become rich and strong, and those who do not will end up being crushingly defeated. There are no exceptions. (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 3)

Jiang pointed to two developments central to his understanding of “modernization” ( jindaihua). One is the use of scientific

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knowledge and machinery in production, which had brought about economic, social, and political changes in the modern world (Jiang Tingfu 1937). The other was the making of a modern nation-state, which he believed to be as important as the application of science and machinery in the process of modernization. Medieval Europe, Jiang noted, was similar to China’s situation during the Spring and Autumn period, when the land was fragmented into many autonomous states, and Europe’s circumstances after the Renaissance were very like what China experienced during the Warring States. The Europeans, however, developed a vehement patriotism and a deeply ingrained notion of ethnic identity during a time of fierce competition among the powers. This new notion of nationalism, Jiang argued, was essential to the making of a unified, strong nation-state (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 2). For non-Western countries that started modernization later, Jiang emphasized, the centralization of power and creation of a strong state were especially critical to their success. Unlike the process in the West that started from the bottom up, modernization in the non-Western countries, initiated by rulers, always took place from the top down, often counter to the opinion of the conservative masses. Therefore, Jiang asserted, centralized state power was indispensable to successful reforms in those countries, and “the more centralized the state’s power was, the more successful were its efforts of modernization” (Jiang Tingfu 1937, 208). Science, machinery, and nationalism thus are the key elements in Jiang’s definition of modernization. After establishing the spread of modern science and the making of a nation-state as the two key criteria for evaluating the process of modernization, Jiang proceeded to examine China’s experiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He identified four different schemes for “saving the nation and saving the people” ( jiuguo jiumin) that were implemented successively in China. The first was the scheme of “self-strengthening” from the 1860s to the 1890s. This plan, in Jiang’s view, was “incomplete” because the provincial governors who sponsored the movement had limited understanding of Western civilization and, furthermore, because the existing political institutions and social milieu prevented them from pushing the movement any further (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 62–69). China’s defeat by Japan in 1894 bespoke the failure of the partial modernization that had been limited to military and industrial areas. The next attempt at “saving the nation and saving the people” was Kang Youwei’s

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Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898, which aimed to create a constitutional monarchy and therefore was more complete (ibid., 98–102). But the reform failed, Jiang explained, owing to the weakness of the limited number of reformers and the strong opposition from conservatives who predominated in the court as well as among the gentry elites. The third scheme, embodied in the appeals of Boxer rebels in 1900, was anti-Western and antimodernization; its disastrous failure only proved that China could not reverse historical trends in its quest for survival in the modern age. The last one was Sun Yat-sen’s “three principles of the people” and his three-phase strategy, which began with military unification of the country, continued through political tutelage of the people, and ended with the creation of a constitutional democracy. Jiang praised this scheme as “the only path of national revival” but reminded his readers that it had been far from successful during Sun’s time and that it was Chiang Kai-shek in the 1920s and 1930s who carried out that scheme to make China a fully independent and modernized nation (ibid., 109–128). To understand why Jiang singled out the aforementioned four events to make up the grand narrative of China’s modernization and why he held his own opinions on each of the schemes, it is necessary to take a close look at his approach to historical interpretation. Given his emphasis on the central role of modern science and industry in the process of modernization, Jiang’s account of modern Chinese history naturally emphasized reform programs or movements that contributed to the promotion of modern science and the development of modern industry in China; at the same time, he paid little attention to social structures and class relations. He explicitly opposed the Marxist theory of class struggle and disagreed with the idea of “interpreting Chinese history by analyzing the private interest of the landlord class or capitalist class.” In Jiang’s opinion, the political attitude of a group of people was not necessarily based on its economic and social status; it was meaningless and misleading to explain complicated political phenomena with the simplistic method of class analysis. If there was any class who played a key role in Chinese history, Jiang argued, that would be the “bureaucratic class” (guanli jieji). However, this class, Jiang noted, had a particular stance and views. Although the bureaucrats came from the landlord or capitalist class, “they did not represent any group of people; they only performed their duties as bureaucrats” (Jiang Tingfu 1934, 179). This autonomy of the bureaucratic class allowed

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Jiang to explain the tremendous differences between the conservatives and reformers within the bureaucratic class, whose contrasting attitudes toward modernization had nothing to do with their class status or economic interest. As a reflection of his historical approach, Jiang’s historical account foregrounded the ruling elites in China’s modernization and downplayed the activities of the populace. In his opinion, only the few enlightened and informed elites played a true leading role in China’s economic and sociopolitical progress. He observed in 1938 that “in the preceding six decades, all of our reforms were implemented from the top down and all new enterprises were initiated by the few foresighted and enlightened ones (xianzhi xianjue zhe), who exerted utmost efforts and underwent all kinds of hardship to carry their plans out over a long period of time” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 69). Before the Sino-Japanese war of 1894, Jiang remarked, those few leaders were found “among those holding office in the court,” including the Manchu princes and Han governors in charge of the self-strengthening movement. After 1894, the leadership gradually moved to the hands of those “out of office,” and the latter, notably Kang Youwei during the Hundred Days’ Reform and later Sun Yatsen and other leading revolutionaries, “were all intellectuals rather than the ordinary masses” (ibid.). Jiang’s approval of the modernizing elites was in sharp contrast with his depiction of the populace as being illiterate, ignorant, and superstitious, constituting “one of the major impediments to China’s acceptance of Western culture in the modern era” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 69). Throughout the nineteenth century, Jiang wrote, the conservatives in the government, ranging from Lin Zexu and his colleagues in Guangdong during the Opium War to Empress Dowager Cixi and her supporters in the court during the Boxer Rebellion, had appealed to “the people’s will” (minxin) and “the people’s morale” (minqi) to defend their foreign policies. “Those who proposed ‘suppressing the barbarians’ ( jiaoyi) all believed that the four hundred million countrymen were invincible” (ibid., 103–104). It was, however, precisely the conservatives’ use of the ignorant masses that brought about the repeated disasters in modern China. Jiang generally disparaged popular violence in late Qing China. The Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s and early 1860s, despite its importance in reshaping the late Qing political landscape, was missing from Jiang’s recounting of China’s schemes of modernization. He depicted

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the Boxer Rebellion as disastrous to China’s progress and mentioned it as only to accentuate the necessity of the leadership of educated and enlightened elites. Why Did China Fail to Modernize?

China’s modernization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Jiang observed, was exceptionally difficult and sluggish. Therefore, a central issue that he had to address was why China failed to respond to Western challenges as quickly and effectively as Russia, Japan, and, to some degree, Turkey had done. Instead of castigating foreign imperialism, Jiang pinpointed reasons unique to China, primarily the medieval nature of Chinese society. Unlike the European nations that had already laid a solid foundation for science, had begun to apply machinery to production and warfare, and had developed strong nationalist sentiments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Chinese scholars, Jiang contended, were still obsessed with writing “eight-legged essays” for the civil service examination and studying the ancient theories of yin-yang and the five agents (yinyang wuhang); China’s industry, agriculture, transportation, and the military remained the same as they had been for thousands of years; ordinary people were still bound by archaic loyalties to the family and the local community; the whole country still looked like “a sheet of loose sands” ( yi pan san sha) (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 2). Compared to Western countries, China still “stagnated in the medieval age” (ibid., 3). Jiang particularly lashed out at the conservative attitudes among the Confucian literati. This is evident in his analysis of the gentry elites after the Opium War in 1840. As he put it, The military defeat [of China] in the Opium War was not fatal to the nation. The fatal wound of the nation lay in the facts that no inquiry was made into the reasons it was defeated and that no reform effort was made after the war. Had the reforms of the Tongzhi and Guanxu reigns [1862–1874 and 1874–1908] taken place during the years of Daoguang [1820–1850] and Xianfeng [1851–1862], China’s modernization would have occurred twenty years earlier than Japan’s, and the modern history of the Far East would have been completely different. Unfortunately, during the times of Daoguang and Xianfeng, no one learned the lesson of the military defeat, and the situations before and after the war were

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As Jiang explained it, conservatism prevailed among the elites for several reasons. One was cultural traditions that were deeply rooted in Chinese history, which made it difficult for the gentry members to acknowledge the necessity of reforms. Second, traditional culture was the very basis on which they made a living. “Changing that culture was to undermine their livelihood. If new reforms were introduced, those gentry members would face the danger of unemployment. No wonder they opposed the reforms.” Third, the gentry class “lacked the spirit of independence and courage.” Thus, although there were always a few who were clear-headed, they would choose to stay silent in fear of attack from the conservatives (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 21). He gave as an example Lin Zexu (1785– 1850), the commissioner responsible for banning opium smuggling in 1839, which gave rise to the Opium War. In Jiang’s opinion, Lin knew the situations in and outside China well; he realized the inferiority of the Chinese military and would have been eager to buy Western guns and boats. Lin also made tremendous effort to collect foreign publications, which later formed the source material for Haiguo tuzhi (Illustrated gazetteer of maritime kingdoms), authored by Wei Yuan, Lin’s close friend, who proposed “learning advanced techniques from the barbarians to use against the barbarians.” Lin, however, would never openly propose the idea of learning from the West, afraid of being criticized by the conservatives. “He would never openly propose reforms; he would let the scholar-officials who shaped public opinion remain asleep; he let his country weaken day after day and would not risk his reputation to argue with his contemporaries. Lin was no doubt the best product of China’s old culture. He believed his own fame was more important than national affairs” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 23). Another factor that Jiang underlined in explaining China’s sluggish and ineffectual response to the West was the ruling elites’ view of the world order. Instead of treating Western countries as equals, Jiang explained, the Qing court saw them as tributary

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states, assuming China’s cultural superiority and the latter’s subservience. It was thus extremely difficult for the ruling elites to accept the notion of modern diplomacy between equals. The only options conceivable to the Qing court in dealing with those nations were “suppressing the barbarians” ( jiaoyi) and “harnessing the barbarians” (fuyi) (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 6–7). It was unthinkable for the gentry elites to acknowledge China’s backwardness in knowledge and institutions and to learn from the “barbarians.” Resistance to modernizing projects thus was particularly strong during the late Qing period, as evidenced in their hostility to the proposals and projects of self-strengthening from the 1860s through the 1890s (ibid., 66–69). While he attributed China’s failures in the nineteenth century primarily to factors unique to China, Jiang’s attitudes toward imperialism were ambivalent. The fundamental force that drove China to modernize, in his opinion, was the challenge from Western capitalist powers. Because of the inertia of the time-honored cultural system and the conservative attitude of the gentry class living in that system, Jiang explained, China’s response to Western challenges always appeared passive and torpid. The level and scope of Chinese reactions thus depended on the magnitude of the impact of foreign challenges; they would not take any further steps to reform until China suffered greater disasters caused by foreign aggression. The process of China’s modern progress had to take the form of repeated cycles of Western challenges and Chinese responses (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 107–109).2 Jiang well acknowledged the inimical aspects of Western impacts on China. He admitted that imperialism was the “major enemy” of the Chinese nation in the late Qing and Republican years. But he tried to distinguish between imperialism and foreign capitalism. He maintained that foreign capitalism could be both detrimental and beneficial to China. International investments became aggressive and imperialistic only when they were used by politicians to aggrandize their political power or when foreign capitalists relied on political pressure to carry out their investment plans. However, Jiang added, not all foreign investments were harmful; they could be pure and beneficial to both the investors and the receivers if they did not carry a political function. “Undeveloped countries are liable to the oppression and aggression of capitalist countries, but they can also utilize foreign capital to tap local resources and develop their

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economy, and international trade can also help improve the living standards of their people.” Foreign capitalism, therefore, could be both imperialistic and nonimperialistic; it was just like water that could be “both useful for irrigation and transportation, and disastrous” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 70–73). Jiang disagreed with the propagandists of both the Communist and Nationalist parties who attributed China’s poverty and backwardness solely to external factors, especially the exploitation of imperialism. Instead, he emphasized factors internal to China, especially its lack of modern institutions and modern knowledge. Thus, although anti-imperialist feelings prevailed in China in the late 1920s during the Nationalist Revolution, Jiang honestly proclaimed that he “could not hate imperialism as much as other countrymen.” In his opinion, China would have been able to develop the kind of economic and political systems found in Europe had it been willing to do so and had it eradicated the inefficiency and disorganization in its society. “Those who have kept shouting ‘down with imperialism’ but failed to improve their living standard are only self-destroying cowards. The victims of imperialism and colonialism, in other words, should have been able to improve their situation or at least to replace the relationship of one dominating the other with that of equality and mutual benefit” (Jiang Tingfu 1979, 78). To sum up, several features thus characterize Jiang’s modernization narrative. First, he assumed the universality of the process of modernization, which he conceptualized on the basis of European experiences, and believed in its inevitability for all non-Western countries, including China. Second, his emphasis on the key role of science and machinery in modernization led him to accentuate top-down reform programs conducive to the dissemination of scientific knowledge, the use of machines, and the strengthening of the nation; the same approach also accounted for his gross neglect of socioeconomic relations and class structures in his interpretive schema. Third, in sharp contrast with his stress on the leadership of enlightened elites in China’s modernization was his disregard for the role of popular masses and his general disposition to depict them as ignorant, conservative, and destructive. Finally, when explaining the reasons behind China’s repeated failures of modernization, he underscored factors endogenous to Chinese society, especially its cultural traditions, rather than those external to China.

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Chen Gonglu and His Interpretation of Modern China

Jiang Tingfu was not alone among mainstream historians in the 1920s and 1930s in recounting modern Chinese history from the modernization perspective. Many of his colleagues shared a similar understanding of the key issues about modern China: they all believed modernization or Westernization to be the inevitable trend in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China; they all attributed China’s failure to modernize primarily to its own problems rather than imperialism; they all focused on the modernizing efforts of “enlightened” intellectuals and ruling elites and sympathized with their “rational,” incremental approaches in institutional changes; and they all presumed the ignorance and conservativeness of the populace and consequently disparaged their antigovernment and antiforeign actions as necessarily destructive to China’s social progress. Among them was Chen Gonglu, whose lengthy Zhongguo jindaishi (Modern history of China) was widely accepted as the most authoritative textbook on modern Chinese history in China before 1949. Like Jiang Tingfu, Chen saw the conflicts between China and foreign powers as a critical issue in China’s modern history and attributed China’s repeated frustrations in its foreign relations to the tenacity and obsoleteness of China’s traditional institutions. As he posited at the very beginning of his book: Foreign influence is one of the major forces that has shaped the current situation in China. The long history of China, however, has nourished a conservative inclination, as manifested ultimately in the thinking of government leaders and the notions of the populace. Politicians, therefore, were unable to realize the new circumstances in which they were situated and make proper responses. The powers tried to apply Western institutions to China, attempted to pursue commercial interests, sought political influence, or harbored the ambition of territorial annexation. China, however, always responded to the issues of the new era with its indigenous mindset and practices, resulting invariably in failure. The conflict between China and the West thus became the major issue in modern Chinese history. (Chen Gonglu 1935, 1)

Instead of blaming the Western powers for China’s distress, Chen consistently stressed the Qing court’s ignorance, stubbornness, and

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improper handling of foreign issues for China’s repeated conflicts with the West and its predicament in international relations. The outbreak of the Opium War, in his view, resulted from the ignorance of Qing officials, exemplified by Lin Zexu’s absurd assumption of Westerners’ reliance on Chinese goods for survival and his abrupt and indiscriminate measures in dealing with the British merchants in Guangzhou (Chen Gonglu 1935, 54–57). China failed in the war, Chen wrote, because government leaders knew little about Britain and its military, and because they were overconfident. It was even more miserable for China, Chen concluded, that the ruling elites did not realize the reason for China’s defeat during and after the war, and refused to acknowledge the inferiority of the Chinese military forces; instead, they attributed China’s failure to the activities of “Chinese traitors” (hanjian) who sold goods to the British or worked for them (ibid., 74–75). It was no wonder, Chen argued, the bureaucrats in the Qing government showed no willingness to learn from the West after the war and remained as blind and arrogant as before, which only caused the outbreak of the Second Opium War and China’s repeated defeat. What the Qing rulers disputed with the foreigners during the negotiation process, Chen found, was not grave matters pertaining to China’s sovereignty, such as tariff rates, but the trivial issue of the ritual of the Qing emperor’s reception of foreign ambassadors, which, in Chen’s view, was further evidence of the Qing ruler’s stupidity (ibid., 126). Unfortunately, Chen observed, the conservative and xenophobic mentality of the rulers and gentry elites persisted well into the twentieth century during the Boxer Rebellion, when they still believed in China’s invincibility in dealing with the joined forces of foreign powers and attributed China’s defeat again to the activities of “Chinese traitors.” “It is evident,” Chen concluded, “that, from the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing though the Treaty of Tianjin and the Treaty of Shimonoseki to the Boxer Protocol, each time China’s loss was greater than before, which could only be explained by the lack of understanding and improper handling by those in power. The foreigners only took advantage of the opportunities; for what else should they bear the blame?” (ibid., 558). Given the prevailing conservatism among the ruling elites, the proposals and actions of the few enlightened bureaucrats to modernize China’s defense and industry in the nineteenth century became particularly commendable in Chen’s opinion. He thus

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praised Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) for his “familiarity with foreign affairs” and “committment to China’s reforms” (Chen Gonglu 1935, 240) and described him as a man of “great wisdom and foresight” (yingzhe mingda) (ibid., 437). When explaining Li’s failures in the Self-Strengthening Movement, Chen repeatedly emphasized the resistance from conservative gentry leaders. He identified several factors that accounted for their conservativeness. One was the deeply rooted prejudice against reform among the elites, who had learned from Chinese history of repeated disasters caused by reforms and the tragic end of reformers and therefore all adhered to the established rules for self-protection (ibid., 241). More fundamentally, Chen contended, the gentry elites’ conservativeness derived from their widely accepted assumption of China’s cultural superiority over foreign countries, who believed in the perfection of Chinese political and cultural institutions, and treated any proposal for Westernization as “turning the civilized Chinese into barbarians” ( yong yi bian xia) (ibid., 440). Thus, like Jiang Tingfu, Chen saw the cultural resistance from within China as the primary reason behind China’s failure to modernize. The detrimental effects of imperialism on China’s modern economic and political development, which Marxist historians consistently emphasized, were largely missing in Chen’s narrative. Chen concurred with Jiang in disapproving the collective violence of the populace. He depicted the Taiping Rebellion as a disaster to both traditional Chinese culture and the social economy. The rebels’ indiscriminate destruction of temples and shrines, Chen observed, was not only “a most heinous crime” in the eyes of contemporaries, but indeed a “most foolish” action, for Hong Xiuquan based his action on his own religious ideas that were “utterly ridiculous and infantile,” and he showed no respect for those with different faiths and for artworks that deserved protection (ibid., 156). Chen claimed that the devastation caused by the Taiping rebels, the Nian rebels in the north, and the Miao rebels in the southwest, which lasted for twenty-four years (from 1850 to 1873), had wiped out about one-third of the Chinese population (ibid., 210–218). The Boxers in Chen’s depiction were a “foolish mob driven by their emotion or greed for profit” and manipulated by conservative ministers (ibid., 518, 557); their violence only incurred the joint interference of Western countries. Thus, unlike the Marxist historians who extolled the Taiping Rebellion as the height of the antifeudal revolution and the Boxer Rebellion as the height of the anti-imperialist movement

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in modern China, Chen and other mainstream historians saw the two major events as responsible for either unprecedented devastation to China’s society and economy, or unparalleled humiliation to the Chinese nation by foreign powers. The Intellectual Background of Mainstream Historians

To understand why the mainstream historians in Republican China favored the modernization narrative as described above in their recounting of modern Chinese history, it is necessary to look at their academic backgrounds. The concept of evolution, which was first imported from the West by Yan Fu and later applied to the interpretation of Chinese history by Liang Qichao, was more influential than any other idea in shaping historians’ thought about China’s past. Many history textbooks published in the 1920s and 1930s based their interpretations of modern China on the assumption of social evolution or a linear progress of society from antiquity to modernity, exemplified by Western civilization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Chu Zhuwu 2006). Li Taifen, who published Xinzhu Zhongguo jin bainian shi (A new history of China in the recent one hundred years) in 1924, for example, stated that the preceding century was not only a time of unprecedented foreign challenges and drastic social change, but more fundamentally a process of “evolution of the government from autocracy to a republic and of the society from one of simplicity to one of complexity” (ibid). Yin Shuixin, for his part, noted in his 1926 textbook three developments in China’s recent past that had set its “modern history” apart from its premodern history, namely, the enlargement of the Chinese nation by absorbing into it all major ethnic groups around China proper; the establishment of a republic in place of autocracy; and China’s transition from a state of self-centered seclusion to involvement in intensive conflicts with foreign powers (ibid). Chen Gonglu likewise assumed a dichotomy between traditional Chinese “mentalities and practices,” on the one hand, and Western civilization, on the other. For Chen, the fundamental challenges to the Chinese people were to overcome the conservative attitudes of the ruling elites and the populace and to deal with the growing threat of foreign dominance that resulted from “significant progress in practical sciences, the improvement of worldwide transportation, and the intensification of international relations made possible by commercial and political activities” (Chen Gonglu 1935, 1). Thus, despite

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their varying accounts of specific events and individuals in late Qing and early Republican China, all these historians shared an assumption in China’s inevitable evolution from a state of isolation, conservatism, and autocracy toward its integration into the world and eventual acceptance of science and democracy. The modernization narrative that predominated in their works, in a word, reflected the widely accepted evolutionary view of Chinese history. Methodologically, the mainstream historians tended to accept the “new historiography” approach proposed by Liang Qichao at the beginning of the twentieth century as well as Western historiographical methodologies newly introduced to China, including empiricism from Europe and “New History” from the United States. Western-language works on empiricism, such as Introduction aux études historiques by the French historians Charles-Victor Langlois (1863–1929) and Charles Seignobos (1854–1942) and Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie by the German historian Ernst Bernheim (1850–1942), were translated into Chinese and adopted as basic readings for courses on historiographical methods at the leading universities (Ouyang Junxi 2003). Influenced by the empiricists’ thinking as well as by Chinese philological traditions, the historians took it for granted that the first step of historical research was the exhaustive collection and careful examination of historical evidence. Fu Sinian (1896–1950), who founded the Historical and Linguistic Institute of Academia Sinica in 1928, thus remarked that “the study of modern history [of China] is nothing less than the study of historical data, utilizing all the tools offered by natural sciences to examine the source material available to us” and that “the facts [of history] will naturally become clear once we have examined the material” (cited in ibid., 92). Therefore, he set collecting and classifying historical material as the major task of his newly founded institute, beginning with the archiving and cataloging of the voluminous files from the imperial palace of the Qing dynasty. Scholars from other academic institutions also joined in the daunting task of classifying the palace archives. An active participant in this project, Jiang Tingfu hand-copied more than two thousand documents and compiled them into the two-volume Jindai Zhongguo waijiao shi ziliao jiyao (A compendium of essential documents on the diplomatic history of modern China), published in 1931 and 1934, which soon became one of the most important reference books for students in modern Chinese history.

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The influence of empiricism on Chinese historians, however, was not limited to arousing their interest in source material. From their primary attention to historical evidence, the historians also developed the view that historical phenomena should be judged strictly according to the historical facts they had established, avoiding any influence by subjective bias or political stance. Chen Gonglu, a firm believer in empiricism, particularly stressed the importance of “an impartial stance” in historical research and cautioned against the inclination to manipulate historical facts and conclusions to serve the purpose of “vilifying or defending contemporaries,” which was particularly likely to occur when discussing diplomatic issues. “A universal characteristic of human beings,” he explained, “is to be harsh when criticizing others and generous when examining oneself. They apply the same attitude to issues regarding the family as to the state. Thus, few Chinese people oppose calumniating foreign countries to show their patriotism. This lopsided and narrow-minded attitude, however, only does harm to our nation.” The purpose of his book, Chen proclaimed, “is not to record one-sided propaganda or to produce hostilities between nations. Instead, an appropriate attitude is to narrate diplomatic events calmly and in all fairness according to the historical facts we know, to discuss the questions involved, to examine the whole process of the event, and of course never to hide any evils done by foreign aggressors. Only in this way can we hope to produce a credible history and realize the full responsibility of foreign powers [for the consequences of their aggression]” (Chen Gonglu 1935, 3). In addition to empiricism, another Western historical method that influenced the writings of Chinese historians in the early twentieth century was the New History approach imported from the United States. Instead of focusing merely on political events, this approach, pioneered by James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936), sees history as a process involving all aspects of the social, scientific, and intellectual progress of humanity, which should be understood with tools and concepts offered by the various disciplines of social sciences and in light of their relevance to current problems confronting the world. Studying history at Columbia University between 1919 and 1923 under the guidance of Robinson’s colleagues and followers, especially Carlton J. Hayes (1882–1964), Jiang Tingfu developed an interest in using the New History method in his own work on modern China. While viewing modern Chinese history as a process

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encompassing a multiplicity of developments, Jiang paid particular attention to the thinking of the ruling elites and the mentality of the populace, which he believed to be the most significant factors in explaining the repeated failures of modernizing efforts in late Qing China. Chen Gonglu, too, accentuated the critical role of intellectual and psychological factors in shaping collective actions in Chinese society, but his book has more balanced coverage of political, economic, cultural, social, and intellectual phenomena than Jiang’s work, a reflection of his serious interest in writing Chinese history from the New History perspective. A more immediate influence on the writings of Jiang Tingfu, Chen Gonglu, and other historians in the 1920s and 1930s came from the works of Hosea Ballou Morse (1855–1934). Morse graduated from Harvard in 1874 and immediately joined the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs under Sir Robert Hart. For the next thirty-four years, he served as a customs commissioner in a number of treaty ports, rising to the position of head of the Statistical Department before he retired in 1908. During the rest of his life, Morse turned himself into a prodigious historian, producing several works on China’s recent past and current affairs, including the three-volume International Relations of the Chinese Empire (published between 1910 and 1918) and The Trade and Administration of China (1913). The strength of Morse’s writings lay in his personal familiarity with a variety of institutions in China and his good use of English and French documents, including unpublished material. For the next few decades after their publication his books were accepted as the most authoritative accounts of China’s foreign relations and were widely adopted as the standard textbooks for Chinarelated courses in universities in the West. However, the weakness of Morse’s books was equally obvious. Knowing little Chinese, Morse almost made no use of Chinese documents in his account of China; nor did he consult with Chinese scholars, for there was no evidence that he had any Chinese friends. Thus, although Morse prided himself on his objectivity and showed a degree of sympathy with China’s plight in foreign affairs, his exclusive reliance on Western sources made it difficult, if not impossible, to investigate the complexity of institutional and psychological factors that motivated as well as constrained the Chinese ruling elites in dealing with the West. He thus tended to emphasize the ignorance and stupidity of Chinese rulers and the irrationality of China’s traditional systems when explaining

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the roots of China’s conflicts with Western countries and to see the unequal treaties between them as a necessary evil (Fairbank et al. 1995). Morse’s writings had a direct impact on the thinking and work of Chinese historians. Before the palace archives of the Qing dynasty became accessible to the public, Chinese scholars had to rely heavily on foreign sources (especially Morse’s books) to investigate China’s international relations in the nineteenth century, a topic believed to be central to understanding modern Chinese history. Jiang Tingfu became interested in China’s diplomatic relations by reading Morse’s International Relations of the Chinese Empire when he studied at Columbia University. Realizing the shortcomings of Morse’s work, Jiang made a great effort after returning to China in 1923 to collect Chinese source materials on foreign affairs, which culminated in the publication of his two-volume Jindai Zhongguo waijiao shi ziliao jiyao. This publication, together with Morse’s book, became the standard textbooks for the modern Chinese history course that Jiang taught in the history department of Tsinghua University in Beijing in the 1930s (Jiang Tingfu 1979, 95, 129). Chen Gonglu, too, admitted Morse’s influence on his work, confessing in 1956 during the “thought reform” campaign that many of his views in Zhongguo jindaishi had their “intellectual origins” in the works of Morse (cited in Ouyang Junxi 2002, 140).

HISTORY AND POLITICS Despite their proclaimed adherence to the empiricism of nineteenth-century European historiography and their acceptance of more recent historiographical methods introduced from the West, mainstream historians in Republican China nevertheless found it difficult to narrate the past without bias. This tendency was attributable partly to the influence of Morse’s works but more importantly to their personal involvement in politics in the 1930s and 1940s. The influence of present-day politics on historical interpretation was especially evident in the writings of Jiang Tingfu, who eventually quit his teaching job and accepted positions in the Nationalist government after 1935. Jiang’s interest in history originated from his lifelong concern with China’s political and diplomatic situation. While a student at Columbia University in 1919, Jiang first chose journalism as his

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major because he felt that as a journalist he would be able to “influence China’s politics” as he observed in the profession of journalism in the West. He soon, however, switched to political science after he realized that “journalists’ understanding of politics in a country is superficial, and most of them only drift with the current to cater to what people like” and that “to influence politics, one has to understand politics.” But he finally decided to give up political science, which seemed to focus too much on “theory rather than reality,” and to major in history, believing that “the only way to acquire political knowledge is to study history” and that history permitted “the best, the most correct, and most thorough understanding of politics” (Jiang Tingfu 1979, 73–74). Unlike most Chinese historians in the early twentieth century who still focused on the imperial past and avoided the modern period, Jiang concentrated on China’s experiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially its foreign relations, which he believed to be the key to understanding China’s recent plight. He emphasized modernization as the central issue in modern Chinese history because he wanted to inquire into the roots of China’s distress and backwardness and to find a solution to the myriad domestic and diplomatic problems that beset his country. His concern with China’s politics also explained the fact that he eventually gave up his career as a professor at a prestigious university and joined the Nationalist government at the height of his academic career. Dictatorial State

Creating a unified, centralized state, in Jiang’s view, was a precondition for modernization in any society and also the most fundamental challenge for China, a country still beset by political division and civil wars, and therefore no different from a traditional “dynastic state” (chaodai guojia), in which people owed their loyalty to individuals, the family, or the locality rather than the state (Jiang Tingfu 1933a, 168). The most urgent task for China, therefore, was to create a central government strong enough to “terminate civil wars and riots,” “maintain nationwide security,” and make all provinces subordinate to its ordinances; modernization was possible only when such a government came into being in China (Jiang Tingfu 1933e, 173). To unify China and create a strong state, however, necessitated the use of armed forces under “single personal dictatorship” (geren zhuanzhi). This dictatorship was needed in China, Jiang

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maintained, because there were many “minor dictatorships” or warlord forces that were enemies to China’s unification; to replace the “minor dictatorships” with a single major dictatorship, therefore, would be beneficial to the people. But the single dictatorship could no longer resemble the traditional dictatorships in Chinese history. “As long as the dictatorship provides security and stability,” he wrote, “China will undergo a transformation and take on new life, because no dictatorial government could reject the use of science and machinery that have become available to us” (ibid., 176). Jiang thus disagreed with his colleague Hu Shi (1891–1962), who insisted on using nonmilitary means to unify China and creating a democratic government to solve China’s problems. In Jiang’s opinion, Hu’s idea of a liberal parliamentary government in China was “too naive,” for Hu failed to fully realize the problem of “corruption, decadence, waste, stupidity, and indifference” in democratic countries as well as the scandalous elections and struggles for personal gain among congressmen in China (Jiang Tingfu 1979, 141– 142). “Democratic government cannot be practiced in China,” Jiang contended, “because China lacks the economy, society, and intellectual basis necessary for a democracy. Once unification is finished, however, reconstruction will commence, and the environment for democracy will emerge naturally. A short-term dictatorship, then, would paradoxically be a shortcut to a democratic government. To talk about the theories of human rights and popular sovereignty in today’s China would be more harmful than beneficial” (Jiang Tingfu 1932b, 574). Chen Gonglu, who shared Jiang’s views about the major issues in modern Chinese history, saw political disunity to be the biggest problem in China as well. He concurred with Jiang that military campaigns and dictatorship were the necessary means to achieve political unification and discredited democracy as unnecessary. “Without a basis and preparation,” he explained, “China cannot adopt democracy immediately. To introduce democracy abruptly would only subject it to politicians’ manipulation and dominance by evil gentry” (Chen Gonglu 1935, 802). But he suggested that, once the task of unification was finished, the government should take steps to reform itself and grant people the right to vote (ibid., 802–803). Jiang’s view also won support from most of the leading intellectuals who joined his debate with Hu Shi around 1933; they all

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believed the dictatorial state to be a transitional form of government indispensable for China’s political unification and reconstruction but leading to democracy in the future. To advocate his idea of a “new dictatorship” in China, for example, Ding Wenjiang (1887– 1936), a professor of geology and cofounder of Duli pinglun, denied the possibility of democracy in China in the 1930s on the grounds that “75 or 80 percent of the people” in China remained illiterate and therefore unable to exercise the right to vote. The “new dictatorship” that should be practiced in China, he explained, should meet the following requirements: “First, the leader of the dictatorship should act entirely in the national interest; second, the leader of the dictatorship should thoroughly understand the nature of a modernized nation; third, the head of the dictatorship should employ the talents of the whole country; and, fourth, the head of the dictatorship should use current national crises to mobilize the emotion and wisdom of all those who are eligible for political participation and to make them rally under the same banner” (Ding Wenjiang 1934, 6). The new dictator thus was a nationalist struggling for the goals of the nation and therefore different from an old-style dictator, who acted only for self-interest. Ding himself was known in the 1930s as “the most thoroughly Europeanized person and the most scientific person” in China (Hu Shi 1967, 2). Educated after age fifteen in Japan for two years and in Britain for seven years, Ding had a deep faith in liberal values and wanted China to “take the road of democratic politics through an educational and peaceful method.” But he knew that China would not be prepared for democracy until its people were educated and the country overcame the crisis of foreign invasion (Ding Wenjiang 1935, 21). Echoing Ding’s view, Wu Jingchao (1901–1968), a professor of sociology at Tsinghua University, warned: “To transplant democratic politics that have been valid in Britain and America to China by force when the conditions are not right would only result in a repeat of the [situation] of the early Republican years and would only make people even more disgusted by democracy” (Wu Jingchao 1935, 18).3 Jiang Tingfu put it blatantly: “The more we talk about the isms and systems of the West, the more chaotic and fragmented our country will become. The politics of the West and the politics of China are totally different” (Jiang Tingfu 1933e, 170). Qian Duansheng (1900–), a professor of politics at Tsinghua University, denied the possibility of democracy in China, believing that democracy had

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proved unable to handle the problems in modern nations and was thus outmoded in the world. Moreover, he asserted, “it would be impossible for China to have a democratic government as seen in Britain and America within ten or twenty years even under the best circumstances. Even if a democratic government like that in Britain or America is created [in China], the state will be still weak and unable to compete with other nations economically.” In contrast, he claimed, those who adopted dictatorship, such as Russia, Italy, Germany, and Turkey, had successfully handled the various political, social, and economic issues. Therefore, what China needed was a “dictatorship with popular support” and one committed to China’s rapid industrialization in one or two decades (Qian Duansheng 1934, 25–26). To promote dictatorship in China did not necessarily mean to unconditionally support Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. In the view of leading intellectuals, there was a gap between the Nanjing government and the ideal dictatorship they desired. The dictatorship that they espoused was “by no means a barbaric dictatorship, an illegitimate dictatorship, an unlimited dictatorship, a coercive dictatorship, and a dictatorship that prohibited the freedom of speech”; instead, it was “an enlightened dictatorship, a principled dictatorship, and a dictatorship committed to the well-being of the public” (Zhang Hong 1934, 10). But they all admitted that to establish such a dictatorship would be impractical in China at that time. Although Chiang Kaishek’s regime was far from satisfactory, it was the only government widely accepted in China. Therefore, the best choice was to support it rather than to overthrow it at a time when China was distressed with domestic and external crises. Ding Wenjiang thus said that he supported the Nationalist regime “not because the current government is relatively satisfactory, but because we can by no means do away with the government when there is an urgent foreign crisis.” To topple the existing government, he warned, “would not necessarily result in a better one and could only bring about political chaos” (Ding Wenjiang 1932a, 4). Optimistic about China’s economic development under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, Jiang Tingfu showed unequivocal support for the Nationalist government. Jiang wrote in 1933 that “the next four or five years will be critical to our nation” and that “what we need now is reconstruction, fast reconstruction, and large-scale reconstruction.” He urged that the new government concentrate on recon-

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struction to “show its ability to lead China’s modernization” and warned that “anyone who undermines political unity and impedes reconstruction is an evildoer to our nation” (Jiang Tingfu 1933b, 2–6). He persuaded his liberal colleagues at Tsinghua “not to adopt a hostile attitude toward the Nationalist Party” (see Cao Boyan 2001, 174). Jiang especially warned those who were “extremely dissatisfied with the Nanjing government” “not to defy the will of the people and openly undermine the basis of the Nanjing government” (Jiang Tingfu 1932c, 48). He condemned the communist revolution that had survived Chiang’s repeated extermination campaigns and saw it as the biggest barrier to Chiang’s efforts to unify the country. He agreed with Chiang’s strategy of “suppress the bandits first, resist the Japanese second” but took issue with Chiang’s rural policies that aimed to protect the interests of the landlord class; instead, he suggested the Nanjing government acknowledge what the peasants had received from the Communists’ land redistribution and carry out a policy of “land to the tillers,” which he believed to be a fundamental solution to the problem of communism in China (Jiang Tingfu 1933f, 82–84). Conciliatory Diplomacy

Like many other leading scholars, Jiang Tingfu also advocated a conciliatory and cooperative relationship with Japan. In his understanding, the most important task for China was political consolidation and economic reconstruction; China would not be able to fight a war with its enemy until it achieved a considerable degree of modernization. A conciliatory policy therefore was necessary for China to avoid a military showdown and subsequent national disaster. The tension between China and Japan mounted steadily after the Japanese army occupied Manchuria in 1931 and further attempted to penetrate northern China, incurring nationalist ferment throughout China and growing support for a war against Japan. Jiang Tingfu sympathized with the Nationalist government’s nonresistance policy, defending his position by stating that “a modern war requires prolonged preparation and nationwide total mobilization; to have a war with Japan in an abrupt and unprepared manner could only result in defeat” (Jiang Tingfu 1979, 142). He criticized the activists of the resistance movement who emphasized using popular mobilization and patriotism as the major means of resistance to Japanese aggression: “Even to this day,” he remon-

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strated, “some of us still count on swords to deal with cannons and airplanes. Isn’t this a medieval type of superstition? Even to this day, we still count on the few hundred propagandists and the popular morale they have built to deal with a nation that has been trained and organized for fifty to sixty years. Isn’t this a ridiculous combination of national tradition, party culture, and foreign influence? We still try to save face by denying the fact that goats cannot fight wolves” (Jiang Tingfu 1933f, 82). Jiang Tingfu’s knowledge of China’s modern diplomatic history played a key role in shaping his conciliatory view of Sino-Japanese relations in the 1930s. In his Zhongguo jindaishi, Jiang repeatedly criticized Qing bureaucrats and gentry leaders who had insisted on “suppressing the barbarians” by merely resorting to the so-called morale of the people or will of the people regardless of China’s military weakness. He noted that some of them actually recognized the superiority of foreign weapons and China’s need to learn from the foreigners. However, to preserve their personal reputations as patriots and avoid being attacked by antiforeign conservatives, they nevertheless supported the idea of warring with the foreigners. Jiang particularly condemned Commissioner Lin Zexu. In Jiang’s view, Lin’s “relying on the will of the people” (minxin keyong) was nothing more than “the old-style lofty tone and empty words of the gentry class.” “Counting on the people’s morale to deal with the foreigners’ cannons was no different from committing suicide. The people’s morale cannot be lost, to be sure. But ordinary people know little about international relations. Those in power should take action to guide public opinion. It is the politicians’ failure if they offer no guidance or if their guidance is ineffective.” These politicians, Jiang rebuked, “valued their personal fame too highly and treated state matters carelessly” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 29). In Jiang’s view, many politicians in the 1930s were no different from predecessors such as Lin in their attitude toward foreign threats, for they all knew that China’s military was no match for the Japanese and that China had to negotiate and make necessary concessions, but “none of them spoke honestly and conscientiously, and none of them dared not appease the populace” (Jiang Tingfu 1933c, 148); they all “spoke in a lofty tone” (chang gaodiao) to safeguard their reputation as patriots (Jiang Tingfu 1933f, 82). Jiang’s realistic perspective on China’s foreign relations led him not only to condemn the “patriotic” words and actions of politicians

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in both the Qing and Republican governments, but also to defend pragmatic diplomats of the late Qing period who had been labeled as “traitors” (maiguozei) or “collaborators” (hanjian). A good example is Qishan (1790–1854), who replaced Lin Zexu as the governor-general of Guangdong and was given the delicate task of negotiating a peace treaty with the British. Qishan was later condemned to death for removing defense forces from coastal fortresses and signing the humiliating Convention of Chuanbi without authorization from the Qing court. In Jiang’s view, however, China’s defeat in the Opium War did not result from Qishan’s removal of defense forces, but from the basic fact that “China’s fighting abilities lagged far behind the British.” Qishan’s conciliatory attitude was “precisely where he surpassed all others”; “he knew that China was unable to win, so he concentrated on diplomacy” (Jiang Tingfu 1931, 51). “Qishan’s knowledge of China and its enemy,” Jiang asserted, “far exceeded that of all others. Though his knowledge was incomplete, his contemporaries were almost entirely ignorant. Therefore, he vehemently proposed conciliation, while the others condemned him as appeasing the foreigners and even suspected him of being bribed by the British” (ibid., 57). Jiang was not alone among historians in interpreting China’s diplomatic history from a realistic perspective. Chen Gonglu, too, disapproved of the “high-sounding words” (gaodiao) of gentry elites during times of foreign invasion. China was defeated repeatedly from the Opium War to the Boxer Rebellion, Chen concluded, precisely because of gentry leaders’ presumptuous insistence on war, which in turn was based on their ignorance of the strength of their foreign enemies and their false pride in being superior to the “barbarians” (Chen Gonglu 1935, 654). Behind their warlike stance, however, was selfish motivation, for they were just “seeking a good reputation” for themselves at the expense of the national interest. Thus, whenever there was a serious diplomatic crisis, they would “unanimously insist on waging a war, regardless of the real military abilities of the country and ignorant of the strong sea and land forces of the enemy, which only resulted in disaster” (Chen Gonglu 1935, 245; see also p. 383). Chen’s attitude toward the Japanese invasion in the early 1930s was the same as Jiang’s. He sympathized with the Nationalist government’s nonresistance policy, believing that “it would be really difficult for China to win the war” and that preparation for the war would take a long time (ibid., 794). But he criticized the government

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for having missed its best chance to negotiate with Japan for a solution to the crisis owing to its fear of public opinion. And he believed that proresistance intellectuals who opposed negotiation shared responsibility for the government’s failure in diplomacy. Hu Shi, who had disputed with Jiang Tingfu on the issue of democracy and dictatorship in China, shared Jiang’s view on China’s foreign policy. After the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in 1931 that led to the full Japanese occupation of the three provinces of Northeast China, Hu challenged the growing voice for a war of resistance to Japan and insisted on a peaceful, diplomatic solution to the problem of Japanese aggression. His reason was no different from Jiang Tingfu’s: compared to its enemy, China was too backward; for a country that “has not experienced modernization at all” to fight “a nation that has been baptized by modern science and industrialization” could only end in total disaster (Hu Shi 1933a, 310–311). Hu’s attitude had to do not only with his recognition of the gap between the two countries in economic and military strength, but also with his understanding of the issue of imperialism in China. Unlike many radical intellectuals who ascribed China’s backwardness to external factors, namely, the military invasion and economic oppression of foreign powers, Hu believed that the reverse was true: it was China’s own backwardness that had permitted imperialist intrusion. In his view, China was backward because of its own “five evils,” namely, poverty, epidemics, ignorance, corruption, and disorder. It was these five evils, he explained, that had caused China’s loss of “immunity” and explained why imperialism had affected China, rather than the United States or Japan (Hu Shi 1930, 353). A precondition for resisting imperialist aggression, then, was the transformation of China’s domestic politics; once it improved, the threat of foreign intrusion would “automatically disappear” (Hu Shi 1922, 385). Two reasons account for mainstream intellectuals’ insistence on a nonresistance policy in dealing with Japan. In addition to the obvious disparity between the two countries in military strength, as all of them repeatedly underscored, a more important factor had to do with intellectuals’ self-identity. Unlike traditional Confucian gentry elites, who identified with the rulers, the leading scholars assumed an independent stance and allegedly refused to affiliate with political forces. Being “independent,” they believed that their opinions were impartial. Furthermore, as the most educated and learned individuals in China, who had received doctoral degrees from Amer-

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ican or European universities and who held professorships in leading Chinese universities, they also believed that their education and expertise allowed them to offer the most informed and reliable judgment. Together, their impartiality and reliability presumably qualified them to offer the most authoritative and responsible suggestions on major issues concerning the national interest. In contrast with the informed and responsible reasoning of the educated elites were so-called popular feelings or public opinion, which Jiang Tingfu and his colleagues derided as based entirely on hypocritical morality and therefore responsible for incurring the many disasters in late Qing China. These intellectuals resembled the Confucian scholars of imperial times to the extent that they both adopted an elitist approach to state affairs, they both believed that their education and knowledge qualified them to serve as “scholars of the state” (guoshi) or advisors to rulers, and they both assumed the masses to be ignorant and awaiting their guidance. These intellectuals did not realize that their education, the knowledge and perspective that they had gained from their academic training in the West, might also prevent them from realizing or fully understanding other choices in dealing with China’s crisis. Thus, when they justified the conciliatory policy by accentuating the disparity between China and Japan in their industrial capacities and military strength, they actually expressed their faith in “modernity” or the central role of Western science and technology in boosting productivity and driving social progress. In their opinion, the rivalry between countries such as China and Japan was essentially a competition involving their ability to master modern scientific knowledge, to efficiently apply it to production, to organize a modern bureaucracy, and to build a modern military force. For them, to acknowledge and fully understand these disparities and to take action accordingly was the only reasonable and responsible option.4 The intellectuals did not expect that the public opinion or popular feelings that they dismissed for their irresponsibility would eventually overwhelm their responsible reasoning and shape the course of Chinese history when popular demand for resistance to Japan led to the Xi’an Incident and Chiang Kai-shek’s reluctant switch from conciliation to resistance in dealing with Japan. Eventually, the intellectuals had to renounce their own nonresistance stance and even joined the Nationalist government to fight the Japanese. After all, the intellectuals were nationalists committed to the salvation of the nation;

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they showed no reluctance to support the central government’s resistance policy when conciliation was no longer a viable choice.

THE PRAGMATIC TURN IN THE 1930S Liberal intellectuals’ embrace of a dictatorial state, a controlled economy, and a conciliatory foreign policy should not be interpreted as merely echoing the policies of Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang government. In fact, all of them were independent scholars. Hu Shi, Jiang Tingfu, Ding Wenjiang, and their colleagues in Beijing decided to publish a political magazine and name it Duli pinglun (Independent review), which became the most influential political periodical in China during its existence from 1932 to 1937 precisely because, as Hu Shi put it in the inaugural issue, they wanted “to keep a bit of independent spirit, not to affiliate with any political party, not to readily believe in any stereotype, and to express what we individually think with responsible words” (Hu Shi 1932, 201). Educated in the West, most of them espoused liberal values and wanted China eventually to develop a true democracy and fully protect the rights of the people.5 But they also believed that China, stricken by poverty, illiteracy, and disunity in the 1920s and 1930s, was not yet positioned for a democracy and that only a centralized strong state could help China survive its crises of political disunity and foreign invasion. Their preoccupation with the unprecedented distress of the country and their pragmatic approach to dealing with the crises thus overwhelmed their personal preference for democracy and individual rights. The liberals in the 1930s, therefore, went even further than their predecessors in the late Qing and early Republican years, notably Yan Fu and Liang Qichao, in their shared instrumentalist thinking. Whereas Yan and Liang embraced liberal values and enthusiastically popularized them in China, believing that these imported values would help make people independent and strong enough to undertake the cause of national salvation, Jiang Tingfu and his colleagues discredited liberalism as an effective tool to solve China’s problems. As national crisis worsened in the mid-1930s, they not only gave up their liberal thinking and critical attitude toward the government, but further renounced their independent stance and joined the Nationalist government. Jiang accepted an appointment in the Administrative Yuan. Ding Wenjing became the general

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secretary of Academia Sinica. Wen Wenhao served as the general secretary of the Administrative Yuan, and Wu Jingchao served as a secretary of the same institution. Finally, Hu Shi, who had claimed himself an “honest friend” to the Nationalist government and hence kept a distance from it, accepted Chiang Kai-shek’s appointment as a member of the National Defense Council (Guofang Caiyihui) in August 1937. A year later, he further accepted appointment as China’s ambassador to the United States and stayed in that position for four years. By that time, Japan had started a full-scale invasion of China. Hu Shi admitted that China needed a powerful leader (i.e., Chiang Kai-shek) to lead the country in its struggle against foreign invasion and that national salvation was a greater urgency than the pursuit of democracy in China (Hu Shi 1935b). The pragmatic attitude was not limited to the few leading scholars discussed above. Instead, it reflected the general attitude of mainstream intellectuals as well as the majority of the urban middle class and even ordinary people in the 1920s and 1930s. Having experienced economic devastation and social disorder under warlords, they generally supported the Nationalist government for the political unity and social stability they began to enjoy under the new regime and for promising opportunities to develop the economy under the legal and administrative frameworks that the new state had established. Though dissatisfied with Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship and Guomindang agencies’ notorious violation of human rights, the vast majority of them did not want to challenge Chiang’s status as the leader of China and the legality of his government. The Japanese invasion and the danger of political disunity in the early 1930s heightened rather than weakened its legitimacy. Instead of being critical to Chiang Kai-shek, the leading scholars showed their support for his regime and justified the need for dictatorial leadership and conciliatory diplomacy in China. The idea of a violent revolution to overthrow the Nationalist regime and to promote communism in China never gained popularity among them. Liang Shuming thus frankly pointed out the “biggest mistake” of the Chinese Communist Party in his private talk with Mao Zedong in Yan’an in 1938. To explain its mistake, Liang pointed out the sharp contrast between two facts: One is that the revolutionary army [of the Nationalist Party] succeeded in the Northern Expedition in 1926, 1927, and 1928 not

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Origins of the Modernization Narrative because of its supremacy in military strength, tactics, or strategies, but because politically it met the needs of the general tendency. By comparison, the communist revolution in the previous ten years produced no results precisely because of its political failures and its mistake in political line. It would have already succeeded if it had politically adapted itself to the needs of the times and supplemented it with military actions. The other is that from the eve of the War of Resistance up to now, the Communist Party won the sympathy, support, and expectations of the majority of the people, and its reputation superseded other parties. The reason for this is simply its renunciation of domestic struggle, promotion of unity to resist Japan, adaptation to the demands of the people, and adherence to the correct political line. By contrast, its work in the preceding ten years was futile, and the Party survived only through its military, which shows the incorrectness of its political line. (Liang Shuming 2006, 193)

In summary, the modernization narrative in the pre-1949 historiography of modern China is best seen as a result of the convergence of two intellectual trends in the 1930s and 1940s. One was the wide acceptance among liberal intellectuals of the Enlightenment conception of history as a linear evolution of human society leading toward modernity, a tendency most clearly evidenced in successive discourses of evolution, Westernization, and modernization throughout the late Qing and Republican periods. The other was the intellectuals’ preoccupation with China’s aggravated crises in the early 1930s and their subsequent pragmatic solutions that compromised with their earlier obsession with the liberal aspects of modernity. These two factors combined to explain the following three characteristics of the modernization narrative that undergirded liberal historians’ interpretation of modern Chinese history. First, pessimistic about China’s dire straits in the 1930s, the historians narrated China’s experiences in the late Qing and Republican periods basically in a tragic mode, portraying the historical events in those periods as a series of failures. This mode of narration helped them explain the reasons leading to China’s predicament in their own time, but it blocked them from viewing and fully comprehending positive signs of China’s modernization in the same periods. It is for this reason that Jiang Tingfu and Chen Gonglu had little or

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no discussion in their books on China’s progress in industry, transportation, public health, higher education, government system, arts and literature, and so forth. Second, assuming modernization, or the transition from tradition to modernity, as a universal pattern of evolution for all societies, mainstream historians generally attributed the disorder, stagnation, and frustrations in Chinese society to factors indigenous rather than exogenous to China; in their view, it was ultimately cultural attitudes and preexisting economic and political conditions within China that explained its distress after the Western challenge. Third, adopting a realistic and pragmatic approach to the solutions of China’s problems, the leading historians showed unanimous support for the Republican state irrespective of its dictatorial inclinations in the 1930s and at the cost of their own commitment to liberal ideals. Their affiliation with the Nationalists in fact was consistent with their incremental approach to modernization that emphasized the role of enlightened elites and government leaders in initiating and promoting modernizing reforms. This elitist view of history in turn explained the historians’ ignorance or underestimation of the role of the populace in shaping the history of late Qing and Republican China, and their unwillingness to examine the everyday lives of ordinary people in rural and urban societies.

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Origins of the Revolutionary Narrative Marxist Historiography before 1949

The revolutionary narrative emerged in the 1930s and 1940s primarily as resistance by the Chinese Communist Party and its supporters to the modernization narrative then prevailing in mainstream historiography under the Nationalist regime. Among the Marxist historians and CCP theorists who contributed to its rise, Fan Wenlan (1891–1969) stood out for his writing, which had a profound impact on Chinese historiography during and after the communist revolution, and for his particular role as a trusted historian and personal friend of Mao Zedong. This chapter investigates the origins of the revolution narrative in the context of political and intellectual struggles between the Nationalists and the Communists and among the Communists. Fan’s formulation of modern China, endorsed by Mao, served chiefly as a counternarrative to the modernization historiography generated by Jiang Tingfu and his colleagues described in the preceding chapter. It also deviated significantly from the standard explanation offered by Moscow and embraced by early Chinese Marxists and communists. A product of Mao’s challenge to the hegemony of the orthodox Marxist interpretation of modern China shared widely among the communists in Russia and China in the 1920s and the 1930s, Fan’s new version of history prevailed in the end because it was based on Mao’s reinterpretation of Marxism and Chinese revolution and because it met Mao’s needs in his feuds with early CCP leaders who had legitimated their political supremacy within the Party by claiming to be the guardians of Marxist orthodoxy. Fan’s personal academic training shaped his historical writing 74

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as much as his political affiliation did. His background as a classical Chinese philologist and a poorly trained Marxist explains the excessive attention to empirical details in his historical account, on the one hand, and inadequate analysis of class relations and social conflicts in a true Marxist fashion, on the other. His strongly Hancentered ethnic identity and nationalist sentiments accounted for his obsession with the Han-Manchu schism in late Qing politics and his use of a resister-capitulator dyad in explaining China’s foreign relations, which distracted him from coherently narrating the thesis of the antifeudalist and anti-imperialist revolution in his writings. Throughout his life as a communist historian, Fan found himself caught in an inextricable dilemma in which he struggled between tradition and revolution or, more exactly, between his intellectual aptitude as a traditional scholar versed in the obsolete, “feudal” Chinese learning and his impulse to produce a radical narrative in a style alien to his academic training. He never succeeded in this struggle, but his work did produce a new tradition in the Chinese Marxist historiography by centering on rebellions and revolutions in modern China and by glorifying rebels and revolutionaries while demonizing their enemies. The romanticized style of history writing at the cost of historical objectivity, which he started in the 1940s, lasted well into the post-1949 period, shaping the writing and rewriting of modern Chinese history in the People’s Republic of China for the following decades, and Fan himself all but fell victim to an even more politicized historiography during the Cultural Revolution.

