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

1. Making History Modern: The Transformation of Chinese Historiography, 1895–1937

Chapter 1 Making History Modern: The Transformation of Chinese Historiography, 1895–1937 Brian Moloughney and Peter Zarrow The transformation that led to the establishment of a modern historical discipline in China took place in the forty-year period following the SinoJapanese War of 1894–95. It was the product of the fusion of inherited practice and global developments in historiography. The new ideas injected into the Chinese cultural sphere through persistent Western imperialism during the nineteenth century provoked the collapse of the imperial order and, in turn, the transformation in Chinese historiography , but they also stimulated an internal dialogue with the indigenous historiographical tradition that was crucial in determining how the modern discipline developed. History helped Chinese people negotiate the “trauma of accommodation” produced by imperialism and war, but in order for it to be useful they had to refashion historical knowledge so that it could help produce the sense of coherence and identity essential for nation building.1 Thus one aspect of the transformation in Chinese historical thought and writing during this period was the shift toward an increasingly national focus, which involved, at least to some extent, a democratizing process, as more people were brought into an engagement with the past and with the process of producing knowledge about the past. At the same time, there was also a professionalizing process at work, which saw the creation of new institutions and new codes of practice. During the imperial era Chinese historical thought and writing had developed in rich and complex ways, but they were dominated by official historiography, particularly the imperial diaries (qiju zhu 起居注), veritable records (shilu 實錄), and dynastic histories (zhengshi 正史) produced by the state’s official historians.2 The collapse of the imperial state saw the demise of these central pillars of imperial historiography. Instead, 2 · Brian Moloughney and Peter Zarrow state support for the cultivation of historical knowledge shifted to educational institutions. The new school system provided a forum in which history could be used to cultivate a sense of national identity, while the universities became the home of professional historians, specialists who conducted research and provided training in the methodologies advanced to distinguish history from other academic disciplines. Academic professionalization had its origins in nineteenth-century Germany, but it soon filtered out to much of the rest of the world, in part because of the influence of Western colonialism but also due to the global span of Western cultural, linguistic, and economic influences during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 Chinese historians drew extensively on these developments in their attempts to establish modern historical practice , but this was always done in relation to the rich indigenous tradition of historical research and writing. The essays in this volume focus on the intellectual aspects involved in “history” becoming a modern academic discipline in China, with some consideration of the social and institutional background that led to the emergence of a group of professional historians. This is one of the outcomes of a series of annual workshops held in Canberra, Beijing, and Hong Kong between 2007 and 2009 on the broader topic of “The Formation and Development of Academic Disciplines in Twentieth-Century China.” The various academic disciplines were shaped by similar factors: the influence of Japanese scholarship, overseas study in Japan and the West, the appreciation but also critical appraisal of Western intellectual models, and the like. Some of the same intellectual leaders and institution builders were involved in the formation of several distinct disciplines. Indeed, through the first decades of the twentieth century, academic professionalization did not mean narrow specialization. Intellectuals were still, to some degree at least, generalists. This was certainly true of a late Qing figure like Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) and still true of early Republican intellectuals like Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), to name two particularly prominent examples. They were deeply interested, if not equally interested, in history, philosophy, literary studies, and sociology, to name just a few fields. However, history was unique among the other modern disciplines in at least one respect. History had long been a clearly defined and integral part of the traditional cultural fabric. Most academic disciplines were creations of the modern era, without the deep cultural reservoir that historians could draw on.4 But as the pioneering journalist-intellectual Making History Modern · 3 Liang Qichao noted in 1902, at the beginning of his famous polemic about the need for a new history, “of all...