Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

352 Pages·2012·1.882 MB·English

by  Huaiyin Li

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 1
2 Origins of the Modernization Narrative: Nationalist
Historiography before 1949 33
3 Origins of the Revolutionary Narrative: Marxist
Historiography before 1949 74
4 The Making of a New Orthodoxy: Marxist
Historiography in the 1950s 110
5 Between the Past and the Present: The Radicalization
of Historiography under Mao 132
6 Challenging the Revolutionary Orthodoxy: “New
Enlightenment” Historiography in the 1980s 170
7 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

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 mod-
ern 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 disci-
pline. 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 prolif-
eration 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
viii Preface
(shixue weiji), in sharp contrast with the popularity of history in the
Mao era.
As expected, much of the first semester in my graduate pro-
gram 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 the-
sis, proved to be much more enriching and stimulating; what par-
ticularly intrigued me was how his Confucian values influenced his
business management and his planning of a comprehensive enter-
prise 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 fash-
ion, 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 pro-
gram. 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 pub-
lication. That book kindled my interest in the modernization con-
struct 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 sci-
ence 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 Bei-
jing University on his project of comparative study of China’s mod-
ernization 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 his-
torical perspective), eventually published in 1994.
After 1993, as a doctoral student at the University of California,
Preface ix
Los Angeles, and later as a faculty member at the University of Mis-
souri 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 empha-
sized in my own study of rural China a combination of macroanal-
ysis 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 inter-
acting 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 Microhis-
tory, 1948–2008 (Stanford, 2009). During these years Chinese histo-
riography also underwent tremendous changes, most noticeably the
triumph of the modernization paradigm, largely based on modern-
ization theory borrowed from the West, in place of the Marxist revo-
lutionary 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 the-
ories. 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 methodolo-
gies and perspectives that had shaped the interpretation of modern
Chinese history in twentieth-century China.
This project scrutinizes the varying interpretations of mod-
ern Chinese history in chronological order, spanning the Republi-
can 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
x Preface
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 comprehen-
sion 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, par-
ticularly 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, lib-
eral 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 writ-
ing 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 profes-
sional 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 writ-
ing on modern China, evident in the prevalence of the moderniza-
tion paradigm in the field.
In addition to offering to readers in the English-speaking world
a relatively systematic account of Chinese historiography on mod-
ern China and a unique approach to understanding the intellectual