MODERNIZATION OR REVOLUTION? Jiang Tingfu and Fan Wenlan were the two leading historians of modern China in the twentieth century. As described in Chapter 2, Jiang Tingfu won his reputation as a prominent historian in Nationalist China through his book, Zhongguo jindaishi (Modern history of China), which was written in 1938, first published in 1939, and later reprinted frequently in Taiwan and, more recently, in mainland China. His historical views arguably influenced “most writings on China’s modern history and foreign relations before 1949” (Liu Yao 1983). In contrast, Fan had established himself as one of the leading philologists of ancient Chinese classics before he joined the Communist Party and was appointed an official party historian by Mao Zedong in 1940. His Zhongguo jindaishi, first published in 1946 in

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Yan’an, was later acclaimed by an authoritative Marxist historian as the “very beginning of using scientific views to systematically study modern Chinese history” (Liu Danian 1979, 1). Likewise, Fan was extolled for “laying the foundation for the systematic and scientific study of modern Chinese history” and for “establishing an interpretive schema and proposing a series of insightful theses that have influenced the study of modern [Chinese] history for decades” (Chen Qitai 1993, 72). Jiang and Fan differed sharply on both the “main historical themes” (lishi zhuti) and the major empirical issues in modern Chinese history. Assuming “modernization” ( jindaihua) to be the major challenge to modern China, Jiang thought of the late Qing and Republican periods as a time when the Chinese tested a series of schemes of modernization, culminating in Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist revolution, which he saw as the final step in China’s nationstate making. In contrast, Fan Wenlan emphasized the Chinese people’s revolution against imperialism and feudalism as the main thread in modern Chinese history and assumed that the communist revolution was the last phase and only correct path of the centurylong revolution that concluded in 1949. Not surprisingly, Fan and Jiang also contradicted each other in their explanations of the major historical issues pertaining to China’s foreign relations and political movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Foreign Relations

One of the fundamental divisions between the two historians was their understanding of the reasons leading to foreign aggression in nineteenth-century China. In general, Jiang emphasized internal factors, especially problems with China’s traditional institutions of foreign relations and foreign trade, while Fan focused on external factors, or the aggressive and malicious nature of Western imperialism. With regard to the Opium Wars, consistent with the grand narrative of an isolated, backward China and its modernization under Western influence, Jiang emphasized the obsoleteness of the tributary system that guided China’s foreign relations, the ethnocentric assumption of China’s cultural superiority over other countries, and the incompatibility of such institutions and notions with the diplomatic conventions that Western countries had widely observed. In his analysis of China’s foreign relations before the (First) Opium War (1839–1842), Jiang underscored the conflict between China’s foreign

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policies under the tributary system and “the accepted codes and established practices in international relations” (Jiang Tingfu 1934, 202). It was China’s adherence to “archaic” ethnocentric notions and unwillingness to treat Europeans equally, Jiang argued, that forced the British to make war on the “celestial dynasty” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 6–11). After examining the repeated failures of missions of British emissaries to the Qing court and the frustration and helplessness of British merchants in Guangzhou under the monopolistic cohong system, Jiang concluded that “it was completely impossible for the West to alter China’s trade system peacefully and establish diplomatic relations with China on equal terms” (Jiang Tingfu 1934, 203). The Opium War, in this light, appeared to be primarily a confrontation between two totally different civilizations or, in Jiang’s words, “a battle of two equals between China and the West.” Jiang used the same reasoning to explain the outbreak of the Second Opium War (1856–1860). The British, he wrote, warred with China again only after they had tried every peaceful effort in vain to revise the commercial treaty with China, which the two sides had agreed on twelve years earlier (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 32). Fan viewed the Opium Wars from a different angle. Unlike Jiang, who focused on the irrationality of traditional Chinese foreign policies and trade systems, Fan instead accentuated the illegal and immoral nature of opium smuggling by British merchants before the wars. Beginning with an outline of the industrial revolution in lateeighteenth-century Britain and its trade relations with China in the early nineteenth century, Fan described how British merchants imported more opium to China to reduce their ever-increasing deficit in the trade of ordinary goods. He highlighted the “collaboration” between opium smugglers and Chinese officials rather than the conflicts between the two empires. According to Fan, Qing officials, especially Manchu aristocrats such as Muzhang’a (1782–1856), had long relied on the illegal opium trade as a major source of income; they opposed both the legalization of the opium trade, for it was precisely the illegality that offered them opportunities to profiteer, and the strict prohibition of opium, which would have wiped out those opportunities. The Manchu rulers, therefore, shared the interests of the British merchants in maintaining the trade (Fan Wenlan 1949, 14). It was the ordinary Chinese people, Fan argued, who suffered from opium smuggling, which had caused the outflow of silver from China, a shortage of silver in the Chinese market, and hence

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price inflation of commodities and the impoverishment of the common people (ibid., 5–14). This depiction of British merchants and Qing government officials as beneficiaries and the populace as victims of the opium trade fit perfectly into a revolution narrative that assumes a fundamental contradiction in modern China between the Chinese people, on the one hand, and feudalism and imperialism, on the other. This line of thinking is also evident in Fan’s account of the Second Opium War. The war broke out, he posited, because “the foreign aggressors, collaborating with Chinese feudal forces, attempted to extinguish the flames of the revolution of the Chinese people, which would otherwise have destroyed the Manchu government and threatened the aggressors’ privileges secured by the Treaty of Nanjing. Therefore, the wily aggressors used military means to force the stubborn and stupid Manchu rulers to realize the necessity of further collaboration. The Second Opium War was a process of cooperation between the Chinese and foreign counterrevolutionaries” (Fan Wenlan 1949, 178). The revolution that Fan refers to here was the Taiping Rebellion, which indeed involved a mercenary force (the “Ever-Victorious Army”) of mainly Chinese soldiers commanded by American and British officers between 1862 and 1864. But its participation in suppressing the Taiping rebels occurred mainly after the Second Opium War and it was primarily an action of individual foreigners rather than of the British or U.S. government. During the war, the British forces adopted a neutral stance toward the Taiping authorities; the Qing court’s attitude toward the British was dominated by skepticism, which, as Fan admitted, “impeded the quick collaboration of the [Chinese and British] counterrevolutionaries” (ibid., 194). In actuality, as Fan himself demonstrated, it was primarily the Qing rulers’ dispute with the foreigners over the ritual of reception that caused the latter to resort to military means to verify the treaty (ibid., 191–200, 204)—a fact that actually supports Jiang’s argument about the Qing dynasty’s obsolete and irrational diplomatic institutions as the main cause of the war and undermines Fan’s own thesis about the collaboration between the Qing court and foreign powers. Jiang’s and Fan’s different views on the cause and nature of the two Opium Wars led them to differing assessments of the key figures in the events. Jiang’s recognition of the striking disparity between China and Britain in military strength led him to depict

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Qishan, a commissioner of the Qing court who skillfully and successfully negotiated a truce with the British, as a practical statesman and a “first-rate” diplomat in modern China. In sharp contrast, Fan denigrated Qishan as a predecessor to the worst “collaborators” in modern China for his compromise with foreign aggressors. The two historians also viewed Qishan’s predecessor, Commissioner Lin Zexu, differently. Fan extolled Lin as one of the great “national heroes” in Chinese history for his confiscation and destruction of opium and for resisting the invasion of the British force before and during the Opium War. In Fan’s view, Lin “deserves the remembrance and respect of Chinese people” because he “knew the truth of relying on the common people to resist the aggressors” and “defied various difficulties and showed his determination to resist” (Fan Wenlan 1949, 34). By lauding Lin as “representing the worthy part of Chinese feudal culture” (ibid., 15) and “representing the few progressives” of his time (ibid., 29), Fan challenged Jiang Tingfu’s disapproval of Lin as an example of a selfish member of the literati who cared about personal reputation much more than about national interests. For Jiang, Lin’s efforts to ban opium trading and smoking in China were meaningless and unrealistic, for most contemporaries knew the difficulty and impracticality of that task. The reason Lin joined many others to argue for banning opium, Jiang asserted, was only to please the anti-opium emperor and to “mouth high-sounding words” (chang gaodiao) for the sake of his personal reputation. This “dishonesty” (bu chengshi), Jiang pointed out, was a common problem among traditional Chinese scholar-officials like Lin (Jiang Tingfu 1934, 14).1 To Jiang’s defamation of Lin, Fan’s rebuttal was blunt: “One hundred years after [the Opium War], the reactionary clique [meaning Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters] still adhered to the capitulationist line of Muzhang’a and shamelessly confounded right and wrong, praising the capitulators as patriots . . . and calumniating Li Zexu as a hypocrite ‘unwilling to fight against his contemporaries at the expense of his own reputation’ ” (Fan Wenlan1949, 32). Along with their contrasting grand narratives, the two historians also offered different interpretations of the significance of the war. For Jiang, China’s defeat in this war implied that China, with its “medieval” notions and traditional institutions, had lagged behind the West and that the only way for China to survive was to learn from the West and to modernize. For Fan, the war signified

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both the beginning of a series of foreign aggressions that eventually turned China into a semicolonial and semifeudal society, and the beginning of a century-long struggle of the Chinese people against imperialism and feudalism. Rebellion and Revolution

Taking the struggle against imperialism and feudalism as the main theme of modern Chinese history, Fan paid much more attention than did Jiang to rebellions and revolutions. The latter said little about popular resistance to foreign invaders in his discussion of the Opium War. Instead, Jiang depicted the populace as ignorant masses displaying a general apathy toward the war; the residents of Guangzhou, for instance, appeared in his book as apathetic onlookers who even helped the plundering invaders move silver ingots from the provincial treasury to British ships when the joint AngloFrench forces occupied the city in 1857 (Jiang Tingfu 1934, 33). In sharp contrast, Fan highlighted the heroic, triumphant resistance of Chinese people to the British forces by adding a separate chapter, titled “The Anti-British and Anti-Manchu Struggles of the Chinese People,” following the chapter on the Opium War. He described the activities of the Ping Ying Tuan (Suppressing-British Corps) on the outskirts of Guangzhou in 1841 as the very beginning of the anti-imperialist struggle in modern China. But he admitted that the resistance by the local militia was under the leadership of antiforeign landlord and gentry elites who remained loyal to the Qing court. In other words, the resisters “failed to realize that the Manchu Qing government was the enemy of the people” and thus “were willing to be the subjects of the Manchu government” (Fan Wenlan 1949, 73). In Fan’s view, the conflict between the ruling Manchus and the ordinary Chinese people was no less important than the conflict between China and the foreign powers. Therefore, the second half of the chapter is titled “Armed Struggles against the Manchus.” According to Fan’s count, 110 riots and rebellions took place during the short span of nine years following the Opium War, culminating in the Taiping Rebellion in 1851. Fan offered two reasons for the intensified anti-Qing incidents: the escalating tax burden imposed on ordinary farmers using various excuses and the widening schism between Manchu and Han bureaucrats, an issue to be discussed shortly. The two historians’ disagreement over the Taiping Rebellion

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was equally conspicuous. Jiang treated it as no different from other rebellions in the imperial past, all of which were a result of the “trap of cycles” (xunhuan tao) of the Chinese dynasties (or the “dynastic cycle,” as John K. Fairbank rephrased it later) (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 37–40). He denied that Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864), the Taiping leader, had a real intention to create a social revolution promoting equality between men and women or the equal distribution of land, for Hong as well as the high-ranking officials and military commanders under him had numerous concubines, and Hong never put his egalitarian land system into effect. Jiang further argued that the Taiping soldiers, though better disciplined than the Qing army, never gained support from the people, for their destruction of temples and religious idols only incurred popular aversion to them, and their swift success in the battleground in the early years of the rebellion did not mean that they were superior to their enemies in commandership or equipment but only owed to the corruption of the Qing government. Nor did the Taiping forces win support from the gentry class, who, in Jiang’s understanding, identified themselves more with the Manchu government that had accepted Chinese culture than with the antitraditional rebels. Jiang thus concluded that the Taiping Rebellion, as an “old-style popular movement” ( jiushi de minjian yundong), was unable to fulfill the mission of “saving the country and saving the nation” ( jiuguo jiu minzu), the overriding task of all progressive social and political movements in modern China (Jiang Tingfu 1934, 49–52). In sharp contrast, Fan Wenlan highly commended Hong Xiuquan for his ideas on equality in social relations, wealth distribution, ethnic relations, and gender, as expressed through his ordinances and religious treatises. The god that Hong worshipped, in Fan’s view, was “a god of equality, liberty, and fraternity” or “a revolutionary god” (Fan Wenlan 1949, 119). Hong’s religious teachings “contained some democratic elements” that reflected his own “subjective communist utopian ideas” as well as the “objective demand for developing capitalism” (ibid., 118–119). Fan thus lauded the Taiping Rebellion for proposing “four basic equalities for the first time in Chinese history” and credited it as “the very beginning of Chinese bourgeois democratic revolution,” totally different from the myriad “old-style peasant rebellions” of the past. “As epoch-making events in Chinese history,” Fan stated, “the Taiping Revolution together with the May Fourth Movement [in 1919] are the two major land-

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marks of the recent one hundred years. Their splendid achievements will never perish and their great spirit will perpetuate and develop forever” (ibid., 159).2 The Boxer Uprising of 1900, unlike the Taiping Rebellion, which Fan defined as a revolution “against the feudal oppression of the Manchus,” represented in his view “the spontaneous antiimperialist struggle of the Chinese people.” Here again we find a sharp divide between Fan and Jiang. The latter depicted the Boxers as “anti-Westernization and antimodernization” and “doomed to be disastrously defeated”; their failure only “demonstrated that our nation can never turn back the wheel of history if we want to survive” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 108–109). The Boxers, Jiang concluded, were “essentially no different from other kinds of bandit organizations that had prevailed in China” (ibid., 104). Their hatred of foreign missionaries and local converts, and their ignorant passion for superstition only turned them into victims manipulated by the conservatives. Fan Wenlan admitted that the Boxer Uprising was indeed an outgrowth of “backward religious superstition” (Fan Wenlan 1949, 336), and he denounced the Boxers’ indiscriminate attacks on foreign things and people as “ignorant and even reactionary” (ibid., 364), but he argued that the blame should be not put on the Boxers alone, for they had long been influenced by the Manchu government’s policy of “keeping the people ignorant” as well as by superstition; for that reason, the Boxers could only “express their indignation through backward means” (ibid., 336). However, “to describe the Boxers as ‘bandits and rebels’ is deliberate slander by imperialists and their slaves” (ibid., 364). Fan admired the Boxers’ “great spirit of self-sacrifice” in combating imperialist forces and ascribed their high morale primarily to the Boxers’ “hatred of the foreign invaders” rather than their faith in “superstition,” which he believed played a secondary role (ibid.,368). But when describing the Boxers’ attacks on foreign legations and the Northern Cathedral in Beijing, which caused more than ten thousand casualties, Fan could not hide his dismay at their “utmost stupidity,” which, he suggested, could have only one explanation: “the outrageous oppression by the imperialists and the Manchu government had driven the people to such despair as to prefer death to life” (ibid., 387). Nevertheless, Fan highly valued the Boxers’ achievement. It was the Boxers’ fearless resistance and prowess in the battleground, he asserted,

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that forced the imperialists to give up their ambition of “dividing up” China (ibid., 414). Here again Fan disagreed with Jiang, who described the Boxer Uprising as a complete disaster, ending in an unprecedented war indemnity and the loss of even more sovereign rights to the foreign powers. Reform and Reformers

Reform movements in modern China contravene the premises of the revolutionary narrative in two important ways. First, the reformers were invariably social elites, be they government officials or prominent scholars, rather than the common people who acted as the major force propelling social progress in the revolutionary narrative. Second, the reform leaders pursued their economic or political programs by acting within the framework of existing government systems and by borrowing from the West. Thus, instead of overthrowing the government and eliminating foreign dominance, the reform programs worked in effect to preserve and strengthen the current regime and to improve its ties with foreign powers. Understandably, a striking divergence exists between the modernization and revolutionary narratives in their opinions on the roles of reforms and reformers in modern China. A good example here is their contradictory representations of the Self-Strengthening Movement from the 1860s through the 1890s. Jiang depicted the Self-Strengthening Movement as the first step in the modernization in late Qing China. Focusing on building a modern military force, the aim of the movement, Jiang suggested, was primarily to defend China against foreign aggression, especially the threat from a quickly modernizing Japan. Jiang admired Li Hongzhang for his leading role in the movement, praising him as “the greatest statesman in nineteenth-century China.” He declared that Li’s 1864 letter to Prince Gong was of great historical value and deserved “repeated reading and reciting,” for it was in that document that Li recognized modernization to be the inevitable solution to China’s survival and recommended the reform of the time-honored civil service examination system to recruit talented students in science and manufacturing (Jiang Tingfu 1934, 58–59). But Jiang quickly added that the Self-Strengthening program was “not thoroughgoing.” First, its leaders themselves were all “educated in old ways” and unable to comprehend Western civilization; thus, while they admired the superiority of Western machinery and science,

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they all believed China’s political system and ideological foundation to be superior. However, Jiang went on, it was precisely China’s outdated system of government; its lack of centralized revenue, a budget, and an auditing system; and its lack of a modern civil service that accounted for Li’s failure to build a modern navy and to develop a dedicated, professional military officer corps. Second and more important, Jiang contended, the conservative gentry class and the superstitious common people, who still dominated Chinese society, would not allow the Self-Strengthening leaders to go any further with Westernization. Jiang thus concluded that the Self-Strengthening Movement had failed to accomplish the mission of “saving the state and saving the nation” and that “China had to embrace Western civilization in a wholesale manner in order to survive in the modern era” (ibid., 62). Fan Wenlan’s opinion of the Self-Strengthening Movement was completely negative. This movement, he contended, was a product of the Second Opium War; it took place at a time when the foreign powers eventually subjugated the Qing government and transformed China into a “semifeudal and semicolonial” country. The leaders of the movement, “having been transformed by foreign aggressors from old-type warlords into new-type ones” to suppress the Taiping Rebellion, were the “most subservient agents” of foreign powers because they all carried out a nonresistance policy and emphasized faithfully adhering to the humiliating treaties between China and the Western powers (Fan Wenlan 1949, 218–221). The real aim of the movement, therefore, was not the “self-strengthening” of China, but instead the “self-strengthening” of the rival cliques of the movement’s leaders. Contrary to Jiang’s approval of Li Hongzhang, Fan castigated him as a “consistent capitulationist,” who avoided direct conflict with foreign aggressors in order to preserve his military forces, for Li treated them as his private property, and his primary concern was with the interests of his own clique rather than the nation (Fan Wenlan 1949, 232, 267–268). Li was also known for establishing a number of projects in modern industry and transportation under the method of “government supervision and merchant management” (guandu shangban). However, Fan wrote, that method only allowed “the feudal forces to impede the development of capitalism,” for the merchants who invested in the enterprises had little leverage to deal with the corrupt government officials who controlled the projects

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(ibid., 226). This kind of “self-strengthening,” Fan concluded, could only result in “the impoverishment of the people and the weakening of the country”; therefore, “it is completely wrong to see the new industries established by the Self-Strengtheners as the foundation of China’s prosperity and strength” (ibid., 250). The discrepancies between Fan’s revolution and Jiang’s modernization narratives thus are obvious. While Jiang, assuming modernization or Westernization to be the inevitable trend in modern China, attributed China’s conflicts with foreign powers primarily to internal factors, especially the incompatibility of its “medieval” political and diplomatic institutions with “widely accepted international rules” (guoji tongze), Fan emphasized external factors—the suffering of the Chinese people from the exploitation and aggression of the imperialists—in his accounts of revolutions and rebellions, which he saw as the major theme in modern Chinese history. Unlike Jiang who approved of top-down reforms and attributed their failure again to internal factors, primarily opposition from conservatives, Fan condemned those reforms as reactionary and only in the interest of the ruling class; instead, he emphasized collective violence against feudal and imperialist forces, acclaiming it to be the fundamental force propelling social progress in modern China. Finally, whereas Jiang affirmed the central role of reform-minded elites in China’s modernization and downplayed the masses, who in his view were ignorant, conservative, and destructive, Fan condemned the Self-Strengthening elites as agents of imperialists who impeded China’s progress, and he extolled the masses as the backbone of the antifeudal and anti-imperialist revolution. “Scholarship Must Serve Politics”

The dispute between Jiang and Fan over modern Chinese history should be understood in the context of the Chinese Communist Party’s friction with the Nationalists during the war against Japan. After the formation of the united front between the Communists and the Nationalists in December 1936, the two sides found themselves in frequent conflict, which intensified when the Japanese slowed down their military operations after occupying much of central China in late 1938 and 1939, allowing Chiang Kai-shek to shift his attention from resisting the Japanese to containing the rapidly growing Communist force. The Chinese Communist Party, for its part, focused on waging guerrilla warfare, rather than head-on

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confrontation, against the Japanese army to minimize its losses. As tensions with the Nationalists mounted, culminating in an armed clash in southern Anhui province in January 1941, the Party openly condemned Chiang Kai-shek for his compromise with the Japanese and hostility toward the Communists. But Mao found that mainstream opinion on domestic politics among intellectuals was not entirely favorable to the Chinese Communist Party. Jiang Tingfu and Chen Gonglu, the two prominent historians under the Nationalist regime, had openly sympathized with Chiang and his conciliatory policy ever since the “September 18 Incident” that led to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931. Based on their knowledge of the history of foreign relations in modern China, both historians insisted that China had to avoid a full-scale military showdown with Japan before the country was politically consolidated and militarily prepared; the Nationalist government, they insisted, should prioritize economic reconstruction and political unification. Both historians thus concurred with Chiang’s policy of “pacifying the domestic before resisting the foreign” (rangwei bixian annei) (Jiang Tingfu 1933d, 136; 1933f, 82; Chen Gonglu 1935, 794, 802). Not surprisingly, both received good treatment from the Nationalist government. Their books were promoted as the standard textbooks on modern Chinese history and widely used in public schools and universities. Jiang was appointed head of the administrative division in the central government in late 1935 and China’s ambassador to Moscow in 1936. Mao Zedong, therefore, needed his own historians to speak for him and to counterbalance the influence of the works of Jiang Tingfu and Chen Gonglu. After appointing Fan as the head of the Division of Historical Research at Yan’an Institute of Marxism and Leninism, Mao immediately assigned him the task of writing a textbook on Chinese history. From August 1940 to the end of 1941, Fan worked on the first two volumes of Zhongguo tongshi jianbian (A brief history of China).3 In May 1943, Fan began a third volume of the book covering the modern period. By the end of 1945, he had finished the part from the Opium War to the Boxer Uprising; it was published in 1946 and renamed as the first volume of Zhongguo jindaishi (The modern history of China). Fan Wenlan’s book satisfied Mao, for one of Fan’s goals was to portray the struggle between “resisters” (dikang pai) and “capitulators” (touxiang pai) in nineteenth-century China’s foreign relations,

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linking Chiang’s conciliatory policies to the “capitulators” in the Qing government. Thus, when explaining the relationship between the Qing rulers and the British forces during the Opium Wars, Fan consistently accentuated their collaboration rather than their conflicts (Fan Wenlan 1949, 9–14, 178). The capitulators, he wrote, dominated the ruling class and shared with the foreign invaders the interest in suppressing revolutionary movements. “As foreign invasion gradually expanded, their traitorous activities against the nation unfolded. Beginning with Muzhang’a and continuing through Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Yuan Shikai, Duan Qirui, Wang Jingwei, and finally the current leader of the reactionary group in China [i.e., Chiang Kai-shek], they succeeded one another for a century, forcing China to take the road of colonization” (ibid., 14). The capitulators, Fan further contended, were concerned with maintaining their rule and enriching themselves at the expense of the people. Adhering to a conservative and isolationist policy, they “impeded the progress of the forces of production, depended on foreign aggressors, and led China along the road of colonization.” “This policy,” Fan claimed, “has continued to this day and has never been repudiated. The history of China during the past one hundred years is nothing less than the history of the people’s struggle against capitulators and imperialists” (ibid., 65). Fan’s purpose in using history to attack Chiang Kai-shek is clear. In fact, throughout the book, Fan argued against Jiang Tingfu by criticizing the Manchu rulers’ conciliatory policies and condemning the capitulators as traitors to China (maiguozei); meanwhile, he spoke highly of popular actions against foreign aggression and extolled resisters such as Lin Zexu as national heroes. Fan’s real purpose was to attack Chiang Kai-shek for his readiness to compromise with the Japanese and to defend Mao and the Communists for their roles in the war with Japan.4 Fan particularly lashed out at Zeng Guofan, the most influential governor in the late Qing period, because Chiang Kai-shek had long exalted Zeng as a role model embodying the Confucian virtues of loyalty and integrity, and used Zeng’s writings as manuals of moral indoctrination for himself and his subordinates. Jiang Tingfu, too, praised Zeng as an “idealistic person” and a “representative of the traditional culture of our country” (1939, 46). In sharp contrast, Fan Wenlan branded Zeng a “butcher” (guizishou) for his slaughter of the Taiping rebels and a “traitor to the Han” (hanjian) for his loyalty to the Manchu court. In his preface to the 1946 edition of Zhongguo

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jindaishi, Fan condemned Zeng with explicit purpose: “Zeng Guofan was the forefather of all reactionaries in the past one hundred years. Even to this day, there are still people inheriting his mantle as a butcher and traitor to the Han who are bent on becoming his heir. Fan also wrote a separate article, titled “Zeng Guofan: The Butcher and Traitor to the Han People,” and included it as an appendix to his book. For Fan, scholarly research was inseparable from politics; this was true for both “scholars of the reactionary ruling class” and Marxist scholars. Thus, “Jiang Tingfu and some others wrote Zhongguo jindaishi to link scholarship with politics; the result, however, was unfortunate for them, as they revealed themselves to be traitors.” For Marxist historians, Fan admonished, “scholarship must serve politics” (xueshu yiding yao wei zhengzhi fuwu) (Fan Wenlan 1958a).

TOWARD A MAOIST HISTORIOGRAPHY Despite its unparalleled influence on Chinese historiography after the communist revolution, Fan Wenlan’s work was neither the earliest nor the most solid Marxist analysis of modern Chinese history in China. Twelve years before the publication of Fan’s Zhongguo jindaishi, Li Dingsheng (known also as Li Pingxin, 1907–1966), a Marxist scholar and a one-time CCP member (1927–1930), had published a book with the same title, which was influential among leftwing students in areas under the Nationalist government.5 Another Marxist study, titled Zhongguo xiandai geming yundong shi (A history of revolutionary movements in modern China) and authored by Zhang Wentian (1900–1976), was published in 1938, eight years before Fan’s book. Zhang Wentian was the general secretary of the Communist Party from 1935 to March 1943, but his influence within the Party was limited despite support from the Comintern in Moscow; it was Mao who actually controlled the Party and the military after the Long March (Cheng Zhongyuan 2000, 138-139). Nevertheless, before Fan finished his Zhongguo jindaishi in 1946, Zhang’s book had been the most important textbook on modern Chinese history in the Party’s cadre-training schools in all “liberated areas” (Hu Hua 1987, 419). Both Li Dingsheng and Zhang Wentian shared with Fan Wenlan the same narrative of revolution. Emphasizing the critical impact of imperialism on Chinese society, they all took the Opium War as the beginning of modern Chinese history.6 And they all attributed

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China’s backwardness to the invasion of foreign capitalism and the subsequent “semicolonization” of China after the Opium War, and justified bottom-up revolutions against feudalism and imperialism as the only means for China’s survival.7 Yet, as the following discussion reveals, discrepancies between the earlier Marxist historiography and Fan’s new interpretation are equally striking. Overall, the pioneering works of Li and Zhang were more consistent than Fan’s in applying Marxist methods to modern Chinese history. They both emphasized the contradictions between imperialism and the Chinese nation, and between the rulers and the ruled in their analysis of international relations, modern reforms, and collective violence. And they both perceived rebellions and revolutions as essentially a new form of class struggle in modern China. Fan Wenlan, by contrast, paid more attention to factors that, in the view of traditional Marxist historians, were only secondary in explaining the dynamics of domestic politics, such as conflicts among the ruling elites in the Qing government and between the Manchu rulers and ethnic Han officials. Thus, despite his ostensible embrace of Marxism, Fan’s account of events in modern China often deviated from orthodox Marxist interpretation of Chinese history. This is particularly true of his overemphasis of the contradiction between the ethnic Manchu and Han peoples in late Qing China. Manchu-Han Conflict

According to Fan, the Manchus, who founded the Qing dynasty and conquered China in 1644, ruled China with two tools: military force, including the Manchu banners and Han Green Camps, and political force, or Han bureaucrats and gentry scholars. He further posited that the Manchu aristocrats who dominated the court tended to be capitulators when dealing with foreign threats, whereas the Han bureaucrats and military commanders usually acted as resisters. Therefore, tension between Manchus and Han Chinese was exceptionally keen in the face of foreign aggression (Fan Wenlan 1949, 58, 67–70). The Manchus, suspicious of the Han Chinese, rarely granted Han bureaucrats military and diplomatic powers. Thus, Commissioner Lin Zexu had to obtain the court’s approval whenever he needed funds from the provincial treasury for defense purposes. In contrast, Qishan and other Manchu bureaucrats were able to demand more support from the court by falsifying the military situation and freely embezzled military funds, and yet they remained

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trusted by the emperor even after they had been exposed. Fan thus concluded that “in addition to the striking difference between the two countries in military strength, an important reason leading to failure in the war with Britain was the Manchus’ discrimination against the Han” (ibid., 42). Fan’s emphasis on a Manchu-Han schism distinguished his narrative of the Opium Wars from the earlier Marxist accounts. In their descriptions of the two wars, both Li Dingsheng and Zhang Wentian highlighted the contrast between the incompetence and failure of the coastal governors in handling the warfare, on the one hand, and the heroic resistance of some “patriotic” military commanders and the righteous actions of the mobilized masses, on the other, which is consistent with their regarding the struggle between the Chinese nation and imperialism as the major theme of modern Chinese history. Neither mentioned conflicts between the Manchus and the Han within the Qing government. Official historiography in post-1949 China viewed the two wars in the same way. It is no wonder that, after Fan’s death, historians such as Liu Danian (1915–1999) criticized Fan for his overemphasis of Manchu-Han conflict. Liu Danian, in fact, was one of Fan’s few disciples; he had done research directly under Fan from the 1950s to the 1960s and later succeeded Fan as director of the Institute of Modern History in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Assessing Fan’s scholarship ten years after his death, Liu acclaimed Fan as one of the two leading Marxist historians of post-1949 China (the other was Guo Moruo, who specialized in ancient China). However, Liu also noted that Fan had “improperly” elevated the conflict between the Manchus and the Han people to the “status of primary importance” (shouyao diwei) in explaining historical events in late Qing China, which suggested his inability to completely free himself from “traditional, feudal notions” about the centrality and superiority of the Han people in Chinese history. Fan’s preoccupation with Manchu-Han conflict, Liu further observed, explained his failure to highlight the “key links in the evolution of the relationship between different classes in Chinese society” (Liu Danian 1979, 12). Fan Wenlan’s focus on the Manchu-Han divide and his consequent weakness in using the Marxist method of class analysis are also evident in his representation of domestic politics in late Qing China. With regard to the Taiping Rebellion, for example, while he acknowledged this incident as the very beginning of the “bourgeois

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democratic revolution” in China, he nevertheless perceived it in the historical context of Manchu-Han antagonism. His analysis of the origins of the rebellion thus began with a description of the myriad underground anti-Manchu societies in the southern provinces that aimed to “eliminate the Qing and restore the Ming” (fan Qing fu Ming) (Fan Wenlan 1949, 88–90). The Taiping Rebellion, in his view, was a culmination of anti-Manchu agitation among the Han people, who remained loyal to the preceding Ming dynasty. Hong Xiuquan’s claim to be a descendant of the founding emperor of the Ming was one piece of evidence that suggested a link between the long tradition of anti-Manchu riots and the Taiping Rebellion (ibid., 99). Fan Wenlan adopted the same perspective in viewing the relationship between the Manchu rulers and Han elites in suppressing the rebels. He described Zeng Guofan, a Han gentry leader who later rose to the position of governor-general with the largest personalized army in the history of the Qing, as a hanjian touzi (head of the Han collaborators) (Fan Wenlan 1949, 133, 140), for Zeng played the major role in helping the Qing government suppress the Han rebels. However, when analyzing Zeng’s relationship with the court, Fan repeatedly underscored their frictions in order to illuminate the Manchu-Han schism that was central to his narrative of late Qing history. In Fan’s argument, the Manchu rulers were always suspicious of Zeng, despite their increasing reliance on him to suppress the rebels. Thus, at first the court refused to give Zeng the power to command regular forces of Manchu banners and Han Green Camps in the provinces along the Yangzi River and warned him not to make “excessive” requests for rewards (ibid., 133–135). Fan found his best evidence for the conflict in the Qing court’s installing two military camps around the capital city of the Taiping rebels to prevent Zeng’s own Hunan army from capturing the city. When the rebels successfully wiped out the two camps, Zeng’s response was heartfelt joy, for the court had to rely on him even more than before and finally granted him the position of minister of defense and acting governorgeneral of the two lower Yangzi provinces, which enabled him to completely control the regular army and the administrative system of the Qing government in his area (ibid., 144–145). However, as Fan correctly noted, his increased power only increased the suspicion from above and the rumors regarding his personal ambitions. Zeng, therefore, always “lived with anxiety and worries” (ibid., 153). Zeng’s insecurity, however, cannot be attributed merely to the

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Manchu-Han conflict as Fan suggested. The Qing court’s earlier reluctance to devolve its military and administrative power to Zeng reflected its concern with the decentralization of government power and the danger of growing autonomy of local authorities rather than just the usurpation of power by Han officials. There is no doubt that Manchu aristocrats’ distrust toward Han bureaucrats did escalate during the last few years of Qing history, when anti-Manchu agitation fueled riots and rebellions throughout the country. Before the Qing dynasty crisis had reached that point, the political order that the Manchu rulers had established and the Confucian teachings on which the new dynasty had grounded itself for centuries allowed Han gentry-bureaucrats to redirect and maintain their identity with the Qing. The fact that Zeng eventually obtained those key positions showed the trust he had won from the court. In fact, throughout his life as the best-known Confucian statesman during the late Qing period, Zeng’s loyalty to the Qing court never wavered. Therefore, the factor of Manchu-Han conflict should not be overstated in explaining late Qing politics. To interpret the Taiping Rebellion as mainly a manifestation of Manchu-Han conflict between the rebels and the rulers as well as within the ruling circle in fact invalidates Fan’s own thesis of the Taiping Rebellion as a bourgeois democratic revolution. In contrast to Fan’s obsession with Manchu-Han conflict, other Marxist historians focused primarily on socioeconomic factors to explain the Taiping Rebellion. Li Dingsheng, for example, admitted that “the oppression of the Han people by the Manchus was one of the immediate triggers of the Taiping movement,” but he argued that the rebellion was essentially an inevitable result of the “compound impact of the invasion of international capitalism and the oppression of domestic feudal forces” (1949, 44–45). Thus, he paid attention primarily to land concentration in the hands of wealthy merchants, large landlords, and bureaucrats, a process that arguably caused the pauperization of the peasantry and hindered capital accumulation necessary for capitalist development in China. The shared interests of landlords, usurers, and merchants in exploiting peasants and handicraft workers, Li contended, explained their concerted efforts to suppress the rebels during the Taiping movement. The Taiping movement was a “peasant revolution of bourgeois nature” (zichanjieji xing de nongmin geming) because its promise to “abolish feudal land relations and all exploitative relations in society” was conducive to the growth of “national capitalism” (minzu

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zibenzhuyi) (ibid., 43–48). These arguments, to be sure, are based on logical links between different economic, social, and political phenomena rather than on solid empirical research; Li provided no convincing evidence to substantiate his propositions. Nevertheless, his socioeconomic approach to explaining the nature of the Taiping Rebellion is consistent with the “standard” Marxist method of historical analysis that emphasizes the decisive factor of economic conditions and class relations in shaping political choices. Two issues arise from the foregoing discussion of different historians. One is why there was such a discrepancy between Fan Wenlan and the early Marxist historians in their interpretations of modern Chinese history. The other is why Li Dingsheng and Zhang Wentian, who adhered to a more Marxist approach, lost their influence after the communist revolution, whereas Fan remained a dominant historian for the next three decades. To address these questions, I will examine below the training each of the three received during their earlier years and subsequently the different conceptions and methodologies they employed in writing history. I will then discuss intraparty politics in the 1930s and 1940s as the historical context in which Fan did his work. Fan Wenlan and the Zhedong School

Fan’s unique approach in narrating history derived from the influence he received in his early years from the Zhedong school of philology. The leading members of the Zhedong school in the Qing dynasty were known for their anti-Manchu inclination, their concern with statecraft, and their emphasis on solid evidence in literary and linguistic studies.8 Born into a traditional scholar’s family in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, in 1893, Fan received an education in ancient classics at a private school (sishu) before age fourteen and for the next two years at a public primary school at the county seat, where he further studied the Yijing and the Shujing. According to his memoir, Fan developed a hatred for the Manchus when he was a child under the influence of his brother, who attended the Datong School in his hometown, which was founded by Qiu Jin (1875–1907), the famous female revolutionary. His anti-Manchu feeling developed after he personally witnessed the Qing government’s arrest and execution of Qiu Jin. He audaciously shaved off his hair when he was a middle-school student in Shanghai, in defiance of the imposed Manchu custom of wearing the hair in a long queue (Fan Wenlan 1956b).

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Fan came under the direct influence of the Zhedong school only after he became a major in National Learning (guoxue) at Peking University, where he was a student of Huang Kai (1886–1935) and other scholars. A disciple of the famous philologist Zhang Binglin (1868–1936) and an anti-Qing revolutionary, Huang Kai was known for his erudition in a wide range of ancient classics, history, linguistics, and literature, and for his rigorousness in research. It was under Huang’s mentoring that Fan Wenlan received his strict training in the field, and, after graduation from the university, he committed himself to the study of ancient classics. He established himself as a philologist after publishing a commentary on Wenxin diaolong (a classic written in the sixth century AD) in 1925, after he had taught at Nankai University for three years. Fan, however, was not content with being just a scholar. Nurtured in the tradition of the Zhedong school, he soon found himself attracted to the urgent issue of the Sino-Japanese conflict in the 1930s. Discontented with the Nationalist government’s nonresistance policy and its suppression of student protests against Japan in the early 1930s, Fan became sympathetic to the Communists for their active role in anti-Japanese agitation in Beijing and other cities. In 1936, he published Dazhangfu (True men), a biography of the heroes of Chinese history, which he intended to inspire readers’ pride in the Chinese nation and its historical heritage. After teaching at Henan University in Kaifeng for two years, he eventually joined the Chinese Communist Party’s New Fourth Army in 1938, taking charge of its propaganda work, and became a party member in September 1939. Four months later, he traveled to Yan’an, the headquarters of the Communist forces, bringing with him thirtyodd boxes of books. Mao Zedong soon met him and considered him primarily a philologist, inviting him to give three lectures on the history of classical studies at the Annual Meeting of New Philosophies in Yan’an in the summer and autumn of 1940. Mao personally attended the first two lectures (Chen Qitai 2000). Fan Wenlan, therefore, had received no systematic training in Marxist teachings or Marxist historical methodology before he became a communist and an official historian of the Communist Party.9 As a philologist of the Zhedong school, he excelled in the exhaustive research of evidence in classical studies and showed particular respect for the works of the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). He also inherited from his predecessors a strong anti-Manchu spirit

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and a belief in “distinctions between Chinese and barbarians” ( yixia dafang), which translated easily into nationalism in the course of the “national awakening” and anti-imperialist movement in the twentieth century. It is owing to this background that Fan was particularly sensitive to the conflicts between the Manchu and Han peoples in his narrative of late Qing China, whereas other Marxist historians believed the true contradictions in modern China to be those between feudal forces and the masses and between imperialism and the Chinese nation. His lack of training in Marxism explains his maladroitness in analyzing class relations and class struggles in Chinese society. This, however, did not prevent Mao from accepting him as a trusted historian, for Mao himself was opposed to using orthodox Marxist teachings, which he often ridiculed as “dogmas” ( jiaotiao), to understand Chinese history and society. Mao’s primary concern, instead, was politics or the dual struggle with the “dogmatists” within the Party, on the one hand, and the increasingly hostile Nationalists on the other. Fan’s solid training in Chinese history, his Zhedong background, and his enthusiasm for the communist revolution convinced Mao that he could be useful. These factors plus Mao’s personal fondness for Chinese history and the classics explain why he chose Fan to rewrite the history of modern China. They also explain why Fan enjoyed Mao’s favor for decades. Orthodox Marxist Historiography

Unlike Fan, a philologist-turned-CCP-historian without Marxist training, Li Dingsheng and Zhang Wentian both had accepted Marxism before writing about modern Chinese history. Li Dingsheng, fourteen years younger than Fan, became interested in Marxism as early as 1925, when he was a student in the department of sociology at Shanghai University. After graduation, Li became a coeditor of Shijie yuekan (World monthly), focusing on popularizing Marxism among its readers. He became a CCP member in 1927, twelve years earlier than Fan. During Chiang Kai-shek’s “white terror” against the Communists, Li survived as an underground CCP member responsible for the Party’s propaganda and workers’ movement in Shanghai, while working on Chinese translations of Zhengzhi sixiang shi dagang (An outline of the history of political thought), Shehuizhuyi cidian (A dictionary of socialism), and the first volume of Zibenlun (Capital). In 1930, he published his own book, Xiandai shehuixue dagang: weiwu shiguan de shehuixue de jichu lilun (An

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outline of modern sociological theory: the basic theory of the sociology of historical materialism), in which he drew on the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin to discuss sociological methodology and issues of class, state, the family, and society. Li had become a seasoned Marxist before authoring his Zhongguo jindaishi (Modern history of China) in 1933 (Hu Fengxiang 2004 and 2005). Zhang Wentian, seven years younger than Fan, turned to Marxism soon after entering Hehai Engineering School in Nanjing in 1919, fully twenty years earlier than Fan. He demonstrated his ability to use Marxist theory to understand Chinese society in his two articles, “Social Issues” and “The Origins of Social Disorder in China and Its Solution,” which were published in 1919 and 1922, respectively. After spending two years in the United States and teaching English in Chongqing for several months, Zhang joined the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1925 and spent the next five years as a student at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, where he received systematic training in Marxism and Leninism. Upon returning to China in 1931, Zhang found himself involved in the debate among Chinese intellectuals over the nature of the Chinese society. On one side were the Trotskyites, who insisted that China had already become a capitalist society and therefore needed a “socialist revolution” to eliminate capitalism and establish socialism. On the other side were the pro-Stalin communists, who believed that China remained a “semifeudal and semicolonial” society and hence the task of the Chinese Communist Party was to lead an agrarian revolution (tudi geming) to overthrow feudalism and imperialism in China, rather than a socialist revolution.10 As a returned student from Moscow, Zhang naturally sided with the latter group. His training in Moscow and his overt pro-Stalin stance in the debate explain at least in part the Comintern’s appointing him “minister of propaganda” in the CCP’s central committee in 1931 and later the top leader (general secretary) of the Party in 1935 (Niu 1995; Wang Jinyan 2001; Zhang Shude 2004). Li and Zhang not only had long adhered to orthodox Marxism from the Soviet Union before writing on modern China, but also based their general views of modern Chinese history directly on the orthodox interpretations of Stalin and the Comintern. This is especially evident in their understandings of the nature of Chinese society and the tasks of the Nationalist Revolution in the 1920s and the Communist Revolution that followed.11 Li Dingsheng, for example,

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followed Stalin in his depiction of Chinese society after the Opium War and refuted the Trotskyite view of China as a capitalist society. “The tremendous changes in national economy, class relations, and intellectual life in China after the Opium War in the direction of colonization,” he wrote, “should not lead us to conclude incorrectly that China has become a capitalist country. History since the Opium War has only shown that international capitalism extorted and plundered China and further enslaved the Chinese nation. While the traditional agricultural economy has been torn up by the iron claws of international capital, the new capitalist mode of production is yet to dominate the national economy. In other words, the old system of exploitation in Chinese society has not yet declined, and China’s national capitalism, though emerging from place to place, is far from predominant; instead, it is subject to the control of and oppression by the international capital” (Li Dingsheng 1949, 3–4). The Nationalist Revolution of 1925–1927, therefore, was a continuation of the “bourgeois democratic revolution” that had started with the Revolution of 1911; its tasks remained “opposing imperialism and opposing feudal warlords” (ibid., 264–267). Zhang Wentian, too, described the revolution from 1925 to 1927 as a “bourgeois democratic revolution,” and he quoted Stalin to explain the factors that determined its nature, such as China’s “semicolonial status and the imperialists’ dominance in finance and economy” and “the enhanced oppression of feudal remnants under the oppressive rule of warlords and bureaucrats” (Zhang Wentian 1987, 216). Not surprisingly, the same factors are also found in Li Dingsheng’s explanation of the revolution (1949, 264–267). Echoing the views of Stalin and the Comintern, both Li and Zhang further described the Communist Revolution after Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’état in 1927 as an “agrarian revolution” (Li Dingsheng 1949, 263; Zhang Wentian 1987, 283). Rebutting the Trotskyite view that the coup d’état signified the failure of the Communists’ policy of cooperating with the national bourgeoisie (Zhang Wentian 1987, 280), Zhang Wentian saw that event as a “turning point” signaling the transition of the Chinese revolutionary movement to a higher level after the national bourgeoisie (or Nationalists) betrayed the revolution. It was a transition, he argued, from an alliance of the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, peasants, and the proletariat to one of the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty bourgeoisie. To illuminate this transition, Zhang quoted Stalin: “[After the coup

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d’état] the revolution has entered its second phase of development; it has changed from a revolution of the united front of the whole nation to the revolution of millions of workers and peasants, an agrarian revolution that will strengthen and broaden its struggle against imperialism and native bullies and evil gentry, and against feudal landlords, warlords, and the counterrevolutionary Chiang Kai-shek clique” (ibid., 283). This agrarian revolution, however, was still a “bourgeois democratic revolution” rather than a so-called antitariff revolution or a struggle for tariff autonomy, as narrowly defined by Trotskyites. To spell out this point, Zhang Wentian once again quoted Stalin (ibid., 313). Although Li and Zhang shared views about society and revolutions in twentieth-century China, their methods of narration differed. By the time Li Dingsheng authored his Zhongguo jindaishi, he had not been a CCP member for six years and was living as a professional writer, publishing essays on politics, international relations, history, literature, and philosophy for a variety of newspapers and magazines in Shanghai. To survive in Shanghai and make his publications legal and marketable, Li Dingsheng had to avoid openly denouncing Chiang Kai-shek and his government and explicitly siding with the Communist Party. Although he did not hide that he was a Marxist scholar and viewed the major issues in modern Chinese history from a Marxist perspective, and although his views were largely consistent with the views of Stalin and the Comintern, he never cited the writings of Stalin or documents of the Comintern in his book; nor did he denounce Trotsky or the Trotskyites in Russia and China. Throughout his book, Li maintained his stance as a Marxist historian rather than a communist. In contrast, Zhang Wentian’s book is replete with quotes from Stalin and the Comintern. In fact, his Zhongguo xiandai geming yundong shi served as an annotation of the standard views on Chinese revolution offered by the Russians. There were two reasons for Zhang to narrate history that way. First, Zhang’s appointments as minister of propaganda and the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, were sanctioned by the Comintern; he therefore had an obligation to comply with his superiors in Moscow to maintain and legitimize his own position. Equally important was that, by concurring with Stalin and the Comintern, Zhang attempted to maintain the status of the only authority within the Party on the history of the Chinese revolution. Putting his book forward as the

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only correct interpretation of the history, he hoped to play a leading role in shaping the political discourse of the Party and thereby influence its policies, even though Mao had been the de facto leader of the Party since 1935, while his own position as the general secretary of the Party from 1935 to 1943 was only nominal. Despite the differences in narration between Li Dingshen and Zhang Wentian, the two historians’ interpretations of modern Chinese history were closer than Fan’s to the orthodox Marxist views of the Comintern. Already seasoned Marxists when they began writing on modern China, Li and Zhang were adept at using Marxism, or more exactly the views of Stalin and the Comintern, to interpret modern Chinese history. In contrast, Fan was only able to mimic the theoretical frameworks that he had borrowed from the writings of Stalin and the Comintern as well as the Chinese Marxists. Once he set out to tackle more empirical issues, however, Fan would find himself consciously or unconsciously guided by the methods and thinking that he had adopted from his traditional training. He would focus primarily on distinctions between the Chinese and the non-Chinese, or between the Han and the Manchus in late Qing politics, and between the resisters and traitors in China’s foreign relations, obsessions that often distorted his analysis of the social contradictions and class relations that were central to Marxist historiography. History and Intraparty Politics

To explain why Fan Wenlan prevailed over Li Dingsheng and Zhang Wentian in creating the CCP’s historiography from the 1940s onward, we must look further into political infighting within the CCP. After launching the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1929, Mao pursued the strategy of relying on the peasantry to enlarge the Red Army and establish a base area in the countryside, beginning with his creation of the Jiangxi Soviet area. This strategy, however, met with recurrent attacks from the CCP’s top leaders, who insisted on an urban-centered strategy and rejected Mao’s approach as “narrow empiricism” and “rightist opportunism.” Mao therefore lost control of the Red Army after the Ningdu meeting in October 1932 and remained outside the CCP’s top leadership until 1935. During that process, Zhang Wentian joined the Comintern-backed party leaders in criticizing Mao. As the newly appointed minister of propaganda

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of the Party, Zhang published a lengthy article in April 1932, “The Wavering Opportunism within the Party in the Struggle for the Initial Victory of the Chinese Revolution in One or Several Provinces,” which systematically attacked Mao, asserting that the main danger in the base area was “rightist opportunism that has overestimated the Guomindang government and underestimated the revolutionary forces” (Liu Minggang 2005, 10). In order to reduce Mao’s influence in the base area, Zhang also joined the attack on four of Mao’s followers in Jiangxi. Mao, needless to say, had no affection for Zhang, despite Zhang’s siding with Mao during the Zunyi meeting in 1935, when Mao eventually regained control of the Red Army and Zhang became the CCP’s general secretary (Liu Minggang 2005). Zhang’s control of the Party’s propaganda apparatus was another source of irritation for Mao. Although Zhang yielded to Mao in his nominal role as the top leader of the Party, he remained the minister of propaganda and, after 1938, headed the Yan’an Institute of Marxism and Leninism for training party cadres. As a Moscowtrained Communist, Zhang faithfully adhered to the orthodox views of Stalin and the Comintern in educating cadres in Marxist-Leninist teachings and the history of the Chinese revolution, as evidenced in the above discussion of his textbook, Zhongguo xiandai geming yundong shi. In that book, Zhang did not highlight Mao’s role in the Party’s history. The only place where Mao’s name appeared was in the section about the birth of the Chinese Communist Party, where Mao was described as the founder of a Communist group in Hunan in 1920 and an attendee at the Party’s inaugural meeting in 1921 (Zhang Wentian 1987, 143–144). His account of the Nationalist Revolution of 1925–1927 made no mention of Mao’s creation of the Peasant Training Institute in Guangzhou and the mobilization of peasants in his home province, though these stories later became an essential part of the post-1949 historiography on the revolution. Instead of praising the peasant movement, Zhang condemned the peasants’ attacks on landlords and rural gentry as “excessive” (guohuo) actions that “harmed the relationship between the National Revolutionary Army and the peasants” (ibid., 309). In his view, “the agrarian policies of the revolutionaries regarding the revolutionary army, petty bourgeoisie, and petty landlords should have been flexible, should have allowed necessary concessions, and should have cautioned against excessive actions” (ibid., 309). Although Zhang did not mention Mao’s name here, he was criticizing Mao and his

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radical agrarian policies in Hunan. When describing the CCP’s reactions to Chiang Kai-shek’s coup d’état in 1927, in another instance, Zhang downplayed Mao’s Autumn Harvest Uprising, which later, in the Party’s post-1949 historiography, was depicted as the most significant action against Chiang Kai-shek’s white terror. Instead, he focused on the other two uprisings in Nanchang and Guangzhou that did not involve Mao at all. When he did mention the Autumn Harvest Uprising, he depicted it as a failure and emphasized its negative effects: the “mechanical application of the policies of the Autumn Harvest Uprising” by local Communists in certain areas led to their “irresponsible manipulation” (wannong) of armed uprisings and “reckless military actions” (ibid., 321). Mao Zedong, therefore, became dissatisfied with the existing Marxist writings on Chinese history. In his essay “Reform Our Study,” published in May 1941, Mao complained that, despite the efforts of “a few party members and a few party sympathizers” (which meant Communists like Zhang Wentian and non-Communist scholars like Li Dingsheng), no organized work has been done on historical research. Thus, “many Party members are still in a fog about Chinese history, whether of the last hundred years or of ancient times” (Mao Zedong 1991, 797). Although Mao did not name Zhang Wentian and his followers, Mao openly criticized “certain” Communists, who “can only cite odd quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in a one-sided manner but are unable to apply the stand, viewpoint, and method of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin to the concrete study of China’s present conditions and history, or to the concrete analysis and solution of the problems of the Chinese revolution” (ibid., 797). Mao rejected the works of modern Chinese history written by the Chinese Marxists, including Zhang and Li. As he put it, “the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the history of China in the one hundred years since the Opium War are particularly important, but few really understand them. Almost no one has seriously set about to study the economic history of the past one hundred years, the political history of the past one hundred years, the military history of the past one hundred years, and the cultural history of the past one hundred years” (Mao Zedong 1977, 756). Mao was especially unhappy with Zhang’s role as the supreme authority on Marxism in China and with his control of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. He openly derided the institute as “the supreme headquarters of dogmatism.”12 As a result, he reorganized

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the institute into the Academy of Marxism and Leninism (Ma-Lie Yanjiuyuan) in July 1941 and soon after renamed it the Central Academy (Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan). Removing “Marxism and Leninism” from the title revealed Mao’s contempt for and challenge to Zhang’s monopoly of “authentic” Marxist and Leninist teachings and his determination to develop theories and interpretations of the Chinese revolution under his own name. In fact, Mao’s attempts to reshape the CCP’s (or more exactly the Comintern’s) theories on the Chinese revolution had begun two years earlier, when he published a short textbook, Zhongguo geming he Zhongguo gongchandang (The Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party), in December 1939. In that book, Mao first reiterated the CCP’s orthodox views regarding the “semifeudal and semicolonial” nature of Chinese society (Mao Zedong 1977, 589) and the communist revolution as a bourgeois democratic revolution against feudalism and imperialism rather than a proletarian socialist revolution against the capitalist class (ibid., 597, 609). He then offered his own view of the revolution, which deviated from the Comintern’s and the CCP’s earlier interpretations. In his redefinition, the communist revolution was “no longer the old-style, ordinary bourgeois democratic revolution, which is now obsolete, but a new-style, special bourgeois democratic revolution.” He called that revolution a “new democratic revolution” (xin minzhuzhuyi geming), which would at once “clear the way for [the development] of capitalism and create the preconditions for socialism.” Thus, Mao argued, it was in essence “part of the worldwide proletarian socialist revolution” that had begun after World War I and the October Revolution in Russia and, in the case of China, after the May Fourth Movement of 1919. It was a revolution “under the leadership of the proletariat”; in other words, the Chinese Communist Party, who represented the Chinese proletariat, should lead the revolution. Furthermore, because of the CCP’s leadership, the outcome of the revolution should not be a state under “bourgeois dictatorship” but a “democratic republic” in which “workers, peasants, and the rest of the petty bourgeoisie have certain status and play certain roles” (ibid., 612). Two months later, in his essay “On New Democracy,” Mao divided the history of revolutionary movements in modern China into two periods: the old-style democratic bourgeois revolution before World War I and the Russian Revolution, and the new style

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thereafter (Mao Zedong 1977, 628). He emphasized that, after the completion of the new democratic revolution, the Chinese proletariat (namely, the CCP) would play a leading role in “the joint dictatorship of all revolutionary classes” in a “new democratic society” (ibid., 632). By redefining the communist revolution as a “new democratic revolution,” Mao made his interpretation different from both that of the Russian and Chinese Trotskyites, who believed the revolution to be socialistic in nature, and that of the Comintern and early CCP leaders, who believed the revolution to be essentially no different from the preceding “democratic bourgeois revolution.”13 It was at this juncture that Fan Wenlan embarked on the task assigned by Mao Zedong of writing a textbook on Chinese history. Predictably, Fan used Mao’s new concepts in his reinterpretation of modern China. Thus, when his Zhongguo jindaishi was published in 1946, Mao praised that book as having “rich material and a fresh viewpoint” (cailiao fengfu, guandian xinying) (Cheng Long and Yang Liqin 2004, 33). This comment is apt. Fan’s book had “a fresh viewpoint” because the author’s explanation of modern Chinese history not only contradicted the views of pro-Nationalist historians such as Jiang Tingfu and Chen Gonglu in many areas, but also differed from the interpretations of earlier Marxist authors, including Li Dingsheng and Zhang Wentian. Fan accepted Mao’s periodization of modern China based on the change in the nature of the revolutionary movement; therefore, he labeled part 1 (shangbian) of his Zhongguo jindaishi that was supposed to cover the period from the Opium War in 1840 to the May Fourth Movement in 1919 as “The Era of the Old Democratic Revolution” and “part 2 (xiabian) as “The Era of the New Democratic Revolution,” although he only finished the first volume of part 1 and never wrote part 2. This was the first time that Mao’s concept of old and new democratic revolutions was applied to the study of modern Chinese history. Moreover, by emphasizing the struggle between “resisters” and “capitulators” in China’s foreign relations, Fan served Mao’s purpose of using history to justify and support his policies in the struggle against the Nationalists as well as the orthodox Marxists within the Party. Fan thereby cemented both his status as the forefather of Communist historiography and his personal relationship with Mao, which lasted for the rest of his life and proved critical to his survival during the Cultural Revolution. The alignment between Mao and Fan was by no means acciden-

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tal. Preoccupied with practical issues of national survival and intraparty politics, both lacked a genuine interest in pure Marxist and Leninist teachings. Strengthening the Communist forces in their rivalry with the Nationalists, enhancing his own position within the Chinese Communist Party, and maintaining the Party’s autonomy from Russian influence were Mao’s top priorities. Therefore, instead of adhering to Marxist and Leninist dogma to win support from Moscow, Mao did the reverse, that is, he used the imported theories only to justify his own actions. Fan, a philologist with no exposure to Marxism before becoming a CCP member at age forty-six, joined the Communists not because of his faith in Marxism, but out of his nationalist commitment. It was his concern for China’s survival that accounted for his aversion to the conciliatory Nationalist government and his identification with the Communists. Both Mao and Fan, in a word, were essentially nationalists and pragmatic revolutionaries rather than the true Marxists they claimed to be. However, it was not nationalism alone that brought Fan and Mao together. Intellectually, both shared a strong interest in Chinese history and literature. While in Yan’an, the two frequently exchanged books, most of which were about history and the classics.14 After the Communist revolution, Mao spent most of his time reading ancient books and used the wisdom he gained from history to guide his policies and rule the country (Chen Qitai 2000, 186). After the revolution, Fan, too, focused his energy on ancient Chinese history. With scant training in Marxism, his writing of history remained shaped more or less by his traditional philological approach. In fact it was the unique style of his writing, rich in historical material and short on Marxist dogma, that interested Mao.15 Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when radicalism brought all academic activity to a standstill, Mao sent his daughter Li Na to Fan’s residence on July 20, 1968, to pass a message encouraging Fan to continue his work on Chinese history—not only ancient and modern history, but also contemporary history—and instructing him to write “in [his] own way” “no matter what others might think” (Cheng Long and Yang Liqin 2004, 36; Chen Qitai 2000, 153). Mao well realized Fan’s weakness as well as his strengths. His chief strength lay in his solid training in ancient Chinese history and the classics; his weakness was his inadequate ability to use the “new methods” or Marxism to interpret history. Mao and Fan shared an interest in the past that overcame their commitment to Marxist ideology.

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NATIONAL IDENTITY, STATE MAKING, AND HISTORY WRITING For the Chinese Communist Party and its historians, one of the most challenging tasks in the 1930s and early 1940s was to question the legitimacy of the Nationalist government and at the same time to justify the Party’s own existence and its political goals in the struggle against the Nationalists. Since its founding in Nanjing in 1927, the Nationalist government had firmly established itself as the only rightful regime in China after eliminating and subjugating the warlords in various provinces. Backing an incremental scheme of political evolution that allowed for a phase of dictatorship under the excuse of “political tutelage” before creating a constitutional democracy, Chiang Kai-shek and his leadership had no difficulty winning support from the vast majority of the Chinese people, or the so-called middles forces, as the Chinese Communist Party described them, which included the middle class and mainstream intellectuals in the cities as well as ordinary people at the bottom of society. In contrast, the Party survived in the late 1920s and much of the 1930s only after it withdrew from the cities and built its military bases in rural areas where the Nationalists’ control was the weakest. After 1936, the Party reclaimed its legitimacy and won sympathy and even support from the “middle forces” only because of its declared commitment to the War of Resistance against Japan and its official acceptance of Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership under the United Front. Unable to justify its existence with an ideology and political program appealing to the majority of the people in China, the Chinese Communist Party could only turn to history for help when its tensions with the Nationalist regime jeopardized its legitimacy. For Communist leaders and historians, the aspect of Chiang Kai-shek’s national policies that was most vulnerable to attack was his reconciliation with Japan. Therefore, the most effective way to defame Chiang and defend the Party was to rewrite history by highlighting the theme of the purported struggle between “capitulators” and “collaborators” on the one hand, and “resisters,” on the other, in late Qing China. For Fan Wenlan, the capitulators in dealing with the aggression of the Western powers were primarily the Manchus, as the Han bureaucrats were often depicted as resisters to foreign invasions; and the collaborators were Han bureaucrats who sided with the Manchus in suppressing the peasant rebels of the Han. The

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centrality of Han ethnic identity in Fan’s historical scheme obscured the role not only of class identity built on the dichotomy between the ruling feudal forces (including both Han bureaucrats and Manchu aristocrats) and the laboring people, but also of national identity based on the divide between imperialism and the “Chinese nation,” which included both the Han and the various non-Han ethnic groups living within the boundaries of the newly established republic. The anti-Manchu bias of the Zhedong school was no doubt an important factor in Fan’s emphasis on the Manchu-Han divide in interpreting late Qing politics, but the ultimate reason behind his formulation of the collaborator–resister thesis had to do with his purpose of using history to serve the CCP’s present needs. To better understand Fan’s interpretive construct, we can compare it to Jiang Tingfu’s conception of national identity in modern China. For Jiang, the legitimacy of political actions in the Chinese past was ultimately based on shared cultural heritage, rather than ethnic origin. Thus, unlike Fan, who condemned Zeng Guofan as a “Han collaborator” for massacring millions of Han rebels during the Taiping movement in support of the Manchu dynasty, Jiang acclaimed Zeng as a man who made “great contributions to our country in modern times,” because Zeng not only promoted “reforms” by “accepting Western civilization,” but also made efforts to “restore the traditional virtues of our nation”; therefore, Jiang wrote, “Duke Zeng is still worth our sincere respect” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 53). Jiang also justified Zeng’s loyalty to the Manchu court and his killing of Taiping rebels, arguing that “although Hong Xiuquan [the Taiping leader] was a Han person promoting a nationalistic revolution, he nevertheless indiscriminately destroyed traditional Chinese culture that had a history of thousands of years. In contrast, although the Manchus were aliens, they had since the beginning embraced Chinese culture” (ibid., 44). Jiang praised Zeng not only because he understood nationhood differently from Fan, but, more important, because the Nationalist government had made Zeng a spiritual hero to use to cultivate loyalty to it among its citizens. Committed to building a strong state under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, Jiang had the obligation to speak for Zeng—and the Nationalists. For both Fan and Jiang, national identity was a malleable tool that could be reinvented to serve different political purposes. Fan and Jiang not only redefined national identity by accentuating its cultural or ethnic basis, but also contributed to the mak-

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ing of the emerging nation-state, be it Communist or Nationalist, by inventing its history in different ways. For Jiang, to speak for the Guomindang state and legitimate its asserted goals of political consolidation and modernization, it was necessary to depict the Chinese past since the Opium War as a series of efforts to implement different schemes for “saving the nation and saving the people” and to emphasize the failures that presumably led to the rise of the Nationalist state. In sharp contrast, to undermine the Guomindang regime’s legitimacy, it was obligatory for Fan to denounce the ruling elites in late Qing China for their conciliation with foreign powers and suppression of peasant rebels, to extol popular resistance and rebellion, and to romanticize the past by assuming a dichotomy between good (resisters and rebels) and evil (collaborators and capitulators), eulogizing the former while demonizing the latter and assuming the ultimate triumph of good over evil. The history of the nation thus produced appears indeed as “a process of imagining or inventing,” in which the historian projects back current political claims “on to carefully selected fragments of the past to create an apparently seamless national history which culminates in the present” (Breuilly 2002, 82–85). Fan’s highly subjective and moralized rendering of history, needless to say, not only ran counter to his own training in traditional philology that prioritized objectivity in evidential research, but also defied the orthodox Marxism that underscored the importance of objective laws of social evolution in interpreting history. It is small wonder that, as early as in 1949, when the revolution was near completion, Fan had realized the problems with his writings, especially their obsoleteness after the Communist revolution, and therefore began to dilute the pragmatic color in his book. As a token, he deleted a paragraph from his preface that explicitly likened Chiang Kai-shek to Zeng Guofan and defamed both as “Han traitors” and “butchers” (Fan Wenlan 1949, “Preface”). In his new preface to the 1954 edition of Zhongguo jindaishi, Fan stated that he was “very unsatisfied” with the book written nine years earlier and that he had “wanted to completely tear up the book and rewrite it according to the phases of development of [China’s] modern history” (Fan Wenlan 1955a, 2).16 As I will describe in the next chapter, Fan indeed made many efforts to revise his earlier interpretations of modern Chinese history. Suffice it here to note that Fan’s revised views were in many

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aspects similar to the earlier interpretations of Li Dingsheng and Zhang Wentian. In other words, Li and Zhang, rather than Fan, were the true forefathers of Chinese Marxist historiography of modern China. However, both Li and Zhang have been forgotten in post1949 China. Because he lost his CCP membership after 1931, Li Dingsheng remained a professor in the history department of East China Normal University in Shanghai after 1952 and died at fiftynine at the start of the Cultural Revolution, when he became a target of attacks by radicals (Hu Fengxiang 2004). Zhang Wentian, too, lost his influence as a Marxist theoretician and historian after the revolution; he chose to serve as Chinese ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1951 to distance himself from the center of power in Beijing, but he eventually fell victim to Mao’s persecution in 1959, when he openly criticized the Great Leap Forward. He died in Wuxi in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution (Cheng Zhongyuan 2000). In contrast, Fan remained a leading historian in the People’s Republic throughout the rest of his life. Although after the revolution he devoted himself to the premodern period, employing his philological training to gain a reputation as a rigorous, professional historian, and although he rarely wrote on the modern period after 1956, hence deliberately eschewing the field of modern Chinese history with its controversies and uncertainties, his legacy of politicizing and romanticizing history in the 1940s exerted a profound influence on the field of historical research in post-1949 China. Eventually Fan found himself targeted by highly politicized historians on the eve of the Cultural Revolution for his insistence on “historicism” (lishizhuyi) after the revolution. His personal friendship with Mao Zedong saved him from a planned attack by the radicals.17 After receiving Mao’s instruction in July 1968, Fan started an ambitious plan to continue his Zhongguo tongshi jianbian and rewrite Zhongguo jindaishi. His health, however, prevented him from going further. A year later, he died at seventy-six with his tasks unfinished. In fact, the task of rewriting modern Chinese history from a Marxist perspective was never seriously undertaken before or after his death. Beginning as a rebuttal of the modernization narrative of pro-Nationalist scholars, Fan’s work on modern China in the 1940s proved to be more of a nationalist undertaking than a Marxist study. To recapitulate, three factors explain the nationalism that permeated his revolutionary narrative and his deviation from the Marxist tradition. First and foremost was his commitment to

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“national salvation” during the Japanese invasion, which accounted for his animosity to capitulators in history and to the conciliatory policy of the Nationalist leaders, an attitude that prevailed among the many idealistic intellectuals who sympathized with Yan’an. No less important was his background as a philologist in the tradition of Zhedong school and a poorly trained Marxist, which explains his excessive attention to empirical detail in his historical account, on the one hand, and inadequate analysis of class relations and social conflicts in true Marxist fashion, on the other. His strong Han-centered identity and nationalism led to his obsession with the HanManchu divide in late Qing politics and the “resister-capitulator” dichotomy in China’s foreign relations, which distracted him from coherently narrating the thesis of the antifeudalist and anti-imperialist revolution in his writings. The third factor involved Mao’s quest for ideological autonomy in his struggle against the monopoly of orthodox Marxism by the Comintern and its agents within the Chinese Communist Party, which allowed Mao and his historians to freely interpret in light of the needs of the Party in its rivalry with the Nationalists during the most difficult years of the War of Resistance to Japan, no matter how far their interpretations deviated from the “right” path.

