Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

Chapter 2. Origins of the Modernization Narrative: Nationalist Historiography before 1949

33 ---------------------------------- CHAPTER 2 --------------------------------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 34 Origins of the Modernization Narrative 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 Origins of the Modernization Narrative 35 its creation of a separate government in 1933 shattered the dream of China’s political unity and stability that had...