Wahrheit und Geschichte: Zwei chinesische Historiker auf der Suche nach einer modernen Identitat fur China (review)

Apart from making a very valuable contribution to the barren field of studies on non-Marxist historiography in Republican China, it is probably one of Axel Schneider's major achievements not to restrict himself to what the main title of this book might initially lead one to expect. Wahrheit und Geschichte (Truth and history) is not a book on the way late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western methods of historical-hermeneutic interpretation were received in China. Schneider does not confine himself to the narrow scope of "reception of Western thought in China," but attempts to understand the specific functions that historiography had to fulfill in relation to conceptions of science, politics, modernization, and cultural identity in the thought of Fu Sinian (1896-1950) and Chen Yinke (1890-1969), two prominent Republican historiographers. As a point of departure, Schneider follows Yves Chevrier in his conviction of the central role played by China's "traditional historiography" (p. 7) in the discourse on the normative order of the world, but particularly in the field of political legitimation: it was in historiography that the "moral-cosmic order of the Tao" (p. 7) was to be represented as well as conveyed. Historiography, in other words, served the double purpose of finding truth in history and at the same time communicating this truth in the present. In the context of the "conflict with the West" (p. 9), Schneider goes on to tell us that this "characteristic constitution of historiography" (charakteristische Verfassung der Historiographie) (p. 9) had to face three challenges: the one posed by Western theories of historiography and their epistemological implications, the one of reevaluating the social and political role of the historian, and the one of finding a national and/or cultural basis of Chinese identity in a changing world.

At this point, one might wonder if "traditional historiography," especially its various modifications up to the Republican period, really played such a dominant role in Chinese thought. In many instances during the discourses on normative order or political legitimation, at least since the late nineteenth century, the field of historiography seems to have been blithely abandoned to make way for heated debates on epistemology, methodology, literary theory, political philosophy, and so forth. At any rate, Schneider's thesis is valid inasmuch as it proves to be the point of departure for a very far-reaching, insightful journey into the thought of Fu Sinian and Chen Yinke.

Although he has chosen Fu and Chen mainly because both of them were early members of the Academia Sinica, Republican China's most prominent Western-oriented institution for research in history (p. 12),¹ Schneider never reduces their thinking to a mere reflection of the institutional roles they played at various stages in their lives. It is indeed another important merit of Schneider's book to offer careful readings of Chen's and Fu's writings, thus giving their thinking the attention it certainly deserves. Consequently, throughout his study, Schneider resists the temptation to undercut his readings by applying rigid analytical frameworks of generational, regional, local, familial, partisan, or other empirical parameters. The reader, therefore, never gets the uncomfortable feeling that he or she is witnessing a deflation of textual resources of intellectual history through conflation with empirical data.

Schneider's approach is clearly reflected in the extensive synopsis of the development of Chinese historiography, from the beginnings of the Qing dynasty to Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Zhang Binglin, Wang Guowei, Hu Shi, Gu Jiegang, the authors of Xue heng (Critical review), Guo Moruo, Tao Xisheng, and Qian Mu. The author may have been too ambitious in attempting to cover so much ground in approximately sixty pages. Certainly I feel this was the case with the section on the various Qing exponents. At any rate, Schneider succeeds in sketching the broader context and some of its...