Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

Chapter 8. Master Narratives in Crisis

236 ---------------------------------- CHAPTER 8 --------------------------------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 val- Master Narratives in Crisis 237 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- 238 Master Narratives in Crisis 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...