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The Making of a New Orthodoxy Marxist Historiography in the 1950s

One of the major challenges that confronted official historians in China after the communist revolution was how to attenuate the pragmatic quality of the revolutionary historiography of the 1930s and 1940s, and create a new interpretative schema that was consistent with the orthodox Marxist doctrines that regained currency after 1949. Fan Wenlan, the leading Communist Party historian, openly admitted in 1951 the problem of “ahistoricism” (fei lishizhuyi) in his earlier work, Zhongguo tongshi jianbian (An outline of Chinese history), which was written in Yan’an in 1940 and 1941.1 “Speaking of the present by borrowing from the ancient” ( jie gu shuo jin) and “simply analogizing ancient people and ancient events to current people and current events,” Fan remarked, “impaired the historical viewpoint of seeking truth from facts” (Fan Wenlan 1954, 19). The problem of ahistoricism also characterized his Zhongguo jindaishi (The modern history of China), finished in Yan’an in 1945, in which he dichotomized the ruling class in Chinese society into the simple categories of collaborators and resisters in terms of their attitude to foreign invasions and completely negated the former in order to attack Chiang Kai-shek by innuendo for his conciliatory policies with Japan. Such historical writings became outdated and problematic when the communist revolution was over. What concerned Fan and many other historians in rewriting modern Chinese history, therefore, was how to rebuild an interpretive framework to reduce the color of ahistoricism and base their analysis of history on the correct Marxist methodology as they understood it. Since the late 1920s and 110

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1930s, communist and Marxist historians in China had accepted the Comintern’s definitions of China as a “semifeudal and semicolonial” society and of the communist revolution as a revolution “against feudalism and imperialism.” The historians after 1949 had no problem accepting the same thesis for understanding the overall nature of Chinese society and the characteristics of revolutions in modern China. But no one had offered a clear and satisfactory answer regarding exactly what factors determined the nature of Chinese society and shaped the course of historical development in modern China or what the overarching theme was in modern Chinese history. For example, was modern Chinese history primarily a history of China’s decline toward the status of a “semifeudal and semicolonial” society or primarily a history of the Chinese people’s struggle against feudalism and colonialism? In other words, what was the “basic thread” ( jiben xiansuo) of modern Chinese history along which one could identify the most significant events in history? By what criteria should one divide the history into periods (fenqi) in order to arrange events for the convenience of narration and history teaching? And what were the subthemes of each of the periods? These questions became an issue in the early 1950s because the educational authorities of the People’s Republic of China, following the example of the Soviet Union, needed a standard interpretation of modern Chinese history for the compilation of “universal textbooks” to be used nationwide. History, in other words, could no longer be freely interpreted to serve the changing needs of the Party; it had to be turned into an academic discipline along with other areas of the humanities and social sciences, based on a set of widely accepted and relatively stable concepts, analytical tools, and explanatory schemes. This chapter, therefore, examines the disciplinization of the writing and teaching of history, focusing on a debate from 1954 to 1956 on the periodization of modern Chinese history. This debate is worth our scrutiny here not only because it gave rise to a new interpretive scheme for modern Chinese history that would dominate the field in the decades to come, but, more important, because it shows us how far the official historians departed from the pragmatic tradition in their quest for a “true” Marxist methodology in historical research, how the revolutionary discourse prevailing in the humanities and social sciences since “thought reform” in the early 1950s shaped historians’ thinking, and the problems with the disciplinization of history that eventually led to the eruption of the

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“historiographical revolution” in the late 1950s and mid-1960s, a topic to be examined in the next chapter.

CLASS STRUGGLE OR PRINCIPAL CONTRADICTION? The Class Struggle Thesis

The debate on the periodization of modern Chinese history began with the publication of an article by Hu Sheng (1918–2000), the head of the textbook compilation group under the Department of Propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party, in the inaugural issue of Lishi yanjiu (Historical research) in January 1954.2 Hu first dismissed the method of periodizing history according to the different forms of encroachment by foreign imperialism in China, for this method ignored the other side of the process, that is, the reactions of the Chinese people to foreign aggression. He further disagreed with periodization based on changes in social and economic areas, because it overlooked changes in superstructure or in political systems and changes in the political consciousness of the people; these changes, though based on changes in economic structure, could be more drastic and radical than the latter. Hu then suggested periodizing modern Chinese history by looking at the forms of class struggle in Chinese society. To justify his proposition, Hu referred to the debate among historians in the Soviet Union on the issue of demarcating the feudal and capitalist periods in Russian history. As a result of that debate, Hu explained, most Russian historians agreed on using “the most important manifestations of class struggle that indicated changes in social and economic relations” as the major criterion for distinguishing between the feudal and capitalist periods. Hu further quoted a Russian article that summarized the debate to strengthen his proposition: “Class struggle, as Lenin put it, is the ‘true driving force of history.’ Its phases and unfolding, and its culmination and outburst all reflect changes in the entire realm of the forces of production and relations of production. Therefore, it undoubtedly constitutes the most important manifestation of each form of class society in its historical process. The Marxist periodization of history is impossible without looking at this manifestation” (Hu Sheng 1954, 5). Applying the conclusion of the Russian debate to modern Chinese history, Hu proposed periodization according to the manifesta-

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tions of class struggle in modern China. “The basic task of works on modern Chinese history,” Hu wrote, “is to explain how new classes emerged from within Chinese society, what changes occurred to the relations among different classes, and how class struggle developed under the aggression of foreign imperialism in China” (ibid., 6). He then suggested dividing modern Chinese history according to “three surges of revolutionary movements,” for these surges “fully exposed new changes in social forces through intense class struggle.” By his definition, the revolutionary movement first surged in the Taiping revolutionary movement, a period when the capitalist relations of production had not yet emerged within Chinese society, and, therefore, the peasant class remained the “driving force of history” (ibid., 7). The Boxer Uprising represented the second surge of the revolutionary movement, when the peasant revolution, which remained the major revolutionary force in Chinese society, coexisted with capitalist thinking that was reflected in the aborted Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898. The third surge of the revolutionary movement began in 1905 and ended with the outbreak of the Revolution of 1911, a time that witnessed the initial development of China’s domestic capitalism and the rise of bourgeois revolutionaries as well as constitutionalists who represented “the bourgeoisified landlord class” (ibid., 11). After World War I, Hu posited, the Chinese proletariat emerged as an independent force in society and initiated the “New Democratic Revolution” (in contrast to the “Old Democratic Revolution” led by the Chinese bourgeoisie) and hence brought China into the contemporary period (Hu Sheng 1954, 13). By emphasizing the revolutions in modern Chinese history, Hu Sheng’s explanatory scheme continued the revolutionary narrative that Fan Wenlan had developed in his Zhongguo jindaishi. Like Fan Wenlan, Hu overlooked progress in the “forces of production” and negated the reform movements in the late Qing and Republican periods. As a result, the Self-Strengthening Movement, which represented a step forward in China’s forces of production, had no place in his scheme at all, for including it would lead to approval of Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, who had long been portrayed in the revolutionary narrative as reactionaries and enemies of peasant rebels, and would therefore weaken the revolutionary theme. In fact, Hu went even further than Fan in denigrating the reforms. While Fan acknowledged various “achievements” of the reform movement in 1898 (Fan Wenlan 1949, 308), Hu denounced the top-down reforms

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as only an attempt “to resist peasant revolution” (Hu Sheng 1954, 9). Like Fan’s work, however, Hu’s new interpretation had only one goal, that is, to justify the inevitability and rightfulness of the communist revolution by interpreting modern Chinese history as a series of failures of the “Old Democratic Revolution” under the weak leadership of the peasantry and the bourgeoisie that ultimately led to the “New Democratic Revolution” and its success in eliminating feudalism and imperialism in China under the leadership of the thoroughly revolutionary and uncompromising proletariat (i.e., the Chinese Communist Party). The Principal Contradiction Thesis

Hu Sheng’s thesis was questioned by Sun Shouren, a history professor at Northeastern Normal University. Sun first challenged Hu’s application of Russian historians’ method of periodization to Chinese history. In his opinion, China was different from Russia; the latter was basically an independent society, whereas China was a “particular transitional society” or a country experiencing a transition from an independent society to a semicolonial society. Therefore, he argued, one should not think of the periods of modern Chinese history merely in terms of the “low tide” and “high tide” of class struggle within the society; particular attention had to be paid to the “intrusion of imperialism and its combination with feudalism.” Instead of using class struggle, or the three surges of revolutionary movements, as the criterion of periodization as Hu proposed, Sun suggested dividing modern Chinese history into periods according to changes in the “principal contradictions” in Chinese society. Unlike Hu, who sought support in Russian historians’ works, Sun justified his criterion by referring to Mao Zedong’s theory on contradictions. According to Mao, “there are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions.” Thus, “in studying any complex process in which there are two or more contradictions, we must devote every effort to finding its principal contradiction. Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved” (Mao Zedong 1937, 322). In modern Chinese society, Mao wrote, “the contradiction between imperialism and the Chinese nation and the contradiction between feudalism and the great masses of the people are

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the basic contradictions in modern Chinese society. Of course, there are others, such as the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the contradictions within the reactionary ruling classes themselves. But the contradiction between imperialism and the Chinese nation is the principal one” (Mao Zedong 1939, 631). After citing Mao’s many sayings on contradiction, including the quotations above, Sun proposed that the periodization of modern Chinese history should be based on changes in the nature of the principal contradiction. To understand these changes, he suggested, one had to look further at the two aspects of the contradiction (i.e., imperialism vis-à-vis the Chinese nation). As he put it, “the major aspect of the principal contradiction in modern Chinese society was the foreign aggressive forces and their running dogs, the reactionary domestic rulers. Together, they gradually turned China into a semicolonial society while maintaining its feudal basis, and they caused changes in the nature of modern Chinese society. Especially decisive were foreign aggressive forces; the changes in the nature of foreign aggressive forces and of their aggression in China caused profound changes in the nature of Chinese society” (Sun Shouren 1954, 22-23). Based on the foregoing rationale, Sun divided modern Chinese history into the following four periods: (1) the period from 1840 to 1864, when the British aggression caused the emergence of the principal contradiction between imperialism and the Chinese nation and signaled China’s transition from a feudal society to a semicolonial and semifeudal society; (2) the period from 1864 to 1894, when foreign aggression receded and took “moderate political, economic, and cultural forms” instead of the form of wars, and when the principal contradiction took place primarily between the masses of people and the ruling class; (3) the period from 1894 to 1905, when imperialist aggression beginning with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 caused the final formation of a semicolonial and semifeudal society in China and when the contradiction between imperialism and the Chinese nation once again became the principal contradiction; and (4) the period from 1905 to 1919, when imperialist aggression again receded and took a “relatively moderate form,” and the contradiction between the masses of people and the ruling class resurfaced (Sun Shouren 1954, 30-32). The contrast between the propositions of Hu and Sun is striking. While Hu borrowed from Russian historians and emphasized

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class struggle as the major token demarcating historical periods, Sun found support from Mao’s theory for his use of principal contradictions as the criterion of periodization. This discrepancy led to their different understandings of the theme of modern Chinese history. By highlighting class struggle, Hu depicted modern Chinese history as a series of revolutions against feudalism and imperialism. The emphasis of his narrative, therefore, is on Chinese revolutionaries as the decisive force shaping the course of history. In sharp contrast, Sun focused on contradiction and, in particular, on the principal aspect of the principal contradiction. He thus depicted foreign military aggression and foreign political, economic, and cultural influences as the dominant factors in shaping the nature of Chinese society. To do Sun justice, he did not totally ignore the rebellions and revolutions in modern China when conceptualizing his periodization. After discussing the changes in the major contradictions in Chinese society, he also noted the “changes in the nature of the revolutionary movements against foreign aggression and domestic oppression” and suggested periodizing modern Chinese history by looking primarily at changes in the nature of the major contradictions, while “referring to changes in situation of revolutionary movements.” Thus, for each of the four periods that he identified, he also mentioned the changes in the nature of the revolutionary movements in that period (Sun Shouren 1954, 30). Overall, however, Sun’s formulation was distinguished from Hu’s by emphasizing principal contradictions, especially foreign aggression and the influences of foreign imperialism, as the key factor in periodizing modern Chinese history. The Social Economy Thesis

Disagreeing with both Hu’s emphasis on class struggle and Sun’s emphasis on principal contradictions, Jin Congji, a junior teacher at Fudan University, proposed taking into account both the “modes of production” (or “socioeconomic structure” as he alternately put it) and class struggle when periodizing modern Chinese history. In his article published in Lishi yanjiu, Jin first criticized Hu Sheng for ignoring changes in socioeconomic structures in modern China; it was the socioeconomic changes, Jin argued, that constituted the basis on which the complex class struggles took place. Revolutionary movements, he admitted, could be used as the sole criterion for periodizing the history of the Communist Party or the history of

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revolutionary movements, but they could not be used for dividing the history of the entire society. Jin further blamed Sun Shouren for overlooking socioeconomic changes when analyzing the changes in the nature of Chinese society and for replacing a concrete analysis of such changes with a description of the evolution of class relations. In his opinion, to conceive of different periods in modern Chinese history, one had first of all “to investigate developments and changes in economic structure and modes of production in modern Chinese society,” while also paying attention to “developments in class struggle and changes in its nature” (Jin Congji 1955, 46). Like Hu Sheng, Jin also cited the works of Stalin at the beginning of his article to justify his argument. Among the sayings of Stalin that he quoted are the following: “The history of social development is primarily the history of the development of production, or the history of the development of forces of production and relations of production.” “The key to studying the laws of social history . . . thus is to inquire into the mode of production in a given period of a society or into the social economy.” “The primary task of historical science is to investigate and reveal the laws of production, the laws of the development of forces of production and relations of production, and the laws of socioeconomic development” (Jin Congji 1955, 44). Jin, to be sure, admitted the importance of class struggle in understanding history: “The history of all class societies is nothing less than the history of class struggle. The different phases of class struggle, therefore, are also the most accurate reflections of socioeconomic changes and the most remarkable manifestations of the actual developments in the forces of production and relations of production in the entire society.” But he quickly negated Hu’s use of class struggle as the only criterion of periodization by turning to the opinion of Russian historians. He quoted the Chinese translation of a Russian article on Soviet historians’ consensus on the periodization of Russian history as saying “historians should never treat the manifestations of class struggle as the only and universal marks of the inherent historical process of socioeconomic formations”; “it is selfevident that no positive results can be obtained by dividing historical periods strictly according to a single, universal criterion” (Jin Congji 1955, 45). Based on his criterion that combined socioeconomic factors with class struggle, Jin divided modern Chinese history into five periods. For each of the periods, he outlined both the features of China’s

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social economy as well as the characteristics of class struggle in that period, although he paid primary attention to socioeconomic factors throughout his article. His proposition, therefore, was distinct from both Hu’s class struggle thesis and Sun’s principal contradiction thesis. Together, the three different views offered the basis on which the debate on the periodization of modern Chinese history unfolded.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE THESIS The reactions of participants in the debate varied. Over the course of the debate, which lasted for nearly three years, however, support for Hu’s class struggle thesis increased. This section examines both the spoken and the unspoken reasons why most of the historians opposed the principal contradiction and socioeconomic structure criteria and endorsed Hu’s view. Refuting the Principal Contradiction Thesis

The biggest problem with Sun Shouren’s thesis of principal contradiction, as his critic, Dai Yi, pointed out, was his overemphasis on the “external cause” (waiyin), or imperialist intrusion, and underestimation of the importance of “internal causes” (neiyin), or social and economic relations within Chinese society in shaping the course of Chinese history. In Mao Zedong’s “Maodun lun” (On contradiction), the work Sun used to support his proposition, Dai discovered another point that Mao made on the decisive role of internal causes, rather than external causes, in shaping social change and development (see Mao Zedong 1937, 302). Thus, even if the foreign aggressive forces constituted the “principal aspect of the contradiction,” Dai argued, the impact of the changes in the effect of foreign powers on Chinese society had to be materialized through “the contradictions between the forces of production and the relations of production within Chinese society” and through “the class struggle and national struggle within Chinese society” (Dai Yi 1956, 121). Another critic, Huang Yiliang, faulted Sun for ignoring Mao’s point on the interchangeability between the two aspects of a contradiction (see Mao 1937, 322). The struggle between the Chinese people and the imperialists, or between the two aspects of the “principal contradiction” in modern Chinese history, Huang contended, always unfolded in favor of Chinese people rather than imperialism. The struggle necessarily resulted in the reactionary rulers’ loss of their

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dominant status and the complete victory of the people’s revolution. In other words, the Chinese people, in place of imperialism, would become the “principal aspect of the principal contradiction.” To treat imperialism invariably as the principal aspect of the contradiction in modern China, Huang warned, “would lead to the wrong conclusion that imperialism and its running dogs would rule China forever and that the Chinese people would never achieve victory” (Huang Yiliang 1955, 41). Even more fatal to Sun’s argument was Huang’s attack that compared Sun’s emphasis on imperialism as the principal aspect of the principal contradiction in modern China to the “racist view” among the “imperialist, bourgeois historians” of the superiority of white people over the rest of humankind and the “central role” of white Europeans in world history, a view that served to “justify the aggressive policies of imperialism.” To refute Sun’s emphasis on the role of imperialism in modern China, Huang reiterated the prevailing view in the official historiography in China and the Soviet Union about the “the masses of people” as the “creators of history” by quoting the works of Stalin again and again. By focusing on imperialism in periodizing modern Chinese history, Huang contended, Sun “wiped out the role of the Chinese people as the creators of Chinese history.” Huang thus concluded: Sun’s “wrong views are completely contradictory to the fundamental principles of Marxist and Leninist historical materialism and, to a certain degree, coincide with the imperialist, bourgeois world outlook” (Huang Yiliang 1955, 33). Huang went far beyond the scope of an academic debate and turned his critique into a political assault. Refuting the Social Economy Thesis

The deficiency of Jin Congji’s thesis, his critics complained, lay primarily in his juxtaposition of class struggle with social economy and in his equal treatment of the two factors, or his use of two separate criteria, in historical periodization. This dual criterion, according to Dai, was unnecessary because, as Jin himself admitted, class struggle was the most profound reflection of changes in social economy and the most evident manifestation of the actual condition of forces of production and relations of production. To separate socioeconomic changes from class struggle, Dai wrote, would mean that “class struggle could not reflect economic changes,” which contradicted Jin’s own statement. Dai further pointed out that Jin “misunder-

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stood” the points of the Soviet historians that he had cited to justify his proposition. To prove Jin’s misunderstanding, Dai quoted a paragraph from the same Chinese translation of the Russian article that Jin had used: “The periodization of the history of capitalist relations [in Russian history] should be based on class struggle, which is the result and indicator of development in modes of production and is the motivating force of historical events. It is the extremely important manifestations of revolutionary class struggle that had significant impact on the historical course that should be used as the demarcations of different periods. Within each period, the nature and direction of class struggles with exceptionally complex political and ideological forms should be illuminated by developments in the forces of production and the relations of production.” This statement, Dai explained, showed that the Soviet historians did not suggest the necessity of separating socioeconomic changes from class struggle (Dai Yi 1956, 118–119). Another critic, Wang Renchen, claimed that Jin’s emphasis on socioeconomic changes not only “obscured the role of class struggle in history,” but also suggested Jin’s inclination toward “economic materialism,” a problem that the Soviet historians had criticized during the debate on the periodization of Russian history (Wang Renchen 1956, 177–178). Dai Yi provided four reasons, backed by frequent citations of the works of Lenin and Stalin, why he endorsed the criterion of class struggle: (1) class struggle is the most substantial reflection of developments and changes in economy and in the social mode of production; (2) class struggle is the motivating force of history; (3) class struggle reflects changes in the social status and living conditions of the laboring people as the masters of history; and (4) all phenomena of social superstructure are related to class struggle, which underlies all conflicts in the areas of politics, law, ideology, and arts. His conclusion: “Using class struggle as the criterion for periodization can best reflect the developments and changes in modes of production, can best reveal the laws of progressive movements in history, and can best illuminate the interactions between the base and the superstructure” (Dai Yi 1956, 115). Following Dai Yi’s lengthy article published in Lishi yanjiu in June 1956, historians who joined the debate almost unanimously accepted Hu Sheng’s proposition of periodizing modern Chinese history according to developments in class struggle or revolutionary movements. The subsequent debate only centered on the number

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of periods in modern Chinese history. Some suggested dividing the history into three periods (Dai Yi 1956; Wang Renchen 1956; Zhang Kaiyuan 1957). Others recommended four periods (Sun Zhengrong 1957; Lai Xinxia 1956; Rong Mengyuan 1956) or even nine periods (Zhao Dexin 1957). Critical to shaping the result of the debate was the opinion of those responsible for compiling the standard history textbooks for all universities in the country, for the debate was triggered by the need for a standardized, official interpretation of the periods of modern Chinese history. Reflecting their consensus on class struggle as the criterion for periodizing modern Chinese history, the teaching and research group in modern Chinese history in the history department of Tianjin Normal University first expressed its support as a group for Hu Sheng’s view in October 1956. Finally, at two conferences on course syllabi for comprehensive and teachertraining universities held in the same month, the majority of the participants decided to adopt Hu Sheng’s criterion of class struggle and his periodization of “three revolutionary surges” in the universal syllabus for courses on modern Chinese history. The Attitude of Fan Wenlan

It is interesting to consider the attitude of Fan Wenlan toward the debate. As the director of the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Science and a historian trusted by Mao, Fan was no doubt the most authoritative scholar in the field. In an essay published in 1956, he criticized the “dogmatists” in the history field for “paying no attention to historical data on objective facts” and for being interested only in citing Marxist classic works. Such dogmatists, he ridiculed, only “picked a few passages” from classic works and used them as “armor” and “cannons” while “gathering for the moment a few fitting historical materials as pawns” in a battle—namely, an academic debate. He admonished the dogmatists to adopt the attitude of “seeking truth from facts” and to “work hard, tirelessly, and persistently” to “grasp a large amount of historical material” before making a judgment on the issue under debate (Fan Wenlan 1956a, 359-360). The next year, Fan published another essay, “Several Problems in Historical Research,” in which he criticized the dogmatists in the field for their “conformity by appearance” (maosi) in studying Marxism. Such dogmatists, Fan complained, “ignored concrete realities and treated the words and sentences found in Marxist books as a panacea, limited their think-

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ing to various abstract [Marxist] formulas, and put such abstract formulas into use indiscriminately regardless of the time, space, and conditions [in which the object under study existed].” This approach, Fan declared, “is pseudo-Marxism and dogmatism” (Fan Wenlan 1957, 208). Predictably, Fan Wenlan was unsatisfied with almost all the other participants in the debate on historical periodization, who invariably cited the views of Soviet historians or the works of Lenin and Stalin to make a point or defend their own points. In sharp contrast with them, Fan did not cite any Russian works at all in his two lengthy articles on the periodization of modern Chinese history published in 1955 and 1956 respectively, a way of showing his firm objection to the dogmatic approach prevailing among the historians in the early 1950s. Even more striking is the fact that he refused to accept class struggle as the criterion for periodization and instead endorsed the principal contradiction criterion. Fan was the only historian during the debate who openly spoke for this criterion besides Sun Shouren, the scholar who proposed it. Fan’s acceptance of the principal contradiction thesis is not difficult to understand. Mao’s distinctive theory on contradiction was one of the key components of “Mao Zedong thought,” a result of Mao’s ideological departure from the orthodox Marxism that had once predominated in the thinking of CCP leaders in the 1920s and early 1930s. Fan’s adoption of Mao’s theory as the criterion for periodizing modern Chinese history was consistent with his earlier adherence to Mao’s thought in his writings in the 1940s. But Fan did not completely accept Sun’s construct. Like Sun, he favored using the principal contradiction as the criterion to divide history; he also saw the contradiction between imperialism and the Chinese nation as the most important contradiction in modern China; and he further believed that “imperialism always constituted the principal aspect of the contradiction” (Fan Wenlan 1956c, 153). However, he disagreed with Sun’s method of periodizing modern Chinese history only according to “changes in the nature of foreign aggression in China” and “changes in the nature of the foreign aggressive forces per se” (Sun Shouren 1954, 23); instead, Fan periodized history according to his own understanding of changes in the principal contradictions. In his view, the contradiction between imperialism and the Chinese people constituted the principal con-

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tradiction when an imperialist power invaded China and invoked China’s resistance that involved all social classes; when imperialism oppressed China in the moderate forms of political, economic, and cultural influences, the contradiction between the masses of the people and feudalism stood out as the principal contradiction. These two contradictions, Fan explained, alternated to be the principal contradiction in a given period. He thus divided modern Chinese history into four periods and identified a principal contradiction for each of them: (1) the period from 1840 to 1864, when both of the contradictions were prevalent in Chinese society; especially strong, however, was the one against feudalism (namely, the Taiping Rebellion); (2) the period from 1864 to 1895, when the contradiction against imperialism stood out; (3) the period from 1895 to 1905, when the struggle against imperialism again constituted the principal contradiction; and (4) the period from 1905 to 1919, when the struggle against feudalism predominated (Fan Wenlan 1955b and 1956c). Fan’s periodization, therefore, was almost identical to Sun’s, but his explanation was different: whereas Sun focused on foreign aggression and its impact on Chinese society, Fan highlighted changes in the principal contradictions in each of the four periods. The principal aspect of the principal contradiction in Fan’s new interpretation varied; it alternated between feudalism and imperialism in different periods, whereas in Sun’s theory it was invariably imperialism. This revision was necessary, for it allowed Fan to avoid criticism for overemphasizing “external causes,” or the role of imperialism, following in the footsteps of “imperialist, bourgeois historians” in the West. In his explanation of the characteristics of each of the four periods, Fan emphasized both changes in the principal contradiction and corresponding changes in the struggle against imperialism or feudalism. In other words, Fan paid equal attention to the principal contradiction and to class struggle or the revolution against imperialism and feudalism. Fan’s construct thus was actually a synthesis of the class struggle and principal contradiction criteria. It was impeccable even from the perspective of the historians who embraced the class struggle thesis. Indeed, none of the participants in the debate ever disputed with Fan over his new interpretation. It is surprising, in this light, that no one endorsed his construct either, despite the “perfection” of his construct, his status as the leading authority in the field of modern Chinese history, and the fact that his construct was based faith-

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fully on Mao’s theories on contradiction and the Chinese revolution. It was Hu Sheng’s class struggle criterion and his three revolutionary surges formula that eventually prevailed. How, then, did Hu outcompete Fan in constructing the new interpretative framework of modern Chinese history? What were the unspoken reasons that the vast majority of historians in the field endorsed Hu’s revolutionary surges proposition?

THE PARADOX OF THE NEW ORTHODOXY It is quite certain that the historians’ acceptance of the revolutionary proposition was voluntary; no government leaders or Party authorities openly interfered with the debate. This was in sharp contrast with the debates in the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, which Mao deliberately manipulated, suppressing opinions that contradicted his political agenda. The free debate on the historical issues in the early and mid-1950s reflected Mao’s policy of “letting a hundred schools of thought contend” (baijia zhengming) and his personal interest in history. To promote historical study in China, the CCP central committee created the Council for the Study of Historical Issues on the instruction of Mao in October 1953. Composed of eleven leading historians and headed by Chen Boda, the vice director of the CCP’s propaganda department, the tasks of the council included, among others, creating more institutes of historical research and publishing a historical journal named Lishi yanjiu (Historical research). According to Mao’s instructions, the journal was to adopt the principle of baijia zhengming and avoid being a “despotic magazine” (zazhi fa) intolerant of different opinions. The reason Mao allowed a free debate in the history field (in 1956 it was officially declared the Party’s policy in all fields of academic research and artistic work), according to Liu Danian, the vice-director of the Institute of Modern History in the 1950s, had to do with the fact that many of the leading historians, such as Fan Wenlan and Guo Moruo, had different opinions on historical issues such as the periodization of ancient Chinese history (Liu Danian 1986, 5). The baijia zhengming policy would help prevent the suppression of different opinions in journals controlled by the scholars. Lishi yanjiu did adhere to the principle in the early years after its founding in 1954. Following the publication in its first issue of Hu Sheng’s article that triggered the debate on the periodization of modern Chinese history, Lishi yanjiu

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published articles by other historians who either opposed or supported Hu. None of them received a warning from the government for any view they expressed during the debate. Two reasons accounted for the historians’ acceptance of the class-struggle criterion. One was the ideological influence of the Soviet Union. After the communist revolution, Mao adopted the “lean to one side” (yi bian dao) policy toward the Soviet Union. As a result, China not only formed a political and military alliance with the Soviet Union, but also borrowed systematically from the latter in establishing its own administrative, economic, cultural, and educational systems. Soviet influence was especially strong in the education field. Almost all universities and their departments were reorganized in the Soviet style. Textbooks in most courses were either directly imported from the Soviet Union or based on Soviet models, and, consequently, Russian replaced English as the number one foreign language in all universities. Soviet influence was equally conspicuous in the ideological area, where translations of Russian books on Marxist theory, especially the works of Stalin, were accepted as the most authoritative sources on Marxism and all issues regarding socialist reconstruction. In historical research, Stalin’s interpretation of historical materialism was treated as the only correct Marxist theory on modes of production or the relationships between the forces of production and the relations of production and between economic basis and sociopolitical superstructure in successive social formations. Mao, who had fought hard against the blind transplantation of Russian theories of Marxism and communist revolution to China in the 1930s, joined other CCP leaders in the early 1950s in embracing the Soviet orthodoxy, for not only had China fully sided with the Soviet Union, but, more important, Mao and his comrades had no knowledge of how to build socialism and they had no other options but the Soviet model to adopt. Mao did not fully realize the problem of wholesale imitation of the Soviet model until 1956, when he delivered the famous speech “On the Ten Major Relationships,” in which he attempted to highlight China’s own characteristics, priorities, and approaches in economic construction and the handling of social and political issues (Mao Zedong 1956). Until that point, Soviet influences were unparalleled in almost all fields in China, and they continued to shape the thinking of Chinese leaders and intellectuals for decades to come despite China’s break with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. It was no wonder, there-

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fore, that almost all the historians who participated in the debate on historical periodization invariably cited the works of Stalin and Soviet historians to justify their points. Class struggle, which had been accepted by Soviet historians as the most important criterion for demarcating the feudal and capitalist periods in Russian history, thus also constituted the basis for Chinese historians to periodize modern Chinese history. The other reason is the predominance of a revolutionary discourse in China after 1949 that assumed the central role of antiimperialist and antifeudal struggles in modern Chinese history and the supremacy of the revolution over all other political options. To indoctrinate intellectuals with its revolutionary ideology and to justify the communist revolution and legitimate the new state, the CCP launched a series of campaigns in the early 1950s, including the thought reform (sixiang gaizhao) campaign and subsequent campaigns against the movies The Life of Wu Xun (Wu Xun zhuan) and An Informal History of the Qing Court (Qing gong waishi), against the prevailing interpretations of the novel Dreams of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng), and against the ideas of Hu Shi (Hu Haitao 2006; Li Gang 2007). All these movements aimed to instill in intellectuals the proper political consciousness. They were to praise the laboring class and derogate the ruling class, to praise bottom-up mass violence and derogate top-down reforms, and to praise actions against imperialist powers and derogate the acts of the imperialists. In a word, they had to show unreserved support for the revolution and to place revolution above all else in political discourse. Thought reform in the early 1950s, in particular, played a key role in establishing the primacy of the revolutionary narrative in historiography and generating a revolutionary discourse that soon claimed hegemony in the society. Rather than an effort to indoctrinate intellectuals with the CCP’s pure ideology or the theories of Marxism and Leninism, as some have argued, thought reform was primarily a campaign for noncommunist intellectuals and the general public to repudiate their past, to demonstrate their new loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, and to accept the legitimacy of the new party-state by familiarizing themselves with the Party’s narratives about the communist revolution and modern Chinese history. An immediate result of thought reform, therefore, was the establishment of the hegemony of revolutionary discourse in society. During the few years of the campaign, this narrative was no longer limited

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to the official historiography; it became part of the ideology to be promoted by the party-state throughout society. Although the revolutionary ideology was accepted reluctantly by some intellectuals, the majority of the educated elites as well as much of the general public willingly embraced it owing to their repugnance for the Nationalist regime and their growing confidence in the new government. Historians’ acceptance of the revolutionary criterion also reflected the political consciousness that Chinese intellectuals had developed after 1949. Hu’s emphasis on the revolutionary surges in conceptualizing modern Chinese history perfectly tallied with political discourse that eulogized and prioritized the revolutions in modern China. In sharp contrast, the two criteria proposed by Sun and Jin seemed to be politically “incorrect”: to support Sun’s emphasis on the impact of imperialism on Chinese society would open one to criticism for ignoring the more fundamental “internal causes” in explaining history and even the accusation of speaking for imperialism; to endorse Jin’s social economic criterion ran the risk of embracing economic determinism and downplaying the importance of class struggle in propelling the progress of human society. Fan Wenlan’s elaboration did not seem to be perfect, either, for it was based on the problematic criterion of “principal contradiction” that had incurred the aforementioned criticism, and it did not articulate the revolutionary theme as clearly as did Hu’s formulation, although it was in line with Mao’s original theories on contradiction and Chinese revolution. To accept Hu’s construct was not only politically safe in a society where the revolutionary discourse prevailed, but also ideologically and academically correct in the history field itself, where the views of the Russians presumably represented the orthodox Marxist interpretation. The eventual triumph of the revolutionary framework formulated by Hu Sheng, in sum, is best seen as a result of the convergence between the revolutionary discourse introduced by the Chinese Communist Party and the hegemony of the Soviet representation of Marxism in the history field in China. The debate on the periodization of modern Chinese history and the subsequent formation of a standard interpretive schema had two different and contradictory consequences. On the one hand, they no doubt affirmed the revolutionary discourse of the party-state and formalized the revolutionary narrative in the official historiography. On the other hand, they were also the necessary steps leading to the disciplinization of the field through the wide acceptance of the

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explanatory schema and academic norms, a process that functioned to increase the autonomy of the field from the influences of the party-state’s ever-changing political agendas and ideological needs and to attenuate the pragmatic nature of the historiography of modern China. Fan Wenlan, for example, expressed his strong dissatisfaction with his book on modern Chinese history and made serious efforts to revise or relinquish many of the views he had expressed in that book (Fan Wenlan 1955a). In his article about the periodization of modern Chinese history published in 1955, Fan deemphasized the Manchu-Han rift in his new understanding of the “fundamental contradictions” in Chinese society after the Opium War. Instead, he accepted the struggle between the ruling class and the oppressed masses, regardless of their ethnic origins, as the fundamental contradiction in the society. Thus, in his new interpretation, the ruling class comprised both “the Manchu aristocrats and the Han landlords and bureaucrats,” and the masses included the Han people as well as ethnic minorities, including the Manchu people. Compared to the overriding contradiction between the rulers and the ruled, ethnic conflicts, especially the contradiction between the Manchu and the Han, were only “secondary” as he put it, though he noted that this contradiction could be acute under certain circumstances (Fan Wenlan 1955b, 114). Fan was obviously trying to reconcile his obsession with the Manchu-Han conflict and the Marxist orthodox view that emphasized class struggle. Echoing Mao’s formulation about the changed nature of Chinese society after 1840, Fan further explained that there were “two fundamental contradictions”: a preexisting one between the ruling class and the ruled, and a new one between the Chinese nation and foreign capitalism/imperialism. He admitted that there were contradictions within the “reactionary forces,” including “the contradiction between different groups of Han feudal forces, on the one hand, and the Qing court, on the other,” but such contradictions were secondary in importance (Fan Wenlan 1955b, 117). Fan disagreed with the indiscriminate use of the term “imperialism” to generally describe foreign economic, political, and military aggression in nineteenthand early-twentieth-century China. Instead, he distinguished between “the aggression of foreign capitalism” before1895, which had concentrated on the economic area, and “the aggression of imperialism” after 1895 that focused on political areas (ibid., 128). Fan no longer grouped the Manchu rulers and foreign imperi-

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alists together to depict the Manchu aristocrats as merely “capitulators” colluding with foreign aggressors to suppress the Chinese people. Instead, he acknowledged the existence of “a contradiction between the Chinese feudal forces and imperialism” (Fan Wenlan 1955b, 117). As he put it, “when imperialism was embarking on an aggressive war, all classes within China, including part of the feudal ruling class, were able to unite and engage in a national war against imperialism. It was only when the oppression of imperialism took the relatively modest form of political, economic, and cultural oppression that the ruling class would capitulate to imperialism and collaborate with it to oppress the masses of the people” (Fan Wenlan 1956c, 150). Thus, the Sino-French war of 1884 and the Sino-Japanese war of 1894, he wrote, “were both national wars of the Qing government against aggression.” “The Qing government’s war of resistance was just, and the brave fight of Chinese soldiers and some commanders were in accord with national interests” (ibid., 155). Fan’s revised view of modern Chinese history is also evident in his new interpretation of major events such as the Taiping Rebellion and the Self-Strengthening Movement. In his 1946 book Zhongguo jindaishi, Fan depicted the Taiping Rebellion as both the continuation of age-old conflicts between the Manchu and Han peoples, to reflect his personal anti-Manchu inclination, as well as the very beginning of the “bourgeois democratic revolution” in China, to elevate the significance of the event and the importance of revolutionary movements in modern China on the whole. In his attempts to reinterpret modern Chinese history in 1955 and 1956, however, Fan perceived the Taiping Rebellion as a manifestation of the contradiction between the popular masses and feudalism (Fan Wenlan 1956c, 154). Therefore, he emphasized its nature as a “peasant war” that was essentially no different from other peasant rebellions in Chinese history, rather than a bourgeois democratic revolution. Although he noted a Taiping leader’s publication of a proposal for Westernization, known as Zizheng xinbian (A new treatise on statecraft), Fan doubted whether this peasant rebellion “had ever displayed any inclination, even in an unconscious way, to develop capitalism under the historical circumstances at that time” (Fan Wenlan 1955b, 122). Fan also adjusted his view about the Self-Strengthening Movement, which he depicted as completely negative in his 1946 book. Although he still denied the capitalist nature of the military industries founded by Li Hongzhang and other Self-Strengthening lead-

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ers, he acknowledged their positive roles in China’s social progress. “It was through these industries,” Fan observed, “that modern machines were introduced to China. Once machines were introduced, workers had to be recruited, so a portion of the proletariat was bound to emerge. The government-founded military industries [during the Self-Strengthening Movement] did have a positive effect in this sense.” Fan further noted that “aside from the governmentfounded military industries, there were also nonmilitary industries founded by the government or by merchants under government supervision, which contained more or less capitalist elements.” The Self-Strengthening Movement, he admitted, also led to the establishment of industries jointly funded by the government and merchants, which he called “industries that combined feudalism with capitalism,” as well as the establishment of industries founded entirely by merchants, which he termed “national capitalism.” Instead of the reactionary movement he had denounced in Zhongguo jindaishi, the Self-Strengthening Movement now appeared as an indispensable process leading to capitalist development in modern China (Fan Wenlan 1955b, 126–127). The efforts of Fan Wenlan and his colleagues to disciplinize the field of modern Chinese history in the 1950s thus had two contrasting effects on the field. While reaffirming the revolutionary narrative that they had created before 1949 through the standard formulation of the different phases of modern Chinese history, their stress on historical research as a science grounded on Marxist methodology also led to a shared conviction among historians that prioritized objectivity in scholarship over commitment to present-day politics. This new orientation functioned to limit the manipulation of history writing for the pragmatic purposes of the party-state and the romanticization of history that had characterized Fan’s own writings before 1949. The acceptance of Hu Sheng’s revolutionary construct by most of the historians in the debate and its official adoption as the standard interpretative framework of modern Chinese history to be included in the universal syllabus for all higher educational institutions demonstrated the establishment of a new orthodoxy in the CCP’s historiography on modern China.3 It was reminiscent of the old orthodoxy that had prevailed in the Party’s early history in the 1920s and early 1930s to the extent that the new orthodoxy came into being once

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again as a result of Russian influence among historians who had experienced “thought reform” in the early 1950s. But the return of the CCP’s historiography to Marxist orthodoxy and its departure from the Party’s characteristic pragmatism also accounted for the weakness and deficiency of the new historiography. After all, Mao showed a particular interest in history not just for the sake of his personal fascination; he had always used history as a powerful tool to serve his political ends. It was precisely the usefulness of history that explained Mao’s encouragement on Fan Wenlan’s work before 1949 and his decision to create the Council for the Studies of Historical Issues within the CCP’s highest organ. Thus, although Mao refrained from interfering in the debate on the periodization of modern Chinese history, he was undoubtedly disappointed by the historians’ dogmatic approach to the debate. As Hu’s construct was accepted as the “standard” explanation of modern Chinese history and hence contributed to the making of a new orthodoxy in the CCP’s historiography, the new orthodoxy itself increasingly lost its relevancy to the ever-changing political realities and hence its utility for the pragmatic leader of the Party. It inevitably gave way to the radical, pragmatic historiography during the “historiographical revolution” and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, where Mao would not eschew direct interference.

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Between the Past and the Present The Radicalization of Historiography under Mao

The “historiographical revolution” (shixue geming) began in 1958 at the height of the Great Leap Forward as a result of growing dissatisfaction among CCP leaders with disciplinized history and its weakened ability to link the past with the current needs of the party-state. Proponents of the revolution questioned historians’ preoccupation with purely academic research and called for their adaptation of historical studies to present-day political realities. After a temporary retreat in the early 1960s when the Great Leap radicalism caused nationwide famine and subsequent attacks from inside and outside the Party, the historiographical revolution resurged at the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), becoming part of the political struggle between different factions of Party leaders. But the driving force behind this revolution was not limited to radical leaders of the party-state; it also came from those who had been marginalized within the profession of history writing and teaching. To them, the disciplinization of history since the early 1950s had meant the imposition of strict academic standards, rigid interpretive schemas, and an oppressive hierarchy of senior, prominent scholars over young, lower-ranking individuals in the profession. They treated the shixue geming not just as an opportunity to elevate their standings within the profession, but also as a movement to revive the revolutionary tradition that they believed had been endangered in the course of the professionalization of history writing. The targets of the historiographical revolution were mainly scholars of the so-called post–May Fourth generation (Xu Jilin 2003, 83). Born in the late 1890s and the 1900s, they were among the first 132

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generation of modern Chinese intellectuals with professional training in their respective fields; many of them had studied in Europe and the United States, and became pioneers in their respective disciplines in China. Despite their background as liberal intellectuals, however, many of them developed a sympathy with and even joined the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s, believing that Marxist historical materialism was more scientific than other doctrines they were acquainted with for understanding history and society, or simply because of their discontent with the Nationalist government’s corruption and its tyranny toward liberal intellectuals. After the communist revolution, they reestablished their social and political standing through the thought reform campaign in the early 1950s and obtained key positions in institutions of higher learning or in government offices in charge of cultural and educational affairs. Though ideologically committed to Marxism and Maoism, they did not easily give up their liberal values. Among them were senior historians who defended conventional academic practices and resisted the ultrapoliticization of history. Politically, they were allies to the practical party leaders who prioritized expertise and professionalism in economic reconstruction and later fell victim to the Cultural Revolution. Supporters of shixue geming, in contrast, were much younger than its targets. Growing up during the turbulent years of foreign encroachment and civil wars in the 1920s through 1940s, they were less educated and less professionally trained than their predecessors. After 1949, they held lower positions in universities and other educational, cultural, or government institutions under the leadership of the senior scholars. While some of them adhered to the liberal values that they had accepted before 1949, others tended to be radical—they constituted the main body of the radicals together with an even younger group who were educated after 1949. Discontent with the inequality between them and their leaders in terms of political standing, social status, and privileges in research and teaching, the radicals welcomed the advent of any movement or program that challenged the status quo. They were enthusiastic that shixue geming deemphasized purely academic work, or “expertise” (zhuan), which had bolstered the privileges of their opponents, and that it stressed the importance of “redness” (hong), or commitment to the Party’s ideologies, in which they claimed superiority to the liberal senior scholars.

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The historiographical revolution, therefore, was not just an attempt by party leaders to manipulate history for political purposes; it was also a reflection of confrontation between the different groups of intellectuals with different interests and political motivations. For the senior historians, the revolution was a challenge to the cultural, social, and political privileges that they had reestablished after 1949, and they sought to mitigate the damage caused by the revolution by circumventing it and defending existing academic practices and institutional arrangements. For the challengers, the revolution offered them a perfect opportunity to narrow their gap with the senior scholars, to advance their standing in social and political hierarchies, and to destroy existing hierarchies and establish their dominance in the field of historical study and beyond.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVOLUTION The Initiation of the Revolution

The historiographical revolution began with a speech by Chen Boda, the vice-director of the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party, to the Committee on Scientific Planning of the State Council on March 11, 1958, the time when the whole country was preparing for the Great Leap Forward at Mao’s instigation. In that speech, Chen complained of two major problems in the fields of humanities and social sciences. One was scholars’ overriding interest in the ancient period and in pedantic and overelaborate research on trivial matters (fansuozhuyi) that made their work “detached from revolutionary realities.” The other was the self-importance and arrogance of “bourgeois intellectuals,” especially their contempt toward the working class, the laboring people, and senior CCP cadres. The solution to these two tendencies, Chen proposed, was a “Great Leap Forward” in humanities and social sciences as well, which should be conducted using two methods. The first was “emphasizing the present and denigrating the past” (houjin bogu), or shifting scholars’ major effort to studying modern and contemporary issues. The second was “learning while working” (bianxue biangan), or encouraging the masses as well as senior cadres who had received no formal education to acquire scientific knowledge and build their ability in solving technological problems (Renmin ribao, May 5, 1958). As Chen later admitted in his memoir, he delivered the speech

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at Mao’s instruction, and what he said reflected Mao’s purposes (Chen Xiaonong 2005, 152). The speech soon received Mao’s praise (Li Rui 1999, 227–228). Mao launched the campaign out of his profound skepticism toward liberal intellectuals. Despite the recurrent political campaigns since the early 1950s aimed at subjugating intellectuals and forcing them to increase their loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, Mao refused to accept them as part of the working class, as some CCP officials suggested, and persistently treated them as belonging to the bourgeois class. Mao was particularly dissatisfied with the scholars’ concentration on academic issues that had little to do with the current needs of the country and their increasing distance from the masses. He thus wanted to achieve at least three interrelated goals through the campaign. By proposing bogu, or downplaying the ancient, Mao sought to weaken and delegitimize the very basis on which the scholars had built their scholarship and academic reputations. Meanwhile, by promoting houjin, or emphasizing the present, he required the scholars to shift their attention to contemporary issues and to use their research to serve the immediate needs of the Party and the country. Finally, by encouraging the masses and the cadres to “learn while working,” Mao hoped to release their potential in creative activities, to narrow their gap with the bourgeois intellectuals, and to challenge the academic authority of the latter. All these purposes were consistent with Mao’s highly politicized approach to historical research and his reliance on the masses throughout his revolutionary career since the 1920s. Deference with Defiance: Responses of Senior Historians

Shortly after the release of Chen’s speech, many leading historians in the country published essays in newspapers or history journals to show their support for the call for houjin bogu. Jian Bozan (1898– 1968), the director of the history department at Peking University, asserted that there was a “struggle between two lines in historical science.” One represented bourgeois thinking because of its emphasis on the ancient period rather than the present, its focus on the investigation of source materials rather than the use of theory, and its study of special topics rather than the writing of general history. The other, which was necessary for overcoming bourgeois thought and paving the way for a Great Leap Forward in historiography, was the Marxist approach that adhered to the principle of houjin bogu and

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used proletarian views or materialism and dialectics to study history (Jian Bozan 1958a, 1958b). Fan Wenlan, too, criticized traditional scholars’ disinterest in the issues of the present day, their “separation of scholarship from politics,” and their obsession with hairsplitting evidential research. He argued that ignoring both revolutionary and reactionary politics actually benefited reactionary politics, for it allowed reactionaries such as Chiang Kai-shek to act recklessly. “Therefore,” he warned, “scholarship that is detached from politics is in fact politicized scholarship that serves reactionary politics.” He concluded his essay by admonishing that “academic work has to serve politics” (xueshu yiding yao wei zhengzhi fuwu) (Fan Wenlan 1958a). Despite their alleged support for houjin bogu, historians found themselves directly challenged by the historiographical revolution. First, most in the 1950s were specialized in premodern rather than modern Chinese history. To speak of “emphasizing the present and downplaying the ancient” directly called their specialty and even professional careers into question. Should they give up their traditional field and move to the new areas of modern and contemporary history? None of the historians who expressed their opinions through the media directly answered this question. Instead, they defended their own field of archeology or ancient history by interpreting houjin bogu on their own terms. Guo Moruo (1892–1978), the head of the Chinese Academy of Science and a leading archeologist and expert in early Chinese history, claimed that among the sixty-odd institutes in his academy, only a few were concerned with the ancient period, a fact that embodied the principle of houjin bogu. He further explained houjin bogu as studying ancient history for present purposes. As he put it, historians of the ancient period could adhere to the spirit of houjin bogu by “illuminating the laws of historical development and letting people command those laws for better transformation of the objective world and to serve reconstruction at the present time or in the future” (Guo Moruo 1958). There was no need, in other words, for historians to change their field from the ancient to the modern or contemporary period as Chen Boda originally suggested. Jian defended the field of ancient history even more forcefully and eloquently. He contended that to speak of houjin bogu did not necessarily mean that Marxist historians had to work only on modern history, leaving the field of ancient history to bourgeois historians. Instead, he said, “we not only need ancient history, but also should seriously study ancient history, truly occupy the front of

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ancient history, and expel bourgeois idealist historiography from its last hiding place.” Likewise, Jian emphasized the utility of ancient history for present-day purposes: “We study ancient history only to better understand modern history, and we study modern history only to better understand contemporary history. Everything is for modern times, for today, and for the ongoing socialist Great Leap Forward” (Jian Bozan 1958a). The historiographical revolution also challenged the traditional approach to historical study, especially its emphasis on gathering and investigating source material. Echoing Chen Boda’s speech, Jian Bozhan criticized the “bourgeois” historians’ overemphasis on source material and their “equation of historical sources with historiography” (shiliao ji shixue) (Jian Bozan 1958a). He also criticized traditional historians’ dedication to hairsplitting investigation of trivial matters in history at the expense of exploring larger historical and theoretical issues. But Jian and other senior historians, who had received rigorous training in traditional historiographical and philological methods and had built their academic reputations precisely on their strength in mastering source materials and indepth empirical research, knew well the importance of sources to historical research. They all realized the danger of downplaying source material in the serious study of history, to which they were committed. Fan Wenlan was especially concerned with the possible denigration of source material during the historiographical revolution. Thus, while acknowledging the necessity of applying Marxism to the study of Chinese history and linking historical research with China’s realities, Fan called for greater efforts to “gather and collate” source material, including newspapers, magazines, books, and archives as well as documents in foreign languages or the languages of domestic ethnic minorities. “These materials,” Fan argued, “are numerous and difficult to use. No results can be produced without taking great efforts” (Fan Wenlan 1958b, 2). To support the collation and publication of archival documents and ancient books, Jian suggested that the government open archival institutions at all levels to teachers and students from the history departments of all universities (Jian Bozan 1958b). Guo Moruo, too, spoke for the importance of historical sources and suggested the Marxist historians compete with bourgeois historians (such as Chen Yinke, who openly refused to accept Marxism) in using source material. As he put it, “we cannot demand perfection

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of a bourgeois historian who pays too much attention to sources. We should instead take advantage of his strength if he does excel in certain regards. But we do not want him to be self-satisfied, nor should we treat him as a summit that is insurmountable. In fact, we need to surpass him. Just as we want to catch up with Britain in fifteen years in the production of steel and iron, in the field of historical research, we should also exceed Chen Yinke in mastering source material in a not-too-long period of time” (Guo Moruo 1958). A third threat of shixue geming to senior historians was its overwhelming emphasis on the priority of “redness” (hong) over “expertise” (zhuan) (i.e., the priority of ideological commitment over professional training), which could easily lead to the disparagement of rigorous training in one’s own field and the deterioration of the quality of academic work. To defend the profession of historical research, almost all of the leading historians emphasized the importance of disciplinary training in and institutional support for historical research. Jian, for example, suggested organizing seminars and workshops on special topics and allowing free debate on academic issues, reviving the historical associations and their annual meetings, allowing faculty members sabbatical leaves for conducting research, and promoting international cooperation and exchange in historical research (Jian Bozan 1958b). Fan Wenlan, likewise, called for more support for college teachers to do research and the loosening of regulations in examining and approving the publication of monographs and articles. Finally, all these historians emphasized the importance of learning foreign languages, communicating with foreign scholars, and using foreign-language material for research. Shixue geming, therefore, was more than a political campaign that demanded historians’ ideological compliance. While showing their commitment to Mao’s radical ideology as they had dutifully done in the preceding movements, the historians thwarted the campaign and minimized its damage to their profession by interpreting its purposes on their own terms. As it turned out, the new revolution was also an opportunity for historians to speak for their profession and to strengthen their footing in an area that had become increasingly vulnerable to the state’s political manipulation. Junior Historians as Beneficiaries

Unlike the established historians, who were skeptical of the aims of shixue geming and therefore were halfhearted in carrying it out,

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junior teachers and college students in history saw the campaign as an opportunity to elevate themselves in the profession and therefore were enthusiastic in supporting it. A conspicuous change in higher educational institutions in the 1950s was the emergence of a large number of junior faculty members, owing to the rapid expansion of the student body in universities and colleges that had lowered their admission requirements since the nationalization and reorganization of the universities in 1952 and especially during the Great Leap Forward. At Peking University, for instance, the faculty increased 2.6 times in ten years, from 864 in 1949 to 1,538 in 1959. Its history department had only 11 teachers in 1949, including seven senior teachers at the rank of full or associate professor and four junior faculty members at the rank of lecturer or teaching assistant. By 1960, however, the history faculty had increased to 84, including 16 senior teachers and 68 junior teachers. The proportion of junior teachers thus increased from 36 percent to 81 percent in the department. Many of them joined the department right after completing their undergraduate or graduate studies during the Great Leap Forward. They not only constituted the majority of the faculty, but also shared administrative power in their department. In some history departments, a new form of leading body, called a “three-in-one combination” (sanjiehe), was introduced, which comprised representatives from students, teachers (mainly the junior teachers who were active in the campaign), and cadres, to replace the traditional leadership in which the senior faculty members played a decisive role though the various committees they controlled (Wang Yuanzhou 2006, 54–55). The junior teachers and college students also found unprecedented opportunities to participate in historical writing and publication, which had been primarily the prerogative of senior faculty members. At the height of the movement, they interrupted their regular classes and instead frequently went to factories, villages, or military units, where they spent weeks investigating and writing the history of a factory, a mine, a store, a village or a people’s commune, or a military battalion or company. Some traveled to remote areas populated by ethnic minorities to write the history of an ethnic group. In addition, the students and young teachers also participated in the rewriting of various kinds of history textbooks or other teaching materials for history courses to reflect the spirit of houjin bogu, irrespective of their insufficient training and expertise in the field.

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Thus, despite the proliferation of history textbooks under the slogan of the historiographical revolution, the problems inherent in such writings abounded. The biggest was their overemphasis on theory (lun) at the cost of history (shi). To combat the “bourgeois” historians’ traditional emphasis on source material and disinterest in theories, supporters of shixue geming prioritized the use of theory or Marxist teachings (especially historical materialism as interpreted by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong) over the investigation of source material in historical study. Their task, therefore, was to prove the applicability of the chosen theories to Chinese history as well as their ability to use them. Their basic method in writing history was so-called theory guides history ( yi lun dai shi), that is, interpreting Chinese history by deduction based on such theories and then looking for facts or evidence in history to prove the theories or even distorting or misinterpreting history to make it fit the theories.1 The gathering and analysis of historical data, which had been central to historical research by traditional scholars, became relatively unimportant. The result was an oversimplified and dogmatic interpretation of historical events and figures. A good example of a simplistic explanation of history is the radicals’ dichotomization of people in the past into two categories, the exploiting class and the laboring class, on the ground of the universality of class struggle in history and its role as the fundamental force propelling social progress. An important task of their historical writing thus was to show the laboring people as the “masters of history” by highlighting their activities in class struggle and production while downplaying the exploiting class. To that end, the radicals had to subvert the traditional method of historiography that centered on the chronology of dynasties and the activities of rulers. Therefore, the most popular slogans during the revolution were “smash the dynasty-centered scheme” (dapo wangchao tixi) and “down with emperors, princes, generals, and ministers” (dadao di wang jiang xiang). Whenever they had to discuss the economic, social, or political systems in history or mention the activities of rulers, the radicals had to first condemn those systems as “feudal” in nature and criticize those people as belonging to the exploiting class, an approach known as “refute the feudal wherever it appears, and curse the landlord whenever he shows up” ( jian fengjian jiu fan, jian dizhu jiu ma). To extol the laboring people in history and denigrate the ruling class, some history textbooks avoided describing the

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activities of the ruling elites and mentioning the names of figures that belonged to the ruling class. Thus, in the description of Confucianism, Confucius’ name had to be omitted; in discussion of the reform of Shang Yang of the Qin state in the fourth century BC, the statesman’s name had to be dropped; and in the depiction of opium confiscation on the eve of the Opium War, Lin Zexu was missing from the picture (Jian Bozan 1959a, 37).

IN DEFENSE OF HISTORICISM The historiographical revolution was short-lived. By 1961, when the Great Leap Forward was over, articles advocating shixue geming also vanished from the media. As the central government took drastic measures to “consolidate” the economy, which had almost been ruined by the disastrous movement, universities throughout the country also enforced new policies to readdress the problems in teaching and faculty development that had occurred during the same movement. One of the new policies was to terminate the threein-one combination leadership that had allowed students and young teachers to participate in school administration and, in place of it, to implement the Provisional Working Regulations for Higher-Educational Institutions (known as the Sixty Articles) promulgated by the CCP Central Committee in September 1961. The Sixty Articles reasserted the decisive role of the chairperson and an executive committee composed of full and associate professors in the administration of a department. Many departments created their own regulations that banned party secretaries (mainly teaching assistants or junior lecturers) from “interfering with the department’s administrative affairs” and reduced their roles to secondary and auxiliary ones (see Dong Baoliang 2007, 310–314). Another measure was promoting the role of senior professors in mentoring junior faculty members and at the same time imposing on the latter strict requirements to develop their expertise in their academic field. Among the requirements were the so-called three basics (basic knowledge, basic theory, and basic training) that the junior teachers had to master and the five barriers (the barriers of classic works, writing skills, source materials, teaching, and research) that they had to overcome. To meet these goals, a junior teacher in history typically had to finish reading two or three hundred books. The emphasis on training in the “three basics” in fact also deprived junior

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teachers of opportunities to teach a course or to do research independently. In many history departments, the relationship between the mentoring senior professors and teaching assistants were turned into one between masters and disciples in the traditional style; the latter were expected to show respect and obedience to the former. When there was a faculty meeting, it was usually up to the teaching assistants to take notes, fetch boiled water, clean the room, or buy supplies. The frustration that the junior teachers experienced after the Great Leap Forward led to their growing discontent with senior faculty members, which explains at least in part their enthusiasm for another round of shixue geming that soon prevailed on the eve of and during the Cultural Revolution. Speaking for the Dynastic Histories

The negation of the Great Leap Forward in higher education also made possible a rebuttal of the major propositions that the supporters of shixue geming had advocated in the preceding years. As described earlier, many established historians showed reservation about the movement from its very beginning. When the Great Leap Forward was over, they made systematic efforts to criticize the slogans and practices prevailing during the shixue geming. One of their counterattacks was aimed at the slogans “smash the dynastycentered scheme” and “down with emperors, princes, generals, and ministers” that the radicals had upheld under the banner of houjin bogu. In an essay published in Xin jianshe (Reconstruction) in March 1959 that reappeared in Renmin ribao (People’s daily) on April 8, 1959, Jian Bozan openly disagreed with the attempts to remove the names and histories of individual dynasties from textbooks on Chinese history. The name of a dynasty, he argued, had an “objective existence” as the “symbol of an era,” and the succession of dynasties represented landmarks in the evolution of Chinese history; therefore, historians “have no right to willfully delete the titles of the dynasties.” The task of historical research, he contended, was precisely to “analyze and generalize” the historical facts about the dynasties and thereby to reveal “the regularities of history” (Jian Bozan 1959b). In the Renmin ribao of the same date, Guo Moruo, too, spoke for the necessity of studying the history of individual dynasties. As he put it, “the old method [of historical research] was to treat each dynasty as a period of time; so there were studies of

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the history of Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han, and so on. There is nothing wrong with studies of such individual dynasties. What matter are the stance, point of view, and methods one uses in doing research. With the correct stance, point of view, and methods, we can study any figure and any event in history; why, then, can we not study the history of a dynasty?” (Guo Moruo 1959). Both historians further criticized the recent tendency to remove the activities of all “emperors, princes, generals, and ministers” as well as important political institutions from history textbooks. To highlight the masses of the people as the central force of history, Jian argued, one did not have to exclude the roles of individual figures in history, including “active members” of the ruling class (Jian Bozan 1959b). Guo, too, maintained that “the activities of the ruling class cannot be excluded [from history textbooks], since the society in the past was a society of classes.” He wrote, “We have to praise the ruling class if its activities turned out to be beneficial to the people of the same era and to the development of the whole nation and its culture; and to condemn it if the reverse was true. To condemn it, however, does not means to obliterate it [from history]; it only means to criticize it.” He further mentioned a number of emperors, including the First Emperor of Qin, Emperor Wu of Han, emperor Taizong of the Tang, and emperors Kangxi and Qianlong of the Qing, and praised them for their historical contributions “to the nation and to economic and cultural developments” (Guo Moruo 1959). “Theory Guides History” Questioned

Another tendency in historical study that came under question in the post–Great Leap Forward years was the overemphasis on Marxist teachings at the expense of empirical research, or the proposition of “theory guides history.” Fan Wenlan criticized those who filled their articles or books with “so-called formulas and laws based on their own fabrication” and “ignored historical facts to an extreme extent,” and ridiculed them as “bombarding without shells” (fang kong pao). He told his colleagues that “in historical study, the cannons that can truly defeat the enemy are historical works (articles or books) based on solid research.” “To manufacture such shells, one has to conduct serious investigation of the historical events being studied, to systematically and completely read all kinds of relevant books, and to understand in great detail the whole process, including the origins and consequences, of the events.” Only after conducting

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such solid empirical research, Fan wrote, could one then use a Marxist point of view and approach to analyze and judge the events. Fan encouraged historians to do research with “a spirit of independence and skepticism” and avoid “turning researchers into the slaves of the subjects under research” (Fan Wenlan 1961, 3). Jian Bozan directly questioned the thesis of “theory guides history” in his famous article “Several Problems Currently Existing in Historical Studies,” published in 1962. “The formulation of ‘theory guides history’ means that historical study should begin with theories and concepts rather than with concrete facts” (Jian Bozan 1962b, 84). However, he reminded, “both Marx and Mao have told us that historical study has to begin with facts and concrete history. One cannot and should not be allowed to begin with theories and concepts. The general theories and concepts are merely the guiding principles for historical study; they are not the departure points. Theories and concepts are the conclusions derived from the study of concrete historical facts. If one begins with theories and concepts, then how is that different from having conclusions first and then manipulating history based on the conclusions? Isn’t this from theory to theory, from concept to concept, and from the abstract to the abstract?” “We should begin with real facts, rather than with definitions, when discussing questions” (Jian Bozan 1962a, 79–80). Jian further criticized history teachers who “talk little or not at all about concrete historical facts in class and instead use the principles of social evolution to replace concrete history.” Such teachers, he complained, “randomly pick up a few sentences from [Marxist] classic works to substitute for concrete, scientific analysis and then make a conclusion by citing a few words from classic works without analyzing concrete historical conditions. In their lecture notes, again they either talk about some fundamentals and principles or cite a few dogmatic sayings. They repeatedly mention the hows and whys that people are familiar with, impose presumptuous conclusions on concrete history, and distort or even fragment concrete history to let objective beings in history serve the historians’ subjective purposes” (Jian Bozan 1962b, 85). Jian’s efforts to correct the problems caused by “theory guides history” were not limited to words. To help history teachers as well as students overcome the problem of having no convenient access original source materials for teaching and studying Chinese history, Jian, together with another senior history professor, Zheng Tiantian,

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began the compilation and publication of the eight-volume Zhongguo tongshi cankao ziliao (Reference materials for the general history of China) in 1961. As the editors stated in the preface of the work, the purpose of the multivolume compilation was to “deal with the problems that have occurred in teaching the general history of China and therefore systematically select relatively complete original material for college students in history departments to enrich their historical knowledge and improve their reading ability.” By the eve of the Cultural Revolution, they had published five of the planned eight volumes that included original documents from a wide variety of sources, including both official sources such as dynastic histories and gazetteers and unofficial documents, such as private “jottings” and collections of essays. The first four volumes each included forty to seventy-five such sources, and the last four volumes would each contain more than 110 sources. They were organized chronologically, with the last three volumes each covering a single dynasty, which defied the radical proposition of “smashing the dynasty-centered scheme.” A large amount of material included in the volumes were records of the activities of rulers or essays authored by ruling elites, contradicting the slogan “down with emperors, princes, generals, and ministers.” Refuting Ahistoricism

In addition to the simplistic application of ideological teachings to historical writing at the cost of the richness and complexity of history itself, the advocacy of “theory guides history” also caused the dichotomization of all players in history into two categories, the ruling class, which was subject to the radicals’ repudiation, and the ruled, whom the radicals glorified. To combat this highly arbitrary and politicized method of history writing that the radicals embraced, Jian Bozan reasserted the approach of historicism that he and his peers had advocated in the early 1950s. Shortly after the communist revolution, senior pro-CCP historians such as Fan Wenlan and Jian Bozan reflected on their own writings during the revolutionary years. They both criticized themselves for the “ahistoricism” (fei lishizhuyi) that they had adopted in their earlier works and instead advocated historicism in the early 1950s. Fan, for example, admitted in an essay published in 1951 that Zhongguo tongshi jianbian (A concise history of China), which he authored from 1940 to1941 in Yan’an, emphasized the despotism

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and brutality of the rulers but ignored their contributions to history. He further conceded that he had erred in “using the past to talk about the present” ( jie gu shuo jin) at the expense of the principle of “seeking truth from facts” (shi shi qiu shi). For example, he wrote, to liken the alliance between Wu and Shu in their joint fight against Wei during the Three Kingdoms period to the United Front during the War of Resistance against Japan, or to liken Sun Quan of the Wu to the Guomindang leaders for their sabotage to the United Front and hence depict Sun in a completely negative tone did not tally with historical facts (Fan Wenlan 1954, 19–20). Jian Bozan, too, criticized himself for having used the method of “likening the past to the present” ( yi gu yu jin) to attack the Nationalists “by innuendo” (yingshe) in his own writings before 1949. Although pro-CCP historians like him did have good reason during revolutionary times to use that method, he admitted, it was nevertheless against historicism. This method, he explained, “does not help people understand present politics but instead blurs their understanding of present-day politics.” Jian further noted two ahistorical tendencies used to judge historical figures in present-day historiography. One was to “evaluate historical figures by using the criterion of a modern citizen and even that of the modern working class” and ignoring the “historical times and historical circumstances in which the historical figures lived.” The other was to “excessively and inappropriately praise historical figures that deserved approval, especially representatives of the laboring class, but to fail to fully realize their historical limitations” (Jian Bozan 1952, 1–4). Jian raises here a fundamental question that confronted Chinese historians for the next three decades, that is, how a historian should mediate between the professional commitment to objectivity in historical research and the externally imposed demand for political correctness. Some historians as well as academics in other disciplines of humanities and social sciences chose to espouse the politically correct after 1949 at the cost of professional objectivity for survival and success. Jian’s defense of objectivity in historical research in the name of historicism reflected his dissatisfaction with the state of the field and his commitment to the discipline irrespective of the increasing pressure of political conformity after 1949. The ahistorical tendency that Jian criticized in the early 1950s had resurged during the Great Leap Forward years. To show their political correctness and adherence to the “class-based point of view”

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( jieji guandian), the radicals went even further by “completely negating the exploiting class” and elevating the peasant class to the level of the modern proletarian class. Therefore, in his article “My Preliminary Opinions on Handling Some Historical Issues,” published on June 22, 1961, Jian first admitted the importance of the “class-based point of view” in historiography: “class contradictions and class struggles are the motivating forces of history. To neglect this point in historical writing will cause mistakes at the level of principle.” However, Jian criticized some historians for “idealizing” peasant leaders. “When writing about peasant wars, one should not forget that the peasant wars took place during feudal times, that the peasants were small owners, and that the peasants did not represent new forces of production. The peasants did oppose feudal oppression and exploitation, but they did not and could never oppose feudalism as a system; the peasants did oppose feudal landlords, but they did not and could never oppose the landlords as a social class. . . . In other words, the peasants’ struggle against feudalism and the landlord class was done spontaneously and without class consciousness.” As for the leaders of the peasant wars, Jian reminded his audience that they “should be approved of but should not be idealized and modernized by equating them with the revolutionary leaders of the modern proletarian class. Because of the limited conditions in history, they had shortcomings. We should not refute them because of their shortcomings; nor should we deny any of their shortcomings because we want to approve of them” (Jian Bozan 1961, 60–61). In another article, Jian further castigated ahistorical views on social classes in history. “To show their correct class stance,” Jian complained, “[some of our comrades] only talk about the revolutionary side and avoid the counterrevolutionary side when discussing the contradictions between antagonistic classes. And when talking about the revolutionary side, they only talk about their merits and avoid mentioning their demerits. It is as if they [the historians] would compromise their stance if they also talked about the counterrevolutionary side or about the shortcomings of the revolutionary side. It is one-sided to talk only about class contradictions without talking about the contradictions within the ruling class; it is onesided of the one-sidedness to talk only about the revolutionary side and only about the merits of the revolutionary side. If we treat history with this approach, then history will become too simple, so simple as to have no contradictions at all” (Jian Bozan 1962b, 96–97).

