Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

Notes

279 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 illus- 280 Notes to Pages 9–12 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...