A Companion to Chinese History

Michael Szonyi, Michael Szonyi

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118624579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Australie et de l'Océanie

A Companion to Chinese History presents a collection of essays offering a comprehensive overview of the latest intellectual developments in the study of China's history from the ancient past up until the present day.

• Covers the major trends in the study of Chinese history from antiquity to the present day
• Considers the latest scholarship of historians working in China and around the world
• Explores a variety of long-range questions and themes which serves to bridge the conventional divide between China's traditional and modern eras
• Addresses China's connections with other nations and regions and enables non-specialists to make comparisons with their own fields
• Features discussion of traditional topics and chronological approaches as well as newer themes such as Chinese history in relation to sexuality, national identity, and the environment

Chapter One
Introduction

Michael Szonyi

Everyone should know something about China’s history. One could justify this statement purely on the banal grounds of China’s considerable and rising importance in the contemporary world. But this approach ignores the many other more interesting reasons why the study of Chinese history is important and relevant today. New research on China’s past is challenging broadly held ideas about the norms of development of human societies and contributing to the emergence of whole new fields of historical knowledge. It is offering new ways of thinking about and new tools for addressing present‐day concerns such as the status of women, climate change, and rule of law. An understanding of Chinese history is essential moreover to making sense of critical political debates in China today. This Companion aims to provide a wide range of readers with an understanding of the state of the field of Chinese history, of some exciting recent developments, and of promising future directions. We hope the chapters will appeal not only to scholars of Chinese history but also to China specialists in other disciplines; to scholars who work on other parts of the world or with other disciplinary approaches that can be enriched by the new approaches presented here; to teachers, present and future, and to a general interested readership.

The Companion is timely because Chinese history—in the sense of the scholarly effort to understand China’s historical experience—is changing rapidly. Everyone knows about the dramatic changes that have taken place in China in the four decades since the death of Mao Zedong. But the remarkable transformation in the study of China’s past is less well known. Each of the chapters in this volume conveys this transformation from a different point of view. Together they convey the diversity and ferment of the field as a whole.

How is China’s history changing? First, core assumptions of the field have been shaken. These assumptions include some of the most high‐level generalizations—such as the idea that China’s history in the centuries before the arrival of the west was one of stasis and isolation—as well more specific arguments. Lu shows in her chapter for example that the history of women in China can no longer be told as a simple tale of unending suffering and victimization; Alford and Schluessel show in theirs that China, far from being an exemplar of imperial tyranny and rule by fiat, actually has a long tradition of law and legal culture. Some of these assumptions and generalizations about Chinese history, while largely abandoned by scholarly historians, linger in the general public, and the chapters of the Companion should also help teachers encourage their students to question what they think they know about China.

The ways historians work is changing. Among the most obvious of the changes is the explosion of source materials for the study of the Chinese past. Wilkinson’s chapter demonstrates that this is true for virtually any period and theme of Chinese history. For some periods and issues, new sources have been literally unearthed. For others, historians can now access sources that were previously unavailable. For still others the prevailing views of what constitutes a historical source have expanded. Tackett’s study of the changing character of Chinese elites about a thousand years ago offers an example of how new digital tools make possible new analyses, even using sources that have long been part of the historian’s toolkit.

The methodological approaches of previous generations of historians have been undermined. Rather than looking at China as a whole as the only meaningful unit of analysis, historians are proposing new geographical units—local society within China, the Eurasian landmass, even the entire world—to frame their analysis. Rather than accepting conventional approaches to periodization, meaning the way in which historians divide their subject of study into different periods, scholars are suggesting new ones.

The kinds of questions that historians are asking are also changing. In the light of the changes since the Deng Xiaoping era, questions that previously animated the field—Why did China fail to make the transition to rapid economic growth? How has Maoism reshaped the lives of the Chinese people?—today seem irrelevant, trivial, and even misguided.

New networks are developing among scholars working in different parts of the world, among historians of other parts of the world, and even among scholars in different disciplines. Chapters in this volume by Shiba, Ching, and von Glahn illustrate the fruitful interaction of Chinese historians in Japan, China, and the United States in the field of economic history. Perdue proposes even wider forms of collaboration, suggesting that the future of China’s environmental history lies in networks encompassing historians, natural scientists, and activists.