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Jian was especially critical of the indiscriminate negation of all historical figures of the “exploiting class.” “Many historical figures are negated,” he lamented, “for no other reason than their status as [members of] the landlord class. This is especially true when dealing with the representatives of the ruling class, namely, emperors, princes, generals, and ministers. One has to first say a few sentences to negate them before approving of them or has to say a few words to negate them after approving of them. It is as if one will lose his class stance if he does not do so.” Challenging this highly politicized method, Jian averred that “we should distinguish between ascending and descending stages in their histories when dealing with the exploiting systems and classes. . . . Every mode of production or social system that emerged successively in history represented a step forward in historical development and the result of the upward development of the forces of production. They cannot be completely negated simply because they were the exploiting systems.” “Viewed from the perspective of historicism,” he stated, “every exploiting system and every exploiting class once played a positive role when it was still at the ascending stage of its history. To oppose them whenever they occurred in history is no different from opposing any progress in history” (Jian Bozan 1962b, 94–95). Scientificness Precedes Revolutionariness

While criticizing extremely politicized historiography, Jian did not avoid the issue of how historical study should serve political needs. He admitted the need for using history to “serve socialist revolution and construction.” But he insisted that to let historiography serve politics did not mean “using historical figures and historical events” for the immediate purposes of political struggle. Instead, it meant “exploring the laws of historical development, finding tendencies in historical development, and serving politics with the knowledge of such regularities and tendencies”; it meant “examining the experiences of struggles of production and class struggles in history, including their successes and failures, and using the conclusions from such experiences to serve politics.” Jian emphasized “objectivity” (keguanxing) and “scientificness” (kexuexing) in historical research and its freedom from the influence of current political needs. Historical research, in his view, could and should serve politics, but the precondition for doing so was its autonomy as embodied in its adherence to historicism. His conclusion thus

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was “scientificness first and revolutionariness second in historical study” (Jian Bozan 1978, 18–19). Jian was not alone in advocating historicism in the early 1960s. Other prominent historians, including Fan Wenlan, Guo Moruo, Wu Han, Deng Guangming, Zheng Tiantian, Zhou Yiliang, Zhou Gucheng, and Li Shu, all joined him in denouncing ahistorical tendencies in historiography and advocating historicism in essays published in newspapers or journals, or collaborating with Jian in editing and compiling history textbooks or reference material for history courses. Nevertheless, Jian Bozhan stood out as the most influential scholar among them in the early 1960s not only because he was one of the “three leading authorities of new historiography” in China after 1949—the other two being Fan and Guo—and he held many key positions in the field, including director of the history department at Peking University, general secretary of the Chinese Historical Association, and head of the Ministry of Education’s group for editing and auditing history course material for higher educational institutions, but more importantly because he took advantage of his position and influence in the field to take substantial actions in combating ahistoricism and addressing the problems it had caused. He edited the four-volume Zhongguo tongshi gangyao (An outline of Chinese history) and the first five volumes of Zhongguo tongshi cankao ziliao (Reference materials for the general history of China), which aimed to provide students with concrete historical facts, including the activities of prominent rulers in history. Authorized by the Ministry of Education as the standard teaching material to be used in universities, both publications had profound impact on the field in the following decades. Equally influential were the articles that he published between 1961 and 1963 to promote historicism. So popular was his article “My Preliminary Opinions on Handling Some Historical Issues” that it had been widely circulated among academics in Beijing even before it was officially published. After its publication, this article earned the nickname of the Sixty Articles for Historians, after the official Sixty Articles for Higher Educational Institutions promulgated by the CCP in the early 1960s. In fact, as some of his contemporaries observed, the influence of his writings in the early 1960s was not limited to historians; it was felt in other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Philosophers, writers, and artists all found his critique of ahistoricism pertinent to their respective fields. As a result of Jian’s relentless promotion and sup-

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port from other senior historians, historicism as a “trend of thought” (sichao) revived and prevailed in the early 1960s. Meanwhile, the politicized ahistorical thinking that had appealed to many historians after 1949 and culminated during the Great Leap Forward subsided momentarily, a situation consistent with the overall political atmosphere in the whole country. To some degree, the senior historians’ counterattack on shixue geming can be viewed as the continuation of the “professionalization” of history as an independent discipline that had begun in China at the turn of the twentieth century, a process comparable to the professionalization of history in nineteenth-century Europe, where it started with the separation of history writing and teaching from literature and rhetorical studies, the increase in professional history teachers, the specialization of historians in specific areas, and their emphasis on the scientific method in historical research (den Boer 1998, 358–361; Kenyon 1983, 144–199; Novick 1998, 47–60). In early-twentieth-century China, history as a separate discipline emerged as a result of the creation of history departments in the newly created universities, mostly in the 1910s and 1920s (the earliest was the establishment of the School of History at the Imperial University of Peking in 1899), and as a result of the recruitment of history professors known for their expertise in Chinese history and classics or who had obtained an academic degree from the West, their teaching of specific courses in history and training of students in a major in history, and the publication of monographs and articles in academic journals on a wide range of topics on Chinese history. Despite the rigid explanatory constructs imposed on specific areas of history and despite the embrace of the Marxist and Maoist doctrines that contradicted the approaches used by many liberal historians before 1949, the disciplinization of history in the early and mid-1950s and the reemphasis on historicism in the early 1960s contributed to the professionalization of history to the extent that the senior historians continued to emphasize solid training in basic skills in historical research, the mastering of source materials in one’s own field, rigorousness and objectivity in historical writing, and distancing historiography from present-day politics. All these factors suggested the tenacity of the liberal tradition shared by the senior historians despite their allegiance to the new orthodoxy of Marxism in historical writing after thought reform.2 But this reemphasis on historicism also turned out to be the

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senior historians’ last stand in defending history as a relatively autonomous discipline. Jian Bozan and his colleagues were able to openly denounce ahistoricism and its damage to historiography only when the radicalism that had buttressed the Great Leap Forward lost its ground in the wake of nationwide economic disaster and when practical leaders within the Party, primarily Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969), took drastic actions in the early 1960s to correct the problems caused by the Great Leap Forward. When economic rehabilitation was over and when he felt a growing threat from Liu and Liu’s supporters who had reversed many of his radical politics, Mao Zedong launched a counterattack by cautioning against the “danger of the restoration of capitalism” in China. In response to Mao’s reemphasis on class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as the “primary contradiction” in Chinese society, the young radicals in the field of history renewed their attack on the prominent historians and called historicism into question under the banner of a renewed historiographical revolution. The senior scholars soon gave way to the radicals, resulting in the resurgence of radicalism in the field throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution. A turning point in this process was the controversy over the historical figure Li Xiucheng.

THE DEBATE ON LI XIUCHENG Li Xiucheng (1823–1864), known also as the King of Loyalty (zhongwang), was one of the key commanders of the Taiping rebels during the last few years of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Despite his destruction of the two major camps of the Qing army that encircled Nanjing, the capital city of the rebels, and despite his defeat of a mercenary army composed mainly of Westerners in the areas surrounding Shanghai, Li was eventually captured by the Xiang army of Zeng Guofan after the fall of the city. While imprisoned, Li wrote an autobiographical account (zishu), in which he narrated his military activities, discussed the merits and demerits of other rebel leaders, and expressed his willingness to persuade the remaining groups of rebels in different areas to surrender in exchange for Zeng’s sparing of their lives. Zeng nevertheless executed Li a few weeks later. According to the initial interpretation of historian Luo Ergang (1901–1997), a leading authority on the Taiping rebellion, Li’s surrender to Zeng was pretence; his real purpose was to survive

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and then to seek opportunities for another uprising (Luo Ergang 1951). Without evidence to support that hypothesis, Luo later gave it up and admitted that Li’s surrender was real, but he justified Li’s account by claiming that Li wrote it for three purposes: to review the history of the Taiping rebellion, to preserve the rebels, and to persuade Zeng to shift his attention to foreign invaders (Luo Ergang 1957). Overall, Luo still treated Li as a hero among the rebels and depicted him positively. Challenging Luo’s argument, an author named Qi Benyu (born 1931) published an article in Lishi yanjiu in August 1964. He argued that Li “had lost his revolutionary integrity and betrayed the revolutionary cause” after he was captured, for Li eulogized Zeng and the enemy, defamed the leader of the rebels, repeatedly emphasized the things that he had done to benefit the enemy, and, most important, offered concrete suggestions on how to persuade other rebels to surrender. Qi contended that Li’s defection should not simply be explained as a result of the “limitedness of the peasant revolution” or the inability to understand the feudal system and hence to embrace a “good emperor” in place of a bad one. What Li did, he argued, was “supporting a bad emperor while defaming his own Heavenly King.” “To help a bad government that was opposed by the peasant masses” was not a matter of the “limitations of consciousness of the peasant class” but a “betrayal of the peasant class.” His conclusion: “The King of Loyalty was disloyal” (Qi Benyu 1963, 19–20, 25). To understand why Qi wrote and published this article, it is necessary to look at who he was. Born in Weihai, Shangdong province, in 1931, at age eleven Qi left to join his father in Shanghai, where he was attracted to left-wing publications, especially the works of Mao Zedong. In 1947, he joined the Chinese Communist Party in secret while a middle school student and participated in the Party’s underground activities for the next two years. After 1949, he was sent to the Communist Youth League School in Beijing to study for a year, and thereafter he became an intern secretary in the secretaries’ office of the General Office of the CCP Central Committee. In 1958, during the prolonged Anti-Rightist Campaign in the headquarters of the Party, Qi and seven other junior cadres submitted a report to their superiors complaining of the problems in the secretaries’ office, only to be labeled as “anti–party members.” On hearing of the incident, Mao unequivocally supported Qi and his comrades, and immediately dismissed from their posts all those who had attempted

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to punish them, an action that heightened Qi’s loyalty and personal gratitude to Mao. Knowing that Mao enjoyed reading history books, Qi purposefully devoted time to history and over the years developed an interest in writing history essays, even mimicking the writing style of Mao. As he admitted sixteen years later, his real purpose in writing the article on Li Xiucheng was to attack Peng Dehuai, the former minister of defense who openly denounced Mao for the disaster caused by the Great Leap Forward and hence lost his position and party membership. For Qi, to refute Li Xiucheng and hence to attack Peng by innuendo was a good way to show his loyalty to Mao. In his opinion, Peng’s betrayal of Mao was similar to Li Xiucheng’s treason toward Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping rebels; both Li and Peng failed to preserve their integrity at the final moment of their careers (wanjie bubao) (Xu Siyan 2006). Qi’s article caused a huge stir among historians. Despite its eloquence and appealing writing style, most of them disapproved of Qi’s arguments and expressed strong dissatisfaction with Lishi yanjiu for publishing such an article. The leaders of the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party, too, blamed Lishi yanjiu for publishing the article without letting them know beforehand.3 Realizing the growing disgruntlement among prominent scholars, the propaganda department held a meeting at the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on September 14, 1964, which the heads of the individual research institutes and representatives of major newspapers and academic journals attended. Most of them aired the same opinion: Lishi yanjiu was too indiscreet in publishing the article; to condemn Li Xiucheng as a traitor oversimplified his history as a great hero of the Taiping rebellion. Summing up the attendees’ comments, Zhou Yang, the vice director of the CCP Department of Propaganda, who presided over the meeting, agreed that it was a “mistake” for Lishi yanjiu to publish Qi’s article. As a remedy, he offered two suggestions. First, let Liu Danian, the vice-director of the Institute of Modern History, write an article to be published in the same journal that would praise Li Xiucheng’s activities. Second, since Liu’s article would take time to complete, beforehand the leading historians in Beijing would be invited to an informal symposium to discuss Qi’s article, and then a report should be released through newspapers stating that “the historians’ circle in Beijing does not agree with Qi Benyu’s opinions” (Zhang Chuanxi 1998, 461).

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The symposium was soon held at the Institute of Modern History, and more than one hundred scholars attended, including almost all the prominent historians in Beijing. Again the historians condemned Qi for his “one-sided” opinion of Li Xiucheng. Jian Bozan’s criticism of Qi’s article at the meeting was particularly sharp. He said that Qi’s article was “one-sided,” for it only quoted the words from Li Xiucheng’s account that were favorable to Zeng Guofan and it ignored the contents that were unfavorable to Zeng. Furthermore, Jian complained, Qi’s article was based solely on one source, namely, Li’s autobiographical account that was written in haste in a few days, without referring to other sources, and Qi’s arguments were entirely based on his own inference rather than on a careful study of all kinds of relevant source material. Jian further complained that Qi was overcritical of Li Xiucheng; if Li was condemned simply because of a “blemish” (wudian) at the final moment of his life, then “few heroes can be found among the leaders of peasant rebellions in Chinese history, and the whole history of China has to be rewritten.” Finally, Jian openly criticized the real purpose of Qi’s article: “The Party proposed paying attention to class struggle and opposing modern revisionism, which refers to the struggle in the present. We should not link it to things in the past. Qi Benyu’s motives were good; he wanted to denounce ‘defection’ by criticizing Li Xiucheng. But we cannot do so by sacrificing Li Xiucheng. . . . The King of Loyalty was a hero of the peasant revolution; he had shortcomings, but we cannot be excessively demanding of him” (Zhang Chuanxi 1998, 463). Following the two meetings, a number of articles were published in newspapers or history journals, all approving of Li Xiucheng. The two articles published in Guangming ribao, for example, both argued that Qi had erred in using the “criteria of the proletariat” (that is, the criteria of the Communist Party) to evaluate a “leader of peasant revolution in feudal society” and in ignoring the “limitations of the times and the [peasant] class” (Zhou Yingfa 1964, 32) and “imposing on Li Xiucheng, a peasant leader of a century ago, what is familiar in our times” and “totally disregarding the historical conditions of Chinese peasants at that time” (Kang Youming 1964, 72). Another article, published in Renmin ribao, contended that one had to adopt an “attitude of historicism” when evaluating a historical figure and to distinguish what was most important and what was secondary in his or her life. It concluded that Li was first and foremost a “peas-

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ant revolution leader” before the fall of the rebels’ capital city and that his surrender to the enemy after the fall was only secondary in his life. An article published in the Shanghai-based Wenhuibao detailed Li Xiucheng’s “great contributions to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom,” emphasized Li’s loyalty to Hong Xiuquan and benevolence to his people, and blamed Qi Benyu for “one-sidedly exaggerating Li Xiucheng’s mistakes, distorting his autobiographical account, and making an evaluation of Li Xiucheng that is unfair” (Mao Jiaqi 1964, 130). Luo Ergang, too, published a rebuttal of Qi’s article in Renmin ribao on July 27, 1964, in which he reasserted and “proved” his earlier hypothesis of Li Xiucheng’s “deceptive surrender.” He described Li’s action as “a ruse of self-injury to postpone an attack” (kurou huanbing ji). According to Luo’s new interpretation, Li Xiucheng “deliberately” wrote a lot of words defaming himself and other rebel leaders in order to win the trust of the enemy; his real purpose, however, was to delay the enemy’s military attack and allow the rebels enough time to migrate to northwest China and then to conquer the North China Plain. Luo further argued that Zeng Guofan actually “fell into the trap,” for he did indeed stop pursuing the “Junior Heavenly King” (the son of Hong Xiuquan) and his followers, and he did indeed propose to the Qing emperor to offer amnesty and enlistment to the rebels as Li Xiucheng suggested in his autobiographical account. Luo thus concluded that Li Xiucheng “did not surrender at all” (Luo Ergang 1964, 66). The opinion in favor of Li Xiucheng thus prevailed. Frustrated, Qi was to write an article to “confess” ( jiantao) his mistake in exaggerating Li Xiucheng’s problems under pressure from leading historians and the CCP Department of Propaganda. It was at this moment, however, that Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao, handed Qi’s article over to Mao. After reading it three times, Mao praised the article and marked the end of the article with sixteen characters: “Black characters on white paper; evidence as solid as mountains; loss of integrity at the end of one’s life; unworthy of being a good example” (bai zhi hei zi, tie zheng ru shan, wan jie bu zhong, bu zu wei xun) (Xu Siyan 2006, 21). Jiang Qing soon met Qi and told him: “Your article is well written. The chairman looked at it and praised you, saying that you made a contribution to the Party. The chairman believed that the problem of defection within the Party has never been solved, and your article raised the issue” (ibid.). Jiang

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further encouraged Qi to continue writing on the topic and to seek help from Kang Sheng (1898–1975), a leading theoretical authority of the Party who had had Mao’s trust since the late 1930s. In fact, the problem of defection that concerned Mao at that time was no longer about Peng Dehuai, who had already been ousted from the Party; it was Liu Shaoqi and his supporters in the Party that had become Mao’s new target. Qi thus stopped writing the confession and instead worked on a second article on Li Xiucheng. Meanwhile, at Mao’s instruction, Renmin ribao reprinted on July 24, 1964, Qi’s first article, which had been published in Lishi yanjiu in August 1963. A month later, it published Qi’s second article, “How to Treat Li Xiucheng’s Surrender and Defection.” In that article, Qi refuted the dominant view that Li Xiucheng’s mistake or defection, when compared to his contributions to the Taiping Kingdom, was only secondary and that overall Li remained a “great revolutionary hero”; he castigated the tendency among historians as well as writers and artists that “eulogized” and “idolized” Li Xiucheng. Quoting Mao Zedong’s saying that one had to separate the distinction between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries from the distinction between merits and demerits or between correctness and wrongness within the revolutionary ranks, Qi argued that once Li Xiucheng defected, he turned himself from a revolutionary into an enemy of the revolution, and the distinction between merits and demerits that was applicable only to revolutionaries could no longer be applied to Li; therefore, it was groundless to assume that Li’s mistake was secondary to his achievements. Li Xiucheng’s defection, Qi averred, could never be pardoned, and Li could never be treated as a revolutionary; otherwise, all other traitors in Chinese history, ranging from Hong Chengchou and Wu Sangui at the end of the Ming down to Wang Jingwei in the Republican period as well as traitors to the international communist movement such as Karl Kautsky, could be pardoned and treated as heroes as well (Qi Benyu 1964). Whether Li Xiucheng’s defection was genuine is not a question to be addressed here. But we need to inquire further into the grounds on which Qi Benyu made his judgment of Li. In response to the pro-Li historians’ argument that one should not treat a peasant revolutionary leader as a proletarian revolutionary and evaluate his or her deeds by communist criteria, Qi admitted that one should not ignore the “concrete historical conditions” when judging a histori-

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cal figure, and he deemed that attitude to be a “basic requirement of historical materialism.” Nevertheless, when denying Li’s contributions to the Taiping Rebellion as a basis for accepting him as a revolutionary, Qi’s reasoning was based solely on the quotation on the distinction between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries from Mao’s speech “The Working Methods of Party Committees.” In other words, Qi did indeed use the criteria that Mao had formulated for the Chinese Communist Party to evaluate Li Xiucheng, brand him as a traitor, and totally condemn him. Another issue worth discussing is the motivation behind Qi’s second article. Qi’s political purpose was evident even in his first article on Li Xiucheng. Nevertheless, when he was writing that article, he did not know exactly what Mao needed and whom Mao’s target was; his writing of that article was solely motivated by his personal desire to show his loyalty to Mao and to win Mao’s favor. However, when he was writing the second article at the instruction of Jiang Qing and with the help of Kang Sheng, Qi had a clear political agenda; he knew well that his article would be used by Mao in his political maneuvers. As it turned out, two years later, when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and removed Liu Shaoqi from the top leadership, Mao’s excuse was primarily that Liu had been a “traitor” in the 1920s. As a reward for his two articles on Li Xiucheng, Qi was promoted to the position of head of the history group of the editor’s office of Hongqi (Red flag) magazine, the only journal published by the CCP Central Committee with a nationwide circulation (Xia Fei 2005). After the publication of Qi’s two lengthy articles in Renmin ribao in the short span of one month (July 24 and August 23, 1964), no historian openly spoke for Li Xiucheng. The articles published thereafter in newspapers and history journals unanimously showed support for Qi and repeated Qi’s arguments. They attacked Li as a “capitulator” who “completely lost his revolutionary integrity” (Su Shu 1964, 85) and “thoroughly betrayed the Taiping revolution and truly surrendered to the enemy” (Shi Zhen 1964, 170; see also Li Yanju 1964 and Ni Moyan 1964). Li Xiucheng’s autobiographical account, they concurred, was “the confession of a true defector” rather than a “revolutionary document” (Yu Songqing 1964). Luo Ergang’s defense of Li Xiucheng, according to its critiques, reflected Luo’s own “subjective and idealistic view of history” (Bing Ran and Da Ke 1964) or his “subjectivity, one-sidedness, and superficiality” in studying history (Jiang Han 1964, 159).

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CONTINUING THE REVOLUTION The consequences of the Li Xiucheng controversy were multiple. It led not only to the prevalence of the view that Li’s defection was genuine, but more importantly to the discursive hegemony of the radicals in historiography and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. It was no longer appropriate and legitimate for historians to talk about “historical and class limitations” of Chinese peasants or about any “progressive aspects” of “outstanding figures”in the ruling class. To show the right “class stand” and correct “class consciousness,” one had to extol the peasant class and peasant revolutionary leaders without reservation and at the same time completely repudiate their “enemies,” including traitors. The radicals, therefore, were in a position to launch a counterattack on senior historians in the name of a renewed historiographical revolution. Unlike the initial shixue geming that was under the control of the senior historians from the very beginning and ended without change to their dominance in the field, the revived revolution in the mid-1960s soon led to a full-scale attack on the senior historians; it constituted one of the origins of and an important prelude to the Cultural Revolution. As an initial step of the revived shixue geming, Qi Benyun published a new article, “To Study History for the Revolution,” in Hongqi on December 8, 1965, which refuted the critiques by Jian Bozan and other senior historians of radical historiography. Qi attacked Jian’s historicism and juxtaposed it with what he called the “proletarian view of class.” As Qi put it, “ ‘historicism’ that discards the proletarian view of class, namely, ‘historicism’ that does not take into account class and class struggle, is by no means Marxist historicism” (Qi Benyu 1965, 16). Qi further censured the senior historians for their discontent with the radicals’ treatment of ruling elites and peasant rebels. All feudal landlords, Qi claimed, were “exploiters and oppressors of peasants,” whether they lived during the rising or declining stage of feudal society. “Wherever there is exploitation and oppression, there is condemnation and rebellion.” Therefore, Qi continued, the peasants of the Qin and Han dynasties (i.e., the peasants during the early stage of China’s “feudal” society) were correct when speaking out against the landlords and rebelling against feudalism; and the proletariat today has the same right to speak out and oppose the feudal lords’ exploitation and oppression. Qi admitted that the peasants in feudal society were “small private owners”

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with innate shortcomings, such as their “narrowness, looseness, and conservativeness.” But he disputed the view that saw peasant rebels as no different from feudal aristocrats in that they were interested only in becoming new aristocrats and new emperors. The feudal elements in peasant thinking, Qi maintained, were secondary to their revolutionary notions, such as “equalizing the noble and the humble,” “sharing all land,” and “sharing all food.” To say that the goals of the peasant rebellion were only “becoming officials and becoming rich” was a “total distortion of the peasant revolutionary movement” (ibid., 19). Finally, Qi refuted the view that placed the “scientific character” of historical research over its “class character.” He contended that “there is no historical study that is without class character.” All ruling classes in the past, he argued, interpreted history according to the interest of their own class, and, to protect their class interests, they deliberately distorted the truth of historical development. For bourgeois historians, he went on, to speak of their research as “supraclass” or “purely objective” is only to “disguise the bourgeois character” of their historical work. He concluded that history research was a field “where ideological struggle has always been exceptionally keen” and that, therefore, the proletariat had to “courageously occupy and consolidate all fronts in the field of historical study” and had to study history “in the interest of the masses of the people and in order to realize their own great revolutionary tasks” (Qi Benyu 1965, 22). Qi’s article merits the detailed description above because its publication had a particular impact on ensuing developments in the field on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Especially remarkable is Mao’s reaction to the article. In his famous speech in Hangzhou on December 21, 1959, Mao told his audience: “Qi Benyu’s essay is written very well. I read it three times. The only shortcoming is that it does not criticize by name” (Wang Xuedian 1998, 52).4 For years, Mao had been seeking a breakthrough in his endeavor to remove high-level “capitalist power holders” from office. He eventually decided to begin with his handling of Wu Han’s historical play Hai Rui ba guan (Hai Rui dismissed from office), despite Mao’s own earlier interest in the story of Hai Rui and his praise for the protagonist, a loyal minister of the Ming dynasty who lost his position in the court as a result of his frankness in criticizing the emperor. In Mao’s opinion, the actual purpose of the play was to attack Mao because

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he had dismissed Peng Dehuai, who was as honest as Hai Rui in criticizing the ruler. Incognizant of Mao’s intention, Jian Bozan blamed Yao Wenyuan, a writer from Shanghai, for his article published in November 1965 that openly criticized Wu Han and his play for depicting the Ming loyalist as a “great hero” who represented the interests of poor peasants and hence replacing the correct view of “class struggle” with “class conciliation.” Jian’s remark on Yao’s article was similar to remarks by Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, and Lu Dingyi, the director of the CCP’s propaganda department, both of whom had refused to reprint Yao’s article in newspapers in Beijing: Wu’s issue was an academic one, and Yao had confused an academic issue with a political issue. Mao, therefore, was unhappy with all those who had attempted to curb the circulation of Yao’s article in Beijing and nationwide, and encouraged Qi Benyu to attack them “by name.” Consequently, Qi published another article, “Comrade Jian Bozan’s Historical Views Should Be Criticized,” in Hongqi, which was reprinted in Renmin ribao on March 25, 1966. “In the struggle between the two lines in the field of historical study,” Qi stated, “Comrade Wu Han is a commander on the side of those who insist on historical idealism and adhere to historiographical principles of the bourgeois and feudal classes. In addition to this commander, there is another, and that is Comrade Jian Bozan.” After reviewing Jian’s major disputes with the radicals on various historical issues, Qi summarized Jian’s “anti-Marxist historiographical principles” as “two oppositions and two defenses,” namely, “opposition to using the viewpoint of class struggle to interpret history and opposition to using historical research and teaching to serve current politics; and defending the bourgeois historical views of ‘historical data equal historiography’ and ‘doing historical research for the sake of historical research,’ and defending the feudal-dynasty-centered historiographical scheme that glorifies emperors, kings, generals, and ministers while vilifying the peasant revolution.” All these views, Qi concluded, “reflect the real-world class struggle in the field of historical study” (Qi Benyu 1966a). But the attacks on Jian Bozan did not end there. The ongoing political struggles at the top level continued to fuel the radicals in pushing forward the “historiographical revolution” and turning it into part and parcel of the upcoming Cultural Revolution. Infuriated by Peng Zhen’s attempt to limit debate on Hai Rui to the academic

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level by enforcing a newly created regulation on academic debate (known as the Eryue tigang, or “February Outline”), Mao made the following remark at the CCP Politburo meeting of March 17 through 20, 1966: “Presently academic and educational circles are under the control of bourgeois intellectuals. The longer the socialist revolution goes on, the more they resist it and the more they expose their true anti-Party and antisocialist nature. People such as Wu Han and Jian Bozan are CCP members, but they are anti-Party too; they are Guomindang members in actuality” (Su Shuangbi 2005, 13). Mao’s message was clear: the debate on Hai Rui and other historical issues was more than an academic matter; it reflected class struggle in the academic field, and it was part of the political struggle itself. Mao’s words ushered in a new wave of attacks on Jian Bozan. Renmin ribao alone, for example, published four articles in June 1966 criticizing Jian. These articles no longer called Jian a comrade when mentioning his name. In other words, they no longer saw their argument with Jian as a “contradiction within the people”; they treated Jian as an enemy. Finally, on December 15, 1966, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Qi published his third article against Jian, “The True Face of the Anti-Party Scholar Jian Bozan.” The article began with an explanation of the purposes of the Cultural Revolution: “The emphasis of this Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is on attacking the few power holders within the Party that take the capitalist road and at the same time thoroughly exposing and criticizing the reactionary scholar-tyrants and reactionary academic ‘authorities’ who uphold the restoration of capitalism.” “Jian Bozan,” the article denounced, “is a reactionary bourgeois scholartyrant, a leader of the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities,’ and an important person in helping the former Beijing CCP committee and the former CCP propaganda department to promote their counterrevolutionary and revisionist lines of peaceful transformation.”5 After recounting Jian’s political activities, Qi vilified Jian as a “hired scribbler ( yuyong wenren) of Chiang Kai-shek, who spoke for Chiang’s fascist regime” before 1949, and, after 1949, again a “hack writer of the power holders taking the capitalist road within the Party, who fiercely opposed the proletarian dictatorship and the socialist system and created public opinion for reviving capitalism.” “For more than thirty years,” Qi asserted, “there has never been a single day in which he [Jian] did not pit himself against the people” (Qi Benyu 1966a).

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Physical abuse and public humiliation at recurrent struggle meetings accompanied the attacks in the media. In the initial three months (June through August 1966) of the Cultural Revolution, Jian Bozan, at the age of sixty-eight, was summoned to such meetings more than one hundred times; some of the meetings had an audience of more than ten thousand people, and Jian had to remain in a standing position for hours while suffering the Red Guards’ condemnation and even beating. His house was confiscated, furniture smashed, and books plundered. But Mao’s real target was not “scholar-tyrants” such as Jian; they were only scapegoats to agitate the radicals and to prepare public opinion and create a political atmosphere for realizing Mao’s goal: removing his true enemy, the “bourgeois power holders,” from the top leadership. Therefore, once the enemy was defeated, Mao no longer found it necessary to deal with the scapegoats seriously. In October 1966, at the same meeting of the CCP Central Committee in which a decision was made to “permanently expel Liu Shaoqi from the Party,” Mao announced the policy of “giving a way out” (gei chulu) for “bourgeois academic authorities.” As he put it: “There is a Feng Youlan at Beijing University who talks about idealist philosophy. We only know materialism and don’t know idealism. We have to consult him if we want to know something about idealism. Jian Bozan is the one who talks about emperors, kings, generals, and ministers. If we want to know something about the emperors, kings, generals, and ministers, we have to consult him as well. These people are useful. My attitude to the intellectuals is that we should respect their personal dignity” (San Mu 2006, 43). The struggle meetings against Jian thus subsided. Jian was assigned a decent house on the campus of Beijing University, and his monthly stipend increased to 120 yuan, several times an ordinary worker’s monthly salary.6 The fate of historians thus was closely linked with the political struggle at the top level. Mao’s personal will and desire for political struggle, more than any other factor, shaped the direction and results of the events in the historiographical revolution and the Cultural Revolution at large. It was usually at his direct or indirect instruction that the radicals launched a debate, published an article, or took other actions against a targeted scholar. Mao’s real interest, once again, was not in attacking historians or in the historical issues in dispute. He only used the debate to produce a consensus in favor of his own opinion and to pave the way for his further attacks on his true enemy. Depending on his needs at different times, Mao’s

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treatment of scholars varied. His methods in dealing with intellectuals fell largely into four categories. The first is straightforward punishment (zheng), as in what he did to Wu Han, the author of Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, when he found Wu a perfect scapegoat for him to initiate and carry out the struggle against his enemy.7 The second is protection (bao), which applied to scholars such as Fan Wenlan and Guo Moruo, who had built a personal friendship with Mao before 1949 and who, after the Cultural Revolution started, faced a threat from the radicals for their earlier sympathy to Wu Han or Jian Bozan or their earlier opposition to the radicals. Mao allowed them to make a self-criticism in public and then openly declared his protection of them. The third is punishment at first and protection later, as in what he did to Jian Bozan, Feng Youlan, and many other scholars, when Mao had achieved his goal in the political struggle and found the scholars still useful to him. The fourth is utilization at first and abandonment later; this was exactly what happened to Qi Benyu and many other radicals. Qi was one of the best-known radicals before and at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when he played a conspicuous role as the editor of Hongqi, the secretary of Mao and Jiang Qing, and finally a member of the Party Central Committee’s Cultural Revolution group. Nevertheless, when Qi and other radical leaders became reckless in agitating the Red Guards to attack Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the CCP Central Committee and thus incurred widespread resentment toward the radicals, Mao quickly removed all of them from office in early 1968 (Xia Fei 2005; Meng Xiangcai 2007). Mao and his political designs played a decisive role in shaping the unfolding of shixue geming and the fates of all participants in the movement. Historiography, which had once displayed a degree of autonomy when the Party’s control was loosened, became vulnerable to power holders’ manipulation.

BEYOND IDEOLOGY AND POLITICS Power struggle among the top leadership of the Party was not the sole reason for the revival of the historiographical revolution on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Equally important was the schism between established historians and novices in the field that had existed since the 1950s. To understand this “generation gap,” let us first look at “The Historiographical Revolution Ought to Be Con-

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tinued to the End,” an article authored by Yin Da and published in Hongqi in January 1966. According to Yin, most senior historians received their training or did research in “feudal and bourgeois historiography” before 1949 under the Guomindang regime and remained “bourgeois historians” afterwards. The article further divided the bourgeois historians into two groups: the right wing, or those who had directly attacked Marxism and spoken for imperialism and the Guomindang regime before 1949, and the left wing, or those who had been discontented with the Guomindang regime and allied with the Chinese Communist Party. After the communist revolution, Yin continued, historians from both sides showed a willingness to study Marxism and seemingly gave up their antiMarxist attitude. But their “bourgeois historical thinking” remained unchanged. The right wing, Yin asserted, pretended to support the Party’s academic policies and even appeared to be Marxist theorists when participating in academic disputes. “While their articles are full of quotations from the [Marxist] classic works, they actually attempted to castrate the revolutionary core of Marxist theories.” They “attempted to dominate the field of historical study” and acted as “scholar-tyrants” (xuefa). They resisted Marxist theories by repudiating the proposition of “theory guides history” and speaking for “emperors, kings, generals, and ministers,” while downplaying the peasant class (Yin Da 1966, 4–6). Although the article did not name any of the right-wing historians, it apparently targeted Jian, for Jian had been the most active in arguing against “theory guides history” and criticizing the oversimplified treatment of historical figures. Yin also criticized left-wing historians. In his view, these people were not necessarily true Marxists. Although some had worthy records in combating reactionary historians before 1949, the leftwing historians had since then lost their “revolutionary tradition,” become “stagnant and increasingly conservative,” and developed “old ideas and old methods” that had been “lurking” in their minds for a long time. Some of them became “prisoners of feudal, bourgeois historical ideas and even voluntary propagandists and salesmen of feudal, bourgeois historical ideas and methods” (Yin Da 1966, 7). Yin again did not name any of the “left-wing bourgeois historians,” but he would have had in mind such historians as Guo Moruo and Fan Wenlan, who came under the radicals’ attacks during the Cultural Revolution but survived politically, thanks to their personal friendship with Mao and his protection.

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Yin Da not only treated senior historians as non-Marxist, bourgeois scholars and called their scholarship into question, but further juxtaposed them to “revolutionary, young historical workers” (geming de qingnian shixue gongzuozhe) who grew up after 1949. In the author’s opinion, it was the junior historians who represented the true Marxist tradition, for they “dare to challenge feudal, bourgeois historiographical traditions, dare to praise the laboring people, dare to despise the emperors, kings, generals, and ministers in past dynasties, and dare to smash the historiographical scheme that centers on the genealogies of emperors and kings.” But the “scholartyrants,” the article continued, had attempted to oppress the young historians with “freezing irony and burning satire” (lengchao refeng) and “unrestrained verbal abuse” (siyi manma), and by ridiculing them as “naive, ignorant, and devoid of substance.” In contrast, the “scholar-tyrants” treated the few who were subservient to them as their heirs and praised them as talented (Yin Da 1966, 4–5). The left-wing historians, according to the author, were no better than the right-wing historians, for they had become adherents to feudal, bourgeois ideas and, instead of carrying forward the revolutionary tradition by helping the young historians out, they pushed the latter to the right-wing side (ibid., 7). Yin Da’s article is interesting not only because it points out the schism between the older and younger generations of historians that had existed since the 1950s, but also because the author equated the old-generation scholars with bourgeois intellectuals and the young with adherents to the true Marxist tradition, and hence interpreted the conflict between the two groups as a confrontation between Marxist and non-Marxist ideas. We need to examine further whether the tension between the two groups of historians was actually a result of the clash between the two different ideologies or even a manifestation of class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians in the field as the author claims. If not, what else lay behind the confrontation between senior historians and junior “history workers” (lishi gongzuozhe)? After the successive thought reform campaigns, almost all historians who had done their scholarship before the communist revolution had to willingly or unwillingly accept Marxism as the ideology or theoretical approach guiding their research and writing; those who openly rejected it were rare. In the field of modern Chinese history, for example, it was no longer possible for historians to adhere to

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the traditional approach underpinning their scholarship; instead of emphasizing the top-down Westernizing reforms, they unanimously underscored struggles against feudalism and imperialism as the major theme in modern China in accordance with the interpretive framework promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, and they all depicted popular protests beginning with the Taiping Rebellion as belonging to the category of “bourgeois democratic revolutions.” In the field of ancient Chinese history, likewise, historians all reinterpreted China’s past according to a strict scheme of societal transition from primitive society through slavery to feudalism, and they paid particular attention to peasant rebellions in each dynasty as well as “sprouts of capitalism” during the “late phase” of China’s “feudalism.” Therefore, it is unfair to assert that after 1949 these historians still adhered to traditional “bourgeois historical thinking.” Nevertheless, it is equally evident in the historical writings after 1949 that the “Marxist approach” historians applied to their works was limited primarily to the acceptance of the aforementioned explanatory schemes. The most adept of them were even able to frequently cite the classic works from Marx down to Mao to demonstrate their ability in applying Marxism to their writings. But it is difficult to tell whether or not those historians fully understood the principles and interpretations they found in the classic works or if they truly believed in the imposed Marxist approach and theory they found in the standard textbooks. There is no doubt that there were indeed some historians who made serious efforts to understand Marxism and were able to creatively apply Marxism to their analysis of the major issues in Chinese history. But they were often perplexed by the incongruence between the more sophisticated interpretation of history found in the classic Marxist works and what they learned from the standard textbooks. It was almost impossible for them to publish independent views that did not jibe with the standard interpretation of historical issues. The rest, indeed the vast majority, of historians passively accepted the Party’s official interpretation only because they were allowed no other alternative. To claim that their writings—whether they were authored by senior scholars or novices in the field—represented the true Marxist tradition in historiography thus is equally unsupported. The tension between the senior historians and the novices thus did not actually reflect the confrontation between Marxist and non-Marxist ideologies as both sides claimed. The senior scholars’

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defense of historicism, or objectivity in judging historical figures and phenomena, and their emphasis on historical data were not so much a result of their faithfulness to the basic requirements of Marxism as their defense of historical research as a serious profession in which they had built their academic reputations. In other words, senior historians resisted the slogans “emphasizing the present and downplaying the past” and “theory guides history” not because they believed that those slogans were contrary to Marxism but because belittling serious historical research under those slogans would greatly devaluate what they had achieved and hence weaken their status as academic authorities. By the same token, the young radicals were enthusiastic in shixue geming not because they were more interested in Marxism or in Mao’s radical ideology than the senior historians were but more likely because the movement emphasized what they possessed or what was easy for them to obtain, namely, their “redness” (hong), or correct class consciousness, and their readiness to use oversimplified and highly dogmatic “theories” for political purposes, and further because it belittled what they lacked, that is, “expertise” (zhuan), or rigorous training in history. Shixue geming, in a word, offered them a shortcut to elevating their standing and narrowing their gap with the established historians. What lay behind the tension between the senior scholars and young radicals, then, was not so much an ideological confrontation as a challenge and defense of different sets of knowledge, different forms of social capital, and different statuses in the power relations in the field. What distinguished the “academic authorities” from the novices in the field were primarily the rigorous and in-depth training they had received in the field and the “objective” and “academic” works that they had published; it was on the basis of this set of knowledge or expertise that they had built their reputation in the field and won respect from society as well as the government. This sort of social capital in turn allowed them to maintain their dominance in their respective fields and in their everyday relations with junior faculty members in the same department or with students in the classroom. Therefore, they had to argue against the politicization of historiography and against the derogation of historical knowledge in order to preserve their academic and social prestige. The reverse was true for the novices in the field. They were powerless in dealing with the senior scholars when professional training and academic achievements were the major factors determining

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one’s standing in the field or one’s position in the workplace. But their weakness in expertise could be made up by their strength in redness at times of radicalization. Unlike the senior scholars, who mostly came from well-to-do families (i.e., families of the exploiting class) and who received “bourgeois” education and did research under the influence of “bourgeois” ideas before 1949, many of the radical youth came from the families of the “laboring people” and received a socialist education in the 1950s. In other words, they had an innate advantage over the academic leaders in terms of class consciousness. When shixue geming began, they found that they could be quickly empowered by embracing the politicization of historiography in the name of “emphasizing the present and downplaying the past” and “theory guides history.” Therefore, they were most enthusiastic to participate in the “revolution.” When writing the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, therefore, they returned to the style of romanticism that had been pioneered by Fan Wenlan in the 1940s (see Chapter 3), and they pushed the romanticized mode of history recounting to the extreme. Unlike Fan Wenlan, who in his writings before and after 1949 acknowledged the “backwardness” of peasant rebels, however, the radicals idealized the Taiping and Boxer leaders as perfect heroes and ignored any negative aspect of their activities that would sully their image as righteous revolutionaries. At the same time, they caricatured the enemies of the rebels as villains. The ruling elites of the Qing were condemned not only because they suppressed the rebels, but also for the simple fact that they belonged to the feudal ruling class. Meanwhile, all forms of economic, cultural, and political influence from the West were associated with imperialism and deemed inimical to China’s progress and responsible for its degeneration to semicolonial status. This dichotomization of historical figures into the two simple categories of good and evil and the subsequent representation of modern Chinese history as a series of struggles between the two contradictory forces served the purposes of the young radicals well; it allowed the radicals to show the redness in their political thinking and strengthen their positions in combating the senior historians and at the same time to offset their weakness in professional training in the field. To recapitulate, two dynamics interacted to define the contour of the “historiographical revolution,” an event that heralded and later developed into an integral part of the Cultural Revolution. One

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is political struggle within the Party as a result of Mao’s quest for dominance. Mao distinguished himself from other political leaders not only in his penchant for history but also in his adroitness in using history to serve the purposes of his struggle with political enemies within the Party. He initiated and directed shixue geming by sending direct or indirect messages to those in charge of propaganda and others willing to serve him. Later he used the same method to start and push forward the Cultural Revolution, circumventing resistance from his opponents. His political calculation and maneuvering determined not only the unfolding of shixue geming, but also the fate of senior historians and radical novices. His personal attitude toward the individuals involved in the revolution accounted for their survival, rise to prominence, or sudden oblivion. The other is the schism among historians. While Mao used radical youth to attack established historians for his political purposes, young historical workers as well as senior historians responded to the revolution according to their respective interests. Their expertise or deficiency in history, their different social and political standings, and their different positions in the existing web of power relations played a more important role than their alleged ideological commitment in shaping their respective strategies for shixue geming. Once they fully joined the campaign or reacted to it with their own agency, the event would gain a momentum that functioned on its own and often went beyond the expectation and effective control of the political leaders who started it. Mao had to act accordingly by ostracizing the most fanatic activists and “liberating” ( jiefang) some of the targeted victims to ensure that the event proceeded along his projected track. Both manipulation by political leaders and the agency of participants in the movements thus have to be taken into account for full comprehension of the intricacies of shixue geming and the ensuing Cultural Revolution.

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CHAP TER 6

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Challenging the Revolutionary Orthodoxy “New Enlightenment” Historiography in the 1980s

Coinciding with the inception of economic reforms and with “liberating the mind” ( jiefang sixiang) in the ideological area, a new intellectual trend, known later as the New Enlightenment (xin qimeng), emerged in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Having witnessed nationwide turmoil or having personally suffered political persecution and physical maltreatment in the previous decade, activists in the movement inquired into the reasons behind the fanaticism and irrationality of the radicals at both the top and grassroots levels. They ascribed the personality cult of Mao, the lack of democracy within the Party, and the disrespect for human dignity during the Cultural Revolution to the fact that China had not fully experienced an intellectual “enlightenment” in its modern era. In their opinion, the advocacy for democracy and science by liberal intellectuals during the May Fourth period in the late 1910s and early 1920s was done only halfway; it soon yielded to the more urgent task of “national salvation” ( jiuguo) under the crisis of imperialist invasion, hence allowing for the survival and revival of “feudal remnants” (fengjian canyu) in Chinese politics and Chinese society after the communist revolution, especially during the Cultural Revolution. To eradicate those traditions and prevent a recurrence of the Cultural Revolution, they called for a “make-up class” (buke) of the interrupted and unfinished “enlightenment” in China. Intellectuals in different fields had diverse aims for the New Enlightenment. Scholars in philosophy, literature, and cultural studies discussed enthusiastically the issue of humanism in and beyond the Marxist tradition; they spoke for the “liberty” and “liberation” of man; they embraced scientism, cultural 170

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pluralism, and cosmopolitanism, and attacked the conservative attitude found in Confucian traditions. Scholars in political science and law condemned the “excessive concentration of power” in the hands of the top leadership and advocated “division of power” in the government, the establishment of an accountable legal system, freedom of speech, protection of human rights, and the competitive election of People’s Congress delegates at the grassroots level (Wang Hui 2003, 155–181, 215–216). The New Enlightenment movement was more than a break with the Maoist past; it was also a continuation of the liberal tradition that had been interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. As we will find in this chapter, the most active members of the movement were intellectuals who grew up and were educated before the communist revolution. Among them a few were of the post–May Fourth generation, such as the literary theorist Zhou Yang (1908–1989), who played a key role in the debate on alienation and humanism in the early 1980s (Goldman 1994, 119–120), and the writer Ba Jin (1904–2005), who bitterly condemned the Cultural Revolution for its violation of human dignity; but most of the intellectuals of this generation had either died during the Cultural Revolution or, if they survived it, were physically and academically inactive by their last years in the early 1980s. Most of the leading members of the New Enlightenment movement, therefore, were those of the pre-Liberation generation who were in their fifties or sixties (and seventies in rare cases) when the Cultural Revolution was over. Unlike the intellectuals of the post-Liberation generation who were educated after 1949 under the Marxist and Maoist orthodoxy, the pre-Liberation intellectuals had been exposed to diverse and contending ideologies, including Marxism, liberalism, anarchism, nationalism, and so on; while some of them became leading radicals during the Cultural Revolution, others remained committed to liberal values despite their ostensible loyalty to the Party after 1949. Like many of their predecessors of the post–May Fourth generation, these intellectuals could be at once Marxist in appreciating the scientific nature of Marxist doctrines and liberals with a strong aversion to the excesses of Maoist radicalism, including autocracy, the cult of personality, the lack of independent thinking, the use of violence, and the violation of human rights. For the historians who enthusiastically participated in the New Enlightenment movement, to write about modern Chinese history

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thus meant to refute the radical historiography that had prevailed during the Cultural Revolution. Driven by the political agenda of censuring the “ultraleft” policies of the Mao era and supporting Deng Xiaoping’s reforms with historical precedents, their new interpretations of history could be as ideologically charged as was the historiography that they tried to repudiate. In both cases, the historian’s mission was to reinterpret the past for present-day needs. Ideologically committed to Marxism and working as professors or researchers in the official apparatus of the party-state, the New Enlightenment historians found it difficult to challenge the interpretive scheme that the Party had endorsed for decades after the communist revolution. The result thus was often a compromise between their reluctant conformity with Marxist ideology and the concomitant revolutionary narrative, on the one hand, and their intention to foreground events and figures that fit into a liberal schema of historical interpretation, on the other. This will be evident in the following examination of their reinterpretation of the “basic themes” and major events in modern China.

CHALLENGING THE ORTHODOXY The Revolutionary Narrative Questioned

The challenge to the revolutionary construct came first and foremost from Li Shiyue (1928–1996), a history professor at Jilin University, who was known among his colleagues for his frankness and unusual eloquence in writing and speech. In his article “From Self-Strengthening and the Reform to the Bourgeois Revolution,” published in Lishi yanjiu in 1980, Li proclaimed: “The Self-Strengthening Movement, the 1898 Reform, and the bourgeois revolution are the major phases in the progress of modern China.” This statement at the very beginning of his article immediately distinguished his view from the standard interpretation of modern Chinese history: the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxer Uprising, which had been central to the revolutionary construct, were missing in Li’s new schema, and in their stead were the Self-Strengthening Movement and the Reform of 1898, which had been condemned as reactionary or inimical to revolutionary movements in the orthodox and radical historiographies before and during the Cultural Revolution. To justify his argument, Li tactically avoided a head-on attack

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on the orthodox construct that remained legitimate and predominant in the early 1980s. Instead, he focused on refuting the radical historiography that had lost its legitimacy after the Cultural Revolution. In his reappraisal of the Self-Strengthening Movement, for example, Li challenged the radicals’ assertion that this movement “only served the needs of imperialist intrusion and accelerated China’s degeneration to semicolonial status.” As he pointed out, the military enterprises established by the Self-Strengthening governors, such as arsenals and shipyards, were mainly intended to “compete with the Westerners,” and their civilian enterprises also helped China protect its “rights and interests” from being nibbled by foreign competitors. The reform measures during the movement, Li conceded, were “limited,” “superficial,” and mainly for “preserving the existing regime,” but the Self-Strengthening leaders were nevertheless “enlightened” (kaiming) and “progressive” ( jinbu) in comparison to the conservatives in the Qing court, for they acknowledged China’s backwardness in military force, industry, and science, and showed a willingness to learn from the West (Li Shiyue 1980, 33–34). Li further rebutted the radicals’ equating the Reform of 1898 with “reformism” (gailiangzhuyi), a term that in the revolutionary discourse denotes fragmented and limited reforms without fundamentally subverting the existing political system and therefore is considered “reactionary” in nature. The Reform of 1898, he argued, was not to preserve the semicolonial and semifeudal system; instead, it was “a very initial attempt to create a bourgeois regime,” and it took the form of “a class struggle between the emerging bourgeoisie and feudal conservatives.” “The ultimate goal of the reform movement,” Li wrote, “was to turn semicolonial and semifeudal China into an independent, democratic, and capitalist China.” The reform was “anti-imperialist” to the extent that the reformers attempted to “save the nation” from the crisis caused by its defeat at the hands of Japan in 1894; it was “antifeudal” because the reformers “promoted bourgeois new culture and attacked the feudalist old culture” through their publications and various organizations (Li Shiyue 1980, 36–37). Finally, Li castigated the radicals for derogating the Revolution of 1911 and adhering to the principle of li zu yu pi (basing oneself on criticism) in dealing with the event. The radicals, Li complained, negated the revolution simply on the assumption that the revolutionaries represented the interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie, an

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exploiting class, rather than the interests of the laboring people, and that capitalism had no future in China. To uphold the principle of li zu yu pi, Li contended, actually meant to deny any progress made by the nonlaboring people in history and to deny all revolutions before the communist revolution. In his opinion, the Revolution of 1911 represented the “highest stage in the development of the struggle of the Chinese people against imperialism and feudalism in the modern era,” for the bourgeois revolutionaries called for not only resistance against imperialist encroachment, but also the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, the establishment of a republic, and even the creation of a socialist economy free of capitalist ills. The revolutionaries’ political thinking as crystallized in Sun Yat-sen’s theory of the Three Principles of the People thus “represented the highest level of political awareness” at that time (Li Shiyue 1980, 37–38). While Li’s essay appeared to be a rebuttal of the radical historiography during the Cultural Revolution, its real target was the revolutionary narrative of the orthodox historiography on modern China that had been predominant since the 1950s. Unlike the orthodox historians who saw the revolution against imperialism and feudalism as the theme of modern Chinese history, Li redefined the theme as “saving the nation from extinction” ( jiuwang) under the crisis of imperialist aggression, a theme manifested in the progressive evolution from the Self-Strengthening Movement through the Reform of 1898 to the Revolution of 1911. As he elaborated it, From the Self-Strengthening Movement and the reform movement [of 1898] to the bourgeois revolution [of 1911], national salvation was always the theme of [modern Chinese] history. The Self-Strengthening leaders claimed that the feudal rulers’ limited reforms could make China rich and strong; supporters of the Reform of 1898 believed that China’s strengthening and prosperity awaited a fundamental transformation without using the means of a violent revolution; the revolutionaries were convinced that only overthrowing the feudal regime could lead to the transformation of China and the salvation of the country from dangers and extinction. Urgent national crises drove people to make a choice among the different schemes and to constantly give up the old schemes that had proven to be invalid in practice and accept and try the new. Hence there was an ebb and flow of political currents that moved forward swiftly. (Li Shiyue 1980, 40)

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In describing the three movements mentioned above as the major progressive stages in “national salvation,” his choice for the theme of modern Chinese history, Li Shiyue did not totally ignore the Taiping Rebellion, an event central to the revolutionary historiography. In the first section of his article, which discussed the Self-Strengthening Movement, he mentioned the rebellion, but he treated it as a prelude leading to the rise of the Self-Strengthening Movement. “The peasant war [the Taiping Rebellion],” Li wrote, “undermined the corrupt bureaucratic and aristocratic forces and provided reformers of the landlord class with opportunities to come to power; once they suppressed the peasant war, the newly empowered reformers became new elements of the ruling forces. The new ruling elites realized the necessity of ‘learning the advanced techniques from the barbarians’ and thus started the Self-Strengthening Movement” (Li Shiyue 1980, 32). The Taiping Rebellion was significant in his perspective only because it gave rise to reform-minded governors such as Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang, who achieved their status in the Qing bureaucracy by suppressing the rebels and later initiated various Self-Strengthening projects. To shield himself from possible assault by the orthodox historians, Li nevertheless compromised with the revolutionary construct by including the Taiping Rebellion as one of the “four phases” in modern Chinese history. As he put it: “Modern Chinese history from 1840 to 1919 underwent four phases: the peasant war, the SelfStrengthening Movement, the Reform of 1898, and the bourgeois revolution. The history unfolded in such a way that one stage always nourished the elements of a later stage, leading to the succession of the different stages. Before a stage came to an end, the signs of the next stage had already emerged; after the next stage started, the earlier stage still lingered, so there was an overlapping of stages” (Li Shiyue 1980, 40). But the Taiping Rebellion was not among the historical events embodying the “theme” (zhuti) of modern Chinese history. For reasons to be explained later in this chapter, the Boxer Uprising, another major event in the revolutionary construct, was totally missing from Li’s schema. “Downward Degeneration” versus “Upward Development”

To depart even further from the orthodox Marxist construct of modern Chinese history, Li published several articles in the following years to elaborate his thesis. In an article published in Lishi yan-

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jiu in 1984, Li openly challenged the revolutionary construct by questioning the validity of Hu Sheng’s “three revolutionary surges” thesis. In his opinion, there were only two truly revolutionary movements in modern China: the Taiping Rebellion and the Revolution of 1911. The Boxer Uprising was essentially a “national war against the intrusion of the allied forces of eight powers,” which together with the Opium War of 1840, the Sino-French War of 1884, and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 belonged to the category of international wars. He further criticized the revolutionary construct for ignoring socioeconomic changes and treating “armed struggles” or revolutions as the only form of class struggle while overlooking other forms of struggle that existed before a revolution took place. In his new redefinition of the “historical trends” in modern China, there was a “downward degeneration” as well as an “upward development”: the former refers to China’s transition from an independent state to a semicolonial (or semi-independent) and even a colonial state, as seen in China’s repeated defeats by imperialist powers from the Opium War of 1840 down to the invasion of the allied forces of eight powers in 1900; the latter refers to China’s progress from a feudal society to a semifeudal (or semicapitalist) and even a capitalist society, as evidenced in the successive movements that “paved the way for capitalism” in China, including the SelfStrengthening Movement, the Reform of 1898, and the Revolution of 1911 (Li Shiyue and Hu Bin 1981; Li Shiyue 1984). These three movements, Li argued, “represented different political solutions by different classes or different strata.” Each of the three movements “negated the one preceding it and represented a distinctive phase of the same historical process of capitalist development in China” (Li Shiyue 1984, 125). Central to Li’s new interpretation thus is the development of capitalism in China; whether they contributed or impeded capitalist development was the primary criterion by which Li judged events or historical figures in modern China. For convenience of discussion, I shall call his new formulation the capitalist construct. By downplaying peasant rebellions and extolling the endeavors of “national salvation” in the form of modernizing reform and revolution in late Qing China, Li Shiyue actually repudiated the revolutionary narrative that had shaped the historiography on modern China since the 1950s and in a sense returned to the modernization narrative that Jiang Tingfu and other liberal historians of the

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Republican period had advocated. The latter, too, disapproved of popular violence and praised the elite-led reforms as feasible solutions to “saving the nation and saving the people” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapter 2). Although Li Shiyue did not use the term “modernization” to describe the general trend in late Qing China, his emphasis on the development of “capitalism” made his interpretive framework resemble Jiang’s modernization construct. Li’s new interpretation was unconventional in several ways. In the revolutionary construct, the phrase “semifeudal and semicolonial” was inseparable; China became a “semifeudal and semicolonial” society through a process of “downward degeneration.” Imperialism, more than any other factor, was held responsible for this degeneration; only a revolution against imperialism and feudalism could terminate that process and bring about “upward progress” in modern Chinese history. In Li’s capitalist construct, however, the phrase “semifeudal and semicolonial” was split up; China’s transition to semifeudal or semicapitalist status replaced the revolution against feudalism and imperialism to represent the “upward development” in modern Chinese history. Imperialism appeared as “an unconscious tool of history,” for it “accelerated the collapse of China’s feudal economic structure and at the same time speeded up the emergence of capitalism in China” (Li Shiyue 1984, 124). Even more surprising was Li’s view of the “major actors of history.” In the revolutionary construct, the laboring people, especially the peasant masses, appeared as the major actors in modern Chinese history; it was their revolution and rebellion that pushed Chinese society forward. In Li’s capitalist construct, reform-minded bureaucrats and intellectuals as well as the emergent bourgeoisie, all belonging to the category of the “exploiting class” in the revolutionary ideology, became the major actors in modern China; their top-down reforms as well as the bourgeois revolution made possible China’s modern progress. By redefining the phases of modern Chinese history and emphasizing the events that contributed to “upward development,” Li Shiyue produced a new narrative about modern China that not only contradicted the revolutionary narrative as explained above, but also departed significantly from the modernization narrative that Jiang Tingfu had formulated in the 1930s. Although Jiang resembled Li in foregrounding the modernizing reforms in late Qing

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China, he underscored the failures of such efforts and blamed conservatives among the ruling elites for such failures. Overall, Jiang depicted the events in late Qing China as a series of frustrations and humiliations. The pessimism that permeated Jiang’s writings in turn reflected his own disappointment with China’s situation in the 1930s and his obsession with analyzing the historical reasons behind China’s failures in his work on modern China. In sharp contrast, Li wrote history for a different purpose, that is, to discover evidence of capitalist development in modern China in order to speak for the capitalistic economic reforms in the 1980s. Thus, while he admitted that there was a trend of “downward degeneration” in modern China, he emphasized the theme of “upward development”; in other words, what he sought to explain and highlight in his new interpretation of modern Chinese history were positive signs in history that he believed to be conducive to China’s modern development. Optimism as a mode of narration guided Li’s representation of modern Chinese history. True or False Marxism?

