Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China

12. Marxism and Social History

Chapter 12 Marxism and Social History Arif Dirlik Nationalist ferment launched a new historical consciousness, and a new historiography in the late Qing period. Conflicts over different conceptualizations of the nation, and corresponding understandings of the nationalist project, since then have continued to animate Chinese historiography . Different nationalist projects, we might observe with slight exaggeration, have called for different histories to justify them, and to endow them with the mantle of inevitability. Marxism dominated Chinese historiography during the roughly half century, from the late 1920s to the late 1970s, in tandem with a widespread conviction in Chinese politics that a social revolutionary transformation was necessary to the future of the nation. Even more so than its historiographical antecedents and competitors discussed in the essays above, Marxist historiography was a direct offshoot of the political problems thrown up by the social revolutionary movement of the 1920s. It was already on its way to professionalization by the mid-1930s, and would come to dominate the history profession as politically enforced orthodoxy after 1949. Nevertheless, it remained subject to political intervention and ferment as the demands of social revolution continued to intrude in historical work. Since 1978, Marxism has lost much of its force (and even more of its vitality) as a younger generation has turned to historiographical alternatives more in keeping with a nationalist project that seeks integration in a global capitalist economy. While the legacies of Marxism are still visible in institutions that call in the revolutionary past for their legitimacy (above all the Communist Party and the military), and school textbooks continue to present the past in terms of categories derivative of Marxist taxonomies of historical time and social space, most professional historians have moved away from Marxist theoretical positions toward more closely empiricist and textual work that answers intellectually and conceptually 376 · Arif Dirlik to contemporary ideological and cultural concerns with modernization and national identity, as well as transnational cultural trends. While Marxist historical work of the revolutionary years is easily dismissed these days for its openly political intentions and ongoing entanglement in politics, it is important not to lose sight either of the broader intellectual context that endowed Marxist theory and concepts with significance, or the part they played in the production of a new social history, which brought into Chinese historical thinking novel ideas of space and time, and a novel conceptual apparatus that opened up new vistas on society and its functioning—as well as its transformation. Marxists were driven into social analysis in response to the failure in the 1920s of the urban revolutionary movement that had given the fledgling Communist Party premature hopes in the conquest of the revolutionary movement, and the state. The initial goal of social analysis was to identify the alignment of forces, especially class forces, so as to draw up a strategy to carry the revolution to success. Controversies over the present quickly led to debates over the past that best accounted for the present, as Marxism had already brought with it an acute historicism backed by authoritative claims to a scientifically comprehensible history.1 But while Marxist historiography was a direct offshoot of the revolutionary movement, it answered calls that went back to the nationalist origins of the revolution. As early as 1902, the radical reformer Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) had argued that in order to constitute themselves as a nation, the Chinese people had to see themselves in the mirror of history so as to feel Chinese in the first place. Past histories had failed in this respect as they had concerned themselves only with the rulers. What was needed now was a history of society and the people.2 While there were varieties of experimentation to achieve this goal, some of which are discussed in the essays above, it was not until the 1920s that calls for a social history gained in volume—by historians educated abroad who brought back to China the newest trends in Europe and North America. In many ways, Chinese intellectuals were exposed to Marxist ideas in reverse: through contemporary intellectual developments in Europe and North America, of which Marxism already was an integral part in one way or another, back to a confrontation with Marx directly through his texts. Politically, Chinese intellectuals knew more about Lenin than Marx, and knew Marx through Lenin. Likewise, they came to know social history first through contemporary social history, such as U.S. Marxism...