The field’s sense of its own significance and relevance is changing. For most of the twentieth century knowledge of China’s past seemed utterly irrelevant to China’s present and future. But a number of developments today, including the revival of popular religion described by ter Haar, and the revitalization of informal networks of Chinese Overseas described by Yu, challenge this assumption. New interest in global history (on which see Blue’s chapter) has generated new historical subfields in which China’s role cannot be ignored: environmental history (Perdue) and comparative legal history (Alford and Schluessel) are examples.

Historians are also exploring how China fits into the larger task of historical theorizing. Whereas previous generations of historians typically sought to show either how China stood outside the patterns of world history or fit squarely into theories of historical development derived from the western experience, Blue’s chapter shows younger scholars increasingly seeking to use China to challenge and ultimately to contribute to and revise broader theory. There is a growing sense that China’s historiographical significance lies not simply in confirming or refuting historical theories but in generating them.

Finally historical narratives and historical claims also figure in contemporary politics in interesting and distinctive ways, as Barmé and Szonyi show in their chapter. (This itself is nothing new; Chinese history has always been political, as several authors show.)

We have deliberately conceived of this Companion as speaking to a wide and diverse audience, even at the risk that not all of its parts are equally accessible or equally of interest to everyone. Among the goals of this work is to address the lag—mentioned above—between recent scholarly developments on one hand and the conventional wisdom and the picture to which students are typically exposed on the other. Popular understandings of China often confuse and conflate normative and empirical dimensions of China’s past. For example, the tribute system—a normative model for the conduct of foreign relations—is often equated with the actual conduct of foreign policy, an error that Wills’s chapter serves to correct.

The conventional wisdom and the picture given to college students converge in journalist Fareed Zakaria’s extraordinary account, cited in Blue’s chapter, of a meeting with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Lee handed Zakaria some photocopied pages from an old college textbook as a way to convey his ideas about Chinese distinctiveness. Specialist scholars might use these same pages to convey everything that was wrong with previous perspectives that oversimplified and essentialized Chinese culture and history.

The authors treat their subjects from a variety of approaches: chronological, historiographical, and at times even personal. The chapters are organized into three sections. Part I consists of overviews of the field from different perspectives: the changing sources for the study of the past (Wilkinson); China’s changing position in global and world history (Blue); the role of history in contemporary Chinese politics (Barmé and Szonyi); and three geographically defined chapters on the state of the field in Europe, China, and Japan (Zurndorfer, Ching, and Shiba). Why these three and only these three? Since North America is the default perspective for many of the contributors (and much of the expected audience) it did not seem helpful to give further representation to this already much over‐represented set of scholars. The absence of chapters on other continents is obviously a product of the unequal distribution of educational resources around the world; no comment is intended on the value of scholarship produced by scholars working in areas not represented in this Part.

The general conclusion that emerges from these chapters is that while scholarship is increasingly globalized, the world of Chinese history is far from flat. The trajectory of historical studies in different places has been profoundly different. To give one example from Zurndorfer’s chapter, unlike in the United States, where a ‘regional studies’ approach that was driven by Cold War funding priorities is the norm, in many European universities the philological tradition with which China studies began remains central. Important differences persist to the present day, rooted in different professional and intellectual constraints and institutional traditions.

Differences in approach mean different research outcomes, as becomes evident in the historiographical sections of later chapters. For example, PRC scholarship aimed at identifying the ‘sprouts of capitalism’ was intended to contribute to a vision of Chinese history consistent with Marxism and the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But this scholarship generated new knowledge of economic prosperity and dynamism in the last five centuries. This in turn helped fuel some exciting debates in Japan and the west about Chinese economic development and in turn new studies of social and economic organizations and practices.

Of all the geographic areas discussed, the growth of the historical profession in China both quantitatively and qualitatively has been most striking. As Ching’s chapter shows, new freedoms to move beyond narrow politically shaped scholarly agendas have had a huge impact on the field. That being said, there are still limits. As in most other countries, national history is the dominant form of history in China. Scholars in the PRC must still be cautious when writing and teaching about many topics, including the history of the Chinese Communist Party (and especially its leaders), religion, minorities, and border regions (and, needless to say, specific topics such as Taiwan, Tibet, and the Tiananmen movement of 1989).

