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4. Narrating the Nation: Meiji Historiography, New History Textbooks, and the Disciplinarization of History in China
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Chapter 4 Narrating the Nation: Meiji Historiography, New History Textbooks, and the Disciplinarization of History in China* Q. Edward Wang It goes without saying that how history is written today in China differs markedly from how it was in its long imperial period. When did this change happen? What were the sources for the change? And, how did this stylistic, or historiographic, alteration influence the formation of history as an academic discipline in China? These are the questions this chapter hopes to answer. Scholars of Chinese historiography in the past have identified two events which they believe were associated with the transformation of historical writing in China. One was the Opium War of 1839–42 and the other was Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 (1873–1929) publication of the “New Historiography” (“Xinshixue” 新史學) in 1902. After the reigning Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was defeated by Great Britain, these scholars maintain, the Opium War ushered China in a new direction of historical development, which reoriented the way in which the Chinese wrote history. If the Opium War forced them to change their outlook on history, Liang’s “New Historiography” represented a conscientious effort by a member of the literati to embrace new ideas and methods in history * The author wishes to express his gratitude to Rowan University for research support of this project. At the beginning stage when he conducted the research, he also received Grant for Short-term Research in Japan from Association for Asian Studies (NEAC), for which he is grateful. An early version of this article was presented at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in Spring 2010 when he was a research fellow. The author would like to thank Nicola Di Cosmo, Daniel Botsman, Daniel Woolf, and the two editors of this volume for reading and commenting on the early versions of this chapter. 104 · Q. Edward Wang writing. This effort eventually led to a sweeping reform, or a “historiographic revolution” (shijie geming 史界革命) in Liang’s term, of the Chinese historiographic tradition, which the Chinese had cherished for centuries. Focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century, or the interval period between the occurrence of the Opium War and the publication of Liang’s seminal work, this chapter aims to discuss the historiographic changes in the period, which have hitherto received less attention in current scholarship, and argues that these changes paved the way for introducing the ideas of the “New Historiography” and exerted a great impact on the initial disciplinarization of history in late Qing and Republican China. Over a decade ago, Robert Darnton noted that it is difficult to analyze the readers’ experience because it “lies beyond the range of historical research.”1 Indeed, though Liang Qichao left with us voluminous work, it remains unclear exactly how he was inspired to compose the “New Historiography.” Yet one thing does seem clear: he wrote the work during his exile in Japan after the 1898 Reform. In his exile and after acquiring a reading knowledge of Japanese, Liang read avidly a good number of Japanese books, especially Japanese translations of Western works.2 By his own admission, for Liang this reading experience was like a person who “was seeing sunshine in the dark, or drinking wine on an empty stomach.”3 If this was eye-opening experience for him, this feeling was shared by many other Chinese studying and sojourning in Japan, whose number, according to some estimates, reached hundreds and thousands in the early twentieth century.4 It seems that these students were also the most receptive audience of Liang’s work. His “New Historiography” was serialized in the New Citizen ’s Journal (Xinmin congbao 新民叢報), a newspaper Liang edited and published while in Japan. In response to Liang’s call for a “historiographical revolution,” Deng Shi 鄧實 (1877–1951), who also studied in Japan, explained that this “revolution” was crucial for the survival of the Chinese nation because “if there were no such a revolution, then there would be no history in China thenceforth. If there was no history, then there would be no nation.”5 In 1905, after his return from Japan, Deng went on to co-edit, along with others from the same group, the National Essence Journal (Guocui xuebao 國粹學報), aiming to recover and revive the cultural essence in the Chinese tradition for the nation-building [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:14 GMT) Narrating the Nation · 105 project.6 All this suggests that if Liang’s “New Historiography” signaled the transformation...