Given its radical departure from the revolutionary construct, it is not surprising that Li’s capitalist construct incurred strong criticism from adherents of the orthodox interpretation of modern Chinese history. Hu Sheng, who had invented the “three revolutionary surges” thesis in the early 1950s and now was the head of the CCP’s party history office and author of the newly published Cong Yapian zhanzheng dao Wusi yundong (From the Opium War to the May Fourth Movement) that elaborated his original thesis, openly rejected Li’s construct in the preface of his book: “It is my opinion in this book that there is no reason to describe the progressive currents of history in this period according to the thread of “Self-Strengthening Movement—Reform of 1898—Revolution of 1911” (Hu Sheng 1982, 4). But he did not provide the reason why he disagreed with it. The sharpest criticism came from an article published in Hongqi, the only official CCP journal that was circulated nationwide. The article’s author, Qi Longwei, denounced Li as departing from Marxism and renouncing its method of class analysis (Qi Longwei 1982). Later Qi further condemned Li’s writings as a betrayal of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought, an ideological “retrogress,” and a return to the “wrong views” of the historians in “old China” (Qi Longwei 1984).

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In his rebuttal, Li Shiyue ridiculed the attack from his critics as evidence of the survival of “dogmatism and ultraleftist politics” and a revival of false accusation and personal attack known as dagunzi (beating with a stick, or criticizing unfoundedly) and daimaozi (put on a hat, or stigmatize) during the Cultural Revolution. He argued that the critics who accused him of betraying Marxism were actually anti-Marxist, for they had “simplified” ( jiandaihua) and “stereotyped” (gongshihua) Marxist theories and interpreted them “in terms of absolutes” ( jueduihua). To defend his new interpretation of modern Chinese history, Li called for jiefang sixiang (liberating the mind) and shi shi qiu shi (seeking truth from facts) in historical research, borrowing the two most popular slogans that Deng Xiaoping had promoted to justify the economic reforms in the early 1980s. He complained that historical research in China, like other disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, had the problem of becoming “obsolete” in terms of research subjects and methodologies. “A new understanding of the present situation,” he wrote, “necessitates a new interpretation of the past, so that the needs of the development of historiography itself and the needs of socialist construction will be satisfied.” Only by breaking with stereotypes and interpreting history in light of the new realities in China, Li concluded, could historiography update itself and better serve the needs of the reform era (Li Shiyue 1982, 3). The advantage of Li’s arguments, therefore, lay in the fact that they squared perfectly with the pragmatist discourse of the reform era that legitimated economic reforms on the ground of breaking with dogmatic Marxism. His call for new interpretations of history from the perspective of reform politics in the post-Mao era also made sense to the historians who had been used to the pragmatist tradition in Chinese historiography that emphasized the use of history for present needs. Later, Li revealed that what caused him to reconsider the Westernizing reforms in modern China such as the Self-Strengthening Movement was precisely the reform leaders’ introduction of the “opening-up” policy and the emphasis on borrowing advanced technologies from foreign countries after 1978 (Li Pingsheng 1988, 29). To the extent that he used history to speak for Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policies and at the same time used the current policies to justify the modernizing and Westernizing reforms in modern China, Li’s new interpretations were as pragmatic as the radical or “ultraleft” writings that he challenged:

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while the radicals used history to serve Maoist politics, Li reinterpreted the same history to support the reforms that subverted Maoism. Li Shiyue’s articles triggered a new round of debate on the “basic thread” and periodization of modern Chinese history. Among the participants, those who adhered to the traditional thesis of “three revolutionary surges” and those who endorsed Li’s “four phases” both were relatively few. Most chose a stand between the two and accordingly divided modern Chinese history into a varying number of periods (see Zeng Jingzhong 1985 and Liang Jinghe 2007 for details on the different interpretations of the basic thread and periodization of modern Chinese history). Echoing the reform-oriented discourse in post-Mao China, Li Shiyue’s capitalist construct won support from the general public as well as historians who were tired of the outdated revolutionary historiography. Yet, during most of the 1980s, it was also liable to criticism and even political attack from conservatives in the government and historians who adhered to the revolutionary construct. In the long run, however, as the reforms unfolded and as the market economy and private ownership eventually prevailed, the capitalist construct also established its dominance in historiography in a revised and updated form in the 1990s, as described in the next chapter. The reverse was true for the revolutionary construct.

TRAITOROUS OR PATRIOTIC? REASSESSING THE SELFSTRENGTHENING MOVEMENT The debate on the basic thread and periodization of modern Chinese history was concomitant with the reappraisal of major historical events in the late Qing and Republican periods. Especially controversial among historians were the reevaluations of the Self-Strengthening Movement and the Boxer Uprising. To fully appreciate the nature of the New Enlightenment historiography and to gauge how far it departed from the revolutionary orthodoxy, it is revealing to look further into the controversies over these two events. The Orthodox Views

The orthodox views of the Self-Strengthening Movement in the revolutionary historiography can be traced back to the writings of Fan Wenlan and Hu Sheng in the 1940s, in which they likened the Self-

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Strengthening leaders’ reliance on foreign support and suppression of the rebels to Chiang Kai-shek’s policies and therefore completely condemned the movement. In his Zhongguo jindaishi, Fan depicted the Self-Strengthening leaders as the “subservient agents” of foreign powers and downplayed their efforts at military modernization as serving the “self-strengthening” of their own cliques and the “deepening” of China’s “colonization.” He further saw their management of civilian projects as impeding capitalist development in China (Fan Wenlan 1949, 203, 220, 222, 226; see also Chapter 2). Hu’s view was basically the same. He believed that the Self-Strengthening Movement served the interests of the old political order rather than the interests of China. The military enterprises built during the movement only enabled foreigners to control China’s military forces, and the Self-Strengthening leaders’ control of civilian enterprises only blocked the “free development of private capitalism” (Hu Sheng 1949, 97, 100, 102). After 1949, both Fan and Hu slightly modified their views on the Self-Strengthening Movement and acknowledged its limited role in promoting capitalism in China. In his famous article on the periodization of modern Chinese history, Hu admitted that the SelfStrengthening leaders “adopted some capitalist forms” during the movement in order to “build closer economic and political relations with foreign capitalist forces” (Hu Sheng 1954, 8). Fan, too, pointed out that the civilian enterprises founded or sponsored by the SelfStrengthening leaders “more or less contained capitalist elements” and that their military enterprises made possible the introduction of modern machines to China and contributed to the “emergence of some proletarians” (Fan Wenlan 1955b, 126). Overall, however, their negative views of the movement remained largely unchanged. The monographs and textbooks published in the 1950s echoed their views and generally defined the movement as “reactionary” (i.e., counter to the revolutionary movements) and “traitorous” (i.e., to the benefit of foreign powers) in nature (see Zhang Mingjiu and Xu Tailai 1982). A debate in the early 1960s on the Self-Strengthening Movement further enhanced the orthodox view. Jiang Duo, a researcher at the Shanghai Economic Research Instutute, found that the orthodox views on the Self-Strengthening Movement as seen in Fan Wenlan’s book (1949) and Mou Anshi’s monograph (1956) did not square with the findings from his own research on the history of the

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Jiangnan Shipyard (formerly Jiangnan Arsenal, founded by Zeng Guofan in 1865). Therefore, at the invitation of an editor of Wenhuibao, a Shanghai-based newspaper, Jiang published three articles in December 1961 and January 1962 in which he admitted the “reactionary and negative side” of the Self-Strengthening Movement but underscored its “progressive and positive side” (Jiang Duo 1997, 122). According to Jiang, the movement was as “nationalistic” as the Meiji Restoration in Japan to the extent that both were oriented toward “resisting [foreign] humiliation” ( yuwu) and “self-strengthening” (ziqiang). The movement leaders’ encouragement of private investment in modern enterprises, he argued, “stimulated and accelerated the emergence and development of the capitalist mode of production in China.” Overall, the Self-Strengthening Movement “reflected and represented the new direction of the development of Chinese society” (Jiang Duo 1961, 1962a, 1962b). Jiang’s views, which appeared more objective and well-rounded than the orthodox views, were congruent with the overall mood of mainstream historians in the early 1960s right after the disastrous Great Leap Forward, when they openly criticized “ahistorical” views in historical research that had prevailed during the historiographical revolution in 1958 (see Chapter 5). Jiang’s articles sparked a debate that lasted until early 1964, in which nearly fifty articles by other historians were published. It began as an academic debate involving no political charges. However, as Mao emphasized class struggle and warned against the danger of capitalist restoration in 1962, the debaters became increasingly critical of Jiang. Most of them did not deny the “economic effects” of the Self-Strengthening Movement that Jiang had described, but they contended that the movement leaders’ economic activities should be evaluated in the larger context of class struggle in modern China or linked with their “class character” and “political line”; the evaluation of the Self-Strengthening enterprises, in other words, should be viewed in light of the “facts” that the movement leaders were primarily the “agents of imperialist powers” in China and that the movement “externally met the needs of imperialism and internally served to suppress the revolutions of the people and to maintain the feudal regime,” as Fan Wenlan and Hu Sheng had stated. As the political atmosphere became increasingly tense in the first half of the 1960s, the debate also became a “siege and attack” on Jiang, as he later recalled. During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang

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was further accused of “glorifying the Self-Strengthening leaders” and suffered various forms of persecution (Jiang Duo 1997, 122). Challenging the Orthodoxy

The challenge to the orthodox historiography on the Self-Strengthening Movement began with an article by Xu Tailai, a lecturer at Xiangtan University, published in the first issue of Lishi yanjiu in 1980. In that article, Xu first refuted the traditional view that the Self-Strengthening Movement should be condemned primarily because it was for the purpose of enhancing the “feudal regime” of the Qing. Borrowing from the political propaganda of the post-Mao era that upheld the slogan “practice is the sole criterion of truth,” Xu contended that the judgment of the Self-Strengthening Movement should be based on “practice,” or the actual effects of the event, rather than the “motives and purposes” of the movement leaders. He further argued that the Self-Strengtheners’ establishment of modern civilian and military enterprises was primarily motivated by their “economic interests” and their intention to “resist foreign aggression” rather than to “suppress peasant rebellion.” If the movement was to suppress the peasant rebellion, Xu reasoned, it should have terminated in the early 1860s and had no need to continue into the next two or three decades. Disagreeing with the traditional view that described the relationship between the Self-Strengtheners and foreign aggressors as one of “mutual collusion,” Xu highlighted the “contradictions” between them. After examining the memorials of the Self-Strengtheners on establishing modern military forces and civilian enterprises, Xu concluded that their primary purposes were, in their own words, to “deal with the foreigners” (zhi yangren) and “resist foreign humiliation” (yu waiwu) (Xu Tailai 1980, 30). Xu also discussed the effects of the Self-Strengthening Movement on the development of capitalism in China. In his view, the movement leaders’ promotion of “official supervision, merchant management” (guandu shangban) and “joint management by officials and merchants” (guanshang heban) in establishing modern enterprises provided some bureaucrats, landlords, and merchants with the opportunities to invest in modern enterprises; contributed to the rise of Chinese national capitalism; and played a role in protecting national capital. By using modern machines in production, training technicians and workers, introducing advanced management skills, and disseminating scientific knowledge, the

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Self-Strengthening Movement, Xu concluded, “paved the way for the development of national capitalism” (Xu Tailai 1980, 33). Finally, Xu offered his own interpretation of the “lessons” to be learned from the Self-Strengthening Movement: “To change its own backward conditions, an economically backward country had to be bold enough to acquire advanced scientific knowledge from foreign countries and to introduce advanced foreign productive technologies and machineries. At the same time, it had to maintain national independence and sovereignty and to engage in a resolute struggle with both the foreign aggressive forces that attempted to enslave and plunder China and the stubborn, conservative forces within the country” (Xu Tailai 1980, 35–36). Xu’s statement contrasted sharply with the conclusion that Huang Yifeng and Jiang Duo drew from their new study of the same movement: “An economically backward country [like China] that was subject to the control of feudalism and the intrusion of foreign aggressive forces had to first conduct a bourgeois democratic revolution against feudalism and foreign intrusion if it wanted to change its own feudal and backward conditions, develop capitalism, and build an independent state” (Huang Yifeng and Jiang Duo 1979, 70). The problem with Huang and Jiang’s reassessment, as Xu pointed out, was that they failed to ask themselves this question: Was China ready for such a bourgeois revolution in the 1860s and 1870s, when capitalism as an economic formation barely existed in the country and when the Chinese bourgeoisie as a social class was yet to emerge? Huang and Jiang’s claim, in Xu’s view, was ahistorical, for it required the Self-Strengtheners to do what the Communist Party was only able to do many decades later. Xu’s statement perfectly fit the postrevolutionary discourse in the early 1980s, when China just started the “reform and openingup” policy that called for learning from the West and overcoming dogmatic thinking under the slogan of “liberating the mind.” In fact, Xu was able to completely subvert the traditional revolutionary interpretation of the Self-Strengthening Movement and had his article published in the leading historical journal in China precisely because his writing jibed with the Party’s reform policies. However, while Xu’s challenge to the orthodox historiography appeared discursively correct, it was politically illegitimate for him to go any further to subvert the ideological basis on which the revolutionary historiography was built. Throughout his article, Xu had to share with his opponents the same orthodox Marxist terminology

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and the same conceptual assumptions about modern Chinese society. He thus acknowledged, for example, that modern China was a “semifeudal and semicolonial” society; that feudalism and imperialism were the primary barriers to China’s progress; that “bureaucratic capitalism” was inimical to “national capitalism”; and that a “bourgeois democratic revolution” was indispensable for capitalist development in China. All these assumptions remained fundamental to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, for they served to justify the Party’s assumption of power in 1949 and continuation in power thereafter. The debate on the Self-Strengthening Movement, therefore, took place within the original paradigm. What Xu challenged was only concrete conclusions regarding concrete historical events; he did not challenge the paradigm in which the orthodox historiography had developed and formulated its judgments and conceptions. Toward a New Consensus

The controversy between Jiang and Xu led to a surge of academic interest in the Self-Strengthening Movement. From 1980 to early 1985, more than two hundred articles on this topic were published (Zhang Mingjiu and Zhang Yigong 1985). In all of the 1980s, about twenty monographs on the movement and its leaders were published, and five national conferences on the movement were held, each attracting fifty to more than one hundred attendees and a similar number of papers. In addition, special symposiums were held from time to time to discuss individual Self-Strengthening leaders such as Zuo Zongtang, Li Hongzhang, Zeng Guofan, and Sheng Xuanhuai (Jiang Duo 1997). Scholars were divided in their overall judgment of the Self-Strengthening Movement. Those who sympathized with the movement leaders tended to downplay peasant rebellion as a factor in generating the movement, to accentuate the movement’s contribution to the rise of capitalism in China, and to separate the movement leaders’ diplomatic failures from their efforts at military and industrial modernization, whereas those who still adhered to the revolutionary construct in varying degrees did the opposite. Many scholars, however, switched their attention to empirical studies on specific institutions or individuals in the movement. They generally adopted an objective and less politically charged approach in their research. Jiang Duo, who reviewed the field in 1997, pointed out some areas where the scholars had reached consensus over the

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years: they all agreed that the Self-Strengthening Movement represented the inception of China’s transition “from a feudal society to capitalist modernization” and “from isolation and self-seclusion to reform and opening up”; they all agreed that the movement had both “positive or progressive” and “negative or reactionary” sides, though disagreement remained over the proportion of each of the two sides; and they all disagreed with the politicized stigmatization of the Strengthening leaders as “Han collaborators, butchers, national traitors, and compradors” as found in the writings of revolutionary historians before the 1980s (ibid., 126). Illustrative of the historians’ changed opinions on the SelfStrengthening Movement was their new evaluation of Li Hongzhang, the most prominent leader in the event. In the revolutionary historiography (as represented by the works of Fan Wenlan, Hu Sheng, and many others) as well as the radical writings during the Cultural Revolution, Li bore all the stigmas mentioned above. In the 1980s, however, historians increasingly depicted Li as a “pioneer” in introducing Western technology and initiating China’s modernization (see, for example, Qi Qizhang 1989; Wang Heming 1989). At the symposium “Li Hongzhang and the Modern Chinese Economy” held in Hefei, the hometown of the protagonist, the seventy-odd attendees from eleven provinces almost unanimously praised Li as a man who made “important contributions” to China’s modernization (Wang Yanmin 1989). Chen Xulu (1918–1988), a history professor from East China Normal University in Shanghai and one of the attendees at the meeting, summarized the changed opinions on Li Hongzhang as follows: In the past, we said that Li Hongzhang had the problems of “capitulation and betrayal” [touxiang maiguo] and “worshiping foreign things and toadying to foreign powers” [chongyang meiwai]; we were sure about this judgment as if we had undeniable evidence. I myself also believed so. Now we are making a big reversal, saying that Li Hongzhang had patriotic and nationalist ideas, and was a pioneer in the modernizing journey, which is indeed somewhat dramatic. This dramaticness is not caused by Li Hongzhang himself, but by ourselves in our research. In my opinion, it is the dramaticness in our political campaigns that has been reflected in the studies on Li Hongzhang, hence the dramatic changes in evaluating him. (Chen Xulu 1989, 29)

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Chen’s comments well explained how the changing political atmosphere directly shaped historians’ perceptions of historical events in modern China.

HEROIC OR BENIGHTED? REASSESSING THE BOXER UPRISING Revolutionary yet Backward: The Orthodox View

Equally stark are the contrasting views on the Boxer Uprising. In their pioneering works on modern Chinese history according to the orthodox historiography, Fan Wenlan and Hu Sheng both depicted the Boxer Uprising as a heroic struggle of the Chinese people against imperialism; at the same time, however, they both pointed out its “backwardness” because of the “superstitious” and “xenophobic” forms that the movement took. Fan, for example, admitted that the rebellion took place in a “backward, religious, and superstitious” way and even blamed the Boxers for being “ignorant and even reactionary” for their indiscriminate attack on foreigners and foreign things. But he nevertheless defined the rebellion as a “patriotic” and “antiimperialist” movement (Fan Wenlan 1949, 336, 364). In his opinion, the Boxers’ superstition only partly explained their fearlessness in fighting the foreign intruders; the fundamental reason behind their “great spirit of self-sacrifice” was the Boxers’ “deep-rooted national hatred” toward the intruders; it was the “extreme oppression and coercion of imperialism and the Manchu government,” Fan maintained, that “drove people to prefer death to life” (ibid., 368, 387). Unlike Fan, Hu Sheng avoided describing the Boxer Uprising as an “anti-imperialist” movement. In his interpretation, the rebellion “did not develop into a healthy movement of the people against imperialism” (Hu Sheng 1949, 140). Although the Boxers did rebel against the Qing government at the beginning of the movement and thus displayed the “true nature” of a peasant movement, the “political naivete of the peasant masses” nevertheless led the movement “astray,” pushed the rebels to “actions of fanatic, unreasonable xenophobia and hostility toward new things,” and made the movement “a victim utilized and manipulated by the ruling forces.” This “distorted development,” Hu explained, was a result of the participation of “hooligans and ruffians” in the uprising and government officials’ instigation that caused the rebels’ xenophobia to “overwhelm the

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antifeudal and antigovernment nature” of the movement (ibid., 143). In his 1954 essay on the periodization of modern Chinese history, Hu insisted on his opinion on the Boxer Upising and described it as a “spontaneous struggle of mainly the peasant masses” that took place in a “distorted form.” Nevertheless, he praised the Boxer Uprising as emblematic of the “second surge of the revolutionary movements” in modern China and compared it to the Taiping Rebellion and the Revolution of 1911 (Hu Sheng 1954, 8–9). Similar views were also found in the writings of other mainstream historians in the 1950s. Jian Bozan, for example, defined the Boxer Uprising as an “unyielding and heroic anti-imperialist struggle” and at the same time pointed out its “narrowness and backwardness.” Situated in a discursive context in the early 1950s in which “American imperialism” appeared to be the major threat to China after the Korean War, the historians linked the Boxer Rebellion with the renewed struggle against imperialism. As Jian put it in the preface to a multivolume compilation of historical documents on the Boxers, his and his collaborators’ purpose in publishing the work was to help readers “understand imperialism in history” and to “settle the bloody accounts of imperialism” (Jian Bozan 1953, 1). The above views on the Boxers represent three discursive traditions in twentieth-century China: the Enlightenment discourse of the May Fourth period in the 1910s and 1920s that dichotomized a backward, conservative, and superstitious China with a progressive, liberal, and scientific West, a discourse that continued to influence the thinking of radical intellectuals, including communists, in the following decades; the revolutionary discourse of the Nationalists as well as the Communists that took imperialism to be the number one enemy of both the Nationalist and communist revolutions; and the Cold War discourse in the 1950s that assumed a worldwide confrontation between the capitalist/imperialist West and the socialist East, and therefore enhanced the anti-imperialist discourse that continued after 1949.1 Revolutionary and Rightful: The Radical View

The radical historiography on the Boxer Uprising departed from the orthodox views before the Cultural Revolution in that it attenuated and even completely obliterated the negative side of the movement and unreservedly extolled the Boxers. It can be traced to the historiographical revolution during the Great Leap Forward, when the

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intensification of the Cold War led to a heightened discourse against Western imperialism in China. The leading historians, therefore, generally avoided talking about the negative side of the Boxers and instead fully praised the movement as a rightful anti-imperialist struggle. At a conference held in Shandong in August 1960 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Boxer Uprising, the attendees extolled the Boxers as “representative of an awakened Chinese nation” or a “revolutionary, antifeudal peasant organization,” and praised the rebellion as “an anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and progressive war” or a “revolutionary struggle against feudalism and imperialism” (Zhongguo Kexueyuan Shandong Fenyuan Lishi Yanjiusuo 1961, 12–13, 35, 77–79). The reservations with the movement as seen in the historiography in the early 1950s totally disappeared. The most radical representation of the Boxer Uprising came from Qi Benyu. In his article “Patriotism or Betrayal? A Review of the Reactionary Movie Qing gong wai shi [An unofficial history of the Qing court],” Qi linked one’s attitude toward the Boxers with his or her political stand. “To support or oppose it, and to praise or hate it—this is the touchstone to verify if one is a true or fake revolutionary, and if one is a revolutionary or a counterrevolutionary.” “True Marxists,” Qi wrote, “have always enthusiastically praised [the Boxers]”; to vilify them as “ignorant” or “superstitious” as the movie did only meant to “fully collaborate with imperialists” and to act as “hired scholars of American imperialism in China” because Dean Acheson, the U.S. secretary of state (1949–1953), had described the Boxer Uprising as “xenophobic turmoil” in his famous whitepaper on U.S.-China relations (Qi Benyu 1967). Not surprisingly, all antiforeign activities of the Boxers were now portrayed as rightful actions against imperialism. To highlight the revolutionary nature of the Boxer Uprising, Qi further juxtaposed it to the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898. In his view, the leading figures of the reform belonged to the ruling class that “exploited and oppressed the working people”; the purpose of their reform, therefore, was to enhance their regime and replace the revolutionary movements of the people with “incremental changes.” Qi further blamed the reform leaders for relying on imperialist forces to materialize their reform goals, an action that was no different from “inviting a wolf into the house” and that could only accelerate China’s degeneration to a semicolonial and semifeudal society (Qi Benyu 1967). By completely condemning the Hundred Days’

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Reform, Qi once again departed from the orthodox historiography that had treated the reform as a “progressive” and “patriotic” movement (Fan Wenlan 1949, 308; 1955; Hu Sheng 1949, 127; 1954). Like his earlier essays, Qi’s new article served a political purpose. As early as 1954, Mao Zedong had criticized Qing gong wai shi as a movie about “betraying the country” (maiguozhuyi) rather than “patriotism” (aiguozhuyi); he complained that it had not yet been reviewed critically (Mao Zedong 1954, 134–135). Despite Mao’s comment, Qi stated at the beginning of his article, the “biggest power holder within the Party who takes the capitalist road” (i.e., Liu Shaoqi) as well as the “counterrevolutionary revisionists” in charge of propaganda within the Party praised the movie as “patriotic” and refused to criticize it. According to Qi, the movie “glorified imperialism, feudalism, and bourgeois reformism” and at the same time vilified the revolutionary mass movement. Liu endorsed the movie, Qi accused, because Liu himself had wanted to give up the revolutionary struggle on the eve of the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalists, dreamed of peaceful participation in a parliamentary government in China, and, after 1949 “continued to dream about the restoration of capitalism, stubbornly adhered to bourgeois world views, immensely admired bourgeois reformism, and strenuously attempted to abort the Chinese revolution and develop capitalism.” At the end of the article, Qi declared that “you [Liu Shaoqi] are not a ‘veteran revolutionary’ at all! You are but a pseudo-revolutionary and a counterrevolutionary; you are the [Chinese] Khrushchev sleeping right next to us!” (Qi Benyu 1967). Qi’s article was anything but an academic piece. Its publication in Hongqi and again in Renmin ribao quickly stirred up nationwide agitation among the young Red Guards and helped Mao in his struggle against Liu. Nonrevolutionary and Benighted: The Post-Mao Reappraisal

It is no wonder, therefore, that the reversal of the radical historiography on the Boxer Uprising after the Cultural Revolution began with a rebuttal of Qi Benyu’s article. In their coauthored essay published in Lishi yanjiu in 1979, Zuo Buqing and Zhang Mingjiu refused to call the Boxer Uprising a “revolution.” According to Zuo and Zhang, “a revolution in its strict sense means only a fundamental transformation in which a new mode of production replaces the old mode of production and a progressive social system replaces a

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corrupt social system.” The Boxers, the authors argued, “opposed only imperialist aggression but did not oppose the feudal social system and the feudal regime of the Qing,” and they “never proposed a plan to change the feudal system.” Qi’s description of the Boxer Uprising as an “antifeudal struggle,” they castigated, was a “fabrication,” for it did not exist at all in history. His “glorification” of the Boxers showed his “gross distortion of the Marxist-Leninist theory of class struggle” because the task of overthrowing the feudal system could only be accomplished by a bourgeois revolution and not by a peasant movement. The failure of the Boxer Uprising proved the “conservatism and spontaneity” of the peasantry and its inability to “free itself from the control of the feudal system.” Qi’s approval of the Boxers’ indiscriminate antiforeign activities and his equation of the Boxers’ “antiforeignism” ( paiwaizhuyi) with “patriotism,” the authors further contended, only showed his own antiforeignism and sympathy with the “feudal conservatives” in the Qing court; the latter, too, had endorsed the Boxers’ antiforeign activities. Finally, the authors argued, Qi’s denigration of the Reform of 1898 only showed his “unconditional worship of violence and glorification of violence,” which encouraged the ruthless and rampant violence during the Cultural Revolution (Zuo Buqing and Zhang Mingjiu 1979, 8–10). Wang Zhizhong went ever further in critiquing the Boxer Uprising in his article “Feudal Obscurantism and the Boxer Movement,” which appeared in the first issue of Lishi yanjiu of 1980. As the title indicates, the focus of Wang’s analysis is on the “obscurantism” (mengmeizhuyi) or the “feudal superstition” (fenjian mixin) of the Boxers. After describing the Boxers’ various religious practices, the author argued that the Boxers were “far from a truly awakened revolutionary force.” Although such practices made the rebels “courageous” on the battleground, the “invalidity of feudal superstition” together with their “lack of organization and discipline” made the Boxers vulnerable to attack by foreign enemies (Wang Zhizhong 1980, 45). Wang further condemned the Boxers’ “gross antiforeignism” as another form of “feudal obscurantism.” Because of their “ignorance and benightedness,” Wang wrote, the Boxers were hostile to both imperialist intrusion and the “introduction of new modes of production to China.” Therefore, while resisting foreign intrusion, they also “indiscriminately attacked and completely wiped out all new modes of production and new lifestyles that differed from feudal traditions.” Here Wang pointed out two interrelated roles of imperi-

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alism: military intrusion as well as its function as “an unconscious tool of history” in “bringing new modes of production and ways of life” to China. Quoting Marx’s remark on the British roles in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India, Wang stated that imperialism functioned in Asian countries such as China and India to destroy the old society and at the same time laid a material basis for building a Westernized society (ibid., 47–48). To conclude the article, Wang criticized Qi Benyu for eschewing the issue of the “backwardness and benightedness” of the Boxers and encouraging “a new form of obscurantism” in China (ibid., 54). Echoing Wang’s overall negation of the Boxer Uprising, Li Shiyue explained why he excluded that rebellion from his four-stage schema of the “major thread” in modern Chinese history. He posited that the rebellion was merely a continuation of popular riots against foreign religions (fan yangjiao); it “never displayed the features of a peasant revolution” (Li Shiyue 1984, 130). Later, Li not only denied that the rebellion was a peasant revolution, but further refused to consider it an “anti-imperialist” struggle. In his view, the Boxer Uprising was merely an antiforeign movement that manifested its “blindness and backwardness” and was “dominated by feudal, conservative ideas from the beginning to the end.” The “indiscriminate antiforeign and irrational violence” in the movement “contradicted” the correct directions of the Self-Strengthening Movement and the Reform of 1898. Despite the “participation of the masses,” the Boxer Uprising should not be seen as a “correct” movement and did not deserve “unconditional praise” (Li Shiyue 1989, 34). Not all historians endorsed the above interpretations. But these new views stood out as the most influential among a large number of publications on the topic and were indicative of the new direction of Chinese historiography after the Cultural Revolution. To better understand why they were able to subvert the traditional views and what impact these writings had on historiographical development in the 1980s and thereafter, we must look at them in the context of the New Enlightenment movement of the late 1970s and the 1980s.

LI SHU AND NEW ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY As the most prestigious history journal in the People’s Republic of China, Lishi yanjiu generally shaped the trends in historical thinking and writing in a given period. During the New Enlightenment

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years, it was usually the articles published in this journal that initiated debate in the form of additional articles in the same or other journals. As the editor in chief of Lishi yanjiu, Li Shu (1912–1988) influenced these debates more than any other historian. To understand the purposes of New Enlightenment historiography, it is necessary to look at Li Shu’s career and his thinking about history. Li Shu as a New Enlightenment Thinker

Serving as the editor of Lishi yanjiu and the vice-director of the Institute of Modern History starting in 1961, Li showed his ideological inclination by publishing a number of essays in the early 1960s that spoke for “historicism” in historical research and criticized the tendency of excessive politicization during the historiographical revolution. Not surprisingly, his journal became the target of the radicals at the beginning the Cultural Revolution; an article published in Renmin ribao, for example, denounced Lishi yanjiu as the “reactionary stronghold of bourgeois historiography” (Jin Qunxin 1966). Li Shu consequently suffered the radicals’ humiliation and denunciation at repeated “struggle meetings” against him. He was assigned a job cleaning toilets and later sent to the countryside to do farm work together with other scholars at a cadres’ school. In 1975, Li was released from the school and reappointed editor of Lishi yanjiu as it resumed publication (Ding Shouhe 1998). When the Cultural Revolution was over, Li Shu was among the first to advocate a new “enlightenment” in Chinese society. In his view, the “old culture, old thoughts, and old ethics” that were deeply rooted in “feudal society” remained strong in contemporary China. The reforms and revolutions in modern China, he explained, had made little change to the feudal ideology despite the introduction of Western technology and democratic, liberal ideas to China. The May Fourth Movement launched a fierce attack on the old culture, but it quickly gave way to political struggles. The communist revolution succeeded in eliminating feudalism politically and economically, but it had never finished the struggle against feudal ideology—hence the phenomena of the personality cult, personal dictatorship, and the launching of the Cultural Revolution, which were nothing less than the manifestation of feudal ideas in new forms. The so-called socialism during the Cultural Revolution, he contended, was actually the continuation of feudalism behind a façade of socialism, or what he called “feudal socialism.” For these reasons, the task of eliminating feudalism had

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yet to be finished; eliminating the “influence of feudal remnants” remained a precondition for China’s modernization (Li Shu 1979). Li Shu was even more audacious when he proposed the idea of “Western learning as the content, Chinese learning as the form” (xixue wei ti, zhongxue wei yong) in 1980.2 According to his interpretation, China had “an unavoidable choice” after the arrival of Western capitalist forces, “to accept Western bourgeois culture or to perish.” Therefore, the fundamental challenge that confronted China was its modernization, and modernization meant to “Westernize” or “Europeanize.” To modernize, he averred, China “had to accept Western learning as the content, or there cannot be modernization.” Here Li Shu was arguing against the famous formulation of “Western learning as the form, and Chinese learning as the content” proposed by the Self-Strengthening leaders in the nineteenth century. That formulation, Li argued, only offered an excuse for traditionalists to oppose “cultural exchanges between China and the West” and to protect “feudal traditions” in Chinese society, ensuring the repeated failures of China’s modernization. To free China of the burden of feudal traditions and given that “Chinese learning cannot be completely abandoned,” it was necessary to reverse the traditional formulation and to embrace “Western learning as the content” (Li Shu 1989, 53). Li Shu’s attitude toward Western civilization and Chinese traditions thus is reminiscent of the antitraditionalism among the radical intellectuals during the May Fourth period; in fact Li was later identified as a proponent of “wholesale Westernization” (quanpan xihua), a slogan that Chen Duxiu and other “New Culture” advocates had embraced in the 1910s (Wang Xuedian 2002, 251). Li Shu’s thoughts were also provocative in the early 1980s because he challenged some of the fundamental assumptions of the orthodox historiography. For decades, Li complained, it had been widely assumed that violent revolutions were always preferable to incremental and nonviolent reforms. So popular was this notion that people tended to equate revolution with the “end” itself rather than the “means” of historical progress. “In fact,” he wrote, “revolution is not the end. The end of a revolution is to change social systems, push forward economic development, elevate the level of the forces of production, and improve the living standard of the people. The problem with our writing of history in the past is mainly that it only talks about revolutions” (see Li Rui 1998, 32). Compared to violent revo-

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lutions, Li insisted, nonviolent revolutions or reforms were preferable. “Nonviolent revolutions have a power that violent revolutions have never had to drive forward the progress of human civilization.” “The true irrepressible revolutions, such as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution in Europe, have never been brought about by violence, nor could they be achieved by any violent actions.” “It is my opinion now,” Li concluded, “that revolution is the last thing to do; it is better to avoid revolution. What we can rely on is educational development, cultural prosperity, and the nourishment of democratic spirit—all these depend on economic development” (Li Shu 1988, 43, 148, 184). Li’s rejection of revolutions in history led him to further doubt the concomitant assumptions of the revolutionary ideology that had shaped the orthodox historiography. The first is the widely accepted view that ordinary people, or “the masses,” are the protagonists, or “creators” or “masters,” of history, an idea first proposed by Fan Wenlan in 1949 but never found in the classic Marxist works or Russian textbooks (Jiang Dachun 1998, 32). In his opinion, the masses only “participate in the making of history under certain historical circumstances,” but they are not the makers of “all of history,” and they are not the “only” makers of history (Li Shu 1984, 52, 60–61). Li also questioned the assumption that the history of all human societies after the emergence of classes is nothing but the history of “class struggle.” He criticized this view as “absurd,” for it fails to explain many historical phenomena. He doubted that the “class struggle view” was a true Marxist theory or constituted the “core” of Marxist historical materialism as people had long assumed (Jiang Dachun 1998, 35–36). Li Shu and Historical Debate in the 1980s

Li Shu’s espousal of New Enlightenment ideas and refutation of revolutionary ideology directly affected his thinking about the major issues in modern Chinese history and his inclinations in editing Lishi yanjiu. In his review of Chinese historiography in 1979, Li Shu disagreed with Hu Sheng’s revolutionary construct. To include the Taiping and Boxer rebellions as two of the “three revolutionary surges,” he pointed out, was to equate peasant movements with the “main stream” of modern Chinese history and to depict the communist revolution as “the continuation of old-style peasant movements.” In his opinion, the Taiping Rebellion was merely the “epilogue of old-style

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peasant wars” that had no significance in modern Chinese history. The Self-Strengthening Movement, though beginning as a reaction to the Taiping Rebellion, signaled the “start of capitalist development” in China. What constituted the “main stream and development in modern Chinese history,” he explained, were “the Self-Strengthening Movement, the 1898 Reform, and the 1911 Revolution, which succeeded one another and reached higher and higher levels, culminating in the creation of a bourgeois republic” (Li Shu 1980b, 10). Li Shu’s understanding of the theme of modern Chinese history is identical to Li Shiyue’s view discussed earlier. Li Shu formed his own ideas in 1979 (Ding Shouhe et al. 1989, 62), at the same time that Li Shiyue was preparing his article for Lishi yanjiu. Therefore, it is difficult to judge whether Li Shu’s ideas influenced Li Shiyue’s or vice versa. It is not unlikely that Li Shu, as the editor of Lishi yanjiu, offered suggestions to Li Shiyue on revising his article and at the same time also absorbed the ideas from the latter when formulating his own view on modern China. At any rate, Li Shu played a key role in publishing Li Shuyue’s article and launching the revived debate on the “major thread” of modern Chinese history. Li Shu’s role in the debate on the Self-Strengthening Movement was equally pivotal. To criticize the radical views that completely negated the Self-Strengthening Movement, Li Shu first invited Jiang Duo, who had spoken for the movement in the early 1960s, to submit an article that was expected to accentuate the “positive side” of the Self-Strengthening Movement. Intimidated by the persecution against him during the Cultural Revolution and to shield himself from another round of political attacks, however, Jiang and his coauthor wrote an article that described the Self-Strengthening Movement as mainly a “reactionary movement” and an “evil product” of five factors: “the collaboration of Chinese feudalism with foreign aggressors,” “reactionary motivation for maintaining and consolidating a feudal regime,” “support from and benefit to foreign aggressors,” “tendencies that led China into the deep trap of semicolonial and semifeudal status,” and “sponsorship by notorious butchers, Han collaborators, and national traitors such as Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang” (Huang Yifeng and Jiang Duo 1979, 66–67).3 Jiang Duo, who had been too liberal in the early 1960s in discussing the Self-Strengthening Movement, now appeared to be too conservative—instead of speaking for the movement as he had done seventeen years before, he basically reiterated the radical view

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that condemned it. Disappointed, Li Shu invited Xu Tailai, a former student of Li Shiyue, to write an article rebutting Jiang—hence the publication of Xu’s influential essay “Another Review of the SelfStrengthening Movement,” which triggered a new round of debate among historians (Xu Tailai 1980). Li Shu’s rejection of violence and approval of incremental reform also account for his disparagement of the Boxer Uprising and his praise of the Reform of 1898. In his review of Chinese historiography in 1979, Li defined the Boxer Uprising as a “spontaneous struggle of peasants” that was both “patriotic” because of its fight against foreign intruders and “backward” because of its “feudal and benighted” characteristics (Li Shu 1980b, 9). It was at his suggestion that Zuo Buqing and Zhang Mingjiu wrote and published their coauthored article refuting Qi Benyu’s exaltation of the Boxers; it was also under his guidance that Wang Zhizhong wrote and published his controversial article in the same journal that condemned the Boxers to a degree unseen before and after its publication (Wang Xuedian 2001). Both articles in fact represented Li Shu’s own opinion on the Boxer Uprising. At the conference in Shandong in November 1980 commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the Boxer Uprising, Li told the audience that the rebels’ slogan of “eliminating the foreign” (mie yang) was “wrong.” “Foreign things,” he said, “could never be eliminated. Quite the contrary, they had to be studied with great urgency” (Li Shu 1989, 55). It was at that meeting that Li proposed his formulation of wholesale Westernization, or “Western learning as content and Chinese learning as form” (Wang Xuedian 2001, 19). Li’s low opinion of the Boxer Uprising contrasted sharply with his approval of the Reform of 1898. The latter, he argued, was a “bourgeois democratic reform movement”; it “represented the interests and demands of the emerging bourgeoisie who had just showed up on the political stage.” Its attempt to create a constitutional monarchy in China and its many political, economic, and cultural measures were “conducive to capitalist development.” Despite its failure, Li wrote, the Reform of 1898 played a role comparable to an “enlightenment” movement; “its status in history was much more important than any peasant movement” (Li Shu 1980b, 9). Continuities in the New Enlightenment Thinking

Li Shu’s New Enlightenment ideas as well as his thinking on modern China were not entirely new when viewed in the context of

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the intellectual history of twentieth-century China. His condemnation of feudalism and obscurantism, his skepticism toward violent revolution and the role of the masses in history, as well as his embrace of Westernization and incremental reform—all these can be traced to the writings of Enlightenment intellectuals in the May Fourth period and thereafter. Likewise, his positive view of the SelfStrengthening Movement and the Reform of 1898, his denigration of the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, as well as his general view of modern Chinese history—all these are not too different from the views found in the writings of Republican historians such as Jiang Tingfu and Chen Gonglu (see Chapter 2). For the Enlightenment writers in the 1910s and 1920s, who experienced the drastic changes from imperial to Republican times, who were amazed by the sharp contrast between what they had been accustomed to and what was newly imported, and who were frustrated by the repeated failures to make China “modern,” it was only natural to assume a juxtaposition between a “backward” China and a “modern” West or between the “feudal” cultural traditions in China and the democracy and science in the West, and subsequently advocate “wholesale Westernization” as the solution to China’s backwardness. Li Shu and his contemporaries espoused a new enlightenment and the idea of Westernization in the early 1980s for reasons not too different from those of their predecessors. Having recently endured the political agitation, cultural seclusion, and personal suffering during the Cultural Revolution and having just entered a new period of “reform and opening up,” witnessing a striking gap between a “backward” China and the advanced West, they took for granted the dichotomy between China and the West, or between the “tradition” that had survived from China’s past and the “modernity” they found in things from the West, and hence once again proposed wholesale Westernization in order for China to catch up with the modern West. There was a clear continuity between the enlightenment writers in the early twentieth century and the New Enlightenment intellectuals in the 1980s. Continuity is also manifested in their adherence to Marxism. The New Enlightenment intellectuals in the 1980s were not only liberals espousing Western modernity, but also Marxists who thought about historical and contemporary issues in Marxist terms. This ostensible contradiction in the thinking of the intellectuals in the 1980s is not difficult to understand. The Marxism that these scholars accepted, as they repeatedly clarified, was different from the “dog-

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matist Marxism” that had prevailed in China for decades. Reviewing his writings in the last year of his life, Li Shu wrote in the preface to his self-selected works that all the essays contained in the book had one common theme, namely, “to question dogmatic Marxism” (Li Shu 1998). Indeed, throughout his career as the editor in chief of Lishi yanjiu from the 1960s to the 1980s, Li showed unequivocal and consistent opposition to highly politicized historiography, especially the ahistorical application of highly dogmatic Marxist doctrines to historical research. In 1960, for example, he edited Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on Historical Science, a collection of passages from the works of the four authors pertaining to history and methodology in historical research. To ensure a “correct understanding” of them and avoid the dogmatic use of them, he reminded readers in “Editor’s Note” to pay particular attention to “when, on what occasion, and for what matter” the “classic Marxist authors” wrote those passages (Li Shu 1980a). Li’s battle against dogmatism continued into the 1980s, when he wrote a series of influential essays on the general issue of Marxism and historiography as well as more specific theoretical issues that had confused historians for decades, such as the thesis of the masses of the people as the creators of history and that all histories are about the history of class struggle. Li Shu made a particular effort to distinguish the original ideas of Marx and Engels from the interpretations of Lenin and Stalin. As he complained, the Marxism that people had studied for decades in China was actually based on the works of Lenin and Stalin, which were written by the two authors to address the peculiar issues in Russia and therefore were not readily applicable to the situation in China. Indicative of Li Shu’s rejection of the Russia-originated Marxism, the title of the aforementioned collection of Marxist passages was changed to Marx and Engels on Historical Science when it was revised and reprinted in 1988 (Jiang Dachun 1998). When first editing this book in the early 1960s, Li particularly emphasized the “scientificness” (kexuexing) of the sayings of the authors. As he explained to his student, Marxism was “correct” because it was “scientific.” Marx himself, in his opinion, had “a scientific spirit and a scientific attitude.” Later, during the Cultural Revolution, among the “mistakes” he was charged with was his insistence on “scientificness” and his “opposition to revolutionariness and the principles of the Party” (Ding Shouhe 1998, 129). For Li Shu, to insist on the original and “scientific” Marxism thus was consistent with his faith in

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science and Western-originated modernity; in fact, the Marxism he found in the original works of Marx and Engels represented modernity because of its “scientificness.” Thus, when he proposed “Western learning as content” for China’s modernization, he included Marxism as part of Western learning (Li Shu 1989, 53). Li Shu’s aversion to dogmatized Marxism influenced his colleagues on the editorial board of Lishi yanjiu and the editors in chief who succeeded him. According to the recollection of Zhang Yunqiu, one of the editors in the 1980s (now teaching in North Carolina): Within the editorial board of Lishi yanjiu, although Marxism was never openly repudiated as a guiding theory in selecting publishable manuscripts, it was in practice quietly dropped or ignored by the editors. Editors were never demanded to conform to Marxism. As far as I was concerned, I was inclined to dismiss those manuscripts that allegedly used Marxist theories, especially the theory of the economic base. I did so not necessarily because I was biased against Marxism, but because I deemed it necessary to redress the previous overemphasis on Marxism by giving more space to different and new theories (approaches). (Yunqiu Zhang 2006, 372)

CHINESE LIBERALISM AFTER 1949 Li Shu’s embrace of enlightenment ideas and his insistence on the “scientificness” of Marxism, and the rise of the New Enlightenment thinking in the 1980s on the whole showed the vitality of liberal thinking among Chinese intellectuals after 1949. Contrary to the assumption that the liberal tradition came to an end in 1949 along with the triumph of the communist revolution, it in fact survived the repeated political campaigns of the Mao era. Two factors made possible the survival of the liberal tradition into the 1980s. First, most of the liberal intellectuals who had been active in the Guomindang-controlled areas continued their careers as professors, writers, artists, and so forth after 1949; thought reform at the beginning of the 1950s forced them to declare their loyalty to the Party, but it never succeeded in transforming them into true believers in Marxist and Maoist ideologies—a fact that explained why Mao persistently refused to accept the intellectuals as part of the proletariat and launched successive campaigns against them. Therefore, they

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were ready to express their independent ideas and even openly criticize the Party whenever the circumstances allowed, as seen in 1956 on the eve of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in the early 1960s in the wake of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and on many occasions in the 1980s. Second, even more important than non-CCP intellectuals in carrying out the liberal tradition after 1949 were the so-called intellectuals within the Party (dangnei zhishi fenzi). By and large, the intellectuals within the Party after 1949 can be divided into two groups, those from the “red areas” and those from the “white areas.” The intellectuals from the CCP-controlled red areas had experienced the Party’s repeated campaigns against liberal thinking in Yan’an in the 1940s and developed a strong political sensitivity to protect themselves from possible persecution. As a friend of Li Shu put it, “those from Yan’an would never talk casually, never ask what should not be asked, and never speak what should not be spoken” (Li Pu 1998, 49). As a result, they turned out to be more “faithful”—at least in their official writings—to Mao’s ideology and hence occupied the key positions in charge of culture, education, and propaganda in the Party. In sharp contrast, those from the Guomindang-controlled areas appeared to be more “liberal.” In the words of Li Shu, these people “only have a sense of right and wrong but do not have a sense of belonging to higher or lower levels.” Therefore, “they do not see themselves as people of a lower level before a person of a higher level, and they do not assume themselves to be of a higher level when dealing with those of a lower level.” This lack of a sense of hierarchy also made them known as “the democrats within the Party” (dangnei minzhu renshi) (Li Shu 1998, 490–491). In other words, despite their CCP membership, they were believed to be different from regular party members; they were more like the “democrats” outside the Party in their behavior and even their dispositions (qizhi). As a result, an invisible barrier often existed between the two groups of intellectuals that prevented them from talking freely to each other (Li Xin 1998). Li Shu and many other well-known scholars, including leading historians such as Jian Bozhan and Wu Han, belonged to the category of democrats within the Party. Educated in universities in the “white areas” in the 1920s or 1930s, they had accepted liberal values, believed in Enlightenment ideas, and wanted a democratic, industrialized China. They developed sympathy with the communist revolution and eventually joined the Chinese Communist Party

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because they were disappointed with the dictatorship, corruption, and inefficiencies of the Guomindang regime and because they believed that the Party could make their dreams come true. After 1949, they held important positions in educational and cultural institutions as well as secondary positions in the Party. Nevertheless, they still thought and acted more like independent intellectuals than party loyalists. Although they showed a willingness to cooperate with Mao and the Party during the political campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, their faith in Enlightenment values would not allow them to remain silent when radicalism (or “feudal socialism,” as Li Shu called it) and pragmatism prevailed in Chinese politics as well as academic research. Their criticism of ahistoricism in the 1960s and their refutation of the revolutionary ideology in historiography in the 1980s showed their defiance of the radical tendencies before and during the Cultural Revolution. The revival of liberalism in China in the form of the New Enlightenment movement in the 1980s was primarily a result of the efforts of these intellectuals. Viewed in this light, the liberal historians’ questioning of the orthodox and radical historiography in the 1980s was not so much an engagement in academic debates as a concerted effort driven by their shared ideological commitment; their writings on historical issues regarding modern China, in other words, were no less politicized than what they criticized. It is no wonder, therefore, that when their negation of the revolutionary ideology went so far as to challenge the legitimacy of the communist revolution and the Party itself, it inevitably incurred repeated opposition and even persecution from the Party, first in 1983, again in 1987, and later in 1989, under the name of clearing up “spiritual pollution” and resisting “bourgeois liberalization.” Not surprisingly, those who orchestrated the revived attack on the liberals were intellectuals from the “red areas,” notably Hu Qiaomu and Deng Liqun.4 Li Shu thus lost his position as the vice-director of the Institute of Modern History in 1982 and in the winter of 1983 had to attend a meeting where Party loyalists criticized him for five consecutive mornings (Liu Jiusheng 2006). Fortunately, all those campaigns were short-lived; they were put to a halt whenever Deng Xiaoping and other reformers in the Party realized the danger of the “ultraleftists” to the ongoing economic reforms. As a result, Li Shu and the liberal intellectuals were able to continue their writings and other academic activities without much harassment from the party-state.

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Li Shu and the rest of the New Enlightenment intellectuals not only revived the liberal tradition in the 1980s, but, more important, harbingered an ideological transformation in the Chinese social sciences and a paradigmatic revolution in historiography. As shown in the following chapter, as modernization theory was introduced to China in the late 1980s, it soon replaced Marxism as the prevailing ideology to shape the scholarship of a new generation of sociologists, political scientists, and economists. In the field of modern Chinese history, the modernization paradigm also replaced the revolutionary paradigm to produce a new generation of historiography. The New Enlightenment movement, therefore, not only manifested the continuity of Chinese liberalism within the Marxist framework, but also signaled the beginning of a new wave of essentially Westerncentered liberal thinking in Chinese historiography that fundamentally undermined the Marxist tradition.

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From Revolution to Modernization The Paradigmatic Transition in Reform Era Historiography

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rise of the New Enlightenment historiography in the early 1980s, as it turned out, was only the beginning of a two-decade process in which Chinese historians not only reformulated their basic views about the major historical issues in late Qing and Republican China, but also reconstructed the conceptual frameworks and redefined the mode of narration for history writing. The transition in the 1980s and 1990s in the narratives of modern Chinese history from eulogizing rebellions and revolutions to accentuating modernization and reforms during the late Qing and Republican periods paralleled a similar trend in the Western historiography of modern China. The emergence of East Asian societies as newly industrialized economies, the receding of Third World revolutions, and the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, as Arif Dirlik pointed out, accounted for a renaissance of modernization theories that had prevailed in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, and the “victory” of the modernization paradigm over the revolutionary paradigm in the Western historiography of modern China (Dirlik 1996 and 2002). In China, likewise, the rise of modernization historiography was primarily a result of Chinese historians’ response to the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and its radical ideology, and the subsequent transition from Maoist socialism to market-oriented reforms that has eventually led China to capitalism. Dissatisfied with the “outdated” revolutionary narrative, proreform historians showed a growing interest in the study of modernizing reforms and economic, social, cultural, and political changes that arguably contributed to China’s modernization in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen204

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turies. By accentuating modernization as the overriding theme of China’s recent past, they tried to justify the reform program in the post-Mao era with historical precedents and to use history to better serve political reality, a tradition that has long shaped Chinese historiography. But the emergence of modernization historiography was more than a response to the transition from revolutionary fever to postsocialist reform in the 1980s; it was also a result of the growing influence of Western theories of modernization on the thinking of Chinese intellectuals. Beginning in the late 1980s, liberal historians in China gradually jettisoned the Marxist approach in their writings and in its stead turned to the conceptions and analytical frameworks offered by modernization theories to reexamine the major issues in Chinese history. Especially popular among them were the “classical” modernization theory, which assumed a linear, “phased” transition from “tradition” to “modernity,” the universal applicability of a Eurocentric modernity, and the convergence of industrial societies; and the more recent “revisionist” modernization theories that took revolutions and political decay into account to explain the “complexity” of modernization in non-Western societies and allowed for “multiple modernities” in different civilizations. Therefore, what happened to the Chinese historiography of modern China in the 1980s and 1990s was a true “paradigmatic” transformation, for not only did historians subvert the criterion for selecting topics and formulating problems—from focusing on rebellions and revolutions to centering on issues pertaining to modernization—but they also revolutionized the conceptual and analytical frameworks they employed to interpret history.1 By the late 1990s, the modernization paradigm had undeniably established its dominance in the field of modern Chinese history. Most monographs and journal articles published in the late 1980s and 1990s discussed various topics regarding modernization in the late Qing or Republican periods or reexamined historical issues from the modernization perspective.2 Emblematic of the preponderance of the modernization paradigm over the revolutionary paradigm, a two-volume book, Chongxin renshi bainian Zhongguo (Rethinking one hundred years of China), was published in 1998 to summarize the new interpretations of major historical events, figures, and ideas on modern China (Feng Lin 1998). The cover of the book states explicitly: “The one hundred years of modern Chinese history were

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not merely a history of revolution; the one hundred years of modern Chinese history were in fact a history of modernization.”3 In fact, so influential was the new paradigm that even the most authoritative historian of the revolutionary paradigm had to admit its predominance and legitimacy in the field. Hu Sheng (1918–2000), president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, thus stated in 1998 in the preface to the second edition of his Cong yapian zhanzheng dao wusi yundong (From the Opium War to the May Fourth Movement) that it was “feasible” and “very important” “to use modernization as the theme in narrating the modern history [of China],” though he adhered to his own narrative that focused on class relations and class struggles (Hu Sheng 1996, 18). This chapter, therefore, examines the rise of the modernization discourse and its impact on Chinese historiography in the late 1980s and the 1990s. After scrutinizing Chinese scholars’ conceptualization of “modernization” (its meanings, phases, and patterns) under the influence of Western modernization theories, I will explicate historians’ deconstruction of the master narrative that had shaped revolutionary historiography and their new interpretations of a series of empirical issues that contributed to the formation of modernization historiography.

MODERNIZATION THEORY WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS? The prevalence of various conceptions and theories of “modernization” and “modernity” and their substitution for Marxist methodologies and analyses constituted the most noticeable change in China’s social sciences and humanities in the 1980s and 1990s. Beginning with the introduction of modernization theory from the West in the late 1980s, an increasing number of scholars applied the concepts and analytical frameworks they borrowed from the Western literature on modernization to their respective fields, including especially modern Chinese and world history; sociological, economic, and political studies on contemporary China; and studies of Chinese law, philosophy, culture, and literature. Their scholarship was characterized by their embrace of a modernity modeled after the historical experiences of Western societies; their juxtaposition of Eurocentric modernity, which they deemed to be “universal,” with the peculiar traditions of premodern or non-Western societies; and their endorsement of the elitist, incremental approach to modernity and subse-

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quent repudiation of revolutions in the course of modernization. In sharp contrast to their enthusiasm for modernization theory was the Chinese scholars’ lack of interest in Marxism, especially its historical materialism, which, for more than three decades, had shaped standard interpretations of economic, social, cultural, political, and historical issues in all disciplines of the social sciences and humanities since 1949. Therefore, what concerned them in their inquiries into societal or historical issues were no longer class relations or the “relations of production” but instead imported or “indigenous” institutions, cultures, and values that arguably embodied modernity; no longer class struggles that entailed discontinuities and upheavals but instead top-down reforms that allowed for the stability and continuity of preexisting order; and no longer rural society, the peasant masses, or initiatives at the grassroots level but instead urban society, the bourgeoisie, and the thinking of intellectual elites. Modernization theory, in other words, replaced Marxist historical materialism as the “paradigm theory” in contemporary Chinese social sciences and humanities, including historical studies. The Introduction of Modernization Theory

On his visit to the United States in 1981, Luo Rongqu (1927–1996), a professor of American history at Beijing University and later a leading authority on modernization studies in China, met Cyril E. Black, a history professor and author of Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (1966), when Luo was lecturing at Princeton University. Black introduced to Luo his own work as well as related studies by his Princeton colleagues and other scholars, which kindled Luo’s interest in the study of modernization. Worried about being accused of introducing a Western bourgeois theory to China, Luo did not start his own research on modernization until 1986, when the campaign against “spiritual pollution” was over and a relaxed atmosphere prevailed among intellectuals. Luo then initiated a project on modernization in world history. The Chinese government, too, supported the study of modernization through funding from the National Social Sciences Foundation for a number of research projects, including Luo’s on “the study of the modernization process in the world.” In 1986, Luo published his first article on the subject, titled “Modernization Theory and Historical Research,” in Lishi yanjiu, which signaled the inception of modernization studies in China. Professor Luo’s experience was indicative of the two basic factors that accounted for the rise of modernization studies in China.

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One was the influence of Western studies of modernization, which directly sparked Chinese scholars’ interest in this subject. Many of them, mostly young sociologists and historians, began their studies of modernization by introducing Western modernization theories to a Chinese audience. In 1985, Ding Xueliang, for instance, published two essays in Dushu (Reading), a popular magazine among intellectuals, reviewing Cyril Black’s edited book, Comparative Modernization, and Marion Levy’s Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Ding Xueliang 1985a and 1985b). In 1988, he published a lengthy article, “The Origins and Conceptual Frameworks of Modernization Theory,” in Zhongguo shehui kexue (Social sciences in China), the most prestigious journal in the social sciences in China, in which he scrutinized the “classic social theories” of Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durhkeim, and Max Weber, and the “pattern variables” of Talcott Parsons, without offering much criticism of his own or observation of the various theories’ significance for understanding different patterns of modernization. His aim was rather to faithfully introduce Western sociological theories to Chinese readers, who were eager to know more about the origins of modernization theory. Other scholars, too, published a series of articles reviewing and critiquing foreign studies on modernization theory as well as the issue of development and underdevelopment in non-Western societies.4 Also contributing to the popularity of modernization theory in China in the 1980s was the publication of Chinese translations of Western books on development and modernization. Three book series stood out in this regard, and they all began publication around the mid-1980s, coinciding with the surge of academic interest in modernization. They included the Toward the Future (Zouxiang weilai) series (published by Sichuan renmin chubanshe), the Twentieth Century Library (Ershi shiji wenku) series (Huaxia chubanshe), and the Translations on Contemporary Academic Trends (Dangdai xueshu sichao yicong) series (Shanghai yiwen chubanshe). As a result, most of the English-language books authored by Western scholars, ranging from Max Weber and Talcott Parsons to Samuel Huntington and Gabriel Almond, were made available to Chinese readers. They constituted the major sources from which Chinese intellectuals derived their knowledge of Western studies of modernization and development in Western and non-Western countries. Policy makers in China, who shared many basic assumptions about China’s modernization with modernization theorists in the West, welcomed the introduction of modernization theory to China,

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believing that modernization was possible and that a “latecomer” like China could be transformed from a backward, agricultural society into a modern, industrial society in the image of the firstcomers, or Western countries, at least in terms of technological, economic, and social development. By vigorously pursuing the ambitious, long-term program of “four modernizations,” Chinese leaders turned much of what critics of modernization theory denounced as false premises and conceptions (Giddens and Merton 1982, 144) into the goals of China’s national policies. Chinese leaders also concurred with Western theorists that modernization could be achieved through different stages centered on economic growth. Deng Xiaoping’s plan of modernization, known as the “three-step strategy,” thus focused on increase in gross national product (GDP), claiming that China would double its GDP between 1980 and 1989 to solve the problem of subsistence (wenbao) and further double it between 1990 and 1999 to achieve the goal of “being well-to-do” (xiaokang); finally by the middle of the twenty-first century, China would become an “affluent” (fuyu), modernized society when its GDP reached the average level for developed countries. Despite its commitment to “socialist modernization,” the Chinese leadership under Deng and beyond endorsed in essence the validity and universality of the Western capitalist model of modernization by pursuing a series of reforms of marketization, privatization, and globalization that made China’s economy part of the capitalist world system by the beginning of the 2000s.5 Only in his understanding of China’s political development in the short term did Deng overtly disagree with modernization theorists, as he repeatedly insisted on the Communist Party’s leadership to ensure political stability and cautioned against “liberalization” leading China toward an American-style political system with a tripartite balance of power. His preoccupation with political stability and centralization as preconditions for China’s successful economic growth is reminiscent of the “revisionist” views of modernization theory in the 1970s that emphasized the importance of political stability (usually under an authoritarian regime) in modernizing societies.6 Redefining Modernization

Chinese intellectuals did not accept modernization theory without reservation. When discussing the “classical” modernization theory that predominated in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese critics all noted the historical circumstances that led to its

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rise: the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the confidence of Western intellectual and political elites in EuroAmerican patterns of modernity, and their subsequent use of modernization theory formulated on the basis of Western experiences to win over the newly independent Third World countries that were seeking a model of economic growth and social development (Luo Rongqu 1986; Yan Lixian1988a and 1988b; Sun Liping 1992; Li Huaiyin 1993a). The concept of “modernization,” Luo Rongqu thus pointed out, was essentially an “American idea,” reflecting American social scientists’ assumptions of Western societies as the “ideal type” of modern society and of the United States as exemplary of the highest level of modern development. Modernization theory, therefore, was “the ideology of American imperialism”; it was “a product of the optimistic conception of social evolution, a product of the intellectual trends in Western bourgeois society, and even a product of the megalomaniac idea of ‘America as number one’ in the postwar years” (Luo Rongqu 1987, 164). Luo was especially critical of the tradition-modernity dichotomy inherent in modernization theory. He doubted the applicability of the binary concepts of tradition and modernity in describing different societies. To classify all social phenomena into the two simple and mutually exclusive categories of tradition and modernity, he argued, was “false and unverifiable,” for a “modern society” could never be a “purely modern society” but one that contained both tradition and modernity. And the term “tradition” itself, in his view, was problematic, for it presumably comprised all things other than those that had been determined to be “modern” and it failed to distinguish between things that were supposed to be “traditional,” such as between a primitive tribe and a highly developed “premodern” society. Thus, to attribute all phenomena before modernization to “tradition,” he contended, eliminated their specificity and multiplicity in both spatial and temporal senses. Luo further raised doubts about the Eurocentric conception of modernity that characterized modernization theory. To describe modernization as a single linear process turning a traditional society into a homogeneous modern society modeled after the modern West, Luo complained, equated modernization to Westernization and denied the complexity of social changes under different circumstances as well as the diversity of modernized societies (Luo Rongqu 1987, 170; see also Yan Lixian 1988b, 73; Sun Liping 1992, 6–8).