Part II consists of nine chapters on the chronology of Chinese history. Individual authors have decided the appropriate balance between narrative, historiography, and their own interpretations. The organization of the section as a whole reflects the diversity of current opinion about how best to periodize Chinese history. Had the Companion been published some decades ago, this section might have been organized in terms of dynasties, with one chapter for every dynasty. Biran and Guy explore why the imperial dynasty is no longer seen as the natural unit for historical analysis. Or it might have been organized, according to a periodization scheme derived from the European experience, into subsections labeled Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. But Holcombe shows that China cannot easily be assimilated into such models. Instead, the boundaries between the chapters of this section are defined by a multitude of overlapping, cross‐cutting, occasionally contradictory periodization schemes. Indeed, virtually every chapter situates itself in relation to one or more different schemes. There are chapters defined in terms of a meaningful phase in the history of Eurasia as a whole (Puett on “Early China in Eurasian History”); in terms of a period derived from the European experience (Holcombe on “Was Medieval China Medieval?”); in terms of a specific historical shift (Tackett on “A Tang‐Song Turning Point”); in terms of the ethnicity of the imperial ruling house (Biran on “Periods of Non‐Han Rule”); and even in terms of the policy priorities of a single regime (Cheek on “The Reform Era as History”). Paul Cohen’s chapter on the nineteenth century seems almost a relieving break, with its chronological limits specified in a way that is clear and familiar. But even Cohen, like his co‐authors, asks tough questions about the meaningfulness of the temporal limits of his chapter. This is part of the larger challenge of placing Chinese history in a truly comparative framework rather than, as has been done so often in the past, simply assuming that Chinese history is derivative of the universal western experience, passing through a series of stages dictated by the course of European history.

In their attention to periodization the chapters in this section address the tension between the impulse to cross temporal divides and resistance to the old notion of an unchanging China, in which chronology becomes virtually irrelevant, or other simplistic approaches to chronology. One such simplistic approach in contemporary China is the Great Revival of the Chinese People, a central motif of the current leadership. The idea rests on a three‐part schema of past glory, decline in the face of imperialism, and recovery that harkens back to modes of understanding chronology that seem ludicrously simple today.

The resolution of this tension lies in more precise attention to what is changing and when. Broadly speaking, the chapters challenge two conventional understandings about the periodization of Chinese history. While the period of imperial rule all the way from the Qin unification to the 1911 revolution was once seen as basically of a piece, today scholars identify a fundamental shift in politics, society, the economy, culture, and thought at about the midpoint of this period. This shift is mentioned by Holcombe, Guy, and Shiba and is the main focus of Tackett’s chapter. The other dramatic rethinking of continuity and change concerns the question of 1949 as a dividing line. Current scholarship discussed in Chen’s chapter on the Republic and Smith’s on the Maoist period shows that despite the revolutionary break there were many ways in which life under the new regime resembled life under the regime it replaced or even under its predecessors. This historiographical change is more than just about finding change where once there was thought to be continuity and vice versa. It also means reevaluating the historical register in which events are situated. The reform movement of 1898 used to be seen as an aberration in the dying years of the Qing; today scholars see it more as part of a long upswell of reformism that culminated in 1911 (which in turn set off a new chain of reformist and revolutionary impulses).

Part III turns from chronology to thematic approaches. These chapters do a different type of work, and generally focus more on new historiographical questions. Several of the chapters in this section—Alford and Schluessel on law, Lu on gender, Mullaney on ethnicity, and Perdue on the environment among others—bear directly on contemporary debates in China. They are shaped by, derive much of their energy from, and in turn contribute to pressing concerns facing the Chinese people today, and thus show another way in which knowledge of history is relevant. Turning the issue around, Rigger’s chapt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• PART I: States of the Field
• PART II: Chronologies
• PART III: Themes and Approaches
• Glossary of Selected Terms
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement