Commentary by Richard Madsen

Commentary on "In the Scales of History" C o m m e n ta r y b y R ic h a r d M a d s e n 55 "China's twentieth century history remains a grand national history only to the extent that it can accommodate the stories of the many local communities that comprise it." This is a rhetorically eloquent way of stating what sociologists call in more prosaic terms the challenge of relating macro and micro levels of social analysis. The task of relating history to biography is, as C. Wright Mills famously put it, the central challenge of the social sciences. The capacity to make such linkages is the litmus test for the presence of a true sociological imagination. Yet the job is never definitively done. Macro level social structures develop according to a logic of their· own, full of paradoxes and unintended consequences, which cannot be reduced to the sum total of the intentions of the individuals who live within these structures. And individuals in their small-scale communities are often caught up in larger dramas-in a "cunning ofhistory"that they can only dimly comprehend. There is no definitive way of establishing the macro-micro linkage. There are vast numbers of links between the individual, the small community, and the larger fabric of history, but scholars can only tentatively discern some of them, and which ones they focus on depends on the social historian's location within his or her own webs of significance. We would expect Chinese and Western intellectuals to focus on different linkages because their work will be situated within different systems of relevance. By this I mean that they will be speaking to different audiences, who will want history or social science to answer different kinds of questions.and who will have different standards for evah;lating good work. John Fitzgerald effectively argues for an agenda to be followed by American ~or, more broadly, Western-historians of China. I do not, however, think that his approach would necessarily be the most relevant agenda for Chinese historians or social scientists. Based on my interactions with Chinese colleagues, mainly in sociology, but also in·social history, I will suggest differences in the ways that Chinese and Western social scientists might approach the tasks of conceiving micro and macro levels of analysis and in drawing links between them. The purpose of this is to reflect on ways in which Chinese and Western scholars might enter into genuine dialogue with each other-to learn not just abouteach other, but genuinely to learnfrom each other. Facilitating such crosscultural dialogue among intellectual equals is, I believe, one of the most urgent tasks facing the learned professions in this multi-cultural, interdependent world. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. XXIV, NO.1 (April 1999): 55-61 56 Twentieth-Century China Chinese and American audiences have different questions to ask the historian . Many Chinese, especially those in middle age who suffered through the Cultural Revolution and other disasters of the Maoist era, have a keen, if often suppressed, interest in very personal aspects of recent history. They want to know exactly who did what to whom within their localities. They want to know the intimate details of conspiracies and betrayals and collaborations so they can assess moral responsibility and differentiate between heroes and villains. The people whom I interviewed for my various books on Chinese society loved to talk about history at this local level-if they could do so in a context where they would not be identified and subject to social and political pressures from neighbors and acquaintances whom they had offended. American audiences, as John Fitzgerald points out, also want to know about this micro level of human history, but they have different motivations for this desire. They want to be able to have an empathic bond with the subjects of Chinese history. Books that can evoke this empathic bond by presenting history in terms of vivid human stories become favorite textbooks for professors faced with the challenge of awakening interest in a far away place among apathetic undergraduates. But concerns about the moral accountability of familiar individuals and concerns about empathic connections with distant...