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Despite their awareness of the fallacies intrinsic to modernization theory, Chinese scholars shared much with their counterparts in the West when defining modernization. They both believed in the possibility and universality of evolution leading to an industrialized society; they both agreed on the general goals of modernization; and they both underscored the key role of modern knowledge and industrialization in the process of modernization.7 Chinese researchers, to be sure, acknowledged the diverse paths to modernization in different societies and realized the possible “stagnation, breakdown, and retrogression” (Luo Rongqu 1993, 143,) or “dislocation, disorder, and recession” (Li Huaiyin 1994, 33) in the successive waves of modernization in the world. But they expressed confidence in modernization as an inescapable process that, in the words of Luo Rongqu, “will lead all human societies from the age of agricultural civilization to the entirely new age of industrial civilization” (1990b, 116). This optimism regarding the universality of modernization, needless to say, had much to do with the scholars’ confidence in China’s own modernization that was accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s as well as their commitment to accommodating their scholarship more closely to China’s ongoing reforms. In doing so, they preferred to ignore the criticism of classical modernization theory from Third World scholars in the preceding two decades as well as the realities of poverty, stagnation, warfare, genocide, and epidemics that still plagued many Third World countries. Instead of treating those problems as symptoms of “underdevelopment” as did the dependency theorists, they tended to see those countries as candidates for modernization during the wave yet to come. This belief in the possibility of modernization in all societies was visible in the description of the origin and spread of modernization in world history in terms of successive “waves.” Luo Rongqu (1990b), for instance, suggested that there had been three waves of modernization in the world so far. Triggered by the Industrial Revolution, the first wave occurred in England and Western Europe from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, when the use of steam machines revolutionized these economies and turned England into the first industrial nation and a global empire. The second wave, spanning from the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, involved the rest of Europe and its offshoots on other continents, of which the most significant developments were the industrialization of Russia and North America.

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The third wave, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century and continuing to this day, engulfed much of the Third World, including China. For Chinese theorists, modernization was not only a worldwide process involving all societies through successive waves, but also a phased process within a modernizing society. Differentiating and defining the different phases of modernization, therefore, was another issue that interested researchers. Here again we find influence by classical modernization theory on their thinking. Luo Fuhui, for example, accepted Cyril E. Black’s theory of “four phases,” namely, (1) the challenge of modernity; (2) the consolidation of modernizing leadership; (3) economic and social transformation; and (4) the integration of society (Black 1966, 67–89), and believed that China entered the first phase with the Opium War of 1840 and had finished the second phase by 1949, concurring with Black’s periodization of China’s modernization (Luo Fuhui 1993, 37–38; Black 1966, 92). My own interpretation of the four phases of modernization was almost identical to Black’s, only with different terms and some modification of their definitions (Li Huaiyin 1994, 38–39). Luo Rongqu, in contrast, borrowed from the theory of Walt W. Rostow on the “five stages” of economic growth, namely, “the traditional society,” “the preconditions for take-off,” “the take-off,” “the drive to maturity,” and “the age of high mass-consumption” (Rostow 1960), in his description of the phases of modernization in countries involved in the different waves. Luo praised Rostow’s theory highly and deemed it to be a valuable “framework for comparative analysis.” He claimed that his own analysis of the “three waves of modernization” in world history “corresponds by and large” to Rostow’s description of the historical process of economic growth in major countries. Luo particularly concurred with Rostow’s optimistic judgment about modernizing developments in the postwar world and quoted Rostow’s statement affirming postwar development as an “irreversible” trend and the most important event since the initiation of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England (Luo Rongqu 1993, 142). Luo’s concurrence with Rostow was surprising, for Rostow was known for his overt opposition to Marxism, having subtitled his book on the five stages of growth “A Non-Communist Manifesto,” whereas Luo proclaimed his goal to be the establishment of a Marxist school of modernization studies in China.8 This enigma can only

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be explained by the fact that, despite Luo’s ostensible commitment to Marxist ideology and Rostow’s unabashed purpose of speaking for the foreign policies of the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, both scholars essentially shared the same assumptions about modern economic growth and about capitalist modernity and its possibilities in the Third World. Chinese researchers thus shared with their Western counterparts very basic assumptions about modernization; both were optimistic about the inevitability and universality of modernization in all societies, and both were confident in the power of modern science and technology to transform all societies into interconnected entities with similar economic and social structures. It was taken for granted by Chinese intellectuals that China, like all other nonWestern societies, would sooner or later become modernized, and that China’s ongoing transition from an agricultural economy to a modern industrial economy was essentially no different from the process that other modernized societies had already experienced. This conviction about the universal possibility of modernization paired perfectly with and rendered great support to the Chinese government’s modernization program. It also reflected the optimism and confidence of Chinese intellectuals in China’s ability to modernize in the 1980s and 1990s, as the country was experiencing unprecedented economic growth.

FROM JINDAIHUA TO XIANDAIHUA Chinese historians did not have to wait until the introduction of modernization theory to interpret the history of modern China from the perspective of modernization. Jiang Tingfu, as shown in Chapter 2, had described China’s experiences after the Opium War as a history of “modernization” ( jindaihua), or progress from an agrarian society to an industrial society, which he believed to be a universal challenge for all non-Western countries after their encounter with the modern West. In the 1980s and 1990s, modernization historiography resurged and eventually predominated in the field of modern Chinese history.9 The resurgence occurred in two phases that contrasted sharply with each other in their theoretical frameworks. The first originated from traditional Marxist historiography and prevailed primarily in the second half of the 1980s. It underscored modernization ( jindaihua), rather than revolution, as the theme of

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modern Chinese history (1840–1949) but interpreted modernization in traditional Marxist terminology. The second, prevailing increasingly in the 1990s, discarded the orthodox Marxist doctrines and instead embraced modernization theory from the West or revised the Marxist scheme by borrowing elements from modernization theory. It trivialized revolutions in modern Chinese history or reinterpreted them as part of a larger process of modernization (xiandaihua), while foregrounding foreign influences and domestic developments leading to the growth of “modernity” in China. The following discussion highlights the contrasts between the two different narratives of modernization and explains why the former lost its appeal and gave way to the latter in the 1990s. The Jindaihua Thesis of the 1980s

Working within the Marxist conceptual framework, historians in the 1980s tended to define jindaihua as a process of capitalist development or, in their words, “capitalismization” (zibenzhuyi hua). In his essay on the “disciplinary issues” of modern Chinese history, for instance, Xu Tailai proposed that jindaihua comprised changes in three areas: (1) in the realm of “forces of production,” it represented the transition from manual labor to mechanical production; (2) in the area of “modes of production,” it meant the transition from feudalism to capitalism; and (3) in the political arena, it denoted the transformation of feudal dictatorship to bourgeois democracy and the prevalence of the bourgeois notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although jindaihua was a comprehensive process, encompassing changes in all areas of society, “what was essential to that process,” Xu accentuated, “was capitalismization” (Xu Tailai 1988, 118). But Xu did not, nor did any other proponent of the jindaihua thesis, explain what exactly he meant by “capitalism” or “capitalismization.” To propose the development of capitalism as the theme of modern Chinese history directly contradicted the revolutionary thesis in traditional Marxist historiography, which viewed revolution as the necessary precondition for China’s capitalist development. A critical question for the jindaihua historians was whether it was possible for China to develop capitalism or to modernize before 1949, when the revolution against imperialism and feudalism had not yet finished. Their answer was yes. They believed that jindaihua was possible first and foremost because China did not completely

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lose its independence after the Opium War. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, they argued, China’s independent status outweighed its semicolonial status, a situation that was true until the signing of the Boxer Protocol in 1901. Even after 1901, they contended, China remained a semicolonial, or, in other words, semiindependent, country. Jindaihua, therefore, was not only possible before China was completely colonized, but also the only means to resist semicolonization and colonization. Second, they refuted the argument of “independence first and jindaihua second” as erroneous in itself. “Without a degree of modernization in the forces of production,” Xu Tailai argued, “it was impossible for China to overthrow the feudal order or to restore its independent status.” After all, he reasoned, people could not merely focus on revolution or changing the “relations of production” and the “superstructure” irrespective of the backwardness of China’s forces of production. To create a new form of relations of production and superstructure, people “have to first eliminate the backward condition of the forces of production and modernize them,” a view that Xu believed to be consistent with Marxism. Third, economic dependence on foreign countries should not be equated with the loss of political independence. As a global process, jindaihua meant increased connections between different countries. “Opening up and mutual dependence,” in Xu’s view, was what made a modern economy different from a closed, self-sufficient “natural economy.” Utilizing foreign capital, raw materials, technologies, and personnel was part and parcel of the normal exchange and mutual dependence between modern societies; it was also essential for a backward economy to bring itself up to date. Thus, rather than a symptom of China’s semicolonization, economic dependence on foreign countries should be seen as an inevitable step leading to China’s modernization. Finally, Xu challenged the revolutionary thesis by positing that revolution was merely a “means” rather than a “goal.” The goal of revolutions in modern China, he maintained, was to “establish a capitalist modern civilization” (ibid., 121–122). Therefore, the theme of jindaihua was broader than that of revolution, for the former contained both the means (the revolution) and the goal (capitalist development), while the latter only included the means. Despite their shared Marxist terminology, the jindaihua thesis, as epitomized in Xu’s work, departed significantly from traditional revolutionary history: the former focused on the decisive role of

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“forces of production” in social progress, whereas the latter stressed the importance of class struggle in changing “relations of production”; the former insisted on the simultaneous development of both modernization and revolution, whereas the latter assumed the precedence of revolution over modernization; the former incorporated both revolutionary and nonrevolutionary movements into its narrative framework, whereas the latter adhered to the “three revolutionary surges” in its historical account. But the weakness of the jindaihua thesis is equally clear. Unlike the revolutionary narrative, which was coherent in articulating the theme of revolutions against imperialism and feudalism by accentuating the “three revolutionary surges” in the late Qing period and the communist revolution in the twentieth century, the jindaihua narrative failed to explain why “capitalismization” in modern China did not end in the establishment of a capitalist system and bourgeois democracy but instead the communist revolution and the subsequent creation of a socialist system. Unable to jettison the Marxist approach, the jindaihua historians could only adopt the representation of the communist revolution found in the traditional revolutionary historiography, as evidenced in Xu Tailai’s periodization of modern Chinese history, in which the last period (1919–1949) was described as when “the proletariat matured and replaced the bourgeoisie to solely shoulder the task of leading capitalist modernization.” (Xu Tailai 1988, 124). Rather than a challenge to the revolutionary narrative, the jindaihua narrative added strength to what it was intended to replace. Thus, although the jindaihua historiography paid much attention to modernizing movements and reforms that had been neglected or downplayed in the revolutionary history, its adherence to the Marxist approach explained in large part why this “innovative” interpretation that prevailed in the late 1980s as an alternative to the revolutionary narrative lost its appeal in the 1990s, when Chinese historians, especially the younger generation, were dissatisfied with the widening discrepancy between the Marxist as well as the jindaihua historiographies and the prevailing political discourse that sought to repudiate revolutions and justify the ongoing reform programs. The Xiandaihua Historiography of the 1990s

Unlike proponents of the jindaihua thesis, who adhered to Marxist conceptions, the historians contributing to the burgeoning modern-

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ization historiography in the late 1980s and 1990s based their analytical framework mainly on modernization theory imported from the West. What they found particularly appealing in modernization theory was its conception of the phases of modernization and its comparative approach to different patterns of modernization, which offered them new conceptual tools to reinterpret modern China. Also influential among the Chinese historians were Western studies of China’s modernization. The most popular of them was no doubt The Modernization of China, edited by Gilbert Rozman (1981), in which leading modernization theorists such as Cyril E. Black and Marion J. Levy, Jr., joined China specialists in the United States to offer a systematic analysis of China’s modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholarly efforts to reinterpret modern Chinese history from the modernization perspective began in the late 1980s, when modernization theory was newly introduced to China, and culminated in the publication of three books on the history of China’s modernization authored mainly by historians: Bijiao zhong de shenshi: Zhongguo zaoqi xiandaihua yanjiu (A comparative study of China’s early modernization), edited by Zhang Kaiyuan and Luo Fuhui (1993); Zhongguo xiandaihua de lishi toushi (China’s modernization in historical perspective), edited by Hu Fuming (1994); and Zhongguo xiandaihua shi (A history of China’s modernization), edited by Xu Jilin and Chen Dakai (1995). Unlike historians of the jindaihua thesis, who defined modernization as “capitalismization” and applied it strictly to the period before 1949, those who accepted modernization theory saw China’s modernization as a continuous process starting from the nineteenth century and still ongoing in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, they preferred to use the term xiandaihua to refer to the whole process of China’s modernization. Despite their different understandings of the phases of China’s modernization, the three books mentioned above as well as other studies on China’s modernization abandoned the Marxist approach and the concomitant revolutionary narrative, and they all adopted modernization theory, especially Black’s four-phase model, to reconstruct the analytical framework for modern Chinese history. As a result, revolutionary and modernization historiographies contrast sharply with each other primarily in their master narratives. Whereas the former saw modern Chinese history as a series of bottom-up struggles of the people against feudalism and impe-

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rialism, the latter depicted China’s history in the same period as the consecutive top-down efforts by enlightened elites to modernize China in different phases and at different levels. Thus, although both narratives saw Western influence as the catalyst for change in modern China and both accepted the Opium War as the beginning of modern Chinese history, they contradicted each other in their interpretations of the roles of Western presence and its consequences in modern China. This will be clear when we look at their different interpretations of imperialism and the communist revolution, the two issues that had been central to traditional Marxist historiography. Imperialism and Modernization

Contrary to the revolutionary narrative that viewed the aggression of European powers and Japan in China, ranging from the Opium War in 1840 to the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, as the most evident evils of Western imperialism and the very root of China’s distress in the modern era, modernization historians interpreted those wars as the very stimuli for China’s modernizing reforms. Mao Haijian, for example, questioning the widely accepted view that equated compromise (tuoxie) in China’s foreign relations with capitulation (touxiang) and capitulation with treason (maiguo), argued that “armed resistance was no doubt correct when dealing with the aggression of foreign powers, but the resistance was doomed to fail. So, to act otherwise was also wise. The former was [correct] at the moral level, and the latter was [correct] at the political level. Responsible politicians should choose a strategy more favorable to their nation, and that should not be simply equated with the moralistic concepts of being ‘patriotic’ or ‘treacherous’ ” (Mao Haijian 1995, 559). What accounted for China’s defeat in the Opium War, Mao argued, was its “backwardness and conservativeness” rather than the Qing rulers’ conciliatory policy. Since resistance was “doomed to fail,” the only viable option for China in the war was “to conclude a relatively favorable truce agreement with Britain as early as possible” (ibid., 557). “The real significance of the Opium War,” Mao wrote, “was that it informed the Chinese people, by fire and by sword, of their correct mission: China had to modernize and embrace the currents of the world” (ibid., 25). The Treaty of Nanjing, which stipulated the opening of five Chinese cities, “offered China a new path to escape from the [dynastic] cycle.” “In the short

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term, the negative effects [of the treaty] were greater than the positive effects. In the long run, however, the negative effects would continue to recede, while the positive effects would grow gradually. In this [the twentieth] century, the positive effects surpassed the negative effects. We cannot imagine what China would have been today had China not opened up in the mid-nineteenth century or had it delayed its opening to a later period” (ibid., 484). Foreign investments, Western educational and religious institutions in China, extraterritoriality and other legal privileges of foreigners secured by the unequal treaties between China and foreign powers, all these had long been seen as obstacles to China’s independence, economic development, and social progress. Modernization historians, to be sure, acknowledged the inimical effects of these institutions on China’s sovereignty and economy, but they paid more attention to the aspects of Western presence that they believed to be conducive to China’s modernization. The foreign concessions (zujie) in port cities, for example, were traditionally seen as the hallmark of imperialist dominance in China. From the perspective of modernization history, however, they appeared to be effective agents in disseminating Western civilization in Chinese society. Xiong Yuezhi’s studies of the international concessions and settlements in Shanghai, for instance, emphasized their role in spreading Western culture and civilization, ranging from modern utilities and public transportation at the material level and municipal administration, education, and work hours at the institutional level, to the ideas of “liberty, democracy, equality, and fraternity” as well as the notions of “materialism, competition, and evolution” at the spiritual level. “The existence of the concessions,” he concluded, “provided convenient conditions for the introduction of the material and spiritual civilizations of the West to Shanghai in a massive, systematic, swift, and unrestricted manner” (Xiong 2002, 56). Missionary schools were another source of Western influence arguably contributing to China’s modernization. From the 1860s to the 1890s, Christian organizations from North America and Europe established about two thousand such schools at all levels in different parts of China. Most of the schools shifted their curricular focus from theological subjects in earlier days to modern sciences to meet the needs of Chinese society and therefore trained more students as teachers, engineers, mechanics, surveyors, and skilled workers than as evangelists. Yu Zixia thus concluded that the missionary

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schools functioned as a “special channel to spread Western learning” in China (1997, 25–26). Tian Zhengping (2004) argued that the missionary colleges in China, beginning with St. John’s College, founded in Shanghai in 1879 (later renamed St. John’s University), laid a foundation for the development of higher education in modern China, for those schools not only worked to undermine the traditional educational system, but also provided teachers and administrators for Chinese institutions of higher education, many of which hired experienced Western missionaries as their administrators or modeled their administration, curriculum, pedagogy, and even sports after the examples of the missionary colleges and universities. Missionary schools for girls, according to He Dajin, trained the first generation of “educated modern women” through their well-rounded curriculum that covered different subjects of Western and Chinese learning, and stressed training in vocational skills. By turning the female students into independent professionals and promoting the idea of gender equality, these schools “spearheaded the women’s liberation movement in modern China” (He Dajin 2005, 21). Together, these recent reappraisals of Western influences in modern China subverted the traditional image of foreign economic, cultural, and political institutions as the footholds of imperialism in China and instead depicted them as agents of modernity. Although they all admitted the “inequality” between China and the West as manifested in those institutions and their “negative” effects on China, especially their infringement on China’s sovereignty, modernization historians chose to overlook or minimize these aspects of Western imperialism. To accentuate modernization as the theme of modern Chinese history, they preferred to interpret the military challenges from the West as the indispensable impetus for China’s modernization and to describe the Western presence in China as inspiring modernizing changes in Chinese society. Modernization historians, in a word, were no less teleological than the revolutionary historians whom they challenged in using history to rebuild an alternative narrative of modern China that was as ideologically charged as its revolutionary rival. The Communist Revolution

For modernization historians, the most challenging task was reinterpreting the communist revolution and its role in China’s modernization, thereby safeguarding the modernization paradigm

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from attacks by revolutionary historians. Since its rise in the second half of the 1980s, the modernization narrative had incurred open criticism from traditional Marxist historians. Liu Danian, for example, explicitly refuted the modernization thesis. He insisted that “national independence” and “modernization” were two closely related yet separate things. “National independence means changing the status of the oppressed nation and overthrowing the semicolonial and semifeudal political order. Fundamentally, it is about solving the problem of relations of production. Modernization, in contrast, means changing China’s backward economy and culture, and developing social forces of production, mainly modern industries.” It was impossible, he argued, to solve the two problems simultaneously or to achieve industrialization first and independence second. To modernize, China had to first eliminate imperialism and feudalism and achieve national independence (Liu Danian 1997). Other Marxist historians concurred with Liu on the relationship between revolution and modernization. Li Wenhai noted, for example, that “the loss of national independence and the tenacious existence of feudal despotism were the two major barriers in the way of modernization.” “Solving the two problems of national independence and political democratization was the first and foremost task that had to be finished before China was able to embark on the path of modernization” (Li Wenhai 1997, 9). “Rather than contradictory to modernization,” he reasserted, “revolution was the most important and powerful driving force of modernization. Modernization is impossible without revolution” (Li Wenhai 2005, 116–117). Gong Shuduo, too, maintained that revolution, rather than modernization, was the “theme” of modern Chinese history. As he put it, “in a semicolonial and semifeudal society like modern China, where the major contradictions remained that between imperialism and the Chinese nation and that between feudalism and the masses of the people, there could not be modernization without a national, democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism.” To see revolution as the theme of modern Chinese history, he argued, does not exclude modernization from that history, for “the final goal of the national democratic revolution in modern China was the independence, democracy, unity, and prosperity of the country, which already contains the meaning of the struggle for modernization” (Gong 2005, 116). By seeing modern China as a semicolonial and semifeudal soci-

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ety and claiming imperialism and feudalism to be the major obstacles to China’s modernization, these historians were able to justify positing the anti-imperialist and antifeudal revolutions, rather than “modernization” (or more precisely economic, social, and cultural modernization), as the theme of modern Chinese history. In fact, their proposition that the creation of an independent nation-state and the consolidation of a modernizing leadership preceded successful industrialization and economic development is congruent with classical modernization theorists’ conceptualization of the stages of modernization, in which “the building of an effective centralized national state—on the basis of coalitions touched with a new nationalism, in opposition to the traditional landed regional interests, the colonial power, or both” was seen as “almost universally, a necessary condition for take-off ” (Rostow 1960, 4–16; see also Black 1966, 67–89). A fundamental challenge to modernization historians, therefore, was to reinterpret revolutions, especially the communist revolution, in modern China from the modernization perspective and to avoid reiterating the traditional Marxist explanation for revolutions that remained evident in the jindaihua historiography of the 1980s. Let us once again focus on the three major books on the history of China’s modernization mentioned earlier. All these books depicted the revolutions in modern China as part of the larger process of modernization. In Bijiao zhong de shenshi: Zhongguo zaoqi xiandaihua yanjiu, for instance, Luo Fuhui suggested that revolutions were central to what Black called “the consolidation of modernizing leadership” that characterized the second phase of modernization. Quoting Black’s claim that “the transition from traditional to modernizing political leaders has invariably involved violence and not infrequently civil wars of considerable intensity and duration” (Black 1966, 33), Luo contended that the Chinese revolution was indispensable to the “creation of a centralized, efficient leadership,” for the Qing, the early Republican, and the Guomindang governments turned out to be “incompetent” in leading China’s modernization, and their modernizing reforms proved to be “of a limited, protective, defensive, and patrician character,” again quoting Black’s book (ibid., 64; Luo Fuhui 1993, 29–32). It is surprising, however, that despite Luo’s emphasis on the critical role of revolution in China’s modernization, the book as a whole paid little attention to revolutionary movements. It was only in the introductory chapter that Luo briefly discussed the necessity of rev-

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olutions for China’s modernization, tactically written to shield the book from the attacks of Marxist historians. The rest of the book did not cover revolution at all. It did have a chapter on “political development and change,” but that chapter only examined the evolution of political thinking in China from monarchism to democracy and changes in the political systems of the late Qing, early Republican, and Nanjing governments. The communist revolution was missing from its narrative completely. The second book, Zhongguo xiandaihua shi, did not ignore the communist revolution but downplayed its role in China’s modernization. Beginning with a discussion of a centralized government as the prerequisite of modernizing reforms, Xu Jilin underscored the rise of “totalism” (quannengzhuyi) in twentieth-century China, as represented by the party-state of the nationalists, which could have functioned as a modernizing leadership bringing China into the next phase of modernization. But throughout its twenty-two-year existence (1927–1949) on the mainland, Xu contended, the totalist state failed to “centralize, differentiate, and institutionalize” its administrative power, leaving its legitimacy to internal and external challenges. It was precisely the low-level “institutionalization” of the state and its weak control of the countryside that created a “vacuum of power” and hence the conditions for the communists to mobilize the peasantry and conduct a revolution. The communist revolution, in other words, was not the necessary path to establishing a modernizing leadership in China, but was in part a result of the nationalist state’s failed bureaucratization and in part a result of the communists’ retreat “from the city to the countryside, from the coast to the interior, from the political center to the marginal areas, and from the circle of intellectuals to the masses of peasants.” Centering on the mobilization of the peasants, Xu concluded, the communist revolution was far from revolutionary and representative of the correct direction of China’s modernization, but instead was the “most ancient and most dramatic episode” of the “change of dynasty” (gaichao huandai) (Xu Jilin and Chen Dakai 1995, 9–24). “From the nationalist revolution [in the 1920s] to the war of liberation [the civil war from 1945 to 1949], political change in China went in a big circle” (ibid., 15). The communist revolution, Xu reasserted, was merely a “revolution of dynastic change” (gaichao huandai geming) (ibid.); it made no contribution to China’s modernization. By contrast, the third book, Zhongguo xiandaihua de lishi

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toushi, interpreted the communist revolution as the culmination of the nationalist movement, or the making of a modern nation-state, in the second phase (1895–1949) of China’s modernization. The rise of nationalism, it argued, was possible in the late Qing and Republican periods only after the ruling elites and the literati, under repeated challenge from the West during the first phase of modernization (1840–1894), gave up their shared assumption of the supremacy and perfection of Chinese culture and political systems. The book then depicted the communist revolution as the continuation of the nationalist movement that had begun with the intellectual ferment right after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and resurged in the early twentieth century in the Revolution of 1911 and the nationalist movement of the 1920s, which, however, failed to build a centralized, modern state. The communist revolution succeeded in state making, according to the author, for three reasons: the unprecedented wave of national “awakening” in the War of Resistance against Japan between 1931 and 1945; the mobilization of the peasant masses during the war with Japan and the civil war from 1946 to 1949; and the Communist Party’s formulation of its own nationalist theory, under the rubric of New Democracy (xin minzhuzhuyi), by adapting Marxism to Chinese social and political settings. The completion of the communist revolution, the author argued, signified the conclusion of the century-long process of state making (Li Huaiyin 1994). Although the above three books have different views of the communist revolution, none of them reiterated the Marxist representation that had dominated the revolutionary narrative. These new representations either ignored or downplayed its role in China’s modernization or reinterpreted it as a form of nationalism. The communist revolution, in other words, was no longer the ultimate destination of historical developments leading China to socialism, as revolutionary historiography represented it; instead, it was depicted as a means to achieve the end of modernization, another iteration in the dynastic cycle, or a central piece of state making in twentiethcentury China.

DISCOVERING MODERNITY IN CHINA The different master narratives found in revolutionary and modernization historiographies led not only to a fundamental divide over basic issues (such as imperialism and the communist revolution)

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in modern Chinese history, as discussed above, but also in different modes of “emplotment,” to borrow Hayden White’s term (1973 and 1987), in constructing master narratives and recounting individual events. Overall, modernization historians in the 1980s and 1990s showed little or no interest in popular agitation and collective violence or the economic and social reasons behind rebellions and revolutions, which had been the central concerns of revolutionary historians; nor were they much interested in the factors leading to the frustrations and failures of China’s modernization, which had occupied the attention of modernization historians in the 1930s and 1940s. Instead, what most interested modernization historians in the 1980s and 1990s were positive signs in economic, social, political, and cultural changes that they believed to be conducive to the growth of modernity in late Qing and Republican China. Among the favorite topics of modernization historiography thus were the reevaluation of China’s cultural traditions, the New Policies in the last decade of the Qing, the issue of civil society, and industrialization and urbanization in coastal China. What follows, therefore, is a brief review of recent scholarship on each of these issues. Tradition and Modernization

Disagreeing with revolutionary historians who blamed imperialism for China’s failures in the nineteenth century, modernization historians found the roots of China’s frustrated modernization in its own traditions, which they perceived as differing significantly from the “feudal” traditions that the revolutionaries had attacked. Continuing the May Fourth heritage of radical antitraditionalism, revolutionary historians depicted the autocratic political system, the patriarchal family, and gender inequality in imperial China as components of the “superstructure” of Chinese “feudal” society. But they believed that more fundamental than the political and ideological superstructure was the economic infrastructure of Chinese feudalism, that is, “feudal” relations of production or rent exploitation under the landlord system in agriculture. Eliminating landlordism, therefore, superseded everything else in the struggle against feudalism. In contrast, modernization historians not only excluded imperialism as the primary obstacle to China’s modernization, but also ignored the class relations that were central to the Marxist analysis of modern China. Instead, they focused mainly on the traditional notions and institutions that prevented the Chinese from borrowing

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from the West and undertaking an all-around modernization program; they attributed China’s failure to modernize in the nineteenth century to problems with itself (e.g., Zhang Kaiyuan 1988; Yuan Weishi 1992 [2003]). Modernization historians departed from the Marxist historiographical tradition not only in their deliberate neglect of the “feudal” class relations that were central to the Marxist analysis of precapitalist China, but also in their affirmation of certain aspects of Chinese cultural and political traditions that arguably contributed to China’s modernization. Inspired by Max Weber’s thesis of Protestant ethics in the development of capitalism in the West and the recent rise of Asian “tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) as newly industrialized economies, all of which had been under the influence of Confucianism, modernization historians tried to find a similar connection between Confucian ethics and capitalist development in modern China. They paid particular attention to the “gentry merchants” in the late Qing and early Republican periods, for that group had both a gentry class background instilled with Confucian values and careers as industrialists or merchants. They found that Confucian values, such as the “this-worldly” (rushi) orientation in the thinking of Confucian elites and the traditional values of “diligence and frugality” (qinjian) and “sincerity and trustworthiness” (chengxin), contributed to success in business. But researchers also pointed out the shortcomings inherent to the gentry merchants, such as their inability to use rational and accurate calculation in using capital to generate profit, their excessive reliance on government protection, and their lack of interest in adopting the latest technologies in production and business management, all of which ran counter to what Max Weber called “economic rationalism,” which was central to modern capitalism in the West (Xu Dingxin 1988; Li Huaiyin 1993c; Ma Min 1996). For modernization historians, therefore, Chinese cultural traditions were both an asset and a hindrance to China’s modernization. The New Policies of Late Qing

The New Policies (xinzheng), a series of modernizing reforms that the Qing government promoted in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, was another area where the modernization historiography departed from traditional Marxist interpretations. The latter, espousing rebellions and revolutions as progressive trends in modern China,

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downplayed the New Policies as a “fraud” ( pianju) by the Qing court or a “reactionary” response to popular discontent with the government and the anti-Manchu agitation that gained momentum in the 1900s. Modernization historians, by contrast, saw the New Policies as the beginning of systematic modernization that accelerated the growth of the capitalist economy, the transformation of the political system, and the emergence of a modern intelligentsia in twentiethcentury China. Therefore, the New Policies became one of the hot topics in the field of modern Chinese history, and more than two hundred articles and four monographs on this topic were published between 1990 and 1997 (Chen Xiangyang 1998). One of the new policies, for example, was the promotion of modern industry and commerce through the establishment of the Ministry of Commerce and its promulgation of “Corporate Law” and other economic legislation, a development that broke with the Qing government’s traditional economic policy restricting the establishment of modern enterprises by individual investors. Zhu Ying thus argued in his studies that those laws and regulations contributed to the development of modern industry and commerce in China, for they “legally acknowledged and protected the rights of industrialists and merchants for the first time [in Chinese history]” (1993, 100; see also 1996). With corporate status and the protection of laws, he elaborated, private business owners improved their situation in dealing with the government because their survival no longer depended on seeking personal patronage from officials at different levels or the protection of foreign companies with which they had registered their businesses. Under the law that granted honorary titles to investors according to the amount of investment or kinds of manufactured goods, industrialists and merchants also changed their social status from a despicable group located at the bottom of the social hierarchy to a prominent one that was officially recognized and honored. Educational reform was another breakthrough during the New Policies period. On the one hand, according to Xin Ping (1997), the abolition of the civil service examination system in 1905 accelerated the dissolution of traditional social and political structures because it blocked the traditional path to upward social mobility, disconnected the educated elites from the political system, and turned the gentry class, who had been loyal to the imperial court, into dislocated and discontented elements, who later joined the opposition forces. On the other hand, Xin observed, the establishment of a new

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educational system, which comprised 52,348 new-style schools and a student population of nearly two million by the end of the 1900s, and government-sponsored or self-funded overseas studies gave rise to a new generation of intellectuals, whose knowledge structure and values differed from those of the traditional literati. It was precisely the modern intelligentsia, Xin argued, who became the social basis for economic, social, cultural, and political changes in the twentieth century. The most controversial part of the New Policies was constitutional reform aimed at creating a constitution and a congress for the Qing government and a self-government program at the lower levels. As initial steps of the reform, the Qing court promulgated in 1908 two documents as guidelines for the reform, the “Nine-Year Scheme of Preparation” for establishing a constitutional government and the “Royal Constitutional Outline.” Marxist historians who espoused the revolutionary narrative continued to see those announcements as “burdensome farces only for the purpose of deception and imposed by force on the Chinese people without any real social basis” (Wei Qingyuan et al. 1993, 270). More researchers in the 1990s, however, discarded that opinion and held that those announcements were serious steps leading the constitutional preparation movement to a “substantial phase” (Hou Yijie 1993, 211–212). The nine-year plan, according to recent studies, was neither a deception nor a postponement by the Qing court; quite the contrary, it was hasty in comparison to the constitutional movements in other countries (Dong Fangkui 1990; Ji Yunfei 1992; Cao Xiaojun and Yu Linnan 1995). The “Royal Constitutional Outline,” in the view of Hou Yijie, embodied “the basic features of a constitutional monarchy, in which monarchial power is subject to the restrictions of the constitution and laws,” and it also reflected “the principles of popular sovereignty, human rights, rule of law, tripartite balance of power, and protection of private property, which are central to the constitution of a capitalist country” (Hou Yijie 1993, 211). Overall, modernization historians saw the constitutional reforms as the beginning of China’s democratization or political development, irrespective of the myriad problems that debilitated the newly created political organs and led to the eventual bankruptcy of the constitutional reforms, such as the passivity and lassitude of the Qing court in planning the reform program, the lack of a determined, strong leadership, the corruption of the government, and, most of all, the weak social and

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economic basis of the reform. In stark contrast to the revolutionary narrative’s general disapproval of the New Policies, recent studies of the economic, educational, and political reforms in the last decade of the Qing generally extolled them as an important phase in China’s modernization (Xiao Gongqin 1993) or an “all-around modernizing reform movement” that far surpassed the Self-Strengthening Movement and the Hundred Days’ Reform in terms of its scale, achievements, and historical influence (Wang Shouzhong 1990, 23; see also 1996). Civil Society

Inspired by Jürgen Habermas’ theory of public spheres and the debate among China historians in the United States on the relevance of his theory to modern China, modernization historians showed keen interest in looking for signs of public spheres and civil society in the late Qing and Republican periods to demonstrate that China had a similar tendency to Western countries in its course of political development. Among the signs they identified were the various self-governing bodies, especially the chambers of commerce (shanghui), in the cities. Before the chambers of commerce were accepted as an incipient form of civil society in modern China by modernization historians in the 1990s, they had been a topic in studies of the Revolution of 1911; historians in the 1980s, for instance, examined them only to determine the class status of chamber members. They were interested in whether the leaders of the chambers of commerce belonged to the “large bourgeoisie” or the “comprador bourgeoisie” or whether they fell into the category of the upper or lower stratum of the “national bourgeoisie.” Their main concern, however, was with the political attitudes and choices of the bourgeoisie in the Revolution of 1911 and hence the nature of the revolution itself. Under the influence of modernization theory, shanghui studies in the late 1980s tended to assume a dichotomy between the “modern” chamber of commerce as a “body corporate” (faren) arguably based on the “rule of law” (fazhi) and the “traditional” hanghui (guild) that was based on the “rule of man” (renzhi). Zhu Ying, for example, asserted that the chambers of commerce showed “relatively strong characteristics of independence and autonomy,” and operated on the basis of “contractual regulations” and “salient voluntary and democratic principles” (Zhu Ying 1997, 69). The transition from

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hanghui to shanghui, therefore, signified a process of modernization or “rationalization” (helihua) (Ma Min and Zhu Ying 1993, 122–140). However, as researchers admitted in their more recent studies, the relationship between the shanghui and the hanghui was more complicated than they had presumed. Ma Min observed, for instance, that many of the hanghui underwent a process of modern transformation and constituted the basis of the shanghui. These two types of merchant organization, therefore, were not as incompatible and different from each other as they had believed before (Ma Min 2003).10 Modernization historians were particularly interested in the growing influence of the chambers of commerce and other self-governing bodies in cities in the early twentieth century. The gentry merchants in Suzhou, for example, garnered a considerable amount of power in municipal works, jurisdiction, public welfare programs, social security, and the administration of business, public health, education, and culture through their chambers of commerce and a variety of auxiliary organizations such as the merchant militia (shangtuan), educational societies, societies of firefighters, the citizens’ associations (shimin gongshe), and so on. Ma Min and Zhu Ying thus termed them “the nongovernmental nexus of power” because of their substantial influence on urban economic and social life (1993, 115–116). Echoing the debate on civil society in modern China (Philip Huang 1993), those scholars further described the “transformation of traditional urban social organizations and the emergence of new-style social groups and organizations” as the “expansion of public spheres” and redefined the “nongovernmental nexus of power” as the “incipient form of civil society” or “early stage civil society” in modern China (Ma Min 1995, 281). But the gap between “civil society” in early modern Europe and “incipient civil society” in China was enormous. Unlike the former, which manifested the autonomy and opposition of the emerging bourgeoisie to the state, the latter, as the shanghui researchers admitted, showed a “peculiar dependence on the state,” for the primary purpose of the creation of the chambers of commerce and other self-governing bodies in Suzhou and other cities in the 1900s was “to mediate between the government and the people” and to supplement “rule by the government” (guanzhi) with “rule by the people” (minzhi), rather than to challenge state authorities (Zhu Ying 1996 and 1997, 112–113). The “public spheres” and “civil society” in late Qing China, therefore, came into being in large part as a result of

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the government’s promotion of the New Policies and its devolution of power to the society. Thus, although there were frictions and conflicts between the state and the civil society, what dominated their relationship was their mutual accommodation rather than opposition (Ma Min 1995, 281–292; see also Ma Min 2003). This fact caused critics to question the validity of describing a unique type of state-society relation with terms borrowed from the West denoting the reverse relationship. An important reason for the fallacy, as a critic pointed out, had to do with the fact that the shanghui researchers focused their work mainly on the last decade of the Qing dynasty, when the chamber of commerce was still in its early stage and indeed depended on government promotion, and mainly on traditional cities such as Suzhou and Chengdu, where old-style gentry merchants predominated (Zhang Zhidong 1998). The terms “public sphere” and “civil society” would have been more relevant to China if they had focused on the Republican period or the more metropolitan and Westernized cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin, where the bourgeousie were relatively full-fledged and showed a greater degree of autonomy in dealing with the state. Another fallacy had to do with modernization theory per se, especially its Eurocentric conception of “modernity,” which the shanghui researchers had accepted and applied to their studies consciously or unconsciously. To offer a more plausible and well-rounded interpretation of state-society relations in modern China, therefore, the shanghui researchers, as well as modernization historians on the whole, had to investigate a broader range of self-governing organizations and grassroots social forces in urban as well as rural China and to take into account the temporal and spatial variations in their interaction with government authorities. More important, they had to overcome Eurocentric assumptions associated with modernization theory and rebuild an explanatory construct grounded on the historical experiences of modern China itself. Urbanization

The switch from the revolutionary paradigm to the modernization paradigm also resulted in a growing interest in the study of urban history. For decades, the Marxist study of modern Chinese history had focused on rural society, for not only did the rebellions and revolutions, which constituted the theme of the Marxist account of modern China, take place primarily in the countryside, but the reasons

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leading to collective violence had to be sought in the aggravated poverty of rural population under the dual oppression of feudalism and imperialism. Modernization historians, instead, shifted their attention from the rural to the urban, for they believed that it was the cities, especially the treaty-port cities, where modernity grew under foreign influence and spread to the rest of the country. Beginning in the late 1980s, urban history became increasingly appealing to researchers. A number of monographs on individual cities and more than seven hundred articles were published in the late 1980s and 1990s (He Yimin 2000). The rise of “modern cities” along the coast and the Yangzi River in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was central to what modernization historians described as the process of urbanization in modern China. Most of these cities were port cities opened up under unequal treaties between China and foreign powers. Studies in the 1990s, therefore, generally emphasized external influences, or the impact of foreign trade, foreign investments, and foreign settlements, as the motivating forces behind the booming of these cities. A good example was Shanghai. Zhang Zhongli’s (Chung-li Chang) study (1990) shows that Shanghai’s opening as one of the five port cities after the Opium War allowed it to take full advantage of its geographic location—at the mouth of the Yangzi River and backed by the most prosperous area (the Yangzi delta) in China—and quickly replace Guangzhou as the center of China’s foreign trade. The foreign concessions and settlements in Shanghai further provided a secure political environment for foreign and native investments, and easy access to foreign capital and technology, which explained in large part Shanghai’s rise as the largest manufacturing and financial center in China. In another instance, the opening of Tianjin in 1860 as a treaty port and the establishment of nine foreign concessions in the city, as Luo Shuwei (1993) shows, changed its status from an auxiliary city to Beijing to the center of the marketing network in North China and the second largest industrial city in the country by the 1930s. Chongqing and Wuhan, as the two most important inland cities on the Yangzi River, again prospered as a result of their status as port cities in the flourishing foreign and domestic trade in the Yangzi region (Wei Yingtao 1991; Pi Mingxiu 1993). In his edited volume Dongnan yanhai chengshi yu Zhongguo jindaihua (The southeastern coastal cities in China’s modernization, 1996), Zhang Zhongli further argued for the “demonstration

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effect” of the port cities on the development of inland cities and the countryside. Borrowing the “unbalanced growth” theory from development economics, Zhang suggested that regional development in modern China was characterized by a dual structure consisting of a core zone of port cities and a peripheral zone of inland cities. The port cities along the southeastern coast played a guiding role for the interior in economic growth, administrative organization, municipal works, cultural and educational activities, and social life. In his project on the cities on the Yangzi River and China’s modernization, he suggested a dual process of “concentration and radiation” occurring between Shanghai and other cities on the Yangzi River and further between those cities and the inland areas, in which capital, technology, and talents “radiated” from the former to the latter, while raw materials flowed into the cities. It was precisely that pattern of “graded transmission” (cengceng chuandi) of modernizing factors from Shanghai through the secondary cities to the interior, Zhang proposed, that propelled cultural and social change and the whole process of modernization in the Yangzi region (1999, 10). More recent studies, however, have challenged Zhang’s “graded transmission” theory. Jiang Tao (2006), for example, juxtaposed the “modern city system” with the “traditional city system” in modern China. The former, he explained, consisted of the port cities along the coast and the Yangzi River, with Shanghai as its center, and functioned to “incorporate China into the market order of the capitalist world”; whereas the latter comprised mainly the traditional administrative centers of the Qing dynasty and worked to “maintain the dynastic rule of the unified empire.” Contrary to Zhang’s assumption that the rise of the former stimulated the modernization of the latter, Jiang underscored the decline of the traditional cities after the rise of the port cities. Shanghai and other “newly rising cities,” for example, prospered in the second half of the nineteenth century at the cost of the deterioration of the cities along the Grand Canal, including Yangzhou, Qingjiangpu, and Linqing. He refuted the proposition that the emergence of the modern cities led to urbanization in China, for the proportion of urban population did not increase accordingly, which in turn could be explained by the fact that agricultural productivity remained stagnant and unable to support more urban consumers, and the cities were unable to absorb more rural migrants. Thus, aside from the migration of rural population to the cities, there was also a demographic flow in the reverse

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direction, which resulted in the overall stability of the proportions of rural and urban populations in China. He Yimin (2006), too, noticed an “imbalance” in the development of cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast with the rapid growth and prosperity of the opened cities in East China was the backwardness of the “insulated” cities in the interior, such as Xi’an, Taiyuan, Lanzhou, and Guiyang, which had limited connection with the domestic market and the world economy, and saw the decline or stagnation of their population. Despite these latest revisions, however, studies of urban history have overall developed under the shadow of modernization theory. Assuming port cities as a model of urban development for the rest of Chinese cities, they idealized the relationship between the port cities and the nonport and inland cities, while overlooking the possible decline of the “peripheral” cities as a result of the rise of the “core” cities.

THE OPTIMISM OF THE REFORM ERA Apparently, the modernization literature differed from earlier generations of Chinese historiography in both the subjects of its narratives and its mode of narration. Modernization historians sought to explain primarily what China had achieved in its quest for modernity rather than how and why China had failed to modernize, an issue that liberal historians had taken up in the Republican period, or how the rebellions and revolutions in modern China led to the communist revolution, an issue that revolutionary historians had prioritized. The mode of narration was no longer pessimism—or an obsession with China’s frustrations and the reasons behind them, and overall a tragic tone in rendering historical events and explicating their links with present-day and future China—a mode that had predominated in the writings of Jiang Tingfu and his colleagues in the 1930s. Nor was it romanticism, namely, the simplification of Chinese history as a recurrent battle between good and evil and the subsequent caricaturing of historical figures involved in the struggles, a mode that prevailed in the revolutionary literature before 1949 and the radicalization of Chinese politics and society thereafter. What characterized the historical representations by modernization historians in the 1980s and 1990s was optimism; they showed a general preference for the “benign” effects of Western influences on

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China and the growth of modern elements in Chinese economy, society, government, and culture that arguably contributed to China’s progress and heralded capitalist developments in the post-Mao era. Thus, an aggregate result of modernization literature in the last two decades of the twentieth century was a new image of Chinese society in the late Qing and Republican periods as the beneficiary of the introduction of Western civilization to China rather than a victim of Western imperialism. Overall, modern Chinese history was retold as a story of the slow yet steady growth of modernity in Chinese society that was unfortunately interrupted by the communist revolution and the subsequent Maoist radicalization but was resumed in the post-Mao era through the reform and opening-up programs. This new mode that permeated modernization historiography in the 1980s and 1990s is reminiscent of the optimism that prevailed in the literature of modernization theorists in the postwar United States, where the unprecedented economic prosperity and military prowess of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s led modernization theorists to believe that the United States not only took the lead in modernization, but also served as a model for all “traditional” societies in the universal process of modernization. Chinese historians, living in the reform era that witnessed dramatic economic growth, showed a similar confidence in the prospects for China’s modernization. The bitter sense of defeat and failures that had haunted liberal historians in the Republican years and pervaded their history writing almost vanished. Instead of seeking the reasons for China’s humiliation at the hands of imperialism as their predecessors did, the historians of the post-Mao era preferred to find historical precedents in late Qing and Republican China to justify the ongoing reform policies that aimed to transform China into a prosperous market economy through the development of capitalism and integration with the world economy, and to legitimate their own political agenda to move China closer to the goal of essentially Eurocentric modernity. The optimism that characterized modernization historiography of the reform era, in short, was a product of the convergence between the growing influence of Western liberal ideologies (especially modernization theory) among liberal intellectuals in China and liberal historians’ unchanged commitment to serving present-day politics by recasting the past.

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Master Narratives in Crisis

Intellectually, a remarkable development in China in the 1990s and 2000s was the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant ideology shaping the thinking of mainstream intellectuals as well as policy makers in the government. Based on a consensus to establish a market economy in China, to legalize and protect property rights, and to fully integrate China into the global capitalist system, economic reform in the late 1990s and early 2000s underwent a transition from introducing market mechanisms to outright privatization of state-owned and collective enterprises. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 further accelerated the massive flow of foreign capital into China, resulting in the skyrocketing growth of China’s foreign trade. Globally, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower, and the unprecedented prosperity in the capitalist world stimulated by information technologies and globalization gave rise to optimism toward liberal capitalism among intellectuals in the West and the resurgence of modernization theory in the social sciences, especially in the study of international relations. Combined, these domestic and external developments accounted for the preponderance of neoliberal thinking among Chinese intellectuals. The dominance of the modernization narrative in writings on modern China reflected precisely the liberal thinking during this period. This chapter looks at three developments in history writing that became conspicuous around the turn of the twenty-first century. The first is the decline of the revolutionary narrative, because of its obsoleteness in an age when capitalist reform and liberal val236

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ues prevailed, and also because of relentless challenges from modernization theorists and historians. Indicative of its decline in the field were the steps taken by the leading revolutionary historians to revise and refute the basic assumptions underlying the revolutionary narrative. The second is the emergence of a new generation of Chinese historians who showed a growing interest in social and cultural histories at local or regional levels under the influence of theories and methodologies borrowed from the West. The third is the effort by a group of historians to reconstruct the “true realities” of some of the critical events in twentieth-century China by taking advantage of newly available archives and documents; their findings frequently challenged the version of stories endorsed by the partystate. Together, these new developments worked to undermine the validity of the master narratives that had dictated the thinking and writing of Chinese historians for most of the twentieth century.

THE RETREAT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE The Hu Sheng Phenomenon

One of the striking developments in Chinese historiography in the 1990s was the retreat of the revolutionary historians from their traditional positions on the major issues in modern Chinese history. To adapt historical study to changed socioeconomic realities and the revised ideology of the party-state in the late 1980s and the 1990s, they made substantial revisions to the basic assumptions of the revolutionary historiography. The most telling example in this regard was Hu Sheng, who had proposed the “three revolutionary surges” thesis in the 1950s that shaped the development of revolutionary historiography in the following decades and who later established his status as a leading authority in the field with his book Cong Yapian zhanzheng dao Wusi yundong (From the Opium War to the May Fourth Movement), first published in 1981, and his position as the president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1985–1998). A believer in Marxism during his youth and a member of the Chinese Communist Party since 1938, Hu was known as one of the xiucai (scholars versed in classics and good at writing) within the Party for his many political essays published in left-wing newspapers and magazines as well as his several books on Marxist doc-

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trines and Chinese history. The most popular among his books was Diguozhuyi yu Zhongguo zhengzhi (Imperialism and Chinese politics), written in 1947, which covered the history of China from the Opium War to 1925 and distinguished itself from many similar books by its refreshing writing style and its unequivocal extolment of anti-imperialist struggles in modern China. After the communist revolution, Hu continued his interest in history, as seen in his 1954 essay that sparked the debate on the periodization of modern Chinese history. At the same time, Hu cautiously followed the Party’s political lines and policies in his capacities as a high-ranking official in charge of propaganda, publication, and textbook auditing. He was one of the first among the many “capitalist roaders” ousted during the Cultural Revolution to resume positions in the Party or government. His 1981 book, which Hu had started writing in 1973 immediately after his “liberation,” made few breakthroughs academically (Zheng Hui 2001); by and large, that book repeated and elaborated the major arguments that he had formulated in his 1955 essay.1 But Hu admitted in his last years that much of his writing after 1949 did not reflect his actual thinking. Mimicking Confucius’ saying in The Analects, he composed a poem to summarize his life experiences on his eightieth birthday in 1998: “At forty I felt perplexed, and the confusion remained unsolved for the next thirty years. It was in my seventies and eighties that I began to know the Mandate of Heaven.”2 As this poem indicates, Hu Sheng began to realize the problems with his writings and to think more independently in his own terms as late as in the late 1980s. In 1987, at the height of the campaign against “bourgeois liberalization,” Hu published a long article in Renmin ribao, “Why China Could Not Take the Capitalist Road” (1987). This article soon received praise from the CCP Central Committee and was widely used for indoctrinating students and correcting their “ideological confusion.” But when a speaker extolled that article as representing “the highest level of social sciences in China” at a meeting of the Party’s Central Committee, Hu whispered to a friend next to him that he only answered half of the question in that article and that the second half of the question had not been touched upon at all. The second half of the question, as the friend later explained, was why China should not take the socialist road and give up the New Democracy programs shortly after the communist revolution (Li Shenzhi 2001). Hu Sheng did not openly express his new ideas about some of

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the major issues in modern Chinese history until the last few years of his life. At least two factors made it possible for Hu to do so. First, the economic and political situations in China completely changed after Deng Xiaoping’s famous “southern tour” in early 1992, which put the brakes on the revival of leftist thinking within the Party and triggered a new round of economic reforms that made China’s transition to market capitalism irreversible. Second, in June 1992, Deng openly criticized the so-called Marxist-Leninist theoretical authorities, economic authorities, and steadfast defenders of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought for their inability to understand the realities inside and outside China and for their stubbornness in adhering to outdated leftist thinking. Therefore, as one of the leading Marxist theorists in China (Gao Hua 2004), Hu felt both obligated and justified in making some theoretical breakthroughs to show his support for Deng’s call for innovative thinking in ideological and theoretical fields. Hu’s writings after 1992 covered a wide range of ideological and historical issues. Central to his new interpretations of modern Chinese history were the following three points: first, all efforts that contributed to the development of capitalism in modern China are worth commendation; second, the communist revolution was not necessarily an inevitable result of historical development in modern China; and, third, socialism was not the right choice for China after the communist revolution. Hu did not change his earlier view on capitalism in modern China, which he had elaborated in his 1987 article; it was still his conviction in his last years that the predominance of imperialism and feudalism in modern China made the successful development of capitalism impossible and that, therefore, an anti-imperialist and antifeudal revolution was the precondition for China’s economic development, a view that had been central to the revolutionary narrative of modern China. However, departing from the revolutionary narrative, Hu did not infer from that view that all of the reforms that contributed to the growth of capitalism and all of the individuals who supported the reforms and opposed revolutions were politically “reactionary.” To the contrary, Hu suggested that capitalist development was a central theme in modern Chinese history; the purpose of the communist revolution was to remove the barriers of imperialism and feudalism and to pave the way for the development of capitalism rather than the development of socialism. Reiterating

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Mao’s theory of New Democracy, Hu said that the Chinese revolution involved two steps: first a New Democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism to create the conditions for capitalist development, and then a socialist revolution against capitalism to bring about socialist development. The idea of earlier CCP leaders (such as Chen Duxiu), that socialism was better than capitalism and that China should skip the phase of capitalist development and directly jump into the phase of socialism was therefore wrong; quite the contrary, Hu maintained, what China needed in the modern era was precisely capitalism, and the problem with China was that there was too little rather than too much capitalism. To develop capitalism thus was a “progressive idea” and a “progressive thing”; it was incorrect to assume that “those who disagreed with Marxism or opposed socialism were reactionary.” Hu suggested a “reevaluation” of all those people who “wanted to take the capitalist road or showed a general inclination to capitalism” (Hu Sheng 2001, 5). Even more audacious was Hu’s new thinking on the communist revolution. In the traditional revolutionary historiography, the communist revolution was depicted as the culmination of a century-long struggle of the Chinese people against imperialism and feudalism. This interpretation included three key points. (1) The revolution was necessary because the imperialist intrusion since the Opium War of 1840 in combination with the age-old feudal relations of production had caused the poverty of the Chinese people and impeded China’s progress. (2) The revolution had to be led by the Chinese Communist Party because, first, the bourgeois class was young and liable to compromise with its enemies, and thus, after the repeated failure of bourgeois revolutions, only the Chinese proletariat and its political organization, the Chinese Communist Party, were qualified to lead the anti-imperialist and antifeudal revolution; and, second, the Party represented the interests of the vast majority of the Chinese people and based itself on the support of the working and peasant classes. (3) China could only take the socialist road after the communist revolution. Hu challenged these assumptions. He first pointed out a phenomenon that had been largely ignored in the official historiography after 1949. He reminded people that, during the communist revolution, both those who supported the Guomindang and those who supported the Chinese Communist Party were “small in number”; between the two opposing forces was the vast majority of China’s

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population that constituted the “middle force” (zhongjian shili). The middle force, he explained, comprised not only the bourgeois class of intellectuals, industrialists, and businessmen, but also workers, peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie. He emphasized that the “majority” of the workers, peasants, and petty bourgeoisie “belonged to the middle force.” “At that time,” he added, “if there had been a class or a party that was truly able to practice capitalism, the workers, peasants, and petty bourgeoisie would have followed it on the capitalist road; they would not necessarily have taken the road of the communists” (Hu Sheng 2001, 4). Hu’s interpretation thus directly contradicted the traditional assumption that the Chinese Communist Party represented the interests of the Chinese people and that the workers and peasants constituted the social basis of the communist revolution. Finally, Hu argued that the transition to socialism was not the correct choice for China right after the communist revolution. In his article “A Reevaluation of Mao Zedong’s Theory of New Democracy,” Hu first criticized the idea of “populism” (or Narodism in the Russian context), or the assumption that a backward country such as Russia or China could skip the phase of capitalism and directly jump from feudalism to socialism, an idea that had prevailed in late-nineteenth-century Russia as well as in the early history of the Chinese Communist Party, as evidenced in the debate in the 1920s between CCP theorists, such as Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Li Da (1890–1966), and their opponents, primarily Liang Qichao and Zhang Dongsun (1886–1973). According to Liang and Zhang, China was not yet ready for a socialist revolution because the capitalist economy had not yet developed, and the working class had not yet truly come into being in China; the most urgent task for China, therefore, was to promote production, develop capitalism, solve the problem of subsistence of the people, and then to pay attention to the issue of equitable distribution of wealth among different classes. Chen Duxiu and Li Da advocated socialism in China because they believed that capitalism had become an outdated mode of production in the world and that socialism, as an increasingly prevailing system in the world, was more efficient than capitalism for industrial development. After 1949, the orthodox historians in China generally endorsed the arguments of Chen Duxiu and his comrades, believing that the communist theorists had won the debate. Hu disagreed. He believed that their opponents’ argument that China had to first

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develop capitalism before moving to socialism “is not totally groundless,” while the communists’ arguments were not really convincing enough to defeat their opponents in the debate (Hu Sheng 1999a, 3–5; see also Hu Sheng 2001, 5).3 Unlike the early CCP leaders, Hu observed, Mao showed unequivocal opposition to populism during the period from 1939 to 1949. In his report to the CCP’s seventh congress in 1945, for example, Mao stated clearly that “what distinguishes us [the CCP] from populism” was precisely the idea that China had to experience the phase of democracy (minzhuzhuyi, or a society that allowed for capitalist development) before the transition to socialism (Mao Zedong 1945, 274). Hu further mentioned the two articles that Mao published in 1939 and 1940 elucidating his theory of New Democracy. According to those articles, the communist revolution, or what Mao called the “New Democratic revolution” (xin minzhuzhuyi geming), remained “bourgeois democratic” in nature, and its purpose remained “clearing the way for capitalist development.” But the revolution was “new” because it was led by the proletarian class (namely, the Chinese Communist Party), and it was to “create a New Democratic society and state based on the coalition of all revolutionary classes”; therefore, the revolution would also “clear the broader way for socialist development” (Mao Zedong 1940, 668). In the future New Democratic society, Mao wrote, “to replace the oppression of foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism with certain development of capitalism is not only progress but also an inevitable process. It will benefit not only the bourgeoisie but also the proletariat.” After explaining Mao’s theory of New Democracy, Hu argued that the idea of “widespread development of capitalism under a New Democratic state,” though never found in the writings of Marx, was a “Marxist” idea because it reflected “the actual conditions and needs of China.” According to his estimate, modern industry accounted for only about 10 percent of the national economy; it was necessary, therefore, to develop the national economy by, in the words of Mao, “taking advantage of the incentives of private capitalism in the cities and countryside as fully as possible” for a “considerably long period” after the communist revolution. After the revolution, according to Hu, party leaders estimated in 1952 that it would take ten or twenty years to develop a capitalist “New Democratic economy” (Hu Sheng 1999a, 9–12). Unfortunately, Hu went on, the Party launched the “socialist

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transformation” of agriculture and private capitalist industry and commerce as early as in 1953 and completed it in 1956. By skipping the phase of New Democracy, the Party erred toward populism, a mistake that Mao himself had warned against before 1949. Two years later, Mao further launched the Great Leap Forward, attempting to speed up China’s transition to communism when its industrialization had just started and its agriculture remained as backward as before. This program, Hu criticized, “belonged to the category of populism and deviated far from Marxism.” Finally, Hu praised the Party’s policies after 1978 that defined China as remaining in the “early stage of socialism” and that therefore allowed for existence of private capitalist economy (Hu Sheng 1999a, 13–15). As for the question of when China should finish the transition from capitalism to socialism, Hu replied that “it would not be too slow” if the transition could be completed worldwide in the next three centuries (Hu Sheng 1998c, 4). Hu’s words were later interpreted as “do not talk about socialism for the next three hundred years!” (Gong Yuzhi 2008, 143). Hu Sheng’s new view of modern China thus ran counter to the orthodox historiography in at least two important ways. First, by defining capitalist development as the major theme in modern Chinese history and by approving of the reform programs that contributed to the growth of capitalism in China, Hu questioned the revolutionary narrative in Marxist historiography (including his own writings) that had treated the gradualist reforms as reactionary movements impeding China’s progress. Second, his revision also challenged the teleological assumptions of the orthodox historiography that the communist revolution was the inevitable consequence of a century-long structural change in China’s economic, social, and political relations and that socialism was the only correct choice for China after the communist revolution. Hu’s revisions, to be sure, were not entirely novel; as shown in Chapter 6, some of his views, such as capitalism as a progressive force in modern China or the CCP’s resorting to populism in canceling the phase of New Democracy after 1949, had been proposed by proreform historians and thinkers in the 1980s, and he offered his “new” interpretations nearly ten years later than some of the most provocative historians of the 1980s. Nevertheless, Hu was the first among the leading orthodox historians to challenge their own shared basic assumptions. In fact, since Hu was the historian who

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had contributed most to the making of the revolutionary historiography after 1949 and the most authoritative scholar in the field of modern Chinese history in the 1980s and 1990s, his revisions epitomized the retreat of the revolutionary narrative and its surrender to the modernization narrative. A ready explanation of why Hu revised his views on modern China in his last years is his recognition of the changed realities in China: about one and a half decades after the inception of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, China’s transition to capitalism had become irreversible by the mid-1990s; as a leading official historian and a member of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu was committed to offering historical justification of the Party’s ongoing reforms that had buried Maoist economic legacies and to revising the revolutionary narrative that contradicted the capitalist reforms of the Deng era. A more fundamental reason, however, had to do with the characteristics of Hu Sheng and many other CCP intellectuals of his generation. Growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, these intellectuals accepted Marxism and joined the Chinese Communist Party during their youth, after they had studied and compared different ideologies and political policies for China’s progress. To the extent that they made their political choice and formed their life goals on the basis of their independent thinking and reasoning, they were no different from other liberal intellectuals of their age; the difference was that they were more radical and rebellious, willing to risk their lives and careers for what they believed to be the true solution to China’s plight in the twentieth century. This background made Hu Sheng and his generation of CCP intellectuals immediately different from the generation of intellectuals growing up in the 1950s and 1960s; the latter accepted the CCP’s ideologies based on Mao’s personality cult and their faith in the correctness of the Party’s doctrines. The intellectual independence and critical thinking unique to Hu Sheng and many of his peers explained why they felt “perplexed” and even helpless for decades after the communist revolution when Maoist radical policies contradicted their reasoning and yet, as the official historians or writers, they were obligated to speak for the Party’s political lines and policies. Hu was exceptional in that he was bold enough and frank enough to admit in his last years that almost all of his books and essays were connected with the politics of a given period and that he had almost no “purely academic” writings at all.4

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It is not surprising, therefore, that Hu challenged the orthodox interpretations of modern Chinese history—and thus refuted many of his own writings—in his last years, before it was too late for him to say what he believed to be true about modern China and when the changed circumstances in China allowed him to do so. What Hu did in the 1990s thus can be seen as a revival of the intellectual independence of liberal scholars who grew up before 1949. One acute observer and political critic thus aptly described Hu’s refutation of his own views as a manifestation of “the power of reason” found among “intellectuals of conscience” in China (Li Shenzhi 2001, 2). This kind of independent thinking was not limited to Hu Sheng but can be seen in other veteran CCP writers, philosophers, and historians, such as Zhou Yang (1908–1989), Ba Jin (1904–2005), Li Shenzhi (1923–2003), and Li Rui (1917–). All of these men openly questioned the revolutionary orthodoxy in their old age after decades of political conformity. This change of heart among senior CCP intellectuals, which has come to be known as “the Hu Sheng phenomenon” because of Hu’s prominence, is best seen as a manifestation of the spirit of the New Enlightenment movement among Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s, as discussed in Chapter 6. Many of the New Enlightenment writers and thinkers had much in common with Hu and his peers in terms of their intellectual background and experiences before 1949. Hu’s tardiness in joining the New Enlightenment intellectuals is explained primarily by the fact that Hu, as a leading official historian of the Chinese Communist Party, had the obligation to speak for the Party’s political line. Thus, rather than siding with the New Enlightenment intellectuals, Hu was trusted by the Party to fight against “bourgeois liberalization” in the 1980s. It was only in the 1990s, when the political circumstances had greatly improved, that Hu was able to free himself from the predicament that had “perplexed” him for three decades and to express openly, though still with great caution, his real thoughts about modern Chinese history. The Bing dian Incident

The crisis of the revolutionary historiography was not caused only by the retreat of old-generation revolutionary historians from their original positions, but also by incessant attacks from advocates of the modernization narrative. As neoliberalism came to dominate the thinking of mainstream intellectuals in the 2000s and to shape the

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economic policies of the party-state, modernization historians went even further in repudiating the revolutions in modern China while extolling modernizing reforms and the “positive” influences of the West on China’s modernization. The most radical of them openly condemned revolutions for “making serious social disorder” and “disrupting the modernization process” (Zhou Donghua 2005, 94).5 The influence of modernization historiography and its repudiation of revolution went beyond academic circles and further influenced popular perceptions of rebellions and revolutions through the mass media. In two popular TV series, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping tianguo) and Marching toward the Republic (Zouxiang gonghe) produced in the early 2000s, key figures in the Qing government, ranging from Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang to Yuan Shikai, who had been caricatured in the revolutionary narrative as traitors, butchers, and reactionaries, all appeared as sophisticated statesmen showing serious concern with the well-being of the nation. Nevertheless, the revolutionary historiography did not lose its ground in China. There remained a number of Marxist historians who adamantly defended revolutions and rebutted the modernization thesis, but their number as well as their audience decreased steadily, and their voice became so weak in the field that at times they had to appeal to the Party and government authorities for administrative intervention. As one of them warned: “if modernization replaces revolution as the theme of modern history, the whole modern history [of China] has to be rewritten, chaos in the ideological field will occur, and serious political consequences will follow” (Gong Shudu 2005, 116). Embracing neoliberal economic policies, however, the government needed the collaboration of proreform intellectuals and welcomed the modernization narrative, as evidenced in its generous funding of research projects on the history of China’s modernization. But it also guarded against open and direct challenge to the very theoretical and historical foundation of the Party’s official ideology, despite its increasing discrepancy with the Party’s economic policies. From time to time, therefore, the government shut down print or online publications on both the “left” and “right” sides of the intellectual debate to ensure political conformity. It had to strike a subtle balance between its accommodation of the appeals of mainstream intellectuals and its own need to maintain the Party’s ideological basis. It is in this context that the Bing dian incident can be under-

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stood. On January 24, 2006, a weekly supplement to Zhongguo qingnian bao (China youth daily) called Bing dian (Freezing point), was ordered shut down for publishing the article “Modernization and History Textbooks,” authored by Professor Yuan Weishi of Zhongshan University. In the opinion of the auditing group (yuepingzu) of the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party, that article “negates one hundred–plus years of struggles by the Chinese people against [foreign] invasions and directly attacks the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system” (Zhongxuanbu Xinwenju 2006). The central propaganda department of the China Youth League, which sponsors the newspaper, justified the closure by stating that the article “vindicates the criminal acts by the imperialist powers in invading China” and “seriously hurts the national feeling of the Chinese people” (Gongqingtuan Zhongyang Xuanchuanbu 2006). The shutdown of Bing dian immediately attracted the attention of the mass media and the public, and incurred protest from Chinese intellectuals around the world. Surprisingly, the harsh censure from the Party and the Youth League did not result in a political campaign to condemn the article or any measure to punish the author, as had occurred in the campaign against “bourgeois liberalization” in the 1980s. Under the unprecedented pressure from the protesters, including some liberal Communist Party veterans and intellectuals in China, Bing dian resumed publication on March 1, and its first issue after the suspension began with an article titled “The Struggle against Feudalism and Imperialism Is the Theme of Modern Chinese History,” written by Professor Zhang Haipeng, head of the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in which the author reasserted the official view of modern Chinese history and cautiously disputed the empirical evidence in Yuan’s article without mentioning Yuan’s name or castigating him (Zhang Haipeng 2006). Yuan Weishi, for his part, remained as active as before and rebutted Zhang by writing another article, “For What, When, and How to Struggle against Feudalism and Imperialism,” published in the April 3 issue of Yazhou zhoukan (Asia weekly) based in Hong Kong. Just a few months after that incident, a new history textbook was released in Shanghai, which drastically cut down the content dealing with imperialist invasions, revolutions, and wars and, in their stead, increased coverage of the history of science, modern

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economy, foreign cultures, and so forth. Once again, it sparked a heated debate on online forums in China and attracted the attention of overseas media (e.g., Kahn 2006).

