More States of the Field

More States of the Field William C. Kirby and Stephen C. Averill Andrew Nathan has recently reviewed here, in admirable fashion, broad trends in the present-day historiography of Republican China.! The purpose_ of these two additional essays is not to repeat that effort--though some overlap there may be--but to focus on several issues and subfields that may merit additional attention. These first pages address primarily literature on the Nationalist state and its foreign relations during its tenure on the mainland, while the latter section, by Professor Averill, focuses on issues of "revolutionary" and "party" (i.e. Chinese Communist Party) history before 1949. This organizational division of the field deserves a brief comment. DEFINING "REPUBLICAN CHINA." When fITst asked by the Japanese journal Chikaki ni arite to write such a review essay some years ago, such a division of labor between "Nationalist" and "Communist" history made some sense to Professor Averill and me and in itself reflected one aspect of the state of the field.2 We adhere to it here only in recognition of the persistence of patterns that early on defined the study of "Republican China" in this country. This field of Chinese history, even as it has taken on ever-greater degrees of subspecialization , remains distinguished by its narrow temporal boundaries and sharp political divisions. In time, it has been delimited above all by the PRe definition of the minguo era as having ended in 1949, despite the fact that the PRC, too, was 206 a "republic," and despite the continued existence of the Republic of China on Taiwan. In content, even within the short 1912-49 time-frame, scholarship was until quite recently sharply divided between the study of the evolution of Nationalist and Communist alternatives for modern China. To be sure, for several decades after 1949, Nationalist and Communist historians in Taiwan and China also concentrated on the history of their respective parties and movements; and both the PRC and ROC governments had reasons to underscore the new beginnings afforded by the historical "break" of 1949. But in this country, the compartmentalization of scholarship was further reinforced by the partitions erected between academic disciplines. In Chinese studies, 1949 served to divide the realms of history and political science. Among those who wrote on the Republican era, scholars of Nationalist China were trained largely by different mentors (often Qing historians), in different methodologies, than their counterparts who studied the CCP, who tended to be obserVers of contemporary China, working their way backward in time. Scholars of post-1949 Taiwan formed a third and very small sub-field altogether. This had implications for the American study of twentieth-century China, as the study of Nationalist China and the pre-1949 Communist movement proceeded as separate intellectual efforts, each anticipating, in different ways, the revolutionary break of 1949. The history of the pre-1949 Nationalist government was not seen as particularly relevant to the study of either the post-1949 PRC or ROC. As Professor Nathan pointed out in these pages last November, the perceived failure of Maoism has made increasingly apparent the endurance of historical issues across the mid-century divide. Several major studies currently under way seek to address explicitly issues of continuity and change for specific social groups and institutions. Another project, 207 coordinated by Roger Jeans, traces the historical lineage of opposition parties, and reminds us of how the dominance of two "ruling parties" in twentieth century China has obscured the history of organized alternatives to one-party dictatorship.3 But as yet we cannot speak. of the disappearance of subfields that have taken on institutional life through journals such as this one and others (e.g. Minguo dang' an, CCP Newsletter, Dangde weluian). For historians in particular, to whom the archives of pre-1949 governments have only recently (and incompletely) become open, mid-century remains a dividing point in terms of the kinds of source materials available for research. And, since there is as yet no Tocqueville of China's Communist revolution, making historical sense of it in terms of the logic of the ancien regime, it may be premature to speak. (but not to hope) of a broader conception of...