Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century China

I n th e S c a le s o f H is to r y : P o litic s a n d C u ltu r e in T w e n tie th -C e n tu r y C h in a b y J o h n F itz g e r a ld * The year 1949 no longer marks an insuperable divide separating one field of history from another, or separating history from other disciplines at a point marking the founding of the People's Republic of China. The wall has tumbled, and some of our colleagues have come away with bricks and tiles as mementos of the event (Hooper 1991; Perry 1992; Stross 1996). For their part, Republican historians appear happy to concede that Republican China has exercised de facto autonomy for long enough. The journal Republican China has been relaunched as Twentieth-century China. From the other side of the wall, The China Quarterly recently published a reappraisal of historical scholarship on Republican China and announced that it would welcome submissions from historians of the Republic (Edmonds 1997). And down among the fallen shards, Republican archives and colonial-settlement files have been retrieved by local police forces from Dalian to Kunming in search of clues to trace, record and deal with the labyrinthine structures of underground organizations in·a marketbased society. The time for peaceful reunification between the two histories is now upon us. Negotiations on the terms of post-war reconciliation are currently under way in forums such as this. The question remains, however, whether we should be content to approach the history of the Republic after the fashion of the People's Republic, or that of the People's Republic on the model of the political history of the Republic. What might be done besides breaking down the divide of 1949 to construct a history of twentieth-century China? How can the study of politics and culture help in this enterprise? * An earlier version of this paper was. presented to the Symposium of the Historical Society for 20th Century China at Coeur d' Alene, Idiho, 1-2 October 1997. I wish to thank Marilyn Levine and participants at the symposium for comments and criticisms. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to Antonia Finnane for comments that helped to frame this paper, and to thank Prasenjit Duara and JeffreyWasserstrom for supplying copies of unpublished papers to assist in the writing. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. XX~ NO.2 (April 1999): 1-28 2 Twentieth-Century China Until fairly recently, the Republican period seemed a brief interregnum between the fragmentation of empire and China's reconstitution as a unified and centralized state. Today, it no longer seems plausible to present the first half' of the century as if it were a discordant prelude to the orchestrated achievements of the second. In retrospect, even the "disintegration" of the earlier period seems healthy: provincial autonomy held prospects of local self-government , the variety of intellectual and cultural life indicated relative freedom of speech and assembly, and rural dislocation and urbanization both appear to have been associated with the emergence of a civil society. The unity of the People's Republic, by contrast, appears to have been a consequence of enforced conformity that could not, in the end, contain the forces that it attempted to suppress. The price of Mao's vision was too high for his own party to sustain for long. What does this changing perspective on the Republic and People's Republic imply for a history of China as the end of the millennium approaches? To pick up Han Suyin's China in the Year 2001 (1967) is to be overcome by historical vertigo at the spectacle of China's socialist future under Mao Zedong and his loyal successors. All the same, it is sobering to reflect how few of us were trained to predict the extraordinary reversal that occurred just a decade after that book appeared in print. From the perspective of the long twentieth century, it no longer suffices to record or to explain Mao's regime, or for that matter the Nationalist government, or that of Yuan Shikai...