BEYOND THE GRAND NARRATIVES Chinese historiography in the late 1990s and 2000s, therefore, was characterized by increasing awareness of the problems inherent to both the revolutionary and modernization historiographies, and attempts to revise or break with the grand narratives that had shaped the existing historical writings. Compared to the 1980s and earlier, when studies of political and economic history predominated, this period witnessed a boom in studies in social history and a concomitant interest in theoretical and methodological issues. Beginning with their questioning of some of the basic presumptions of the existing historiography, the new generation of social historians proposed a variety of approaches to research in Chinese history. They also showed a keen interest in postmodern theories that were newly introduced to China. The following discussion, therefore, will focus on some of the most prominent scholars in the field of social history and their scholarship. Middle-Range Theory

According to Yang Nianqun, a historian at the People’s University of China, historical studies in China since the 1980s have erred in two extremes. One extreme was the empiricist tradition that traced back to the Qianjia school of evidential research during the Qing, whose preoccupation with trivial details in the studies of ancient classics prevented scholars from seeing the big picture of historical processes (Yang Nianqun 2004a). The other extreme, Yang noted, was historians’ submission to the grand narratives of revolution and modernization. In the absence of their own “independent criteria of judgment,” studies of social history in China, Yang complained, continued to rely on the assumptions of the so-called surges and phases characteristic of the revolutionary narrative when evaluating social changes in modern China and continued to focus mainly on social phenomena relating to the major historical events; few employed an independent critical framework for social history with evidence and support sought according to the logic of the development of local societies themselves.6 Yet, influenced by modernization theory,

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Yang observed, social historians had increasingly aimed to prove the “reasonability” of modernizing tendencies in China without “comprehending and interpreting the experiences and the fate of cultural traditions from a perspective unique to China itself” (Yang Nianqun 2001a, 78). A subsequent problem with the studies of social history in China thus was that the researchers had already formed a conclusion congruent with the grand narratives before they set out to conduct research on a certain topic and hence lacked the ability to find meanings on their own (Yang Nianqun 2002, 16; see also 2004a). To overcome the problems arising from the two extremes, Yang proposed the use of “middle-range theory,” which he borrowed from American sociologist Robert F. Merton (1968). In his view, middle-range theory, though an old construct dating back to the 1960s, was useful because it emphasized conceptualization on the basis of empirical studies of a limited scope, such as a geographical region, an institution, a social phenomenon, or a group of people, and because conceptualization at this level could lead to the construction, revision, or refutation of more general and abstract conceptual frameworks. Yang found a good example of the application of middle-range approach in the study of Chinese history in the concept of “involution” used by Philip Huang in his study of the peasant economy in the Yangzi delta (P. Huang 1990). Although involution was a “regional concept,” Yang explained, it could be used as a guide in “interpreting long-term tendencies of economic development in China” (Yang Nianqun 2001a). For Yang, middle-range theory was valuable also because its emphasis on empirical studies of a limited scope could help shed light on aspects of local history that had been overlooked or “obscured” by the grand narratives in the studies of political history. The biggest problem with revolutionary as well as the modernization historiography, according to Yang, was that they overlooked the quotidian lives of ordinary people, especially their interpersonal relations within a given social setting. The strength of middle-range theory thus was twofold: it “subverted the single-dimensioned grand narrative of modernity and at the same time avoided empirical study and the triviality characteristic of such studies” (Yang Nianqun 2002, 11). To advocate the middle-range theory in China, therefore, was “to infuse into empirical studies elements of [theoretical] explanation in order to organize historical data that are seemingly irrel-

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evant to one another and to find the connections among them, and at the same time to discipline oneself by limiting the scope of such explanation and preventing it from allying with a political ideology or any form of empiricism” (ibid., 16; see also 2001b, 193–196). As an attempt to practice middle-range theory, Yang himself examined Chinese literati in different regions during the nineteenth century. According to Yang, the traditional wisdom on this issue was that the “feudal” Confucian tradition lost its ground soon after the coming of Western challenges and that the Chinese literati realized the need to borrow from the West when their tradition was “defeated” by the West. Yang found that this stereotype, though consistent with “the modern nationalist discourse,” failed to explain the complicated patterns of intellectuals’ thinking and activities. In fact, he argued, Confucianism experienced a long process of differentiation and regionalization in Chinese history; educated elites ceaselessly tapped local resources of Confucian traditions and used them to shape their own behavioral patterns. For example, the literati who took the first steps to introduce Western technology in the “Self-Strengthening” Movement in the 1860s and 1870s were not those from the coastal provinces who were first exposed to Western influences, but a small group of Confucian elites from insulated Hunan province. What explained the Hunan elites’ initiative, Yang contended, was that the jingshi (statecraft) tradition was particularly strong among the Confucian scholars in this region. It was the nature of their intellectual tradition, rather than the degree of Western impact, that shaped the elites’ attitudes toward the West. Yang further investigated the elites in Guangdong province, where the xinxue (school of mind) tradition was strong among Confucian scholars. This local tradition, Yang argued, explained why Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who exemplified the Confucian elites in this region, paid particular attention to changing the “minds” of the people through their publication of books and newspapers during the reform movement in the 1890s. The different cultural traditions in Hunan and Guangdong thus accounted for local intellectuals’ different ways of thinking and courses of action. Central to Yang’s analysis thus was the “middlerange”concept of the regionalization of Confucianism, by which he emphasized spatial rather than temporal variations in interpreting Confucian traditions and a combination of intellectual history and social history in methodology (Yang Nianqun 1997). Yang admitted the limited significance of his work for explicating larger theoretical

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issues in Chinese history. The middle-range theory, Yang conceded, “only adds to the foundation on which a future grand theoretical framework can be built” (Yang Nianqun 2002, 22).7 The Total History Approach

Another imported theory that appealed to the new generation of social historians is Fernand Braudel’s “total history.” Zhao Shiyu, a historian at Beijing Normal University, proposed a “multidimensional and panoramic” understanding of history, which, in his definition, could be the history of a whole country or the history of a given area—the latter “as big as a province or a region covering several provinces or as small as a town, a county, or a village.” As an approach to reconstructing the past, Zhao suggested, total history emphasized “the investigation of all aspects of a local society, ranging from the ecological setting of a given area to its cultural resources, power networks, social life, and so on, in order to display a complete, three-dimensional picture of the area.” The total history concept in the social history of a region, Zhao elaborated, also entailed the “totality” of its methodology: “the theories and approaches of social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and geology should be integrated into diachronic studies [of a regional society], and attention should also be paid to the synchronic analysis of structures and their functions” (Zhao Shiyu 2006, 28). Central to the approach of total history, Zhao stressed, “is to treat a society as a totality: all we should do is to understand how the society is put together as an entirety; what the relationships are between different parts of the entirety; how these parts are accommodated to one another to ensure the normal functioning of the society; what forces or factors are operating behind the entirety that integrate, disintegrate, or transform the entirety and its components; and so forth” (ibid., 36). For Zhao, to promote the total history approach was to subvert the notions of universality and unity inherent in the grand narratives in traditional historiography or what he called “upper-case history” (da lishi). Those narratives, Zhao criticized, assumed a universal pattern of historical development and ignored the differences and particularities of a given society or depicted such differences and particularities as mere variations on the universal patterns. What is missing in “upper-case history,” Zhao wrote, is its “basis in everyday life,” or “lower-case history” (xiao lishi); it is precisely

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the individuality, differences, and particularities that constitute the commonality and universality of history, rather than the reverse. What historians needed to do, Zhao suggested, was to “give the everyday-life basis back to upper-case history; . . . once it is returned, the distinction between upper- and lower-case histories will no longer be necessary—after all, there is just one history in actuality” (Zhao Shiyu 2006, 10). To investigate the everyday life of ordinary people entailed the use of new source materials. In his own studies of “regional social history” (quyu shehui shi), Zhao emphasized the importance of materials scattered in local places or kept by local people (rather than those well preserved in libraries or official institutions), such as stone-tablet inscriptions, economic contracts between individuals, clan genealogies, folklore, and legends. These sources allowed him to examine a wide variety of new topics, such as popular faith and rituals found in temple fairs, as well as various groups of people, such as artisans, eunuchs, and women, that had long been marginalized in society and overlooked by traditional historiography. His findings from such research were often at odds with presumptions inherent to the grand narratives in the existing historiography. In his study of temple fairs, for instance, Zhao found that a carnival-like atmosphere prevailed in the celebrations at temple fairs in many parts of traditional China, and he described the “delirious and boisterous spirit” of the local people as a manifestation of a “counter-Confucian” (fan lijiao) tradition in local society. Contrary to the traditional assumption that the predominance of Confucian teachings resulted in oppressive conformity with established social norms, Zhao argued that the revelry shown in the temple fairs not just contradicted but also complemented the Confucian tradition. Local elites often endorsed the temple fair events on the ground that such activities functioned as a buffer that helped mitigate tensions and conflicts in local society and contributed to the building of communal solidarity and identity. The “counter-Confucian” spirit of the temple fairs thus actually worked in conjunction, rather than in conflict, with the Confucian norms to maintain social order (Zhao Shiyu 2002).

A POSTMODERN TURN IN CHINESE HISTORIOGRAPHY? One thus can easily identify the shifts in studies of social history in the late 1990s and 2000s. Compared to the revolutionary and

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modernization historiographies, the new generation of scholarship moved its attention from the traditional preoccupation with political history to the new realms of social and cultural history; from major historical events and institutions to everyday community life; from the ruling elites to ordinary people; from the major social classes and economic fields to subaltern groups and marginal professions; and, methodologically, from a linear historical account based on dichotomous assumptions to a more complicated, multifaceted account based on the investigation of local source materials. More important than the methodological changes, however, was a growing awareness among the new generation of historians of the disciplinary autonomy of historical studies. Yang Nianqun labeled his own studies as well as similar works by his colleagues inspired by the middle-range theory as “the new social history” (xin shehui shi) on the assumption that their research had a different purpose than the traditional historiography. The latter, Yang claimed, centered on a “narrative of political history” and served as a form of “ideological indoctrination” ( jiaohua) or “a politically motivated explanatory tool to justify the legitimacy of the existing political order.” Instead, he described his own approach to historical study as “an aesthetic experience, an individualistic method of existence, and a method of personal expression” as well as a means “to enhance our ability to think critically about certain phenomena in realities”(Yang Nianqun 2002, 28). Zhao Shiyu, too, distinguished his studies from traditional scholarship and defined “social history” as a new paradigm that should be distinguished from the traditional—especially Marxist—historiography that was essentially about political history. Marxist historiography, Zhao complained, viewed all historical phenomena from the perspective of “class relations and social political struggles,” in which a complicated social structure was deduced to class relations on the basis of economic interests, and class relations in turn were simplified as confrontation between peasants and landlords. The goal of his “social history” thus was to break with the one-dimensional, linear mode of historical interpretation and to reconstruct the past by examining multilayered social relations and a wide variety of factors behind the complex dynamics of historical changes (Zhao Shiyu 2002, 417–418, 453–457). Despite their criticism of traditional historical writings and their quest for the autonomy of historiography, these social historians showed no interest in the construction of a new set of theo-

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ries and interpretive frameworks. Yang Nianqun, therefore, was pessimistic about the overwhelming influence of imported theories and methods in Chinese historiography. In his view, scholarship in China had not prepared Chinese scholars to develop their own macrotheories to challenge the paradigm in his field that has been shaped by imported theories. “We must admit,” Yang wrote, “that, without the ability to truly form our own distinctive explanations, the study of Chinese social history will have to rely on imitating Western social theories for a very long period” (Yang Nianqun 2001a, 79). In another essay, he used the metaphor of Monkey in the famous Chinese novel Journey to the West to describe the current situation of social historical studies in China: “We are now living under the powerful dominance of the West, just like Monkey, who could never escape from the palm of Tathagata Buddha. We have to stay within that palm to express ourselves. It is impossible for Monkey to jump out of the palm and then draw a circle with his magic stick delineating his own realm” (Yang Nianqun 2002, 20). Given their preoccupation with topics that had been overlooked or trivialized by the preexisting master narratives of modern Chinese history, the social historians displayed a common interest in postmodern historiography, especially its questioning of the claim of “objectivity” in traditional historiography. Yang Nianqun, for instance, was skeptical of the assumption that historians were able to “fully reconstruct the objective realities in history.” “History,” he explicated, “can only take the form of narratives and texts once it becomes the subject of research. In that process, the true past is invariably screened by different motives and becomes part of subjective perceptions.” Therefore, he made the suggestion to “thoroughly give up the idea of ‘seeking truth’ [qiuzhen].” To advocate the middle-range theory, he explained, was to emphasize the subjective elements of historical interpretation (Yang 2002, 16). Zhao Shiyu was the most enthusiastic of the historians in his field in advocating postmodern historiography. In addition to translating the works of Western historians, he published a number of articles introducing Western postmodern theories and approaches. Like Yang, he doubted the possibility of “getting to the objective truth in history through a rigorous examination of historical data in the manner of research in natural science.” For Zhao, such data, as a form of “historical memory,” did not necessarily reflect historical facts, whereas the unwritten sources, especially legends and collective memories,

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were not completely “fiction.” Many legends or elements of legends, Zhao suggested, were indeed fictitious, but they still had meaningful implications for understanding the popular mentality and therefore could be interpreted as “facts.” He emphasized the importance of legends in bridging the gap between written documents and the unrecorded memories of the past. A number of his works thus examined popular legends in different areas and their meaning for reconstructing local histories.8 The new generation of social historians thus made headway in deconstructing the traditional historiography: they no longer defined their scholarship within the contours of state ideologies and used their work as a tool of political legitimation for the party-state. Their rewriting of history was subversive to the extent that they jettisoned the master narratives that had undergirded the writings of the revolutionary and liberal historians, and called into question both the possibility of reconstructing the past as it actually was and traditional historians’ claim of the authenticity of their historical reconstructions. However, it is equally evident that the social historians’ abandonment of grand narratives did not lead to theoretical innovation and true autonomy on the basis of empirical findings from their own research, but instead reflected growing dependence on a new set of theoretical frameworks borrowed from the West that they imposed on themselves. Despite their commitment to “localizing” (bentuhua) the imported theories, the prospects for an autonomous scheme of theoretical interpretation in reconstructing the past remain unclear.

IN SEARCH OF “TRUE REALITIES” Also notable in the Chinese historiography of the 1990s and 2000s is a growing interest among the emerging generation of historians in reexamining some of the major political events in twentieth-century China. For decades after 1949, the Chinese Communist Party and its historians had monopolized the interpretation of these events, to ensure its conformity with the grand narrative of modern Chinese history and to serve the Party’s needs in legitimating its leadership and policies. Without access to the original records of party leaders’ letters, speeches, meetings, and other forms of communication, ordinary historians and the general public had to accept the only version of the history of those events endorsed by the Party. But

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the recent release of classified archives in and outside China concerning the history of the Chinese Communist Party and China’s international relations as well as the publication of recently declassified party documents and memoirs by high-ranking officials in the government, the military, and the Party has greatly improved the accessibility of source materials for historians in the field. As a result, a large number of monographs and articles have been published since the 1990s. Committed to reconstructing the “true reality” (zhenxiang) of events that had been obscured or distorted by the official history of the Party in the past, scholars engaging in these studies have claimed the objectivity of their work and presumably have delinked their scholarship from any political inclination. Not surprisingly, their findings from the newly accessible archives and other sources do not always square with the narratives found in the standard textbooks of modern Chinese history. A good example here is Yang Kuisong’s study on the Xi’an Incident of 1936. The narrative of this incident in the Party’s official historiography typically traces it to Marshal Zhang Xueliang’s visit to Yan’an in April 1936. During this visit, according to this narrative, the commander of the Nationalist force, which had withdrawn from Manchuria after the Japanese occupation and been sent by Chiang Kai-shek to annihilate the Red Army, successfully persuaded the CCP representative, Zhou Enlai, and subsequently the Party to adopt the strategy of “allying with Chiang to resist Japan” (lian Jiang kang Ri) in place of the Party’s original strategy of “resisting Japan and opposing Chiang” (kang Ri fan Jiang). Drawing on the recently released party documents and archives, Yang’s research shows that the reverse was true: instead of accepting Zhang’s proposal, Zhou persuaded Zhang to join the Chinese Communist Party in “resisting Japan and opposing Chiang.” After the talks, Zhou and the Chinese Communist Party continued the original anti-Chiang strategy, while Zhang, influenced by Zhou’s persuasion, gradually changed his own position from combating to cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party and from supporting to eventually opposing Chiang. But Zhang was never so determined to oppose Chiang as the conventional wisdom has it. In fact, as Yang argued, Zhang had no intention to kidnap Chiang until he was put in a desperate situation in November 1936, when the Red Army had to plan a retreat from its base area in Shaanxi after its failure to obtain Soviet military aid and after Chiang assembled his army for a final anni-

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hilation of the Communist force, which would foil Zhang’s efforts in allying with the Chinese Communist Party and thereby obtaining support from the Soviet Union for resistance against Japan (Yang Kuisong 1995, 267–273). Yang’s study, therefore, also sheds light on the central role of the Comintern throughout the incident. One of Zhang’s central purposes in cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party, Yang argued, was to obtain military supplies from the Soviet Union; to that end, he even proposed becoming a member of the Party. But the Comintern and the Soviet leaders never trusted Zhang, viewing him as a selfish warlord and an unworthy ally. It was the Comintern’s directive of August 1936, Yang demonstrated, that caused the Chinese Communist Party to jettison its original strategy of “resisting Japan and opposing Chiang,” to reject Zhang’s request for CCP membership, and to switch to the new strategy of establishing a united front with the Nationalists to fight the common Japanese enemy (Yang Kuisong 1995, 174–180). It was also because of the Soviet leaders’ open condemnation of the kidnaping that the Chinese Communist Party quickly changed its policy from denying Chiang’s national leadership and insisting on a “public trial” of Chiang—and even putting him to death if the Nanjing government attacked Xi’an— to appearing as a third party only hoping for a peaceful solution to the crisis, though the CCP’s support to Zhang remained unchanged (ibid., 301–332). The pivotal role of the Soviet Union in shaping the course of the civil war (1946–1949) between the Communist and Guomindang forces is evident in Shen Zhihua’s recent studies, which drew mainly on Russian archives as well as recently published party documents. Strategically, the most important step in the war was competing for control of Manchuria. For the Chinese Communist Party, occupying this area would not only provide it with a vast, secure rear directly linked with the Soviet Union, but also allow it to obtain a large amount of weapons left by the Japanese and control the urban industrial centers; the Communist force would thereby fundamentally change its situation from surviving on poverty-stricken rural bases with backward weapons to eventually having the material foundation for a rivalry with the Nationalist force on equal footing. The CCP’s advantage in this competition was the Soviet occupation of Manchuria right after the Japanese surrender. According to the treaty between the Nationalist government and the Soviet Union

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signed on August 14, 1945, however, the Soviet forces had to withdraw from Manchuria and hand it over to the Nationalist government within three months after the Japanese surrender. During the occupation, neither the Communist nor the Nationalist forces would be allowed to enter the area. But the actual attitude of the Soviet forces toward the CCP and Guomindang forces, as Shen’s research convincingly shows, changed frequently during the occupation, which in effect facilitated the Communists’ penetration into Manchuria. They initially tolerated and even encouraged the Communists’ entry into the area as long as the latter avoided using the official names of their military units and openly contacting the Soviet occupying forces. Later, in November 1945, however, to avoid accusations from the United States and to win its cooperation on other fronts, the Soviet authorities agreed to allow the Nationalist government to airlift forces into the major cities in Manchuria five days before their withdrawal; at the same time, they also promised to force the Communists to retreat from the cities they already controlled and to avoid conflicts with the Nationalist force. The Chinese Communist Party accordingly changed its strategy from seeking to control all of Manchuria to “giving up the major avenues [i.e., the major cities along the railroad] and occupying the two sides” (rangkai dalu, zhanling liangxiang). Nevertheless, the Soviet forces’ delayed withdrawal incited growing hostility from the Chinese people and condemnation by the Nationalist government; Chiang Kai-shek also openly annulled the Nationalist force’s agreement with the Chinese Communist Party on truce in Manchuria. In response, the Soviet authorities urged the CCP forces to immediately occupy the major cities upon their withdrawal and left a substantial supply of weapons to the Communists before they left (Shen Zhihua 2008, 2009, 2011). This support from the Soviet Union contributed immensely to the growth of the Communist forces in Manchuria and prepared them for a decisive campaign against the Nationalists later in 1948 in this area, which laid the foundation for the Chinese Communist Party’s final victory in the civil war in 1949. Together, these recent studies generated a cumulative effect in undermining the basic assumptions of the master narratives that undergird the official history of the Party. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the historians of the Chinese Communist Party had emphasized “internal factors” leading to the success of the communist revolution, especially the Party’s mobili-

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zation of the masses and popular support for the revolution, which in turn were explained in the larger context of long-term structural changes in the Chinese economy and society; whenever they described changes in the CCP’s strategies that arguably contributed to the success of the revolution, these changes were depicted as initiatives from the CCP leaders, who represented the correct direction of the revolution. External factors, especially the critical role played by the Comintern and the Soviet Union, were minimized and even concealed. The new archival research on the Party’s history is important not only because it adds interesting details to, if not alters, our picture of those events, but more important because it offers new interpretations that threaten the validity of the revolutionary narrative on modern China. All in all, the master narratives in modern Chinese history have been in crisis since the 1990s, partly because of the retreat of leading revolutionary historians from their original positions and more fundamentally because of the new generation of historians’ general lack of interest in such narratives. The historians who came to dominate the field in the past two decades have increasingly shifted their attention from major political events and nationwide trends that substantiated the traditional narratives to developments at the local or regional level that were trivialized by the preexisting historiography. Alternatively, they have concentrated on establishing an accurate picture of major historical events by taking advantage of newly available archives and recently published party documents without having to paying homage to the master narrative that long shaped the standard explanation of the events. For the new generation of historians, the master narratives, be they about revolution or modernization, were either invalid in explaining modern Chinese history or not necessary at all. Despite these efforts and the thriving scholarship in the new areas and new subjects they opened up, however, it is evident that few historians have made serious attempts at rebuilding an alternative explanatory framework for modern Chinese history. Most historians have contented themselves with using theories, concepts, or methodologies borrowed from the West, with little innovative adaptation, to guide their research and explain their findings; others are satisfied with new evidence they have uncovered without having to apply theory to explicate the meanings of their findings or contemplate their implications for comprehending larger historical and his-

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toriographical issues. What has transpired in the last two decades in the field thus is largely phenomenal growth in the quantity of empirical studies on various subjects without substantial advancement in conceptual or theoretical construction, a state that I term an “involution” in Chinese historiography. It is a state that more or less reflects the dilemma of China’s development at the turn of the twenty-first century: while the country’s full integration into the global system led to a dramatic increase in the size of its economy, thanks to the stimulation of the skyrocketing volume of foreign trade and foreign investments, China also developed an increased dependence on the West and found it increasingly difficult to sustain its autonomy in strategically important sectors and to advance itself for greater competitiveness in the globalized world economy. For Chinese historians, a fundamental challenge in the twenty-first century, likewise, is to free themselves from dependence on imported theories and methodologies, and to establish their autonomy in rebuilding the interpretive scheme for modern Chinese history after the rejection of the framework of the twentieth century.

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CHAP TER 9

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Conclusion

HISTORY AS REALITY AND CONSTRUCTED NARRATIVE Since the early twentieth century, influenced by Western historiography, the writing of modern Chinese history has centered on the construction of narratives. Compared to the chronicles or annals that dominated Chinese historiography in the imperial period, the narrative form of historical representation was widely adopted by Chinese historians for a compelling reason: by telling a story with well-defined beginning, middle, and ending phases and by imposing on the narrativized past an overarching theme or a master narrative consistent with a historical philosophy or political ideology, historians made the once seemingly chaotic and fragmented past appear to be coherent, goal-directed, and politically meaningful. By and large, we can identify three patterns in which historical representation was related to the historical realities in late Qing and Republican China. In the first pattern, history was a lived experience for the historians who wrote about it. Writing in the 1930s and 1940s, historians sympathizing with the Guomindang or the Chinese Communist Party, for instance, self-consciously depicted the existing revolutionary and modernizing movements as part of a larger historical process beginning in the nineteenth century, remaining unfinished at their time, and involving their personal participation. For them, China was in the midst of experiencing its modern history. They wrote about it primarily for the purpose of justifying the movement they supported, building consensus among its participants and supporters, and influencing the process for 261

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expected results. History writing, in other words, was part and parcel of the process of state-making, whether it took the form of rationalizing the existing regime through top-down reforms or building an entirely new state through bottom-up revolts. Therefore, these historians were more makers than writers of history. What they wrote about was a lived history, or the history they personally experienced. Their different interpretations of the past and the present could be both true and false: they were true to the extent that each of these intepretations could be seen as a fragment of the larger picture of history, mirroring more or less the realities of confrontation between competing political forces and coexisting processes. They were false because the historians’ ideological commitment often prevented them from depicting aspects of the past that did not fit into their ideological schemas; their interpretations were based more on their own ideologically inspired imaginations than on objective investigation. In the second pattern, history was no longer a lived experience, and historical writing lost its relevance to history itself. For historians in post-1949 China, who were as pragmatic and ideologically committed as they (or their predecessors) had been before 1949 in representing the past for a political purpose, to write about the modern history of China, or the period from 1840 to 1949 as they defined it, meant to write about what was over rather than what they currently witnessed and participated. The history of modern China, in other words, was likely to become a myth subject to their manipulation. This does not mean that the history thus written was completely fictional or fabricated. In fact, no matter how dedicated they were to a political agenda, few historians went so far as to fabricate historical facts per se, that is, to cook up an incident or a figure that did not exist in history at all, as a novelist would do. What they could do, instead, was to produce different narratives of the same event by emplotment, or putting together different facts so as to offer different accounts of the reason, the unfolding, and the consequence of the event; furthermore, above the narratives of individual events, they could produce a grand narrative about a long-term historical process by putting together events they purposefully selected and narrated. The radical historiography of the Cultural Revolution was irrelevant to the history it attempted to represent because the narratives it produced were human-made myths serving an explicit presentday purpose, rather than an objective reading of historical facts. Not

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surprisingly, the reversal of Maoist politics in the late 1970s and 1980s also led to the refutation of radicalism in historiography and the reorientation of historical writing for the new needs of the partystate, that is, to legitimate the reform programs of the post-Mao era. In the third pattern, historical narratives correspond more or less to the realities they represent. As history writing in post-1949 China became increasingly disciplinized and professionalized, the historians who led the process of disciplinization claimed their commitment to objectivity in historical research and autonomy of the discipline. As a result of disciplinization in the 1950s and early 1960s, which imposed on the field of modern Chinese history a standard interpretive scheme, emphasized strict training in one’s own area of specialty, and upheld objectivity in historical research, revolutionary historiography underwent a transformation from an activity in which individual intellectuals had the liberty to project their personal perspectives and creative imaginations onto their accounts of the past to a profession in strict conformity with Marxist ideology and newly established academic practices. Although disciplinization of historiography after 1949 offered the prospect of detachment from present-day politics, its lack of adaptability to the ever-changing political environment and the new needs of the party-state ensured its short existence. In contrast, when historians in the late 1990s and 2000s claimed a new interest in “purely academic” research, they brought a more lasting prosperity to the study of modern Chinese history, where the most significant development was not so much the triumph of the modernization paradigm over the revolutionary paradigm as a fundamental change in historians’ academic interests and methodologies. Overall, they have gradually shifted their attention from political history to economic, social, and cultural histories; from major events and prominent figures in history to the ordinary and the mundane; from national events and trends based on a grand narrative to regional or local phenomena that were less tainted with ideology and free of teleological presumptions. As a result, historians have increasingly identified themselves as professionals dedicated to the reconstruction of aspects of the past that were missing or misrepresented in the preexisting historiography. The gap between their representations and the history they represented could be significantly narrowed, while their methodological preferences and aesthetic or moral biases could continue to color their opinions about the past.

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The authenticity of historical writing thus has been contextual, contingent, and multilayered, varying significantly with different modes of historical recounting and in different periods in modern China. Historical representation can be false when historians prioritize their ideological commitments or the needs of the party-state in building narratives; and it can be true when historians detach themselves from politics or personal bias, thus basing their narratives on historical evidence that they establish. Most historical writings in twentieth-century China, however, have fallen between the two poles, tilting by and large toward the true, as revolutionary fervor has subsided among historians and as the field of modern Chinese history has become increasingly autonomous in the course of disciplinization and professionalization.

DECONSTRUCTING THE NARRATIVE As artificial reconstructions of the past, historical narratives are necessarily teleological, geared toward interpreting historical events or the consequences of events by looking at trends or causes leading to desired results. “All narrative history,” François Furet thus wrote, “is a succession of origin events, or, if one prefers, a history of events. And all history of events is teleological history: only the ‘ending’ of the history makes it possible to choose and understand the events that compose it” (Furet 1984, 55–56).1 For Chinese historians adhering to the revolutionary narrative, the success of the communist revolution in 1949 symbolized the culmination of a century-long struggle of the Chinese people against feudalism and imperialism, hence the “ending” of modern Chinese history. Therefore, their writings focused on the “historical causes” leading to the uprisings and revolutions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Outside China, those who empathized with the communist revolution, too, committed their research to explaining long-term structural changes in Chinese economy and society, from which they attempted to find a causal link with the rise and eventual success of the revolution. Non-Marxist historians adhering to the modernization narrative, for their part, elaborated on China’s potential for modern economic growth in the late imperial period and signs of modern development in the late Qing and Republican periods, while treating the communist revolution as an anomaly and the subsequent Maoist era as an interruption of the ongoing process of modernization since the nine-

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teenth century; the capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping, viewed in this light, appeared as a confirmation and resumption of the onceinterrupted modernization that would presumably lead China to an industrialized, liberal democratic society following Euro-American models. Both narratives assumed a linear view of history that excludes the possibility of the simultaneous coexistence of different and rivaling historical trends. Dissatisfied with the grand narratives and their teleologies in interpreting modern China, the emerging generation of historians in the 1990s and 2000s increasingly changed their interest to investigating local events and quotidian phenomena or in reexamining major historical events that had been marginalized or distorted by the preexisting historiography. The result was an unprecedented thriving of studies in social and cultural history that tended to prioritize the historians’ peculiar methodological preferences and of archival research that aimed to reconstruct the “true realities” of important political events. Findings from this new research often undermined the validity of existing master narratives. However, framed by theories and methodologies borrowed from the West or lacking any conceptual schema at all, this new generation of historiography contributed little to understanding China’s modern experiences in a larger historical context and building an alternative explanatory scheme for that purpose, which remains indispensable for comprehending both macrolevel changes in present-day China and the microhistory of local institutions and the everyday life of the people. Therefore, to remain contented with the deconstruction of preexisting narratives without rebuilding a new narrative linking China’s past with the ever-evolving realities in the present will not succeed in maintaining the vigor of Chinese historiography in the twentyfirst century. Narrative is important not just because it makes the past easy to comprehend and differentiates history from chronicles, but more important because it makes past events meaningful to people living in the present. Thus, in rewriting modern Chinese history, there is no need to abandon the commitment to reconstructing historical realities within a narrative framework, but only to jettison the teleology that has characterized existing narratives, especially the artificial closures or “endings” imposed on the purported course of “modern Chinese history,” and to redefine the history of modern China through the reconstruction of a new master narrative that is

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able to account for the historical and logical links between China’s experiences in the past centuries and contemporary developments. Aside from investigating the aspects of the past that have been unrepresented, underrepresented, or misrepresented under the mainstream narratives in the past, the most fundamental challenge that confronts Chinese historians today, in the final analysis, is to rebuild a narrative that not only moves closer to the objective realities of China’s past but yields meaning for understanding today’s China and its future trajectory. Outside China, serious efforts have been made to diagnose the deficiencies of the master narratives found in Western and Chinese historiographies. The most notable examples are the works of Paul Cohen (1985) and Prasenjit Duara (1997). In his study on the American writing of China’s recent history, Cohen criticized three successive constructs that had prevailed in the field since the 1950s, namely, the Chinese response to Western impact, tradition and modernity, and imperialism. Cohen found that all three approaches had the problem of looking at Chinese history from the perspective of the West and hence overemphasizing the roles that the West played in Chinese society, while ignoring the autonomy of China’s history itself. As a solution to these problems, Cohen proposed a “Chinacentered” history, or an approach that examines Chinese history “from within” by focusing on regional/local phenomena and on the lower level of society. He thus called for a shift of attention from the changes wrought by Western influence to internal tendencies and traditions that had existed before the coming of Western challenges and that continued to shape Chinese history in the nineteenth century and thereafter (Cohen 1985, 149–198).2 Duara’s work Rescuing History from the Nation (1997) begins with an analysis of a linear historical narrative in Chinese historiography that was established in the early twentieth century under the influence of Western Enlightenment ideas. This narrative structure, Duara complained, excluded many old historical and narrative structures and popular culture, owing to the lack of a critical attitude among Chinese intellectuals to the rational discourse of Enlightenment and their assumption of “modernity” as the only criterion in its narration. To overcome the problems of the linear narrative, Duara proposed the approach of “bifurcated history,” which called for attention to historical realities that were incompatible with the linear narrative and therefore had been appropriated or concealed. The mission of the

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bifurcated history, therefore, was to discover “areas darkened by the categories and schemas of the evolutionary History of the nation” (Duara 1997, 5).3 By shifting historians’ attention to areas that have been ignored or misrepresented by Western centered and linear historical narratives, the new approaches proposed by Cohen and Duara help historians overcome the problems inherent in the existing historiographies in and outside China, and obtain a well-rounded and more realistic picture of modern China. But they offer no clues to the construction of alternative master narratives. Investigations of regional and local phenomena from a China-centered perspective no doubt advance our understanding of aspects of late Qing and Republican economy, society, and politics unaffected by foreign influence, but the possible significance of findings from this reoriented historiography for a more valid interpretive scheme remains unexplained. Likewise, discoveries of aspects of history that were repressed and obscured by the linear History add one more dimension to, rather than replace, the history generated by the existing mainstream narratives. Both the China-centered and bifurcated histories, in a word, contribute to enriching our knowledge of the past and even subverting existing master narratives, but they help little in constructing a new one. Yet a grand narrative remains central to historical writing: without a narrative that is less tainted by obsolete ideologies and concomitant teleologies, findings under the China-centered and bifurcated approaches remain fragmented and lack a historical context in which their meanings can be properly appreciated.

TOWARD A WITHIN-TIME AND OPEN-ENDED HISTORY OF MODERN CHINA The grand narratives that have shaped the historical account of modern China are problematic not only because they are teleological, tending to obscure or trivialize events and trends that do not fit into them, but more importantly because they often misrepresent the historical processes that constitute the narratives per se. Behind the misrepresentation is an approach that is not only teleological, assuming the linear evolution of history leading to the telos of capitalist or socialist modernity, but also results-driven—in other words, the historians of a given period in twentieth-century China have tended to view the past from the perspective of contemporary

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developments of their own times and, for ideological or epistemological reasons, to see such developments as the end of a long-term historical process in modern China; historical studies have meant looking for causes leading to known results, although those results can only be temporary. The revolutionary and modernization narratives, as this study has shown, were essentially the products of historians’ collective imagination that aimed to explain and legitimate developments that were desirable to them. Therefore, for Chinese historians in the twenty-first century, to rewrite modern Chinese history means not only to discover the aspects of China’s past that have been missing from the teleological historiographies, but more importantly to do away with the results-driven approach that has shaped the existing narratives and instead to interpret the temporary “results” of different periods in modern China as a series of developments representing different historical possibilities leading to the ultimate goal of China’s “modern history,” which is yet to be defined. What I propose, therefore, is a “within-time and open-ended” history. It is “within time” because it looks at a specific historical event from the point of view of the time when the event was taking place, when different possibilities for the development of the event existed simultaneously and when participants in the event were not as conscious of the possible results of the in-process event as were historians of a later period. It is “open-ended” because this approach does not put a “closure” to modern Chinese history as did the teleological historiography of revolution or modernization, in which the “ending” of the history was clearly defined on the basis of ideological assumptions, be it the communist revolution and China’s subsequent transition to socialism, or China’s embrace of modernization with “Chinese characteristics” in the reform era, or whatever else neoliberal or New Left intellectuals desired at the turn of the twenty-first century. Instead, it seeks to interpret modern Chinese history in a larger spatial and temporal context, as I will describe below. Compared to the results-driven approach, which is exclusive in tracing back the “causes” of historical events from an afterthe-fact perspective, the advantage of the within-time, open-ended approach lies precisely in its inclusiveness in explaining the causes of ever-evolving developments in modern China and its ability to move closer to the objective realities in the past. Some examples pertaining to the communist revolution can help us understand the utility of the within-time, open-ended approach

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in reconstructing the history of modern China. Recalling his experiences as a key mediator between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party in 1946, Liang Shumin (1893–1988), then the general secretary of the China Democratic League, admitted that when all of the major political parties agreed to work together to form a government after they concluded the Political Consultative Conference on January 31, 1946, none of them realized that Chiang Kai-shek, “with a large number of well-equipped soldiers, with control of a nationwide government, and with the backing of the United States,” could be defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (Liang Shuming 2006, 318). Skeptical of the feasibility of a Western-style constitutional democracy in China, Liang did not readily believe in Chiang’s sincerity in carrying out the Political Consultative Conference agreement. But he also excluded the possibility of the CCP’s defeat by the Guomindang. With Chiang Kai-shek still in charge of the Nationalist government, he supposed, “the worst-case situation would be a division [of China] between the North and the South [Nan bei chao]. No other situation would be possible” (ibid., 318). In fact, not only did Chiang and almost all of the nonpartisan elites take for granted the unchallengeable legitimacy and military prowess of the Nationalist government after World War II, CCP leaders, too, were ready to give up military confrontation with the Guomindang and to participate in the proposed coalition government. Hu Sheng thus admitted in 1995 that “it was indeed true” that, when the Political Consultative Conference agreement was signed by all parties involved, the Communist Party “did prepare for the Guomindang’s implementation of the agreement and therefore called for a new phase of peace and democracy” in which the Chinese Communist Party would “replace bullets with ballots.” “If the Guomindang did not tear up the agreement,” Hu wrote, “the creation of a coalition government would be unavoidable. It would not be possible for the Chinese Communist Party to dominate such a government. Together with third parties, it could only achieve a considerable status, but the Guomindang would remain dominant” (Hu Sheng 2001, 13). The political developments in China in the first half of the twentieth century, as these instances imply, were not bound to the triumph of the communist revolution and the creation of a socialist system in China as the revolutionary narrative led people to believe. The traditional “results-driven” historiography made little sense when it tried to attribute the reasons for the success of the com-

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munist revolution to long-term structural changes in the Chinese economy, society, and political system since the nineteenth century. Contrary to the assumption of the inevitability of the success of the communist revolution in China and China’s choice of socialism, the likelihood of China’s taking a capitalist path, as Hu Sheng observed, was greater than its choosing socialism during the critical decades from the 1920s to the 1940s. According to Hu, there were two true opportunities for China to opt for capitalism. The first was during the alliance between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party in 1927, because the purpose of the alliance was for the Communists to help the Nationalists complete the nationalist revolution, which, according to the program of the Guomindang’s First Congress, was to oppose imperialism and feudalism and to develop capitalism. Thus, in Hu’s view, if the revolution had succeeded, China would have had the prospect of capitalist development. But Hu repeated the orthodox communist view that the nationalist revolution “failed” because of Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the communists. It would have been politically incorrect, to be sure, for him to admit that the nationalist revolution had “succeeded,” at least from the Guomindang’s point of view. But Hu nevertheless implied the Guomindang’s victory when he noted that “the majority of the middle force [zhongjian shili] was inclined toward the Nationalists” and refused to support the Chinese Communist Party after 1927, a situation that remained unchanged until the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan, when the middle force itself experienced a process of “oscillation and differentiation,” causing more and more members of the middle force to sympathize with the Communist Party (Hu Sheng 2001, 3-4). One thus can easily infer from Hu’s new interpretation that, without the Japanese invasion and the War of the Resistance against Japan, the majority of the Chinese people, or the so-called middle force who did not join either the Chinese Communist Party or the Guomindang, would have continued to support the Nationalist government and that the communist revolution would have been unlikely to succeed in the absence of popular support. The second opportunity for China to take the capitalist road, Hu continued, followed the agreement at the Political Consultative Conference in 1946 and 1947. “If the agreement had been upheld,” Hu reasoned, “the government would have remained dominated by the Guomindang, and capitalism would have been the only option. Although there would have been some New Democratic elements

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[in the capitalist economy] because of the CCP’s participation, these elements would have been very limited. In the end, however, the Guomindang tore up the agreement, resulting in the failure to take the capitalist road” (Hu Sheng 2001, 13-14). Hu further emphasized that these two opportunities were “real” when compared with other events in modern China, such as the xinzheng reform programs after 1900, when the Qing court was unable to abolish the unequal treaties with foreign powers and unwilling to create a constitutional government. In contrast, both the abolition of the unequal treaties and the creation of a constitutional government—hence the completion of the anti-imperialist and antifeudal revolution—became possible during the two periods of Guomindang-CCP alliance in 1924–1927 and 1946–1947. In both cases, China could have opted for capitalism, and the communist revolution could have been avoided. The reason China failed to take the capitalist road, Hu contended, had to do with the nature of the middle force. According to Hu, although the middle force constituted the largest part of the Chinese population and favored the capitalist road, “it had never formed an independent political force. The political parties of the middle force did not have their own army and thus had never become an influential factor. Naturally, it failed to lead China along the capitalism road” (ibid., 15). The victory of the communist revolution, as Hu implies here, was primarily an outcome of the CCP’s organizational and military abilities rather than any other factors. As these instances suggest, to reconstruct the historical realities that have been distorted by results-driven history, one needs not only a spatial shift in perspective—namely, a change from a Westcentered to a China-centered viewpoint and from the linear history of obvious trends and mainstream forces to lower-case histories of the repressed and the concealed, as Cohen and Duara have proposed—but, more important, a temporal shift in perspective from an “after-the-fact” perspective that sees history from the point of view of a temporary “result” in a given period and searches backward for the exclusive causes of that result to an “on-the-spot” or “withintime” perspective that looks at history from the point of view of the moment when the event was occurring and unfolding and does not assume an inevitable result of the event or an inevitable and ideologically defined ending to a conceived long-term process. By taking into account all possible trends and all actors that have played a part in shaping modern China and by viewing modern Chinese history as an unfinished process heading toward a goal that remains indefinite

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as China faces the twenty-first century, the within-time, open-ended approach can bring historians closer to the realities of China’s past than does a teleological and results-driven historiography. A history of modern China reconstructed based on the openended approach offers a new vantage point to reevaluate China today and in the future. Like the three decades of Maoist socialism, which from the 1950s had been seen as the end result of China’s modern history but turned out to be temporary and transitional, the three decades of reform since the 1980s that aimed to transform China into a capitalist economy integrated with the global economic system while retaining the CCP’s political dominance are best seen as one of many transitional experiments leading China to the unknown end of its modern history. The predicament of China in the 2000s is that, after breaking with Maoism, the state still relies on a grand narrative of modern Chinese history produced during the revolutionary era to safeguard its legitimacy, claim its perpetuity, and reject alternative possibilities. The transition to a market-based, privatized economy, while successful in producing rapid growth and improving the well-being of the Chinese people, also resulted in myriad problems, including a stark disparity in wealth distribution and rampant corruption, which in turn jeopardize the state’s legitimacy. The political arrangements, economic institutions, and social configurations in China seen in the early 2000s thus are far from representing the final form in the course of their transformation that began in the nineteenth century; the modern history of China, in short, has not finished. The study of modern China need not attempt to predict how and where its history will end. However, by adopting the “open-ended” approach, historians can avoid the fallacies of the teleological and result-driven historiography that has served to legitimate and perpetuate the temporary and transitional formations of a given period; this approach will help identify where China stands today on its long-term path to the end—no matter how obscure the end seems to be—and offer clues about China’s future trajectory of societal transformation by disentangling them from the contending possibilities in the past.

LOOKING FORWARD: CHINA IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD As China buried socialism through the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the full integration of its newly created market econ-

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omy with the capitalist world system after its entry into the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, the country entered the socalled postreform era. The rapid expansion of China’s foreign trade thereafter; the rise of China as the number two economy next to the United States by the early 2010s; the growing influence China has had on various international forums and regional or world organizations; its increasingly assertive role in international politics; and, domestically, the stark disparity in wealth distribution that came with privatization and the heightened rivalry between neoliberal intellectuals and politicians, on the one hand, and their opponents, on the other—all these developments suggest that “modern Chinese history” did not come to an end after China’s transition to capitalism through the three-decade economic reform from the 1980s to the 2000s. The modernization narrative, which replaced the “outmoded” revolutionary narrative to reinterpret modern Chinese history and prevailed during the reform era to legitimate the economic programs under Deng and his successors, turns out to be obsolete itself in explaining the ever-evolving realities in contemporary China. To make sense of the grand process of transformation that China is experiencing in the twenty-first century and of its significance in world history, it is necessary to redefine “modern Chinese history” as an ongoing, open-ended course and to extend the time span of modern China to include periods before and after the processes that have been covered by existing narratives; it is also necessary to retrieve modern China from the artificial space of the nation-state and to place it in a historical space in which Chinese civilization experiences an unprecedented renewal through creative interactions with other civilizations. To search for an alternative master narrative and properly comprehend the meanings and goals of modern Chinese history in light of globalization, we may find clues in existing political or scholarly conceptions of the ongoing process of China’s transformation and its ultimate destinations. Let us begin with the formulations of national goals by the Chinese state in the past few decades. For much of the reform era under Deng Xiaoping, the standard formulation was “four modernizations” in industry, agriculture, defense, and scientific research that aimed to quadruple China’s economic output by 2000; later, an alternative and increasingly popular formulation was the goal of being “basically well-off” (xiaokang), a term borrowed from Confucian discourse that denotes a stage in a civilizational cycle characterized

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by material prosperity and social justice, which will eventually lead to the higher and ultimate stage of “great harmony” (datong) that does away with all self-interest. More recently, the official discourse defines the goal of China’s development as achieving “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu de weida fuxing), which is often coupled with China’s “peaceful rise” (heping jueqi) or “peaceful development” (heping fazhan). Another formulation of China’s national goals is the construction of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Zhongguo tese de shehuizhuyi). There has been a transition from the simplistic, narrowly defined, short-term goals of modernization, often benchmarked by developments in the “modernized” (i.e., Western and capitalist) economies, to new goals that are more comprehensive in scope and extended in time, while rooted in Chinese cultural traditions and contemporary sociopolitical realities. For Chinese leaders and the general public, “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” has multiple meanings: beyond the modernization of the Chinese economy, it implies restoration of the political and military supremacy that the Chinese empire enjoyed in relation to other political entities before the nineteenth century and the unmatched grandeur and tremendous influence that Chinese civilization once had over other cultures and civilizations. These newly propagated national goals not only have their roots in China’s historical experiences, but also have empirical support from the realities in today’s China, especially its rapidly growing economy and escalating influence in the world. But this formulation is not sustained by a well-developed theory or ideology; the only conception that bolsters this formulation is the civilizational cycle found in Confucian discourse, which has lost much of its relevance for understanding today’s developments in China and beyond. Thus, although the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” transcends the traditional formulations of revolution and modernization and may work well as a political scheme to build consensus in Chinese society and even serve as a basis for national policies to guide China’s future development, as a historical and interpretive scheme it is underdeveloped, lacking theoretical sophistication and persuasion, unable to account for the challenges that confront China and the nature of its development in the context of globalization, or to serve as an alternative master narrative of modern Chinese history in place of revolution and modernization. We may also find a clue in the neoliberal scheme of develop-

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ment that has prevailed in the post–Cold War world and has been widely upheld by neoliberal intellectuals and politicians in China for charting China’s future course and the ultimate goal of modern Chinese history. Reflecting the optimism arising from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transition of many former communist regimes to democracies, market-oriented economic reform in China, and the rapid privatization of socialist economies in Eastern Europe, supporters of the neoliberal scheme have hailed those developments as signs pointing to the “end of history” or the ultimate success of the power of reason and the values of Enlightenment, as embodied in the liberal capitalist model of development, and their universal applicability to all of humanity (Fukuyama 1992). Dubbed the “Washington consensus,” this neoliberal scheme was vigorously promoted by the hegemonic powers in the West to the rest of the world through their direct or indirect influence on development plans in Third World countries by manipulating the international financial and trade organizations under their control. In China, neoliberal economists and policy makers also played a key role in shaping the course of economic reform in much of the 1990s and 2000s that led to the drastic privatization of state-owned enterprises, the establishment of a market economy, and its integration into the world capitalist system through the rapid expansion of China’s foreign trade and foreign investments. Despite the ostensible tenacity of the authoritarian regime in reform era China, the most optimistic of them believed in the inevitability and eventual triumph of a Western-style democracy in China as the best solution to the myriad social and political problems that have afflicted the country since the 1990s. Contrary to the neoliberal conception of development has been a revisionist view among intellectuals in the West and the nonWestern world that questions the validity of Eurocentric models in non-Western societies and underscores the tenacity and vitality of indigenous cultures and popular resistance to Western influences in those countries. When the Cold War was over, the more pessimistic among them, who had contested the assumption of linear progression from “tradition” to “modernity” in all societies during the heyday of modernization theory and had underscored the realities of political disorder and decay in Third World countries in their pursuit of Western-style goals, quickly pointed out the inevitable advent of an age of clashes between civilizations rather than the triumph of Eurocentric modernity in the rest of the world (Huntington 1993,

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1996). Optimistic observers, in contrast, embraced the idea of an alternative path to modernity in non-Western societies that reflects their responses to new challenges of the globalized world on the basis of indigenous cultural traditions. According to this view, the unprecedented wave of globalization since the 1990s has resulted in a shift of the economic center of the capitalist world system from the West to the East and the subsequent emergence of a new world order that allows for multiple power centers in international politics; these developments thus have put in question the hegemony of Western powers led by the United States and arguably made Eurocentric modernity obsolete. Exemplified by the economic and political developments in reform era China, this emerging pattern of modernity, or “global modernity” as Arif Dirlik terms it, does not imply the “delinking” of non-Western societies from the capitalist world, as the radical proponents of dependency theory had proposed earlier; instead, it suggests their participation in the global economic order without compromising their sovereignty and yielding to the lingering hegemony of Western powers (Dirlik 2007, 146–148). Global modernity, in this conception, denotes the growing economic interconnection among all nations in the age of globalization, while allowing for and legitimating cultural pluralism in the increasingly multicentered world. As China enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are no convincing signs that suggest future development in the direction desired by neoliberal intellectuals. Nor can it be said that China’s economic and political system or its practices during the reform era had stabilized to form a definite model to shape the country’s future course of development or to influence the rest of the non-Western world. There is no doubt that as China has globalized its economy and become a manufacturing center in the world, it is bound to play a more active and autonomous role in shaping the emergent world order; given its economic and demographic size, its geopolitical situation, and its historical and cultural heritage, China’s development in the future will be necessarily different from the experiences of the former Soviet Union and other socialist states in East Europe, who have been on the verge of Western civilization historically and ready for conversion to the economic and political forms of the core areas of Europe, and it would also be different from the experiences of China’s East Asian neighbors, who developed under the aegis of U.S. hegemony in the Cold War years.

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Therefore, it is not unlikely that China will witness the rise of a new pattern of modernity that does not resemble the historical and contemporary realities of other newly industrialized and democratized societies. However, this does not mean that the emergent “China model” will build its viability and validity solely on China’s cultural traditions or its existing political and economic arrangements, for the latter are only transitional and temporary in nature. Nor does it mean that China’s future course of development will be free of influences from existing models offered by the “developed” political and economic entities, given the context of globalization in which it is taking place and the impossibility for China to return to its state of seclusion prior to the reform era. In their search for a more feasible scheme for comprehending China’s past experiences and its evolving realities and hence a more valid master narrative of modern Chinese history, historians do not have to limit their attention to the external and internal challenges that define the economic and political developments in today’s China, to which the neoliberal intellectuals and their opponents have attempted to offer their respective solutions. More important than temporary imperatives are the challenges that will confront China after it has achieved the immediate goals of development or modernization; central to them will be issues arising from China’s response to its ever-changing geopolitical setting and environmental constraints, and from its engagement with the rest of the world in dealing with challenges of greater magnitude that confront all of humanity and entail collaborative endeavors by all nations. To comprehend both short- and long-term developments as well as the ultimate goal of modern Chinese history, one has to let go of the existing schemes of historical representation, be they neoliberal or revisionist, and to construct a new narrative of modern China grounded on a nonteleological, within-time investigation of China’s past as well as an open-ended reading of its contemporary and future developments, which transcends any presumed ideologies and conjectures.

Notes

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. Chinese historians use two terms, jindai and xiandai, to refer to the “modern” period in Chinese history. While both terms are rendered as “modern” in English, jindai in Chinese historiography typically refers to the period from the Opium War of 1840 to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, while the term xiandai means the period from 1919 to 1949. In the past few decades, however, people have increasingly used Zhongguo jindaishi or Zhongguo jinxiandaishi to describe Chinese history from 1840 to 1949. For convenience of discussion, this book also uses the terms “modern China,” “modern Chinese history,” and “modern history” to refer to the same period (1840–1949) when discussing Chinese historians’ representations of China in this period. My own definition of modern Chinese history is much broader and more flexible in terms of spatiality and temporality, as will be explicated in this and the last chapter. 2. A number of studies on Chinese historiography in the twentieth century have been published in the past two decades. The most notable among them include Wang Xuedian 1996; Zhang Shuxue 1998; Zeng Yeying 2000; Luo Zhitian 2001; Zhang Jianping 2003; and Zhang Haiping and Gong Yun 2005. 3. We thus find a dialectical relationship between power and truth in the production of historical knowledge in modern China: history and ideology worked together to empower the people involved in political contention through the making of a discourse in which ideology was internalized to build group solidarity and guide collective action; the reconfiguration of power relations in turn shaped the authority of historical knowledge by enthroning the very version of history favored by the triumphant force. 4. The essentiality of narrative to the writing of history is best illus279

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trated by Benedetto Croce’s famous dictum “Where there is no narrative, there is no history” (cited in White 1987, 28). 5. For Chinese historians before the twentieth century, writing about the past was never as problematic as in modern (and postmodern) days. Beginning with Confucius’ writing of Chunqiu (The spring and autumn annals), the official historiography of the subsequent dynasties mainly took the form of chronicles; the historian only needed to record events, which might be mutually related or totally unrelated, according to the sequence of their occurrence, and he was expected to record faithfully what happened regardless of the ruler’s opinions. He would not put together the related facts to produce a story; it was up to the reader to find the story from the chronologically arranged events. Later, for convenience of reading or for the purpose of “assisting in government” (zizhi), historians gleaned from the chronicles the facts surrounding a major event to form a complete story; a history book thus compiled, in a style known as jishi benmo (separate accounts of important events), comprised hundreds of such stories. Although the historian who produced the jishi benmo might add a few words at the end of each story to comment on it, he would not add to his new compilation any fact not found in the original chronicles or delete facts included in the chronicles from his jishi benmo history to reflect his personal perspectives or bias; he was supposed to be faithful to the original chronological records, for his only job was to rearrange the facts recorded in the chronicles to form separate stories. The stories in the jishi benmo histories did not have to have a consistent theme or themes to bring them together. In other words, there was no master narrative to govern the stories contained in the book as a whole, although the preoccupation with moral didacticism, especially the exhortation of the Dao (the idea of an immanent normative order) and Tianming (the Mandate of Heaven), was a constant theme in the chronicles and stories of the jishi benmo (see Schwartz 1996; Schneider 1996; Xiaoqing Lin 1999; Chun-chieh Huang 2007; Q. Edward Wang 2007). Chronicle and story, according to Hayden White, are the primitive elements in historical accounts (1973, 5). According to E. H. Carr, history differs from chronicle precisely because it has a metanarrative in which discrete historical facts are interconnected (see Evans 1997, 194). 6. In his seminal work on the historical writings and philosophies of history in nineteenth-century Europe, White distinguished four major “modes of emplotment” that shaped the historical narratives in the works of the historians and philosophers he studied: namely, romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire (1973, 7–11). 7. The “plots” thus produced in a history narrative were no different from the plots found in a literary work, for both are products of the authors’ imagination. But there is a fundamental difference between the two kinds of writing. A historian may freely select and arrange the individual facts

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pertaining to his or her story to produce a desired, meaningful narrative, and he or she may be able to misrepresent the facts to reflect a bias, but nevertheless he or she cannot alter or fabricate the facts per se, whereas a fiction writer is free of restrictions regarding known or unknown events that actually happened in the past. Thus, although the historian’s narrative is never identical to history itself or to realities in the past, the representation is nevertheless based on the facts screened from historical sources. It thus makes sense to argue that “just because narratives are human creations does not make them all equally fictitious or mythical” (Appleby et al. 1994, 235). 8. The result was a revived tension between the two groups of historians. The vanishing generation of revolutionary historians and the emerging “New Left” historians condemned modernization historiography as an ahistorical construct, speaking for imperialism, at odds with the patriotic spirit, and fundamentally detrimental to the CCP’s historical legitimacy; the modernization historians, steadily growing in number and predominant at the turn of the twenty-first century, denounced their opponents as conservatives obstinately ignoring both the historical realities of pre-1949 China and the new realities in the post-Mao era.

