Some Trends in the Historiography of Republican China

Introduction by Andrew J. Nathan Some Trends in the Historiography of Republican China* ~ ~] ~ :-J with the retreat of China from Maoism, the period that led to the Maoist era--the Republican period, 1911 to 1949--has become more rather than less interesting to historians. The failure of Maoism has forced a~reconsiQerationof the legacy that it inherited from the Republic. Recom;ideration of the Republic in turn has created a new awareness that contemporary problems--those faced by the Chinese leaders and also those confronted by foreign nations that deal with China--exhibit greater continuities with the past than had earlier been appreciated. This essay selectively explores the implications of these new perspectives for recent Englishlanguage scholarship on Republican China. The Republican legacy could not be adequately understood so long as historians saw the pre-1949 era mainly as a backdrop for the rise of Mao and 1949 as representing a clean break with the past. Yet these assumptions were virtually impossible to dislodge-perhaps even fully to recognize--so long as Maoism was viewed, as it was for a long time in the west, as the institutional system that contained the correct answers to China's problems of modernization and social reconstruction. As Myers and Metzger (1980) have forcefully argued, for many years Western historiography of the Republic, while building an impressive base of monographic research , was permeated by a teleological fallacy that treated the political and economic experiments of the pre-1949 era as "doomed to failure. II This approach not only reflected the impact of events--of the towering fact that the communists had won the civil war--but echoed the convictions of many Chinese, who had seen the constitutional regimes of the early Republican sink into warlordism and corruption, then experienced the military withering of the Kuomintang regime in the face of Japanese invasion and civil war, and finally witnessed communist victory in the midst of hyperinflation and social demoralization. It was hard not to feel that the outcome had been preordained. But a history that sees events as preordained can never be as accurate, or as interesting, as one that sees them as problematic. western scholarship on the SUbject, to be sure, was never monolithic . Chalmers Johnson, in Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, challenged prevailing opinion by suggesting that the communists *This paper was originally presented at the Second International Conference on Sinology, held by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in December 1986. The editor believes that the essay deserves wider 117 l circulation, and is grateful to the author and Academia Sinica for l permission to reprint it here with minor changes. gained peasant support less because they offered a solution to the l peasants' economic problems than because their resistance to the Japanese invaders gave them a strong nationalistic appeal. Ramon Myers argued that the economic condition of the peasantry during the Republican period did not deteriorate at all in secular terms, despite the popularity of Good Earth-like images of peasant flight l and famine. other critical works could be named. But the dominant opinion treated the history of the Republic as a series of reform attempts which were all intrinsically inadequate to solve the problems they confronted and could only give way sooner or later to l peasant-based revolution. A new vitality and breadth in Republican studies in the West is evidenced by many indicatorE;l. There is an outpouring of pUblica- l. tions from the university presses, touching on topics as diverse as the Republican common soldier (Diana Lary), alternatives to Mao within the Chinese Communist Party (Lee Feigon), the Kuomindang's early efforts to extirpate the communists and carry out land reform (William Wei), the influence of German ideas .and institutions in [ the 1930s (William Kirby), and the difficu~ties of communist organization and military strategy in Manchuria in the mid-to-late 1940s (steven Levine). The work of Lloyd Eastman and his students has brought new depth to our understanding of Kuomintang organization and ideology. A scholarly journal, Republican China, has been [ established to serve the field. The best scholarship on post-1949 Chinese social institutions--the village and the factory, for example--now looks closely at the...