CHAPTER 2: ORIGINS OF THE MODERNIZATION NARRATIVE 1. For a good discussion on the development of a linear, progressive history of China as an imaged nation-state in the early twentieth century, see Duara 1995, 17–50. 2. Jiang’s work directly or indirectly influenced the postwar scholarship on modern China in the United States. John King Fairbank, a leading figure in modern China studies during the 1950s through the 1970s, started his study of modern Chinese history under the mentoring of Jiang at Tsinghua University in the 1930s. He later acknowledged Jiang’s influences on his own understanding of some of the basic issues of modern Chinese history. In a public speech on his 1972 visit to China, for instance, Fairbank expressed his debt as a “student” to Jiang, his “teacher” who had led him into the field of modern Chinese history in 1930s (Fairbank 1982, 91). Reviewing Fairbank’s career as a “groundbreaking China historian in the U.S.,” Yu Ying-shih emphasized Jiang’s influence in shaping Fairbank’s basic conceptions of China’s foreign relations in the modern period (Yu Ying-shih 2006, 432, 440). 3. According to Wu, democracy was possible only when the following conditions were met: multiple political parties, free debate, suffrage, rule by the majority party, and regular elections. All these conditions, he contended, could be prepared only through educational and peaceful methods (Wu Jingchao 1935, 17–18).

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4. Hence Hu Shi stated in 1933: “My own reasoning and academic training both prevent me from proposing a war of resistance. I highly respect those heroes who have fought for the motherland at the risk of their own lives. But my conscience forbids me to use my pen to require that everyone has to fight fiercely the most brutal modern weapons with his blood and flesh” (1933b). 5. In his 1932 essay “The Future of Chinese Politics,” for example, Ding Wenjiang requested that the Nationalist government “absolutely respect the liberty of speech and thinking of the people” (1932b, 3–4). Qian Duansheng claimed in 1930: “Our pursuit of democracy is unlimited, and we are quite certain that a dictatorship that is against democracy will be doomed in the end” (1930, 50).

CHAPTER 3: ORIGINS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE 1. While condemning Lin for his irresponsibility, Jiang admired Qishan for his realistic diplomacy. Qishan, as the governor-general of Northern Zhili province, had insisted on conciliation with Britain; he later replaced Lin as the Qing court’s commissioner to deal with the British. Because of his dismantling of the coastal fortress in Guangdong and signing of a humiliating treaty with the British, Qishan was later labeled one of the few notorious traitors (maiguozei) in modern Chinese history. In Jiang’s view, however, Qishan was among the few during the Opium War who “knew clearly the strength of the foreigners and the weakness of China” (Jiang Tingfu 1939, 23). 2. Fan, to be sure, did not overlook the many problems that beset the Taiping Rebellion and led to its demise, including factional struggles among top Taiping leaders, conservative military strategies, and Hong’s own “feudal” practices. Fan thus held that “it is dubious whether there was any idea of equality in the worship of God under the regime of the Hong group” (Fan 1949, 162). Such problems of “factionalism, conservatism, and hedonism,” Fan explained, were inextricable from the “narrow-mindedness, conservativeness, and selfishness characteristic of the peasant class” (ibid., 163). 3. Mao celebrated the publication of the first volume in Yan’an in September 1941 by treating Fan to a meal and praising this book: “Our party has accomplished one more major task in Yan’an. By publishing such a scientific work, we Communists have gained the right to speak on our country’s thousands of years of history” (Chen Qitai 2000, 91). 4. Because the immediate purpose of this book was to support Mao in his dispute with the Nationalist government over their attitudes toward Japanese aggression, Fan paid excessive attention to the two Opium Wars in his book. Unlike Zhang Wentian, who only mentioned them in passing in his History of Revolutionary Movements in Modern China, and unlike

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Li Dingsheng, who spent only twenty-four pages or roughly one-thirteenth of his book on those two events, Fan devoted nearly one-third (121 pages) of his 420-page Zhongguo jindaishi to the discussion of the two wars. This disproportional weight given to China’s foreign relations reflects Fan’s very intention in writing the book. 5. Li accepted Marxism when he was an undergraduate student in sociology at Shanghai University in 1925 and joined the Communist Party two years later. He served as a secretary of an underground party organization in Shanghai until 1931, when the Nationalist government destroyed the party network in Shanghai and Li lost contact with the Party. Thereafter, Li worked as a writer, authoring a number of books on Marxism and modern Chinese history. In 1945, he joined other leading liberal intellectuals to establish the Chinese Association for Promoting Democracy and openly criticized Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. After the communist revolution, he became a history professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai while remaining politically active as a noncommunist “democrat” in his capacity as a council member of the Association for Protecting Democracy and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference until his death (Hu Fengxiang 2004). 6. Li Dingsheng, for example, explained that his narrative began with the Opium War rather than “the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing” because the latter only indicated the inception of a new dynasty, whereas the Opium War signaled the beginning of the “invasion of international capitalism into China” that led to significant changes in China’s society, economy, politics, and culture (1949, 3). 7. Li’s narrative, for instance, focuses on two parallel processes prevailing in China after the Opium War: the “process of China’s degeneration to a semicolony and the destruction of its national economy by imperialism,” on the one hand, and the “restructuring of social classes and the rise and fall of revolutionary struggles,” on the other (Li Dingsheng 1949, 2–4). Zhang Wentian stressed the same processes in his book, while he paid primary attention to revolutionary movements, ranging from the Taiping Rebellion to the Nationalist Revolution in the 1920s, as the title of his book indicates. Beginning with the Opium War, his account of modern Chinese history underscores two major trends: “one is the Qing government’s subjugation under the pressure of foreign capitalism and its gradual dependence on foreign capitalism to sustain its rule; the other is movements against the Qing government by the people who suffered the oppression and exploitation of foreign capitalism and the Qing rulers” (Zhang Wentian 1987, 17–18). The commonalities between the earlier Marxist writings of Li and Zhang and Fan’s later interpretation are evident. 8. Named after the region (Zhedong, or eastern Zhejiang province) where it existed, this school included famous scholars ranging from Huang

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Zongxi (1610–1695) in the early Qing period to Zhang Binglin (1869–1936) in the twentieth century. Huang Zongxi was a leader of the school in the early Qing period who resisted the Manchu conquest with a local corps for years and rejected the Qing court’s repeated appointments after the demise of the Ming, remaining loyal to the Ming for the rest of his life while authoring treatises on current politics and the classics. Zhang was a leading scholar in the study of ancient classics and literature in the late Qing period. Imprisoned in 1903 for two years for anti-Manchu words, he later joined the revolutionaries’ attempt to overthrow the Qing dynasty and concentrated on studying and popularizing traditional Chinese learning for the rest of his life. 9. The only “Marxist” book that he had read before joining the CCP was the Chinese translation of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and The Selected Works of Stalin (Jindaishi Yanjiu Suo 1979, 359). 10. For a detailed discussion of the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky and between their respective supporters in China, see Dirlik 1978, 63–69, 85–90. 11. According to Stalin and his supporter Nikolai Buhkarin (1888– 1939), China in the 1920s remained predominantly a feudal society; the Nationalist revolution in China, therefore, was a bourgeois democratic revolution to eliminate feudal remnants in rural China, including the military governors and warlords (Stalin 1927). By defining the Nationalist Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, Stalin had a practical purpose, that is, to allow the Chinese Communists to join the Nationalists in the struggle against the warlord government and to turn China into an ally to the Soviet Union after the revolution. Stalin’s view dominated the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Comintern after a dispute in 1925 with Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), leader of the left opposition, and his supporter Karl Radek (1885–1939); the latter believed that China was already a “society dominated by merchant capital” (Radek 1929, 249–252). For Trotsky, the only choice for the Chinese Communists was a socialist revolution that would attack not only the imperialists and landlords, but also the capitalists. 12. Mao’s dissatisfaction with the Yan’an Institute of Marxism and Leninism was especially evident in his essay “Reform Our Study” (Mao Zedong 1977, 756). 13. The ideas contained in Mao’s theory of a “new democratic revolution” were not entirely new. The Comintern, for example, had observed in its resolution in May 1927 that after Chiang Kai-shek’s April 12 coup d’état the Chinese revolution had changed from one based on “a revolutionary united front of workers, peasants, the national bourgeoisie, and the urban petty bourgeoisie” to a new one based on an “alliance of the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty bourgeoisie.” After the national bourgeoisie retreated from the united front, “the proletariat’s leading role has been enhanced” (Zhang Wentian 1987, 283).

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14. Symbolic of this shared interest was Fan’s presenting to Mao the multivolume Biji xiaoshuo daguan (A comprehensive compilation of jottings and stories [of past dynasties]), which Mao liked so much that he kept it with him for the rest of his life; it remains displayed in his study today (Chen Qitai 2001). 15. As a philologist-turned-historian, Fan emphasized the research of evidence and paid great attention to the details of his account. This was why his Zhongguo tongshi jianbian, designed as a concise textbook of about 100,000 characters, was eventually enlarged to a multivolume work. Mao, as an intellectual with a penchant for reading history books, appreciated Fan’s style and instructed Fan “to write as much as [he] can and not to be restricted by the number of characters” (Cheng Long and Yang Liqin 2004). Fan did not disappoint Mao. In Mao’s view, Fan’s books “have lots of materials and make people willing to keep reading” (Chen Qitai 2000, 183). 16. However, Fan never revised that book any further; nor did he write the second volume of Zhongguo jindaishi that would cover the period after the Boxer Rebellion as he had originally planned. Instead, he returned to his earlier project on ancient Chinese history and focused on writing and revising his multivolume Zhongguo tongshi jianbian. 17. On National Day (October 1) in 1966, Fan was invited to attend a celebration on the Tiananmen rostrum. Upon seeing him at the eastern end of the terrace, Mao greeted Fan from a distance while approaching him, saying: “Comrade Fan Wenlan! Someone wanted to take you down, but I won’t let it happen!” In this way, Mao showed his protection of Fan. Thereafter, no radicals criticized or disturbed him (Chen Zhongyuan 2000, 153).

CHAPTER 4: THE MAKING OF A NEW ORTHODOXY 1. To attack the Guomindang’s “sabotage” of the united front during the War of Resistance against Japan, for example, Fan deliberately depicted Sun Quan, the ruler of Wu (one of the Three Kingdoms in the third century), as a “completely dark figure” for his reluctance to ally with Shu to jointly resist Wei. To condemn the Guomindang’s “rule by secret agents,” Fan described Empress Wu of the Tang as a “bad” ruler for relying on secret agents to deal with her enemies (Fan Wenlan 1954, 19–20). 2. A party member since 1938, Hu Sheng had worked for the Party as a writer and an editor on a number of journals and newspapers. His most important publication before 1949 was Diguozhuyi yu Zhongguo zhengzhi (Imperialism and Chinese politics) (Hu Sheng 1949). 3. Four textbooks on modern Chinese history for university-level courses were published in the late 1950s and early 1960s following the debate, and all of them adopted Hu Sheng’s periodization of the three revolutionary surges (see Lin Zengping 1958; Dai Yi 1958; Guo Moruo, 1962; and Jian Bozan 1964).

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CHAPTER 5: BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT 1. See also Weigelin-Schwiedrzik1996. 2. On how liberal intellectuals distinguished themselves from radicals in the 1950s and 1960s by their insistence on professional autonomy and intellectual independence, see Goldman 1981, 1–17. 3. According to the recollection of Xu Siyan, the editor’s office received Qi’s article in late 1962. After reviewing it, editor Ding Shouhe recommended its publication for its good writing style and persuasive arguments. At the instruction of Li Shu, the editor in chief, Ding then sent the article to Tian Jiaying, the secretary of Mao and supervisor of Qi, for further opinions. Tian’s reply: the issue raised by the article was worth discussion, and this kind of discussion was always valuable; however, Qi was not a good person, and the publication of his article should be postponed for a while. So publication of the article was delayed until August 1964 (Xu Siyan 2006, 21). 4. Mao once told Peng Zhen, head of the “five-person group for the Cultural Revolution,” in late September 1964: “There should be a limitation on criticizing academics; there cannot be indiscriminate criticism. In my opinion, three people, that is, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, and Fan Wenlan, are not allowed to be criticized. In addition, Jian Bozan is also included” (Su Shuangbi 2005, 9). Mao deliberately did not include Wu Han, the author of Hai Rui ba guan (Hai Rui dismissed from office). Two months later, at Mao’s instruction, Yao Wenyuan published an article that openly criticized Wu (Wang Xuedian 1998). 5. By that time, Peng Zhen and Lu Dingyi, who were in charge of Beijing’s party leadership and propaganda committee, respectively, as well as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who backed them, had all been ousted from their positions in the Party and the government. 6. Jian and his wife nevertheless committed suicide on December 18, 1966, to protest the repeated interrogations and threats of violence by a member of the investigation group in the case of Liu Shaoqi (San Mu 2006). 7. Wu Han suffered abuse and beatings by Red Guards at mass meetings and street parades from the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution and died in prison in 1969 at the age of sixty.

CHAPTER 6: CHALLENGING THE REVOLUTIONARY ORTHODOXY 1. For an illuminating discussion on how changing political climates shaped the historiography on the Boxer Uprising, see Wang Xuedian 2001. 2. The term xixue wei ti, zhongxue wei yong has different English translations. According to Li Shu’s own explanation, ti meant “content” (neirong), and yong meant “form” (xingshi) (Li Shu 1989, 54).

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3. In another article published in the same journal, Jiang and Huang further described the Self-Strengthening Movement as having “three evil consequences”: enabling the Qing court to last for another five decades, creating a semicolonial order in China, and leading to the genesis of an interest group that later developed into the bureaucratic-comprador bourgeoisie buttressing Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang regime (Jiang Duo and Huang Yifeng 1980). 4. The debates on the reform movement in the late Qing period were treated as struggles between Marxist and non-Marxist historians; articles that approved of the Self-Strengthening Movement and the Constitutional Movement were seen as evidence of “spiritual pollution” in historiography (Chen Tiejian 1998).

CHAPTER 7: FROM REVOLUTION TO MODERNIZATION 1. Inspired by Thomas Kuhn (1962), historians in the field of modern Chinese history have tended to use the term “paradigm” when discussing disciplinary issues that concern theoretical constructs and widely accepted assumptions in the field. Arif Dirlik thus refers to the Marxist theory of historical materialism or the modernization theory as a “paradigm theory” (Dirlik 1978 and 1996). Philip Huang describes the challenges of a series of the characteristic phenomenon in modern Chinese history to the shared assumptions in the field as a “paradigmatic crisis” (P. Huang 1991). By “paradigm” in this study I mean not only the theoretical constructs that guide the perceptions of thematic issues in the field, but also the conceptions and approaches shared by historians to investigate empirical issues. 2. Based on my search of the China Academic Journals Full-Text Database (www.cnki.net), more than 420 articles whose titles contain the word jindaihua ([early] modernization) were published by 1999, and 308 such articles were published between 2000 and 2007. Articles on Chinese history and historiographical theory that contain the word xiandaihua (modernization) in their titles amounted to 643 by 1999 and 774 between 2000 and 2007. 3. In the preface of the book, Lei Yi, a historian of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and associate editor of Jindaishi yanjiu (the most authoritative journal in the field), explained well the background in which the paradigmatic revolution took place: “The coincidence of the rethinking of the one hundred years of history of modern China with the ‘new era’ of reform and opening up was by no means accidental. The change of the ‘ethos of the era’ from radical ‘revolutions’ and ‘struggles’ to the pursuit of modernization, though occurring too late, created the precondition for the rise of the ‘new paradigm’ of reexamining the hundred years of China from the ‘modernization’ perspective. To be sure, the ‘old paradigm’ that centered on ‘peasant

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rebellions’ was the necessary and legitimate product of a social phase when ‘revolutions,’ ‘seizure of power,’ ‘resistance,’ and ‘struggles’ were the ‘ethos of the era.’ This kind of rethinking and reflection on history at different times is what we call a ‘paradigmatic transformation’ ” (Feng Lin 1998, 2). 4. The most active of them included Sun Liping (1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992), Yan Lixian (1988a, 1988b, and 1988c), and Li Huaiyin (1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1993a, 1993b, and 1994). 5. Determined to break with Maoist socialism, Deng not only launched capitalist reforms in China, but also openly advised leaders of Third World countries visiting Beijing not to experiment with socialism and not to adopt a seclusion policy (Deng 1993, 261, 290). 6. But Deng’s commitment to the long-term goal of China’s democratization showed his essential congruence with the modernization theorists’ assumption about political development (Deng 1993, 194–197). The convergence between Deng Xiaoping’s visions of modernization and the central theses of modernization theory in the West explains why Chinese scholars studying Deng’s thinking tended to label his ideas as the “Chinese” version of modernization theory (Feng Ziyi 1997; Tong Jianting 1998; Ran Huizhen 2003). It also explains why modernization theory, once imported and absorbed into Chinese scholars’ writings, quickly gained popularity in studies of contemporary China. So influential were the concepts associated with the theory that they actually replaced the traditional Marxist concepts and methodology in reshaping Chinese scholarship in the late 1980s and the 1990s. 7. For a review of the various definitions of “modernization” in the Western literature, see Huntington 1971. 8. Luo Rongqu, in fact, was the most serious Marxist historian who tried to reconcile modernization theory and Marxism (see Luo Rongqu 1986 and 1989). 9. Because “modern history” ( jindaishi) in China was usually defined as the period from the Opium War of 1840 to the May Fourth Movement of 1919 or more recently to the completion of the communist revolution in 1949, historians of the modernization thesis tended to use the term jindaihua, rather than xiandaihua, to refer to the general trend in modern China. Although both were rendered as “modernization” in English, xiandaihua was widely used in China’s official propaganda and public discourse on modernization, as seen in frequently used phrases such as “the four modernizations” (si ge xiandaihua) or “socialist modernization” (shehuizhuyi xiandaihua), whereas jindaihua was strictly used to refer to the modernizing process before 1919 or 1949. Alternatively, some historians used the terms jindaihua and zaoqi xiandaihua (early modernization) interchangeably to refer to China’s modernization in the late Qing and Republican periods. 10. Behind that presumed dichotomy was the shanghui researchers’

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acceptance of the chambers of merchants in Western countries as the “ideal type,” against which they examined the Chinese shanghui and saw what it had obtained or failed to obtain. Thus, to demonstrate that the shanghui had become a “modern corporation” with “democratic characteristics,” the researchers looked for evidence from their constitutions, announcements, and regulations, and explained their similarities with their counterparts in the West. As Ma Min later admitted, however, many of those documents had been copied from the constitutions of the chambers of merchants in Western countries or Japan, and they were far from reflecting the realities and characteristics of the shanghui in China. In actuality, he pointed out, what shaped the operation of the shanghui was “material interests” and “personal ties” rather than the “democratic” formalities. The shanghui leaders, for example, were usually selected from the heads of local hanghui and merchant groups (shangbang) or prominent “gentry merchants” (shenshang) according to the amount of their wealth or social status, rather than through a democratic election in accordance with the shanghui constitution (Ma Min 2003).

CHAPTER 8: MASTER NARRATIVES IN CRISIS 1. In fact, Hu was so politically cautious that he was criticized for his allegiance to Hua Guofeng (Mao’s successor) and his leftist policies in the years following the death of Mao in 1976 regardless of Deng Xiaoping’s rising popularity in the Party and challenge to Hua’s leadership (Li Shenzhi 2001). 2. The same year, in the preface to the second volume of Hu Sheng quanshu (A complete compendium of Hu Sheng’s writings), he stated: “Since 1957, I have increasingly felt a contradiction that I had not encountered before in my writing life. It seemed that my writings were to a substantial extent only adapted to certain currents of thought rather than coming from deep at the bottom of my heart. What exactly was there deep in my heart was not very clear, but I felt that my mind conflicted somewhat with the prevailing currents. Now it seems to be that the contradiction emerged because I was unable to adapt myself to the “leftist” guiding ideas of the Party in the theoretical and ideological fields. But at that time I was unable to identify such “leftist” guiding ideas. Because I could not understand it, I was entrapped in the contradiction deeper and deeper. To comply with the currents, I wrote some articles that did not jibe with realities and theoretically were not well grounded. Writing such articles did not free me from the contradiction, but only made it even worse. Because of the contradiction, I felt lost in terms of the direction and goals of my writing” (Hu Sheng 1998b, 1–2). 3. Populist thinking, Hu wrote, was also evident in the “leftist” policies

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Notes to Pages 244–251

of CCP leaders (namely, Li Lisan and Wang Ming) in the early 1930s. The mistake made by Li and Wang, according to Hu, was that they confused the task of the “socialist revolution” against capitalism with that of the bourgeois “democratic revolution” against imperialism and feudalism when leftist CCP leaders proposed attacking the bourgeoisie and confiscating capitalist enterprises at the same time they started the democratic revolution in the cities. Hu further mentioned Mao’s criticism of the reemergence of populism in land reform in the late 1940s, as seen in the tendency to “absolute egalitarianism” in land redistribution and in the attempt to “destroy urban industry and commerce” by going to the cities to confiscate the properties of landlords who had left the countryside to avoid attack by peasants and who owned private businesses in the cities. Mao criticized such populist tendencies as “agrarian socialism” (nongye shehuizhuyi), an approach to practice socialism and avoided capitalist development by transforming the entire social economy into a “universal, egalitarian peasant economy” (Hu Sheng 1999a, 3–5). 4. As a CCP member, he maintained that he had “no regret” for what he had written; “the objective circumstances and subjective purposes,” Hu wrote, “made me willingly experience what I have experienced” (Hu Sheng 1999b). 5. In his reappraisal of the Taiping Rebellion, which had been elevated to the status of a precedent to the communist revolution in the revolutionary narrative, Pan Xulan, a professor at Fudan University, for example, condemned the rebellion as “a great upheaval, a great destruction, and a great retrogression” of Chinese society and responsible for the “loss of China’s last chance to modernize” (2000, 59). Pan praised Zeng Guofan’s suppression of the rebellion as a “major contribution to China” and described Zeng’s defeat of the rebels as “a victory of traditional [Chinese] culture over a heterodox, military regime that was barbaric, antihuman, and based on a wicked culture” (ibid., 264, 272). 6. Therefore, a major problem with social history in China, Yang contended, was historians’ application of concepts and basic assumptions formerly used in studies of political history to their own studies of social history, leading to inevitable misinterpretation and distortion of history. One such misused term, for example, was “patriotism” (aiguozhuyi). According to Yang, the ancient Chinese had only the concept of a unified universe under one single “culture”; they did not have the modern concept of “nation” or nation-state. The peasants in the Boxer Rebellion, he explained, only had the notion of being loyal to their community and, at most, to the Qing court; they did not have the notion of belonging to a country; thus, to apply the term “patriotism” to them could only be misleading (Yang Nianqun 2001a, 79). 7. For criticism by Chinese scholars on Yang’s classification of regional

Notes to Pages 255–267

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patterns as well as the evidence he used to substantiate his arguments, see Chen Meibao 2001 and Shen Dengmiao 2001. 8. For instance, in his own study of the celebration of the “birthday” of the sun on the nineteenth day of the third month in the lunar calendar, a custom widespread in the coastal areas of southeastern China in the Qing and Republican periods, Zhao found that the legendary birthday coincided with the date on which the last emperor of the Ming dynasty committed suicide. After examining the origins of the custom, Zhao concluded that the legend reflected the lingering loyalty of elites as well as ordinary people in those areas to the foregone Ming dynasty; the legend, while fictitious in itself, was “true” in reflecting the mentality of the Ming loyalists (Zhao Shiyu and Du Zhengzhen 1999).

CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION 1. E. H. Carr also stated that “the study of history is the study of causes” (1961, 113). Richard Evans, too, emphasized the central role of causal explanations in the construction of narratives (1997, 125). 2. Soon after its publication in 1985, Cohen’s book was introduced to China (Lin Tongqi 1986) and aroused the interest of Chinese historians. They found that Cohen’s criticism of American scholarship was not totally irrelevant to their own work: for several generations, since the early twentieth century, Chinese historians had borrowed Marxist or non-Marxist theories and concepts from the West to conceptualize the recent history of China, and their accounts, too, had centered on the role of Western influence, which was touted as the source of “modernity,” inspiring positive developments in the once isolated and stagnant China, or condemned as “imperialism” impeding China’s progress and therefore constituting the primary target of Chinese revolution. In Cohen’s words, Chinese historians were like Western historians in being “outsiders” to their own past (Cohen 1985, 197–198). Cohen’s call for more attention to regional and local histories, and to the thinking and activities of people at the lower level of society also struck a chord with Chinese historians because the latter, too, had tended to treat China as a monolithic entity and had focused on the activities of the ruling elites, ignoring local or regional variations and the experiences of people at the bottom of society. It is no wonder that Cohen’s China-centered history was well received among Chinese historians and to some extent inspired their growing interest in local and regional histories in the 1990s and early 2000s. 3. The Chinese translation of Duara’s book appeared in China in 2003. Compared to the excitement that Cohen’s book caused among Chinese readers fourteen years earlier, their reactions to Duara’s work were mixed. Overall, young historians who were dissatisfied with the existing

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paradigms welcomed Duara’s work that questioned the linear narrative, for they had been looking for alternatives to the so-called upper-case History produced by the mainstream grand narratives, and they had developed an interest in “lower-case histories” (popular cults, folklores, community customs, gender, and the like). But, as a Chinese critic complained, the case studies included in Duara’s book were not entirely convincing to them and explicative of the bifurcated history the author proposed, for his discussions draw on writings or representations of elites that help little in elucidating the histories of those who had been obliterated by the oppressive narratives (Li Meng 2003). For further criticism of Duara’s bifurcated history, see Qiu Wei 2004, Zhang Zhongmin 2006, and Xie Wei 2007.

Glossary

aiguozhuyi baijia zhengming bai zhi hei zi, tie zheng ru shan, wan jie bu zhong, bu zu wei xun bao bentuhua bianxue biangan Bing dian bogu bu chengshi buke cengceng chuandi chang gaodiao chaodai guojia chengxin chongyang meiwai Chunqiu congfen shijiehua dadao di wang jiang xiang dagunzi da lishi dangdai xueshu sichao yicong dangnei minzhu renshi dangnei zhishi fenzi Dao dapo wangchao tixi datong Dazhangfu dikang pai

ᝋ഻ѫ㗙 Ⲯᇦ⡝匤 ⲭ㍉唁ᆇˈ䩥䅹ྲኡˈᲊㇰн㍲ˈн 䏣⛪䁃 ‫؍‬ ᵜ൏ॆ 䚺ᆨ䚺ᒩ ߠ唎 㮴ਔ н䃐ሖ 㼌䃢 ኔኔۣ䚎 ୡ儈䃯 ᵍԓ഻ᇦ 䃐ؑ ጷ⌻჊ཆ ᱕⿻ ‫࠶ݵ‬ц⭼ॆ ᢃ‫ق‬ᑍ⦻ሷ⴨ ᢃỽᆀ བྷ↧ਢ ⮦ԓᆨ㺃ᙍ▞䆟਒ 唘‫≁ޗ‬ѫӪ༛ 唘‫⸕ޗ‬䆈ԭᆀ 䚃 ᢃ⹤⦻ᵍ億㌫ བྷ਼ བྷиཛ ᣥᣇ⍮

293

294

Glossary

Duli pinglun ershi shiji wenku “Eryue tigang” fang kong pao fan lijiao fan Qing fu Ming fansuozhuyi fan yangjiao faren fazhi fei lishizhuyi fengjian mixin fenqi fuyi fuyu gaichao huandai gaichao huandai geming gailiangzhuyi gaodiao gei chulu geming de qingnian shixue gongzuozhe geren zhuanzhi gongli gongli gongshihua guandu shangban Guangming ribao guanli jieji guanshang heban guanzhi guizishou Guofang Canyihui guohuo guoji tongze guoshi guoxue gu wei jin yong Haiguo tuzhi Hai Rui ba guan hanghui hanjian hanjian touzi heping jueqi hong

⦘・䂅䄆 Ҽॱц㌰᮷ᓛ Ҽᴸᨀ㏡ ᭮オ⛞ ৽⿞ᮉ ৽␵㼷᰾ 㑱⪓ѫ㗙 ৽⌻ᮉ ⌅Ӫ ⌅⋫ 䶎↧ਢѫ㗙 ሱᔪ䘧ؑ ࠶ᵏ ᫛ཧ ᇼ㼅 ᭩ᵍᨋԓ ᭩ᵍᨋԓ䶙ભ ᭩㢟ѫ㗙 儈䃯 ㎖ࠪ䐟 䶙ભⲴ䶂ᒤਢᆨᐕ֌㘵 ‫ػ‬Ӫሸࡦ ‫ֻޜ⨶ޜ‬ ‫ޜ‬ᔿॆ ᇈⶓ୶䗖 ‫ݹ‬᰾ᰕ๡ ᇈਿ䲾㍊ ᇈ୶ਸ䗖 ᇈ⋫ ࢺᆀ᡻ ഻䱢৳䆠ᴳ 䙾⚛ ഻䳋䙊ࡷ ഻༛ ഻ᆨ ਔ⛪Ӻ⭘ ⎧഻െᘇ ⎧⪎㖧ᇈ 㹼ᴳ ╒ྨ ╒ྨ九ᆀ ઼ᒣፋ䎧 ㌵

Glossary Hong lou meng Hongqi houjin houjin bogu jiandanhua jian fengjian jiu fan, jian dizhu jiu ma jiantao jiaohua jiaotiao jiaoyi jiben xiansuo jiefang sixiang jie gu shuo jin jieji guandian jinbu Jindai Zhongguo waijiao shi ziliao jiyao jindaihua jingshi jishi benmo jiuguo jiuguo jiumin jiuguo jiu minzu jiushi de minjian yundong jiuwang jueduihua kaiming kang Ri fan Jiang keguanxing kexuexing kurou huanbing ji lengchao refeng liang Jiang kang Ri Lishi yanjiu lishi zhuti lishizhuyi li zu yu pi maiguo maiguozei maiguozhuyi maosi mengmeizhuyi mieyang

㌵⁃དྷ ㌵ᰇ ৊Ӻ ৊Ӻ㮴ਔ ㉑௞ॆ 㾻ሱᔪቡ৽ˈ㾻ൠѫቡ㖥 ⃒䀾 ᮉॆ ᮉọ ࢯཧ สᵜ㐊㍒ 䀓᭮ᙍᜣ ُਔ䃚Ӻ 䲾㍊㿰唎 䙢↕ 䘁ԓѝ഻ཆӔਢ䋷ᯉ䕟㾱 䘁ԓॆ ㏃ц ㌰һᵜᵛ ᮁ഻ ᮁ഻ᮁ≁ ᮁ഻ᮁ≁᯿ 㠺ᔿⲴ≁䆺䙻अ ᮁӑ ㎅ሽॆ 䮻᰾ ᣇᰕ৽㭓 ᇒ㿰ᙗ 、ᆨᙗ 㤖㚹㐙‫ޥ‬䀸 ߧౢ⟡䄧 㚟㭓ᣇᰕ ↧ਢ⹄ウ ↧ਢѫ乼 ↧ਢѫ㗙 ・䏣ᯬᢩ 䌓഻ 䌓഻䋺 䌓഻ѫ㗙 䊼լ 㫉᱗ѫ㗙 ⓵⌻

295

296 minqi minxin minxin keyong minzhi minzhuzhuyi minzu zibenzhuyi neiyin Ouhua paiwaizhuyi pianju qinjian Qing gong wai shi qiuzhen qizhi quannengzhuyi quanpan xihua quyu shehui shi rangkai dalu, zhanling liangxiang rangwai bixian annei Renmin ribao renzhi rushi shangbian shanghui shangtuan Shehuizhuyi cidian Shenbao yuekan shijiao ji shixue shijie geming Shijie yuekan shimin gongshe shi shi qiu shi shixue geming Shujing sichao sishu siyi manma Taiping tianguo Tianming tongzhi jingji touxiang touxiang maiguo touxiang pai

Glossary ≁≓ ≁ᗳ ≁ᗳਟ⭘ ≁⋫ ≁ѫѫ㗙 ≁᯿䋷ᵜѫ㗙 ‫ޗ‬ഐ ↀॆ ᧂཆѫ㗙 偉ተ औܹ ␵ᇞཆਢ ≲ⵏ ≓䌚 ‫ޘ‬㜭ѫ㗙 ‫ⴔޘ‬㾯ॆ ॰ฏ⽮ᴳਢ 䇃䮻བྷ䐟ˈք么‫ޙ‬ᓲ 䇃ཆᗵ‫ݸ‬ᆹ‫ޗ‬ Ӫ≁ᰕ๡ Ӫ⋫ ‫ޕ‬ц к㐘 ୶ᴳ ୶ൈ ⽮ᴳѫ㗙䂎ި ⭣๡ᴸ࠺ ਢᯉণਢᆨ ਢ⭼䶙ભ ц⭼ᴸ࠺ ᐲ≁‫⽮ޜ‬ ሖһ≲ᱟ ਢᆨ䶙ભ ᴨ㏃ ᙍ▞ ⿱ຮ 㚶᜿䅮們 ཚᒣཙ഻ ཙભ ㎡ࡦ㏃☏ ᣅ䱽 ᣅ䱽䌓഻ ᣅ䱽⍮

Glossary tudi geming tuoxie waiyin wanjie bubao wannong wenbao Wen hui bao Wenxin diaolong Wuxun zhuan xiabian xiandaihua xianzhi xianjue zhe xiaokang xiao lishi Xihua Xin jianshe xin minzhuzhuyi xin minzhuzhuyi geming xin qimeng xin shehui shi xinxue xiucai xixue wei ti, zhongxue wei yong xuefa xueshu yiding yao wei zhengzhi fuwu xunhuan tao yangwu Yazhou zhoukan yi bian dao yi gu yu jin yi lun dai shi yi pan san sha Yijing yingshe yinyang wuhang yixia defang yong yi bian xia yuepingzu yu guoji jiegui yu waiwu yuwu zazhi fa zheng

൏ൠ䶙ભ ࿕঄ ཆഐ ᲊㇰн‫؍‬ ⧙ᔴ ⓛ伭 ᮷य़๡ ᮷ᗳ䴅喽 ↖䁃ۣ л㐘 ⨮ԓॆ ‫ݸ⸕ݸ‬㿪㘵 ሿᓧ ሿ↧ਢ 㾯ॆ ᯠᔪ䁝 ᯠ≁ѫѫ㗙 ᯠ≁ѫѫ㗙䶙ભ ᯠஃ㫉 ᯠ⽮ᴳਢ ᗳᆨ ⿰᡽ 㾯ᆨ⛪億ˈѝᆨ⛪⭘ ᆨ䯕 ᆨ㺃аᇊ㾱⛪᭯⋫ᴽउ ᗚ⫠྇ ⌻࣑ ӎ⍢䙡࠺ а䚺‫ق‬ ԕਔ௫Ӻ ԕ䄆ᑦਢ аⴔᮓ⋉ ᱃㏃ ᖡሴ 䲠䲭ӄ㹼 ཧ༿བྷ䱢 ⭘ཧ䆺༿ 䯡䂅㍴ 㠷഻䳋᧕䓼 ᗑཆ‫מ‬ ⿖‫מ‬ 䴌䂼䯕 ᮤ

297

298 zhengge xiandaihua Zhengzhi sixiang shi dagang zhenxiang zhi yangren Zhongguo jindaishi Zhongguo jinxiandai shi Zhongguo qingnian bao Zhongguo tese de shehuizhuyi Zhongguo tongshi Zhongguo tongshi cankao ziliao Zhongguo tongshi gangyao Zhongguo tongshi jianbian Zhonghua minzu de weida fuxing zhongjian shili zhongwang Zhongyang yanjiuyuan zhuan zhuti zibenzhuyihua zichanjieji xing de nongmin geming ziqiang zishu Zizheng xinbian zizhi Zouxiang gonghe Zouxiang weilai zujie

Glossary ᮤ‫⨮ػ‬ԓॆ ᭯⋫ᙍᜣਢབྷ㏡ ⵏ⴨ ࡦ⌻Ӫ ѝ഻䘁ԓਢ ѝ഻䘁⨮ԓਢ ѝ഻䶂ᒤ๡ ѝ഻⢩㢢Ⲵ⽮ᴳѫ㗙 ѝ഻䙊ਢ ѝ഻䙊ਢ৳㘳䋷ᯉ ѝ഻䙊ਢ㏡㾱 ѝ഻䙊ਢ㉑㐘 ѝ㨟≁᯿Ⲵ‫ٹ‬བྷᗙ㠸 ѝ䯃ऒ࣋ ᘐ⦻ ѝཞ⹄ウ䲒 ሸ ѫ乼 䋷ᵜѫ㗙ॆ 䋷⭒䲾㍊ᙗⲴ䗢≁䶙ભ 㠚ᕧ 㠚䘠 䋷᭯ᯠ㐘 䋷⋫ 䎠ੁ‫઼ޡ‬ 䎠ੁᵚֶ 』⭼

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Index

ahistoricism, 110, 145–151, 182, 184, 199, 202, 281n.8 Almond, Gabriel, 208 anarchism, 16, 171 Anti-Rightist Campaign, 152, 201 Appleby, Joyce, 5, 6, 9, 27, 281n.7 Autumn Harvest Uprising, 99, 101 Ba Jin, 245 Bernheim, Ernst, 57 bifurcated history, 266–267, 292n.3 Bing dian incident, 246–247 Black, Cyril, 208, 212, 217, 222 Boxer Uprising: Chen Gonglu on, 54, 55; contrasting views on, 187–192; Fan Wenlan on, 82–83; historiography on, 286n.1 (Ch. 6); Hu Sheng on, 113; Jiang Tingfu on, 47, 48; Li Shu on, 197, 198; Li Shiyue on, 172, 175, 176; in radical historiography, 168; Yang Nianqun on, 290n.6 Braudel, Fernand, 251 Breisach, Ernst, 27 Buhkarin, Nikolai, 284n.11 capitalismization, 214, 216–217 Carr, David, 8 Carr, E. H., 280n.5, 291n.1 CCP. See Chinese Communist Party chambers of commerce, 229, 288n.10 Chang Yansheng, 40 Chen Boda, 124, 134 Chen Dakai, 217 Chen Duxiu, 194, 241 Chen Gonglu, 44, 58, 60, 62, 72, 198; on modern China, 53–56, 67–68 Chen Meibao, 291n.7 Chen Qitai, 76, 94, 104, 282n.3, 285nn.14–15 Chen Xulu, 186

Chen Yinke, 137–138 Chiang Kai-shek: and the Communist Party, 85–86, 95, 101, 258; Fan Wenlan on, 79, 87, 107, 110, 136; Hu Sheng on, 270; Hu Shi and, 71; Jiang Tingfu on, 47, 76; and the middle force, 105, 269; and Xi’an Incident, 69, 256 China-centered history, 266–267 Chinese Communist Party: antagonism within, 19, 23, 104; in the civil war, 257–258; conflict with the Nationalists, 85, 86, 105, 190; failures of, 71–72; growth of, 34; history of, 116, 256; ideology of 185, 224; and intellectuals, 135, 164, 247; Mao on, 102; and the middle force, 270; and the revolutionary narrative, 17, 74, 105, 166, 240–242 civil society, 229–231 Civil War, 257 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 48 Clark, Elizabeth A., 5, 8, 10 Cohen, Paul, 15, 266, 291n.2 collaborator. See Han collaborator Comintern, 96–99, 284n.13 Communist Revolution: in early Marxist historiography, 96–97, 111; Fan Wenlan on, 76, 95; Hu Sheng on, 114, 239–244; Jiang Tingfu on, 65; jindaihua historians on, 216; Liang Shumin on, 72; liberal intellectuals and, 201–202; Li Shu on, 193, 195; Mao on, 102–103; and modern Chinese history, 31; in modernization narrative, 220–224, 234–235, 264; in open-ended history, 268–271 recent studies on, 258; in revolutionary discourse, 126, 188; in the revolutionary

333

334

Index

narrative, 10, 15, 17, 18, 26, 27, 216, 264 Confucianism, 226, 250, 252 Confucius, 141, 238, 280n.5 Constitutional Movement, 228–229, 287n.3 Croce, Benedetto, 280n.4 Cultural Revolution: historiographical revolution and, 21, 132–133, 158, 160–162, 168–169, 286n.7; ideologies of, 11; Li Shu on, 193; Mao and, 157, 162–163, 286n.4; and the New Enlightenment Movement, 170–172; radicalism of, 104, 151, 202, 262; reputation of, 204 Dai Yi, 118, 119–120 Darwinism, 16 democratization, 31, 221, 228, 288n.6 Deng Guangming, 149 Deng Liqun, 202 Deng Xiaoping, 179, 202, 209, 239, 244, 273, 286n.5, 288n.6 Ding Shouhe, 286n.3 Ding Wenjiang, 63, 64, 70, 282n.5 Ding Xueliang, 207, 208 Dirlik, Arif, 204, 276, 287n.1 disciplinization, 18–23, 111, 127, 132, 150, 263–264 Duan Qirui, 87 Duara, Prasenjit, 266, 281n.1, 291n.3 Durhkeim, Emile, 208 Elton, G. R., 5 empiricism, 57–58, 60, 250 emplotment, 11–12, 14, 18, 225, 262, 280n.6 enlightened dictatorship, 35 Enlightenment, 11, 188, 198 Europeanization, 38 Evans, Richard, 5, 9, 280n.5, 291n.1 Fairbank, John King, 281n.2 Fan Wenlan, 17, 19, 113, 124, 149, 164; on ahistoricism, 110, 128, 145, 285n.1; on Boxer Rebellion, 82–83, 187; education, 93–95; on foreign relations, 76–80; 83–85; and historiographical revolution, 136–138; on historiography, 85–88, 143–144; on Manchu-Han conflict, 89–92, 128; and Mao Zedong, 74, 86–87, 104, 108, 282n.3, 285n.14–15, 285n.17, 286n.4; on periodization, 121–124, 127; on revolutions and rebellions, 80–83; on Self-Strengthening Movement, 84–85, 129–130, 180–181; on Taiping rebellion, 282n.2

Feng Youlan, 42, 162 foreign concessions, 219 Foucault, Michel, 7 four modernizations, 209, 272–273, 276–277, 288n.9 Furet, François, 264 Fu Sinian, 57 Gao Hua, 239 gentry merchants, 226, 289n.10 globalization, 27, 30–32, 209, 236, 273–274, 276 Gong Shuduo, 221 Gong Yun, 279n.2 grand narrative: challenge to, 28–29, 248–249, 251–252, 255–260, 263, 265, 292; defined, 8; in Fan Wenlan’s writing, 76, 79; ideology and, 9, 262, 272; in Jiang Tingfu’s writing, 47; in Liang Qichao’s writing, 34; on modern Chinese history, 10; 11, 13–14, 18; on modernization, 24–26; reconstruction of, 267. See also master narrative Great Leap Forward: ahistoricism in, 146–150; and historiographical revolution, 21, 22, 132–141, 188; Mao and, 243; negation of, 141–143, 182; Peng Dehuai on, 153; radicalism of, 151; Zhang Wentian on, 108 Guo Moruo, 124, 136, 137–138, 142–143, 149, 164, 286n.4 Habermas, Jürgen, 229 Hai Rui, 159–160, 163 Han collaborator, 67, 79, 91, 105–107, 110, 186, 188, 196 Hart, Robert, 59 Hayes, Carlton J., 58 He Dajin, 220 He Yimin, 234 historicism, 5, 21, 24, 108, 145, 158 historiographical revolution, 21–23, 131, 132–169 Hong Chengchou, 156 Hong Xiuquan, 55, 81, 91, 106, 282n.2 Hou Yijie, 228 Huang Kai, 94 Huang, Philip, 249, 287n.1 Huang Yifeng, 184, 287n.3 Huang Yiliang, 118–119 Huang Zongxi, 284n.8 Hu Fuming, 217 Hundred Days’ Reform, 16, 47, 48, 113, 172, 174, 176, 197 Huntington, Samuel, 208, 288n.7 Hu Qiaomu, 202

Index Hu Sheng: on Boxer Uprising, 187–188; on communist revolution, 269–271; early career, 285n.2; and Hua Guofeng, 289n.1; leftist thinking of, 289n.2; on modernization, 206; on periodization of modern Chinese history, 112–118, 120–121, 127, 130, 176, 178, 195, 285n.3; on populism, 289n.3; on revolutionary historiography, 237–245; on SelfStrengthening Movement, 180–181 Hu Shi, 40–41, 62, 68, 70, 71, 126, 282n.4 ideology: and the disciplinization of historiography, 19–21, 120, 122, 125–128; in historical writing, 1–9, 11, 261–264, 267–268; in historiographical revolution, 22–23, 133, 138 ,145, 159, 163, 165–167, 169, 246; in Hu Sheng’s writing, 236– 239, 244; Mao and, 104–105, 109; in modernization historiography, 14–16, 24–27, 35, 210, 213, 220, 225, 235; in New Enlightenment historiography, 184–185, 193, 195, 200–203; of the post-Mao state, 274; and post-reform era historiography, 29, 250, 253, 255; in revolutionary historiography, 17–18. See also Maoism, Marxism, nationalism, neoliberalism, New Left Iggers, Georg G., 5, 27 Imperialism: Chen Gonglu on, 55; in early Marxist historiography, 88–90, 95, 96–98, 111; Fan Wenlan on, 76, 78, 80, 106, 122–123, 128–129; Hu Sheng on, 112, 238, 239–240, 270; Hu Shi on, 68, 116; Jiang Tingfu on, 49, 51–53; jindaihua historians on, 214, 216; Li Shiyue on, 174, 177; Mao on, 102, 114–115, 242; in modernization historiography, 13, 218, 220, 224, 225, 232, 235; and modernization theory, 210; in New Enlightenment historiography, 182, 185, 187–190, 192; in the periodization of modern Chinese history, 20, 118–119, 122–123, 127–129; in radical historiography, 166, 168; in revolutionary historiography, 15, 17, 221–222, 247, 264 industrialization, 15, 17, 31, 34, 41, 42, 43, 64, 68, 211, 221–222, 225, 243 intellectuals: communist, 244–245; and history-writing, 1, 4, 6–7, 10; in late Qing, 250; left-wing, 96, 109;

335 liberal, 11, 12, 16, 24, 35, 37–44, 48, 53, 62, 64, 86, 105, 241, 266; in the Mao era, 125–127, 133–135, 161–163, 165; neoliberal, 273, 275; in the New Enlightenment movement, 170–171, 177, 188, 194, 198, 200–203; New Left, 268; in the post-Mao era, 25, 30, 205, 207–209, 213, 223, 228, 235, 236; in the post-reform era, 247, 263; radical, 68–72

Jian Bozan: on ahistoricism, 145–148; on Boxer Uprising, 188; on dynastic histories, 142; on historicism, 148–151, 158; in historiographical revolution, 135–138, 160, 161–164; on historiography, 144–145; and liberalism, 201; on Li Xiucheng, 154 Jiang Duo, 181–183, 196, 287n.3 Jiang Qing, 155 Jiang Tao, 233–234 Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), 16, 24, 41, 53, 57, 60, 70, 72, 75, 79, 106, 176, 177, 198, 234, 282n.1; on Boxer Rebellion, 82; on China’s modernization, 45–52; on dictatorship, 61–62; on diplomatic history, 66–67; education, 45; on modernization, 213; professional career, 60–61; on Self-Strengthening Movement, 83–84; on Zeng Guofan, 87–88 Jin Congji, 116–118, 127 Kang Sheng, 156, 157 Kang Youwei, 46, 48, 250 Kautsky, Karl, 156 Kuhn, Philip, 287n.1 Langlois, Charles-Victor, 57 Lei Yi, 287n.3 Lenin, 199 Leninism, 284n.12 Levy, Jr., Marion, 208, 217 Liang Qichao, 23, 33–34, 39, 56, 57, 70, 241, 250 Liang Shuming, 39, 71, 269 liberalism, 2, 16, 23, 24, 37, 38, 70, 171, 200–203 Li Da, 241 Li Dingsheng (Li Pingxin), 88–93, 95–99, 108, 283nn.4–7 Li Hongzhang, 55, 83–84, 87, 113, 129, 175, 185, 186, 196, 246 Li Huaiyin, 210, 211, 212, 224, 226, 288n.4

336

Index

Li Na, 104 Li Rui, 245 Li Shenzhi, 245 Li Shiyue, 172–180, 192 Li Shu, 149, 192–203, 286n.1, 286n.3 Li Taifen, 56 Li Wenhai, 221 Li Xiucheng, 151–158 Lin Zexu, 48, 50, 54, 66–67, 79, 87, 89, 141, 282n.1 Liu Danian, 76, 90, 124, 153, 221 Liu Shaoqi, 151, 157, 172, 286nn.5–6 lower-case history, 3, 251–252, 271, 292n.3 Lu Dingyi, 160, 286n.5 Luo Ergang, 151–152, 155 Luo Fuhui, 217, 222 Luo Rongqu, 207, 288n.8; on history of modernization, 211–213; on modernization theory, 210 Luo Shuhui, 232 Luo Zhitian, 279n.2 Ma Min, 230, 289n.10 Manchurian Incident, 34, 65, 86, 256 Mao Dun, 286n.4 Mao Haijian, 218–219 Mao Zedong: on Chinese socialism, 125; on contradiction, 114–115, 118, 122; and Fan Wenlan, 74, 75, 86, 94, 103, 108; and historiographical revolution, 190; in intra-party power struggle, 17, 22; and Liang Shuming, 71; and Liu Shaoqi, 151; and Marxist historiography, 101; on populism, 242; pragmatism of, 11 Mao Zedong Thought. See Maoism Maoism: liberal intellectuals and, 133, 150; and the New Enlightenment movement, 171, 200–201; in post1949 historiography, 2, 18–21, 272; and post-Mao reforms, 204, 244, 263; in radical historiography, 6, 9, 21–23, 180; in revolutionary historiography, 16–18, 99–104 Marxism, 9, 11, 24, 133, 165–166, 199–200, 203, 215, 239, 242–243, 283n.5 Marxist historiography: before 1949, 6, 10, 74–109, 133; defined, 23; Hu Sheng on, 243; on imperialism, 55; Li Shu on, 195; and modernization historiography, 207, 213, 214, 218, 221, 223, 226, 228; post-1949 disciplinization of, 21, 110–131; in the post-reform era, 246, 253; Qin Benyu on, 158, 160 master narrative, 2–3, 8–9, 13, 14, 27,

29, 206, 217, 224–225, 236–237, 254–255, 258–259. See also grand narrative May Fourth Movement, 19; and definition of modern Chinese history, 279n.1, 288n.9; Enlightenment discourse in, 38, 188, 193; Fan Wenlan on, 81, 103; liberal intellectuals in, 170; radical heritage of, 225; radical intellectuals in, 194 Meiji Restoration, 182 Merton, Robert F., 249 middle force, 105, 241, 270–271 middle-range theory, 248–251 missionary schools, 219–220 modern Chinese history: definitions of, 1–3, 31–32, 279n.1. See also grand narrative, master narrative, periodization modernization: definitions of, 213–214, 288n.9; discourse on, 35–42; as grand narrative, 10–11, 14, 15–16, 17–19, 24, 26–27, 28, 34, 47, 52, 56–57, 72, 74, 85, 108, 176–177, 221, 236, 244, 245–246, 264, 268, 273; historiography, 24–26, 33–73, 74, 204–235, 246, 249, 281n.8; as paradigm, 24, 203, 204–205, 220, 231, 263; theory, 6, 11, 24, 42–44, 203–204, 206–214, 217, 229, 231–234, 235, 236, 275, 287n.1, 288n.6, 8 Morse, Hosea Ballou, 59 Muzhang’a, 77, 79, 87 narrative: 279n.4; construction of, 9, 261–264; deconstruction of, 264–267; in history-writing, 8. See also grand narrative, master narrative nationalism, 2, 33, 37–38, 46, 95, 104, 108, 109, 171, 222, 224 Nationalist government: Fan Wenlan and, 94, 104, 282n.4 (Ch. 3); Hu Sheng on, 270; Jiang Tingfu and, 45, 60, 61, 64, 65, 67, 86, 106; Liang Shumin on, 269; liberal intellectuals and, 10, 69, 70–71, 133, 282n.5; and the Soviet Union, 257–258 Nationalist Revolution, 52, 76, 96, 97, 100, 223, 270, 283n.7, 284n.11 neoliberalism, 236, 245–246 New Democracy, 238, 242–243, 270 New Democratic Revolution, 102–103, 113, 114, 240, 242, 270, 284n.13 New Enlightenment, 24, 170, 193–195, 197–200, 203, 204

Index New Fourth Army, 94 New History, 6, 57 New Left, 9, 268, 281n.8 New Policies, 16, 225, 226–229, 271 new social history, 28–30, 253 Nian Rebellion, 55 Ningdu meeting, 99 Northern Expedition, 34 objectivity: Fan Wenlan on, 130; Jian Bozan on, 146, 148; in liberal historiography, 24; in Marxist historiography, 18, 21; in post1949 historiography, 150, 167, 263; in post-reform historiography, 254, 256; in radical historiography, 23, 75; in traditional philology, 107; in Western historiography, 5–6, 59 Old Democratic Revolution, 103, 113, 114 Opium War: as the beginning of China’s modern history, 36, 39, 49, 213, 218, 238, 279n.1, 283n.6; China’s defeat in, 67; early Marxist historiography on, 88; Fan Wenlan on, 77–78, 80, 87, 90, 282n.4; Jiang Tingfu on, 76–77; Mao Haijian on, 218–219; origins of, 50, 54 optimism, 12–13, 14, 25, 29, 178, 211, 213, 234–235 Ouyang Junxi, 57, 60 Pan Xulan, 290n.5 paradigm, 4, 31, 292n.3; definition of, 287n.1; modernization, 24, 220; revolutionary, 185; in new social history, 253–254; transformation of, 203, 204–207, 231, 263, 287n.3 Parsons, Talcott, 208 Peking University, 139, 149, 162 Peng Dehuai, 153, 160 Peng Zhen, 160, 286nn.4–5 periodization, 19–20, 103, 111, 112, 114–128, 131 pessimism, 12, 14, 25, 29, 72, 178, 234, 254, 275 Ping Ying Tuan, 80 philology, 5, 20, 57, 75, 93–95, 104, 107–109, 137, 285n.15 populism, 241–243, 289n.3 Prince Gong, 83 principal contradiction, 114–115 professionalization, 3, 20, 132–133, 150, 263–264 Qian Duansheng, 63, 282n.5 Qi Benqu, 152–163, 189–191, 197, 286n.3

337

Qi Longwei, 178 Qishan, 67, 79, 89, 282n.1 Qiu Jin, 93 Radek, Karl, 284n.11 radicalization, 19, 21, 168, 234, 235. See also historiographical revolution Reform of 1898. See Hundred Days’ Reform Results-driven history, 271 revolutionary historiography. See Marxist historiography, revolutionary narrative revolutionary narrative, 10, 14; challenge to, 24, 26–28, 172, 174, 176–177, 216–218, 224, 228–229; decline of, 236–245, 246, 248, 259, 264, 269, 273; and the disciplinization of historiography, 19–21, 126, 127, 130; Fan Wenlan and, 17–18; Hu Sheng and, 113; origins of, 74–109; premises of, 16–17 Revolution of 1911, 174, 176, 229 Ricoeur, Paul, 8 Robinson, James Harvey, 58 romanticism, 12, 13, 19, 29, 75, 107–108, 130, 168, 234 romanticization. See romanticism Rostow, Walt W., 212 Rozman, Gilbert, 217 scholar-tyrants, 161, 162, 164, 165 Seignobos, Charles, 57 Self-Strengthening Movement: Chen Gonglu on, 55; contrasting views on, 180–187; Fan Wenlan on, 84–85, 129–130; Hu Sheng on, 113; Jiang Tingfu on, 46, 48, 51, 83–84; Li Shiyue on, 172, 173, 174, 176, 179; Li Shu on, 194, 196, 198; in modernization discourse, 36, 38; in modernization narrative, 16; refutation of, 287n.3 September 18 Incident, 86. See also Manchurian Incident Shen Dengmiao, 291n.7 Shen Zhihua, 257–258 Sheng Xuanhuai, 185 Sino-French War, 129, 176 Sino-Japanese War, 39, 46, 48, 176 skepticism, 13–14, 29, 254 Soviet Union, 38, 96, 125, 209, 236, 257–258, 276 Stalin, 96, 97–98, 125–126, 140, 199, 284nn.10–11 Sun Liping, 288n.4 Sun Shouren, 114, 127 Sun Yat-sen, 47, 48

338

Index

Taiping Rebellion: Chen Gonglu on, 55; and the debate on Li Xiucheng, 151–157; early Marxist historiography on, 92–93; Fan Wenlan on, 78, 80, 81, 87, 90–91, 123, 129, 282n.2; Hu Sheng on, 113, 188; Jiang Tingfu on, 48, 81; Li Shu on, 195, 198; Li Shiyue on, 172, 175–176; in the media, 246; Pan Xulan on, 290n.5; in the revolutionary narrative, 17 Tao Menghe, 40 teleology, 2, 3, 6, 9, 220, 243, 263–265, 267–268, 272, 277 thought reform, 60, 111, 126, 131, 133, 150, 165, 200 Tian Jiaying, 286n.3 Tian Zhengping, 220 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 208 total history, 251–252 tributary system, 50–51, 76–77 Trotsky, 284nn.10–11 Trotskyites, 96 Turner Jr., Henry A., 5 Unger, Jonathan, 11 United Front, 85, 98, 105, 146, 257, 284n.13, 285n.1 upper-case history, 3, 251–252, 292n.3 urbanization, 31, 43, 225, 231–234 von Ranke, Leopold, 5 Wang Hui, 171 Wang Jingwei, 87, 156 Wang, Q. Edward, 280n.5 Wang Renchen, 120 Wang Xuedian, 159, 194, 197, 279n.2 Wang Zhizhong, 191–192, 197 War of Resistance against Japan, 68, 72, 106, 109, 129, 146, 224, 270, 282n.4, 285n.1 Washington consensus, 275 Weber, Max, 208, 225, 226 Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, 286n.1 (Ch. 5) Wei Yuan, 50 Wen Wenhao, 71 Westernization: Li Shu on, 194, 197– 198; Luo Rongqu on, 210; in modernization discourse, 37, 38–42, 44; in modernization historiography, 25, 53, 55, 72; in revolutionary historiography, 82, 84–85, 129 White, Hayden, 8, 11, 225, 280n.5 Wholesale Westernization, 194, 198. See also Westernization

within-time, open-ended history, 268–272 Wu Han, 149, 163, 201, 286n.4, 286n.7 Wu Jingchao, 63, 71, 281n.3 Wu Sangui, 156 Xi’an Incident, 69, 256 Xiao Gongqin, 229 Xin Ping, 227 Xiong Yuezhi, 219 Xu Jilin, 217, 223 Xu Siyan, 286n.3 Xu Tailai, 183–185, 214–216 Yan Fu, 39, 56, 70 Yan Lixian, 288n.4 Yang Kuisong, 256–257 Yang Nianqun, 248–251, 253–255, 290nn.6–7 Yin Da, 164–165 Yin Shuixin, 56 Yuan Shikai, 87, 246 Yuan Weishi, 247 Yu Ying-shih, 281n.2 Yu Zixia, 219–220 Zeng Guofan: Fan Wenlan on, 87–88, 91–92, 107; Hu Sheng on, 113; Jiang Tingfu on, 106; Li Shiyue on, 175; and Li Xiucheng, 151, 154– 155; in post-Mao historiography, 246, 290n.5; in the Self-Strengthening movement, 182, 185, 196 Zeng Yeying, 279n.2 Zhang Binglin, 94, 284n.8 Zhang Dongsun, 241 Zhang Haipeng, 247, 279n.2 Zhang Jianping, 279n.2 Zhang Kaiyuan, 217 Zhang Mingjiu, 190, 197 Zhang Shuxue, 279n.2 Zhang Wentian, 88–93, 95–102, 108, 282n.4 Zhang Xueliang, 256 Zhang Zhongli, 232–233 Zhao Shiyu, 251–255, 291n.8 Zhedong School, 93–95, 109, 283n.8 Zheng Tiantian, 144–145, 149 Zhou Enlai, 256 Zhou Gucheng, 149 Zhou Yang, 153, 245 Zhou Yiliang, 149 Zhu Ying, 227, 229–230 Zunyi meeting, 100 Zuo Buqing, 190, 197 Zuo Zongtang, 175, 185

About the Author

Huaiyin Li is Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the author of Village Governance in North China, 1875–1936 (Stanford, 2005) and Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948–2008 (Stanford, 2009).

Production Notes for Li / Reinventing Modern China Jacket design by Mardee Melton Composition by Wanda China with display type in Adiro and text in Century Schoolbook Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc. Printed on 60 lb. House White Opaque, 500 ppi.